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‘Judge a man by the company he keeps’. My friend Vlad ought to have familiarised himself with this Euripidean maxim before attending yesterday’s festivities in China.

Communist China used the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War to parade its muscle. Over 12,000 soldiers marched through Tiananmen Square, where the same army massacred a peaceful demonstration in 1989.

According to China’s sources, 80 per cent of the military technology on show was brand-new, including missile systems operating from space against groups of aircraft carriers. Reading about it, I heaved a sigh of relief.

Mercifully Britain is safe from this cosmic threat for we have no such groups. After all, a group made up of our solitary carrier would sound shamefully tautological. How Americans feel about this technological breakthrough may be a different matter altogether.

Anyway, it was appropriate that China’s armed forces celebrate in style their triumph of 70 years ago. Defeating imperial Japan is something Chinese communists can take pr…

Ouch! An ice-cold shower has poured down to douse my enthusiasm. For Chinese communists, whose descendants rule the country now, were in effect Japan’s allies, not her conquerors.

It was Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang that fought a guerrilla war against Japan. Mao’s communists were fighting a guerrilla war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang, thus helping Japan no end.

It wasn’t China – and certainly not communist China – that defeated Japan, but the combined might of the USA, Britain and, in the last week, the Soviet Union. Therefore for China to hail that victory as her own is downright mendacious.

That’s why Vlad was the only major foreign leader to accept Xi Jinping’s invitation to attend the parade. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist any longer, and the other real victors gave the extravaganza a wide berth.

That, however, didn’t make the government stands empty. Posing next to the grinning Vlad and inscrutable Xi were the leaders of those other countries that made such a decisive contribution to the glorious victory: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Burma, the Congo, Venezuela, Pakistan, Mongolia, Vietnam and Laos.

That should tell Vlad exactly where Russia falls in the pecking order of nations. And it should tip the West to the strategy Vlad is pursuing.

Emulating his role model Stalin, who in 1939 struck an alliance with the other evil power of Europe, Vlad is now hoping to get into bed with the other evil power of Asia.

Having found the hard way that the West, for all its obvious weakness, is unlikely to succumb to Russia’s nuclear blackmail, Putin is hoping to recruit China to his cause.

Hence his recent pronouncements on the essentially Eastern nature of the Russian people and Russia’s historic mission to unite Eurasia under her banners.

Vlad’s retired colleague Gorbachev used to bang on the same theme, when he defied geography by talking about ‘our common European home from the Atlantic to Vladivostok’. But at least Gorby speaking ad orbi didn’t threaten to enforce such a geographic solecism by nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, our social networks are singing hosannas to Putin. One picture catching my eye was of Cameron and Putin together, with the caption asking rhetorically which one of them “cares about his people”.

My answer would be ‘neither’, but the implication was that one of them does, and it isn’t Dave. I have to agree: Putin does care about his people. Except that he defines that group more narrowly than his Western champions think.

Putin’s people are the ruling junta of the KGB/FSB fused with the criminal underworld. That’s why the top one per cent of Russia’s population own 71 per cent of the country’s wealth, as opposed to an average of 32 per cent in Europe.

The ruling elite operates according to the unwritten laws of mafia gangs, with the godfather aware that losing face will be quickly followed by losing his life. And Putin is in danger of losing face over his aggression against the Ukraine.

His idea was to launch a staggered offensive, testing the West’s reaction every step of the way. In Step 1 the West reacted to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with roughly the same insouciance as it displayed towards Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.

Thus emboldened, Vlad’s ragtag army of psychotic criminals and regular Russian troops without insignia moved into the eastern Ukraine. Had the West again shrugged its indifference, all of the Ukraine would have been occupied, probably followed by the Baltics.

However, though the West didn’t respond with appropriate resolve, it did respond –  by introducing sanctions and pledging its support for the Ukraine and the three Baltic Nato members.

Vlad stopped and looked around. What he saw was many a KGB caporegime looking at him askance to check if il padrino’s face was still where it should be.

Vlad knew he wouldn’t survive a humiliation. Not only would he lose power but he may not even be allowed to enjoy his ill-gotten billions in quiet retirement, Gorby-style.

This explains the crescendo in his overtures to China, which he hopes will end in the rousing finale of a military alliance. Vlad is reluctant t to take on the West by himself – the military odds don’t look promising even despite the West’s demob-happy lassitude.

I doubt that alliance will ever materialise: China’s interests probably lie elsewhere. Even so, there’s every sign that Putin is gearing up for war. In the good tradition of Soviet leaders, he cares about his people so much that he’s prepared to lose millions of them in pursuit of his own criminal ambitions.

 

   

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI once wrote that the Catholic Church is about to be wiped out – only then to start from the beginning and gradually rise again.

Though His Holiness hasn’t uttered a public word about his Vatican successor, one is in little doubt that he sees him as having more to do with the first part of this prophecy than the second – a view Pope Francis seems eager to justify.

Even his admirers will admit that His Holiness is a man of the Left, a movement whose founding raison d’être was, and its current one remains, waging war on every religious, cultural, social and political vestige of Christendom.

Hence a ‘left-wing Christian’ is to me an oxymoron, a ‘left-wing priest’ even more so, and a ‘left-wing Pope’ more still. That, however, is an inner contradiction for every man to resolve privately.

A pontiff’s personal politics ought to have no more effect on his public mission than his taste in food. He’s there to be the Vicar of Christ, not a political agitator.

The trouble starts when a Pope uses St Peter’s throne to promote a secular political agenda, especially one that’s at odds with the very Christian message he’s supposed to preach. This, I’m afraid, is exactly what Pope Francis has done ever since he first occupied the aforementioned throne.

His actions this summer did nothing to dispel this impression. First, the Pope combined political folly with bad Christianity by recognising a nonexistent ‘State of Palestine’.

By doing so he showed how deep the Church has sunk since 1095, when Pope Urban II blessed the First Crusade. Pope Urban understood something Pope Francis doesn’t: Islam is a mortal enemy not only of Jews but also of Christians.

But even if we narrow our perspective to today and tomorrow, what kind of state will ‘Palestine’ be if it gains statehood? Since the past and present are the most reliable indicators of the future, there’s only one possible answer to that question.

It’ll be a jihadist state so anti-Semitic and anti-Christian that it’ll be committed to the genocide of both Jews and Christians. This state will also be an implacable enemy of the West, and it’ll joyously act as a global terrorist base. As a short-term objective, it’ll do all it can to act on its current promise to ‘drive Israel into the sea’, presumably along with all its inhabitants.

Does His Holiness believe that this kind of state deserves pre-natal recognition? Evidently yes, because his next act this summer was to approve of the Iran nuclear deal.

Unlike the ‘State of Palestine’, the state of Iran already exists, and it already is what ‘Palestine’ will be: virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western.

Empowering this state to develop nuclear weapons in 10-15 years may well lead not only to a regional holocaust but indeed to a global one, with mushroom clouds popping up all over the world like toadstools after an autumn rain.

What part of this scenario does the Pope like? None, would be my hope. It’s more likely that he simply doesn’t understand the full implications of this agreement. Then why approve it?

As in his recognition of the ‘State of Palestine’, His Holiness didn’t act in a holy or even rational way. He allowed his visceral political views to add poison to his Eucharistic water, thus betraying the mission to which he supposedly dedicated his life.

Not content to encourage diabolical political regimes without, Pope Francis is busily working to compromise the Church from within as well.

The Church, alone among the world’s secular and religious bodies, has always adopted an intransigent, which is to say Judaeo-Christian, position on sexual morality. That’s another thing Pope Francis has set out to destroy by advocating a more ‘liberal’ stance on homosexuality, abortion and divorce.

He tried to push his ‘reforms’ through last October’s Synod Part 1, but was defeated by the real Catholics among the bishops. Now he has announced that he’ll allow priests to forgive women who’ve had abortions.

As my friend the Rev. Peter Mullen has explained so thoroughly, this is doctrinal nonsense. Courtesy of Jesus himself, speaking through the evangelists, priests have always had the capacity to absolve any sins, including this one.

Surely the Pope is familiar with John 20:23 and Mark 3:29, not to mention the subsequent two millennia of Christian tradition? Of course he is. His generous permission for priests to do what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years anyway has nothing to do with dogma or doctrine.

It’s both an emotional cry of a leftie soul and a calculated attempt to soften up Part 2 of the Synod when it reconvenes next month. I do hope that the real Catholic bishops will again stand fast. We don’t want the first part of Pope Benedict’s prophecy to come true too fast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The carbon dating of the Koran fragments found in a Birmingham library shows that they almost definitely predate Mohammed. And there I was, thinking that Birmingham’s sole contribution to civilisation is Balti cuisine.

Turns out it may well be the birthplace of Islam, invalidating the prior claims of Mecca and Medina. As indirect proof, Birmingham certainly has a greater Muslim population than those two put together, although, unlike them, it also has a smattering of infidels.

Actually, I must admit I had my suspicions before. I used to go to Birmingham quite often, on business (nobody goes there for pleasure), and my impression was that the city was predominantly Muslim. There must be some hidden magnetic force, I thought, attracting Muslims to that part of the Midlands, and it can’t be just the free-spending social.

The impression that Birmingham was mostly Muslim was purely that, an impression, for demographic surveys show that only a quarter of the city’s population espouse Islam. Still, you can understand my error: Muslims somehow stand out in Britain, and seeing so many in one place may easily lead one to infer that they predominate.

Also, now that we know that Islam started in Birmingham and not, as was previously thought, in the Arabian peninsula… oops, sorry. My wife has just looked over my shoulder and pointed out that Birmingham was only founded in 1871, which makes it an unlikely birthplace of Islam, seeing that it has been around for 1,400 years.

Fine, I’m man enough to admit I’ve made yet another error. If it’s an error, that is. Allah, after all, is just the Arabic for God – the same deity that’s accepted as such in both parts of the Bible. I may find Allah an odd name for God, but it’s infinitely preferable to its Russian equivalent, which is Bog. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather pray to God, or even at a pinch to Allah, than to Bog.

But God, whatever you call Him, is outside time. Hence, looking at it from His perspective, it’s possible that a city we think only appeared in the late Victorian era was already up and running circa 568 AD, when the Birmingham Koran was produced.

Hold on, I’ve just spotted a theological flaw in this argument. Yes, God is outside time – but we aren’t. Since we’re strictly temporal, at least in this life, it’s utterly presumptuous even to suggest that we can look at the world through the eyes of Allah, otherwise known as God.

Hence both Birmingham and its Koran exist on a human timescale and can’t possibly overlap. One must grudgingly admit that the distinctly Muslim character of the city must come from a different source – quite possibly from the free-spending social.

Yet the dating of the Birmingham Koran, if it’s reliable, tears a hole in the patchwork quilt of a religion otherwise known as Islam. Its founding tenet is that Allah spoke directly to Mohammed, who then initiated the game of Arab whispers by passing the message on to Abu Bakr, one of his fathers-in-law (since Mohammed had several wives, he must have had several sets of in-laws, and his ability to cope with that arrangement must be seen as divine by anyone who has ever struggled with even one set).

Abu Bakr then passed the good news on to assorted other caliphs and so forth, all the way to Osama bin Laden. This admittedly schematic history of Islam begins to wobble somewhat if it turns out that Mohammed had his epiphany second-hand, and that he more or less cribbed it from a pre-existing document.

That may create a conundrum for Muslims, as the existence of such a document casts a shadow on Mohammed’s claim to be the prophetic primus inter pares. But I don’t doubt for a second that Islamic scholars will handle the problem.

They could, for example, claim not unreasonably that carbon dating isn’t all that precise, and in this case an error of a few years here or there would be enough to reinstate Mohammed’s patent rights.

Or else they may decide to adopt the so-is-your-aunt-Tilly tactic of pointing out that the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud may also be at odds with the claims Christians make for that garment.

Yet such savants will find it difficult, not to say impossible, to deny the synthetic nature of Islam. In fact, they ought to take their cue from Marx and own up to Mohammed’s tendency to borrow from other religions.

Marx honestly identified three ingredients he shook together to produce the heady cocktail of Marxism: German philosophy, mainly Hegel and Feuerbach; British economics, mainly Smith and Ricardo; and French socialism, mainly Saint-Simon and Fourier.

Even if we discard the Birmingham Koran, Mohammed also used three principle sources: Judaism, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Thus he could proudly claim to be a heretic to three major religions, and we aren’t even talking about the minor ones.

But who’s to say that mixing multiple ingredients can’t produce an original concoction? No one, especially not those bar-hoppers who enjoy the unique taste of the odd Mojito, Daiquiri or Long Island Tea.

A note to those intemperate infidels: if you enjoy your cocktails, steer clear of Muslim countries. The Koran, Birmingham or otherwise, says that indulging that taste will get you flogged within an inch of your life.

I’m not proposing this drastic measure as a punishment. On the contrary, stand-up comedy is the only popular entertainment I like.

It’s just that comedians will have to make a living somehow after their profession becomes obsolete, as it surely will soon.

Comedy depends for its survival on two preconditions. First, there must be enough people out there whose sense of humour outmuscles their self-righteousness. Second, comedy can only thrive if reality doesn’t overstep the limit beyond anyone’s ability to poke fun at it.

Since neither of these preconditions is met these days, comedians will have to retrain as diversity consultants, sensitivity advisors, social workers, community organisers or anything else seen as indispensable these days.

Not to starve while the training is under way, they may indeed have to support themselves by working down the mines. If they mutter that life is the pits, no one will laugh at the pun.

As an illustration of the first precondition rapidly disappearing, Mike Kusneraitis, a Tory councillor in the Runnymede Borough, is being investigated for the terrible transgression he has committed.

I’m not sure whether the investigation is merely professional or also criminal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were both. So what’s Mike’s crime?

He shared on the net a spoof of the advertising campaign for Carlsberg beer. For the outlanders among you, the actual campaign shows some impossibly wonderful event, with the tagline saying “If Carlsberg did [X], it would probably be the best [X] in the world.

The spoof that got Mike into trouble features the tagline “If Carlsberg did illegal immigrants…” under the picture of a boat densely packed with 14 pretty, stark-naked girls.

Now some will find this joke funny and laugh; some may find it tasteless and wince. Both will have to agree, however, that this is just a joke, and a topical one at that.

Runnymede is after all a borough where Magna Carta codified the rights of Englishmen exactly 800 years ago. Surely one of those rights must have been to be able to laugh with impunity at anything this side of the Holy Spirit.

This right was first established by a source predating Magna Carta: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” Obviously, modernity is less forgiving than Christ.

Some jokes may be in poor taste, some may be funny. Some may be both, as will be confirmed by anyone who has heard that the last thing to go through Diana’s mind was the steering wheel. None, however, would be seen as grounds for prosecution in a world that didn’t think that humour is tasteless or criminal by definition.

As to reality outpacing any humour or satire, this point was put beyond any doubt by the Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

The very fact that an institution of higher learning has such a job description on its staff would already place it outside the reach of satire, even if the gentleman in question did absolutely nothing.

But hey, everyone must earn his keep, and the good Vice Chancellor is no exception. Hence he proposed the ‘inclusive practice’ of introducing ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns as a way of “exposing our students to an increasingly diverse and global world.”

Actually a world where no sex distinctions were allowed to survive would be rather the opposite of diverse, but one can’t expect intellectual rigour from a chap in charge of diversity and inclusion.

What one can expect is exactly what one got: the proposal to do away with such offensive words as ‘he’ and ‘she’, along with their derivatives, and replace them with the new ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns ze, hir, zir, xem and xyr.

Donna Braquet, Director of the university’s Pride Centre, whatever that is, agrees wholeheartedly: “It is important to participate in making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all. One way to do that is to use a student’s chosen name and their correct pronouns.”

The wording of her drivel proves that the job is already half-done: in a sane world the antecedent ‘a student’s’ would be followed by the possessive pronoun ‘his’, not the ideologically illiterate ‘their’. But, since we’ve allowed PC fascists to impose that harebrained diktat on the world’s greatest language, we must be prepared for ‘ze’ revolution.

There we have the double whammy: PC fascists mangling English in a way that no satire could possibly fathom, and students being brainwashed to be offended by such ‘gender-specific’ fossils as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Comedians have no place in such a world.

There’s nothing we can do about it, other than refusing to use PC pseudolanguage and mocking those who do. The other day I did just that by refusing to use the PC term ‘African American’, as demanded by my interlocutor of the US neocon persuasion.

“Would you call a dog a canine American?” I asked. No smile crossed his self-righteous face. Life is no longer a laughing matter.

“I’ve never been able to picture my wife in my mind – and now I know why,” writes Dominic Lawson in today’s Mail. I hope Mrs Lawson will be satisfied with the ensuing explanation. I am not.

Mr Lawson and I have a few mutual friends, but we’ve never met. Hence I don’t know what his religion is, though by the general tenor of his writing one suspects that his answer to this question would be ‘none’.

That explains why, in common with most modern men (a designation I never use as a term of praise), he feels the urge to look for a physical, in this case medical, explanation for a phenomenon with a strong spiritual dimension.

This explanation goes by the term ‘aphantasia’, invented by the professor of cognitive neurology Adam Zeman, who happens to be Mr Lawson’s school friend. Those afflicted with this condition, about 2.5 per cent of the population according to Prof. Zeman, are incapable of generating visual images in their minds – they have no mind’s eye.

I’m not qualified to judge Prof. Zeman’s findings or indeed to understand some of the recondite terminology he uses. Neither, I suspect, is Mr Lawson. But being by nature a rather incredulous sort, I may venture a guess that there may be more to it than merely a medical condition.

Mr Lawson, who in general tends to vouchsafe more personal details than we care to know, claims he has no visual memory at all. That must be most unpleasant, and one hopes he still manages to recognise people he hasn’t seen for a few days. The inability to do so may upset some editors, those who don’t like their employees asking “And who might you be, my dear chap?”

Now, if you don’t mind my offering a personal detail of my own, my visual memory is rather good. I can’t claim I never forget a face, but I do so rarely. Most of the time I can easily recognise a casual acquaintance of 40 years ago, and even, to the best of my rather poor ability, sketch his face from memory.

Yet I too have trouble visualising my wife’s face after a day or two apart, this with no aphantasia affecting my encephalo-optical function. The explanation for this must lie in a sphere considerably more complex than one describable by professors of cognitive neurology.

We see those we love differently from the way we see others, and the greater the love, the greater the difference. When a man looks at someone close to him, especially his wife with whom he is, according to St Paul, “one flesh”, he employs a vision other than purely optical.

He doesn’t just see a combination of geometrical shapes, sizes and colours. His eye acquires the X-ray ability to see beyond the physical surface and deep into something infinitely more important: the metaphysical essence. Depending on the kind of vocabulary one is comfortable with, this may be described as the spirit, the heart or the soul.

Because it’s infinitely more important, this essence overshadows the purely physical image or even completely obscures it, as powerful pictures can do. Many who have seen Mont Blanc, even those suffering from aphantasia, will remember its snow-capped summit, but few will be able to describe the trees at the mountain’s foot.

This brings us to the question in the title: What did Jesus look like? The iconic images we all know are not, nor are claimed to be, accurate physical representations. The painters, after all, never saw Jesus in the flesh.

However the evangelists did, and they preserved many of the words Jesus uttered during the months they spent together. Even more important, they memorised, and decades later conveyed, the deep meaning behind those words, the divine significance of the message.

Yet none of them left even a sketchy description of Jesus’s appearance. We can surmise some physical generalities, such as the obvious fact that Jesus didn’t look very different from the ambient Jewish population. If he had, Judas wouldn’t have had to identify him to the arresting detail of Roman soldiers in the garden of Gethsemane.

But the evangelists’ memory didn’t retain any individual physical details, which must have made Jesus look as different from other people as Mr Lawson looks different from me. Why?

Because their visual memory was subjugated to their spiritual vision and the all-conquering love they felt for Jesus. They remembered so little because they loved so much.

Then again, all four of them may have fallen into the 2.5 per cent of the population suffering from aphantasia. I’m sure Prof. Zeman and Mr Lawson would be satisfied with this explanation. Are you?

 

   

  

 

 

 

 

 Correct me if I’m wrong, but to me fiscal austerity means making sure one always spends less than one earns. I bet your definition is similar to mine, but I’ll go double or nothing that George Osborne’s isn’t.

That’s because you and I live in the real world, the place where we earn some income and figure out how to pay our way and make ends meet.

Sometimes we have to borrow, but we know that, should our liabilities exceed our assets, and our income is insufficient to cover the deficit, we won’t be able to keep the bailiffs at bay.

However, George, along with other finance ministers all over the West, lives in a virtual world where nothing is real: words, thoughts, morals – and certainly money.

George lives by virtual adages uttered by virtual economists, such as Samuel Brittan, the Financial Times guru, who once pontificated that “Since my undergraduate days, I have been pointing out that a government budget is not the same as that of an individual…”.

Back in the old days, when the world was real, and so were the economists, Adam Smith uttered some real, as opposed to virtual, truth: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”

The two statements represented not just two different approaches to macroeconomics but two different worlds. George, along with his past, present and future Western colleagues, lives in Brittan’s world, while pretending to live in Smith’s.

His much-vaunted budget is being hailed by some, and damned by others, as an exemplar of austerity. So it is, except that in George’s virtual world ‘austerity’ is actually another word for ‘profligacy’.

Hence he took one look at the 2008 crisis and knew exactly what caused it: Labour Chancellor Gordon ‘The Moron’ Brown practised profligacy without ever referring to it as austerity.

That, according to George, was his fatal mistake, one that George vowed never to repeat. He too would practise profligacy, ideally on a larger scale than Brown but, unlike his hapless predecessor, he’d refer to it as austerity.

It has worked like a dream (in fact, it could only have worked like a dream, not actual reality). Under George’s austere tutelage, our national deficit stands at £70 billion, far outstripping Brown’s achievement and confidently moving towards the £100 billion mark.

Austerity George has also more than doubled the national debt, to an utterly suicidal £1.5 trillion, which is quite impressive even if lagging behind America’s $18 trillion-plus. At least Obama’s ministers don’t hold up this catastrophic statistic as proof of their fiscal responsibility.

To be fair, Austerity George doesn’t monopolise his virtual economics. He also lets banks play fast and loose with finances, lending trillions with the same reckless abandon as they did in the run-up to 2008.

As with any pyramid scheme, which is the dominant model of today’s economic activity, things look fabulous for a while. As the pyramid totters in the wind, borrowed and freshly printed banknotes fly out of it, settling on the ground.

This creates virtual prosperity that will persist until reality makes a comeback. The pyramid will then collapse – just as it did in 2008. Next time, however, when banks go to the wall, the government won’t be able to help: servicing the galloping debt will leave no money in the kitty.

Meanwhile George is clipping the coupons of his phoney prosperity, helped in this task by grossly inflated property prices. But for Russian, Arab and Chinese money-launderers parking their ill-gotten cash in British townhouses and mansions, George would find it harder to boast of the impressive performance of his austerity.

Yet there are protests all over the country, with Jeremy Corbyn’s candidature for the Labour leadership injecting some Trotskyist energy into his comrades’ indignation. ‘Down with austerity’ seems to be the battle cry, which is the negative to George’s positive.

However, the protesters also live in the virtual world, which is why they don’t bother to look at the figures. Figures have no place in virtual reality.

Brown was running the country into the ground, but he never mentioned austerity, which was fine with our loony fringe, rapidly gaining the status of the mainstream. George is running the country even deeper into the ground, but he calls it austerity, and those are fighting words.

If George were to state openly that Britain is heading for the knacker’s yard, but that’s fine because nothing in the world will stop him spending money on the [poor, needy, minorities, underdeveloped countries, free health and education, foreign adventures – take your pick], everyone would be happy.

As it is, the God of Party Politics speaks to George out of the burning economy, and his commandment is to talk austerity while doing profligacy.

All we can do is pray that the aforementioned pyramid doesn’t collapse before the next general election. Britain could survive another 2008, one hopes, but she won’t survive Corbyn at 10 Downing Street.

I wonder if George is secretly working on the Elect Jeremy campaign. Who knows, Prime Minister Corbyn might even keep him as Chancellor. Do as you’ve always done, George, he’d say. But for Trotsky’s sake don’t mention austerity.

  

 

The other day Vester Lee Flanagan, a former employee of the local TV station WDBJ, shot dead two of his ex-colleagues on air before killing himself later in the day.

The victims, Alison Parker and Adam Ward, were white, Flanagan was black, and that chromatic distinction apparently precipitated the incident.

In the aftermath, TV audiences have been treated to yet another chorus of demands to ban guns, for, had Flanagan been unable to get his hands on one, the two young journalists would still be with us.

Miss Parker’s bereaved father has vowed to devote his life to the anti-gun campaign. We should all sympathise and – if such is our faith – pray for him and his daughter’s soul.

That, however, doesn’t mean we should accept his views. Instead we ought to wonder to what campaign Mr Parker would be dedicating his life had his daughter been killed by a drunk driver.

Would he call for a ban on cars? Alcohol? Probably not. He’d just grieve and – if such is his faith – pray for his daughter’s soul.

Everything is these days politicised, an observation to which there are no exceptions. But there are degrees, and guns are more heavily politicised than cars or alcohol, especially in America.

Guns add a stream to the watershed dividing Right from Left. The Right tout the right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment. The Left argue that the 300 million privately owned firearms in America belong to a group too wide to be described as the ‘well-regulated militia’ mentioned in the Amendment.

Without going into the intrinsic value of either position, underneath it all lies the distaste the two groups feel for each other.

Both see the issue as the thin end of the wedge. The Right believes that the urge to ban guns springs from the creeping statism of the rainbow Left. The Left believes the urge to own guns springs from the creeping anarchism of the white Right, laced with the latent desire to turn firearms on blacks, women and LGBT activists.

Either way, Flanagan’s self-stated motives seem not to be taken into account seriously. Yet they point at a social malaise far more serious than any manifested by the debate on gun ownership.

That Flanagan was a mentally unbalanced man is beyond question. But his public statements, along with the testimony of his former colleagues, leave no doubt that the issue that unbalanced him was that of race.

As racism shoots up higher on the list of the secular deadly sins, its definition gets broader. Defined in the past as hatred of other races perceived as inferior to one’s own, it has gradually got to mean any recognition of racial differences – and eventually anything anyone wishes it to mean.

The concomitant passions have been getting ever more febrile, reaching the red-hot end at the slightest provocation or even in the absence thereof. Blacks in particular have been actively encouraged to see themselves as victims and seek restitution.

This sense of victimhood isn’t wholly without historical and psychological justification. After all, both founding documents of the American republic were largely produced by slave-owners, some of whom, such as Thomas Jefferson, had runaway slaves whipped to raw meat.

Blacks weren’t regarded as fully human, and genetic memory has a much longer half-life than the 150 years that have passed since that perception became unfashionable. The Irish, for example, still talk about Cromwell’s massacres as if they happened yesterday, whereas they predated the US Emancipation Declaration by 214 years.

Having said that, it’s ridiculous to base political action on conditions that no longer pertain. Yet those on the Left do just that, pretending to protect the baby of minorities while in fact seeking to throw out the bathwater of conservatism. Hence race has become another can of oil poured into the fire of political antagonism.

There’s no doubt that Flanagan was psychotic, but his psychosis was fanned by the poisoned air of political free-for-all, driven by the American Left who dominate most of the mainstream media.

Far be it from me to resort to the old mantra of it all being society’s fault, but ambient conditions do contribute to some psychoses staying dormant and some others splashing out in a red spray.

Flanagan’s psychosis would neither sleep nor even lie down. He branded his victims as racist for the flimsiest of reasons or none at all.

Hence he objected vehemently to the use of the phrase ‘reporter in the field’, for to him this evoked the cotton fields in which his ancestors toiled under the overseers’ bullwhips.

When Alison Parker mentioned ‘swinging by the office’, Flanagan took that as a veiled reference to his supposed semi-simian nature. A watermelon eaten in the office was to Flanagan a calculated insult – why, he even accused a convenience store of racism because it sold a watermelon-flavoured drink.

Would he have committed the murders if race antagonisms hadn’t been whipped up to a frenzy for political gain? Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, this, and not gun ownership, is the aspect of the tragedy that merits serious discussion.

People misjudge Jeremy. They see him as a dangerous madman combining Trotskyist views with support for Hamaz and Hezbollah.

Lefties fear, while Tories hope, that Jeremy will destroy the Labour Party if he ever gets to lead it. More farsighted people fear he’ll destroy Britain if he ever becomes prime minister.

They all fail to see Jeremy’s noble inner core, which only my X-ray moral vision can discern.

Jeremy, you see, is the last knight-errant driven by a chivalrous urge to protect our ladies, fair or otherwise. He’s a Don Quixote charging every sexist windmill to defend the honour of Dulcinea del Toboso, as collectively personified by British womenfolk.

It’s only with Cervantes’s help that his generous proposal to segregate our railways can be understood. Every train, suggests our gallant knight, must have women-only carriages, which is the only way to protect our Dulcineas from the sexual harassment they otherwise suffer.

Think of all those ladies in distress suffering a lifelong trauma when yet another ruffian ogles their mummeries and smirks “You don’t get many of those to a pound” or, if his au courant with the PC metric system, “…to a kilo”.

Imagine the anguish of a long-legged girl, mortally wounded by the question “Do they go all the way up to the neck?” Typologically such abuse is only different from rape in some insignificant details.

However, physical abuse is also prevalent, with many a womanly British bottom getting pinched or patted without permission. (A note to my American readers: when in England, don’t ever refer to that part of the anatomy as ‘fanny’. Here the word describes something relatively unlikely to be patted or pinched on public transport.)

Of course another solution would be to cover the jutting womanly attractions with a shapeless black garment that would also cover their faces. Jeremy’s ISIS friends would applaud the idea, but such a radical measure might whip up Islamophobia, which is rapidly replacing sexism as the eighth deadly sin.

Jeremy isn’t only out to protect women. That would be discriminatory and, unlike segregation, discrimination is yet another cardinal sin, Number 10 by the latest count.

My friend Jeremy would have none of that: “My intention,” he says, “would be to make public transport safe for everyone from the train platform to the bus stop…”

Everyone! All ye of little faith, wipe those supercilious Tory smiles off your faces. Not just women, but anyone belonging to any group likely to be abused on any public transport.

In due course we’ll have ‘blacks only’ carriages (or rather ‘Persons of Afro-Caribbean descent only’ ones), ‘cripples only’ carriages (or rather ‘physically or otherwise challenged persons only’ ones) and so forth.

Muslims and Asians, fat, short, ginger-haired and homosexual people – every minority group will have its own carriage, except the Jews. They won’t be allowed on trains at all for fear of upsetting Jeremy’s Hamaz and Hezbollah friends.

Of course buses, being smaller than trains, would be harder to segregate, but I’m sure Jeremy will think of a way.

For example he may propose that alternating is the only way of segregating. Each bus will be assigned exclusively to a potentially harassed group, identified on the front, where the destination is normally displayed. I can just hear people grumbling “You wait around for a woman-only for ages, and then three come together at once”.

If you want to find out about another brilliant idea Jeremy conceived, concentrate and think: what’s the greatest problem haunting Britain, the way the spectre of communism used to haunt Europe?

We’ve already identified some candidates, such as sexism, misogyny, racism in general and Islamophobia in particular, homophobia (not to be confused with haemophilia), discrimination in general and against Muslims in particular – but not against Jews, who, as Jeremy will tell you, deserve all they get.

What comes next? Income inequality, that’s what. Some people make more money than some others, but there comes Jeremy, riding in on his trusted Rocinante, charging yet another windmill with his lance.

We already have a minimum national wage, says Jeremy, which is good. Of course that means that some employers, who can’t afford to pay it, simply won’t hire, thereby increasing unemployment. But Jeremy doesn’t see that as a problem: unlimited social spending will provide more than the minimum wage for those left out.

But now he’s also proposing a maximum national wage, designed to punish greedy fat cats and, ideally, drive them out of Jeremy’s country. Of course they’ll take not only millions of pounds but also millions of jobs with them, but that’s where the unlimited social spending will kick in. Sorted.

Don’t know about you, but I’m warming up to Jeremy. His time has come because he’s a man for our time.     

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

For reasons that would take a book to explain, many Westerners have always been drawn to various types of Russian fascism.

The international Bolshevik variety attracted the left end of the political spectrum, those Lenin accurately called ‘useful idiots’. Yet not all of Lenin’s Western supporters were fools. Some were knaves.

G.B. Shaw was both, which he proved by summing up the prevailing Fabian sentiments in a 1931 Moscow speech:

“It is a real comfort to me, an old man, to be able to step into my grave with the knowledge that the civilisation of the world will be saved… It is here in Russia that I have actually been convinced that the new Communist system is capable of leading mankind out of its present crisis, and saving it from complete anarchy and ruin.”

Having failed to save civilisation, Russia has switched to national fascism, otherwise known as Putinism. That too is never short of Western fans, and the Internet is bursting with girlish gasps unbecomingly issued by men:

“Putin is popular with his people… 86% approval… looks after his own people… a real Christian…” well, you can look up those panegyrics yourself, along with the offerings by some impeccably conservative columnists.

Most of these people aren’t knaves, and some aren’t even fools. Yet they tropistically reach out for Putin’s brand of fascism, desperately hoping to find there the kind of virtues they don’t see in their own governments.

One can understand their frustration. What’s difficult to comprehend is the ease with which they abandon their principles and override their reason.

Surely, for example, they must realise that the much-vaunted 86% approval rating is meaningless, for two reasons.

First, in a country where the government controls the media, approval ratings testify not to the government’s support but to the efficacy of its propaganda. Thus Romania’s dictator Nicolae Ceausescu polled 97% – two days before he was shot out of hand to the accompaniment of wild public jubilation.

The second reason is less obvious, at least to non-Russians. The country’s population has retained the genetic memory of 60 million people murdered for opposing the regime or – in Lenin’s brilliant addition to jurisprudential thought – “capable of opposing” it.

This second category could conceivably include everybody, and everybody lived in terror. Now imagine their descendants receiving a phone call from a stranger who asks a pointed question: “Do you support Putin or not?”

Putin, as everyone knows, is a career officer in the KGB, the same organisation that massacred most of the 60 million. It’s now running the country and, though it’s less murderous at the moment, genetic memory plays up and most people say ‘yes’ just in case.

That’s not to deny that some genuinely support Putin. But then Russia is entitled to have her fair share of idiots too, along with people particularly susceptible to brainwashing – and believe me, Putin’s propaganda puts to shame anything I remember from my youth under Brezhnev.

There goes that bogus statistic, to be replaced by real ones. Such as the rapidly accelerating death rate, with a 5.2% rise in the first six months of this year compared with the same period in 2014.

The increase is mostly driven by those aged 35 to 40. About 70% of those deaths are caused by alcohol (and 40% of babies dying before age one are crushed to death by their drunken mothers), and happy people seldom drink themselves to death.

Nor do they usually kill themselves. Yet suicide is another important factor, with some parts of Siberia showing three times the rate defined as critical by the WHO.

Putin’s care for his people obviously doesn’t include cancer patients, most of whom are denied opiate analgesics and, unable to tolerate the agony, kill themselves en masse. Those free of malignancies go the same route out of sheer hopelessness.

I mentioned the other day that 23 million Russians live below the poverty line of about £100 a month.  Now it has been reported that the region of Kostroma (a city of almost 300,000 not far from Moscow) subsists on a average income of £187 a month – not nearly enough to eat regularly.

All this explains why Russian men’s life expectancy is a year lower than in Rwanda, although I don’t know how many Rwandans support their president Paul Kagame.

However, as Putin’s hacks boast, the Russians lead the world by a wide margin in spirituality. Hard to see what options those poor people have, although it’s noticeable that those who manage to get to the West instantly become as materialistic as everyone else.

Facts will never rid people of their superstitions, of which this irrational adoration of Putin is one. However, I can confidently predict that, when Putin is overthrown, no one in Russia, including the notorious 86%, will bat an eyelid – as no one did when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Heroic dissidents used to risk their lives unfurling anti-Soviet posters in Moscow squares – yet no one protested in 1991, when doing so was safe. Neither will they protest when Putin goes, and his Western fans will have to seek another figurehead as an object of their fascistic cravings.

Junk is the nickname by which Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, is known to his friends, of whom I’m proud to be one. Junk has many fine qualities, prominent among which is his enviable ability to drink any Russian under the table.

Possibly because he shows off this talent too often, he sometimes speaks out of turn, saying things at a wrong time and producing a sound effect akin to that of two pieces of glass being scraped together.

For example, even if I were a huge fan of the Schengen Agreement (passport-free travel throughout 26 European countries), I wouldn’t choose this particular moment for singing its praises.

The Agreement is largely, though far from solely, responsible for the horrendous migrant crisis Europe is facing.

Swarms of Middle Easterners, some suffering from persecution, some only claiming to be, and some all too ready to persecute others, land somewhere on Europe’s Mediterranean coast.

If they claim refugee status, they’re only entitled to stay in the first safe country they reach – if it’s Italy, they’re in luck. If it’s Greece, less so. If it’s Bosnia, my heart bleeds for them.

However, whatever it is, there are always greener pastures elsewhere, specifically in England’s green and pleasant land, which must abandon any aspiration to build Jerusalem not to upset our Muslim friends.

Seeking such pastures would be difficult in the absence of valid visas prominently stamped on their passports. However, Schengen makes such migration a doddle – not only their visas but indeed their passports aren’t going to be checked all the way to Calais or other Channel ports.

I shan’t bore you with descriptions of the resulting chaos, threatening to destroy not only the European order so dear to Junk’s heart, but indeed any order tout court. Suffice it to say that what Europe is in the midst of is nothing short of a crisis, with a catastrophe a distinct possibility.

Then again there’s the minor issue of security, arising because some of our uninvited guests have the requisite training, experience and – more important – inclination to use offensive weapons indiscriminately. This was highlighted the other day on the Amsterdam-Paris high-speed train, where only heroic action by some passengers prevented yet another Muslim perpetrating yet another mass murder.

Much as we all admire free travel, I’d suggest that our present concrete situation shouldn’t encourage abstract pro-Schengen statements. Then again, as Junk has demonstrated on numerous occasions, he drinks more than I do.

He was clearly in his cups when he wrote this paragraph in Le Figaro yesterday: “What worries me is to hear politicians from Left to Right nourishing a populism that brings only anger and not solutions. Hate speech and rash statements that threaten one of our very greatest achievements – the Schengen area and the absence of internal borders: that is not Europe.”

If Schengen is one of our very greatest achievements, I wonder what one of our very greatest fiascos would look like. 

Also, I’d be tempted to analyse the unlikely unity of opinion at both ends of the political spectrum. I mean, those chaps disagree on just about everything else – so isn’t it possible that, if they’re all in agreement, it’s on merit?

Isn’t it also possible that taking an almost universal consensus into account reflects genuine concern rather than populism? And that the resulting anger is fully justified?

Still, as the founder, president and so far the only member of The Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I agree with my friend Junk on one point. Anger alone doesn’t cut it – it’s positive solutions that we must seek.

So next time Junk and I go out for a few pints (of his favourite Martel Cordon Bleu), I’ll outline my proposals, with no anger or populism anywhere in sight:

1) The Schengen Agreement must be suspended until future notice, effective immediately.

2) All European countries will reclaim sovereignty over their own borders, introduce tight controls and admit or turn away anyone they choose.

3) We should select a Greek island we like least and use it as a vetting camp for refugees, generously compensating the Greek government for the inconvenience – and making acceptance of this arrangement a precondition for any further bailouts.

4) Should any immigrant be found in any country for which he has no visa, he must be summarily deported back to the camp.

5) The upkeep of the refugees must by financed by the oil-rich Middle Eastern countries that surely would welcome this opportunity to show Koran-prescribed generosity to their co-religionists.

6) The EU, so ably led by my friend Junk, must acknowledge that Britain is under no obligation to accept any foreigner who doesn’t land on her shores directly, bearing an appropriate visa, preferably not counterfeit.

I’ll have many other proposals as well, but I doubt Junk will stay lucid long enough to get his befuddled head around them. So I’ll stop here and ask myself how likely Junk will be to nod his enthusiastic support.