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Two days ago, His Beatitude Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ Kirill turned 70, and I’d like to offer my belated best wishes.

I could also offer a eulogy, but there’s no need. One has already been delivered by Dmitry Kisiliov, the TV dummy to Putin’s Kremlin ventriloquist: “Patriarch Kirill is one of mankind’s leading thinkers. His thoughts on spirituality, duty, good and evil, wealth and poverty, meaning of life provide priceless spiritual supports for millions of people.”

St Paul, St Augustine, Nietzsche and Milton Friedman thus come together in the patriarch’s brocaded breast, and one can only prostrate oneself in awe. Then, having resumed the vertical position, one may dare offer a few comments, in the fear that a smiting lightning may strike at any moment.

Vladimir Gundiayev, as the Patriarch was in the lay world, remembers “that a man is not justified by the works of law but by the faith of Jesus Christ”. As a prelate, he has so much faith that he knows he can get away with anything for which lesser people would face everlasting fire.

For example, poor mortals can’t serve God and mammon, but, according to Gundiayev, that injunction doesn’t preclude other parallel careers. One can indeed serve two masters, in his case God and the KGB (FSB/SVR).

His Beatitude has been serving that organisation faithfully since at least 1972, when he first appears in KGB dossiers as ‘Agent Mikhailov’. Operational reports describe his assignments, always adding they were “fulfilled successfully”. No wonder the KGB then seconded Gundiayev to the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – he earned it.

It’s from the height of Gundiayev’s dual consecration that the other day he addressed Russian abbots with a sermon of asceticism. He was scathing about their lives of comfort and luxury.

For example, he forbade them to decorate their sceptres with “baubles” and to have salaries. Abbots, he thundered, should “think more about heroic asceticism”.

Do as I say, don’t do as I do, goes the old saw, while an earlier one says in Latin that quod licet iovi, non licet bovi. Gundiayev’s flock are the bulls here, with him himself as Jupiter.

For His Beatitude doesn’t exactly practise what he preaches. The Russians began to notice that a few years ago, during what I then called the Watch’s Sabbath.

Gundiayev was photographed sporting a £30,000 Bréguet at a press conference. After the ensuing outcry, His Beatitude produced a doctored version of the same picture, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, his retoucher had overlooked a minor detail: the reflection of the watch on the shiny table top in front of Gundiayev. As befits a prelate, the picture became supernatural with idealistic Platonic touches: only the shadow of an object was perceived, not the object itself.

Nor is Gundiayev immune to delights of the flesh. Even though he’s a monk, the patriarch openly lives with a woman he describes as a distant relation, a kinship for which no documentary evidence exists.

This cohabitation unfolds in multiple residences, some of which belong to Gundiayev outright, while others are variously described as ‘church property’, ‘gifts’ or ‘convents’. Russian researcher Dr Bychkov has published a long list of Gundiayev’s palaces, yachts and jets of which he has either ownership or exclusive use. His Beatitude has confirmed most of the items, which suggests that ‘patriarch’ must be etymologically related to ‘pay’.

I particularly liked the story of a convent converted into a patriarchal residence and stuffed with designer furniture imported from Italy. One table cost €20,000, and its finish must have been specified as matte, just in case.

I shan’t bore you with a full translation of the list, hoping you’ll take my word for it: we’re talking about uncountable millions. A tiny detail: last year Gundiaev won a lawsuit against his neighbour, who lived beneath the patriarch’s personal property, a 1,450 sq. ft. apartment with a view of the Kremlin.

His Beatitude claimed that refurbishment of the neighbour’s flat had produced dust, causing damage to Gundiayev’s furnishings. The damage was estimated at over $1,000,000, leaving us to guess the overall value of said furnishings, not to mention the apartment itself.

But let’s not get hung up on trivialities. For, with Putin’s blessing, His Beatitude has issued himself a patriarchal dispensation to serve mammon on a serious scale.

Gundiayev’s business activities have earned him a personal capital estimated at between $1.5 and 4 billion. As a good businessman, he has diversified his activities since the time he was a simple metropolitan (bishop). Tobacco products, oil, spirits and foodstuffs have figured prominently among his interests.

In 1996 he was party to a ROC deal whereby huge consignments of tobacco products were imported as duty-free ‘humanitarian aid’ and then sold through shops at market prices. It’s estimated that Gundiayev’s cut of that scam alone topped $50 million.

Later he got into the oil business, earning a fortune whose exact size hasn’t yet been documented, possibly because investigators can’t count that high. Then in 2000 His Beatitude made another $17 million flogging caviar and crabmeat – every little bit helps. His other interests include semi-precious stones, banking, stock market and property development.

And so it goes on, ROC around the clock. Happy birthday, Your Beatitude! God bless the good works.

Yesterday I appeared on the BBC Sunday Morning Live show, on the panel discussing imprisonment.

Since this subject, like most others, tends to divide people along political lines, I feared that the other panellists would gang up on me. I was wrong: providing partial support was Andrew Pierce of The Mail.

But then there was Afua Hirsch, a human rights development worker, whatever that means. Propping up her corner with expert opinion by TV link was a gentleman who once served time and has since developed an understandable interest in the penitentiary system.

Miss Hirsch and I differ on the very definition of prison. Rather than punishment for crimes, she sees it more as an educational and therapeutic facility for the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Hence, according to her and the ex-convict, we have too many people in prison: other institutions would serve the educational purposes better.

My contention was that protecting us from criminals is among the state’s few raisons d’être. Otherwise it’s not immediately clear whence the state would derive its legitimacy.

Therefore the number of prisoners is a moot point. We should have as many as it takes for the state to protect us.

Prison’s principal role is to punish and thereby deter crimes. Rehabilitation, a notion dear to my opponents’ hearts, would be welcome, but it comes far down on the list of desiderata, if at all.

The ex-convict was aghast. Didn’t I know that most released prisoners reoffend within a few months? Miss Hirsch nodded vigorously and looked at me in a way that suggested she wouldn’t mind seeing me inside one of the facilities under discussion.

Actually, those sentenced to non-custodial punishments reoffend as often as those sent down, the valid difference being that at least the latter can’t hurt us while inside.

The ex-convict obviously didn’t realise that everything he was saying supported my argument. After all, the commitment to mythical rehabilitation has been practised for at least two generations. Surely the recidivism rates prove it isn’t working?

When a system fails so spectacularly, the fault usually lies with its design, not the mechanics of its operation. There’s this truth impossible for Miss Hirsch’s liberal mind to grasp: rehabilitation isn’t what prisons are for, and some people can’t be rehabilitated anyway.

To realise this one has to acknowledge that evil, like good, is innate to human nature and in some people it predominates. But that route may lead us as far as original sin, and of course Miss Hirsch can’t possibly believe in such retrograde rubbish.

Rates of reoffending can be significantly reduced by one expedient only: imbuing people with respect for, and fear of, the law.

Respect for the law is a cornerstone of any successful civilisation, and creating it is a reciprocal process. The old cliché works: justice must be done (by the state), and it must be seen to be done (by the people).

A crime, especially a violent one, sends shockwaves through the community, and they can only be attenuated when commensurate punishment is meted out. If this doesn’t happen, respect for the law goes down and crime rates go up.

That’s why Britain, formerly one of the most law-abiding Western nations, is rapidly turning into one of the most lawless. We have the highest rate of violent crime in Western Europe, and London is leading New York in every crime category except murder (the gap is closing).

Fear of the law is an essential complement to respect. Those contemplating an imprisonable offence should be afraid of retribution.

Andrew Pierce manfully came to my defence. Prison, he said, should have “an element of punishment”. More than an element, actually: punishment is all that prison is about, but I can’t complain: some support is better than none.

Miss Hirsch was aghast. Being in prison is awful, she said, what with poor people being deprived of their freedom. Quite. That’s the whole point: the bad people inside lose their freedom to enable the good people outside to enjoy theirs.

This isn’t to say that prisons should be hellholes. Civilised countries can’t have that. But what civilised countries must have is prisons that scare potential criminals away.

Because of the prevalent liberal mindset, so vividly exemplified by my opponents, this isn’t happening. We don’t have enough prisons, and those we do have are overcrowded and understaffed.

Over 7,000 warders have been made redundant in recent months, and the power of both governors and officers has been curtailed. Thus prisons are controlled not so much by the authorities as by the most feral convicts.

Really hardened criminals dish punishment out, rather than being on the receiving end of it. Anarchy reigns, with thousands of meeker inmates murdered, drugs flowing freely, and warders being assaulted.

The issue came up of extending sentences already served when the prisoner is deemed to remain a menace to society. This to me is an affront to the rule of law: keeping people in prison on the statistical likelihood of their reoffending violates the notion of due process.

When a man has served his time, justice demands that he be released. Sentences should be long enough to begin with, and they shouldn’t be routinely cut in half by tariffs. Yet judges are instructed to be lenient (550 sentences were toughened up on appeal last year).

Miss Hirsch unwittingly agreed by saying that short sentences are just awful. Alas, she wasn’t arguing in favour of longer ones: she believed that, rather than being sent down for a short spell, a criminal shouldn’t go to prison at all.

Actually, if our prisons worked as they’re supposed to, I’d be in favour of short sentences for a first offence, to give criminals a taste of much longer ones to come if they reoffend. However, I didn’t make that point, nor many others: time had run out.

…and why there’s no such thing (as proved by Pat Buchanan).

An American may well be a cultural or even a social conservative. Political conservatism, however, is problematic.

A conservative is defined by what he wishes to conserve. In the West, that can only be Christendom, whatever is left of it. Its political essence is adequately expressed by the triad ‘God, king and country’, establishing the descending order of loyalties.

Now the US was the first political embodiment of the Enlightenment, brought about by the urge to replace Christendom with a civilisation based on secular desiderata. Hence the conservative triad fell by the wayside directly the USA was first constituted.

God was shunted aside by the First Amendment, which, as Jefferson gleefully declared, erected “a wall of separation” between the church and the state. King vanished by definition. Only country remained, and it had to work overtime to fill the void left by the other two components.

As early as 1630 the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop alluded to Matthew 5:14 by describing the new community as a ‘city upon a hill’. Thus he implicitly likened it to the beacon that shone the word of God onto the rest of the world.

Since he did so in a secular context, the religion based on that premise could only be secular. Hence it was really an ideology pretending to be a religion: simulacrum gone sanctimonious, the transient pretending to be transcendent. Rather than worshipping God, the new nation chose to worship itself.

A secular religion was born, and it affects Americans’ politics more than any other creed. Real religion is relegated to a purely private matter, having little to do with quotidian life.

Imitating Christianity, the faithful exponents of the American religion have bifurcated into hermetic and crusading strains. Nowadays they call themselves, respectively, paleoconservatives and neoconservatives.

The paleocons believe that America should mostly practise her incomparable virtue at home, thereby illuminating the righteous path for the rest of mankind to tread. The neocons believe in America’s mission – and right – to force recalcitrant nations to see the light.

None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed, and the two confessions of the American religion are at daggers drawn. This brings us to Pat Buchanan, the paleos’ flag-bearer, now that William F. Buckley is no longer with us.

Buchanan detests the neocons (who are indeed detestable) partly because they’ve won the battle for plum jobs in the academy and media, fields traditionally dominated by liberals (aka socialists).

The liberals sense kindred souls in the neocons. Sharing global ambitions, the two groups are committed to the big, omnipotent state, without which such ambitions can’t be pursued.

The neocons are typologically close, and therefore acceptable, to the liberals and welcome to their media. The paleos, on the other hand, are off limits, and their writers are mostly confined to small journals, such as The American Conservative started by Buchanan.

Buchanan also has visceral reasons to dislike the neocons: many of them are Jewish, and even Pat’s friends can’t deny his virulent anti-Semitism. For example, he once argued that Treblinka, where 900,000 Jews were murdered, “was not a death camp but a transit camp used as a ‘pass-through point’ for prisoners”.

Buckley, who loyally sprang to the defence of every fellow paleo, was unable to do so in Pat’s case. He wrote: “I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said… amounted to anti-Semitism.”

I don’t think Buchanan should be dismissed simply because he’s an anti-Semite. If we begin to ignore a man’s entire output for that reason, we’d have to shun such brilliant writers as Dostoyevsky, Chesterton, Belloc, Celine, Waugh et al.

However, when a man’s viscera defeats his reason so decisively, one suspects that the latter is flawed in other areas too, such as politics. Indeed, all the writers I’ve mentioned were often unsound in matters political. Buchanan is no exception, as his article on what he calls ‘the Trump Doctrine’ proves.

Buchanan takes this opportunity, as he always does, to lacerate the neocons. Now I dislike neoconservatism as much as he does (see my book Democracy As a Neocon Trick), but being wrong in general doesn’t mean being wrong in every particular.

True enough, the 2003 neocon-inspired invasion of Iraq was criminal and, which is worse, criminally stupid. An attempt to enforce heaven on earth can only create hell on earth, and so that foray has proved.

The neocons got intoxicated on the quasi-religious dogma of democracy and set out to shove it down the throat of every tribal society on earth. The Middle East didn’t swallow, and we’re all suffering from the resulting reflux (and influx).

But it doesn’t follow that everything the neocons support is nonsense, as Buchanan evidently believes: “They want to trash the Iran nuclear deal,” he writes, “though… U.S. intelligence agencies told us, with high confidence, in 2007 and 2011, Iran did not even have a nuclear weapons program.”

Buchanan’s faith in such agencies is touching. However, he ought to remember that they told us in 2003, with equally high confidence, that Iraq had WMDs, which precipitated the criminal folly of the invasion.

‘The Iran nuclear deal’ must be trashed, even though the neocons think so – the country isn’t developing long-range missiles to deliver Christmas cards, and Islam isn’t really a religion of peace.

Then Buchanan bewails the neocons’ desire “to confront Vladimir Putin, somewhere, anywhere. They want to send U.S. troops to the eastern Baltic…”

That’s the kernel of the ‘Trump Doctrine”. Buchanan believes that “America’s vital interests” can be served only internally. Whatever happens outside the country doesn’t matter. This is dangerous folly quite on the par with neocon belligerence.

“Mr. Trump,” continues Buchanan, “has the opportunity to be the president who, like Harry Truman, redirected U.S. foreign policy for a generation.”

God help us, the man is mad. For in the same paragraph (!) Buchanan then writes that Truman “adopted a George Kennan policy of containment of the world Communist empire, the Truman Doctrine, and sent an army to prevent South Korea from being overrun”.

This strikes me as rather the opposite of Buchanan’s isolationism. Unlike him, Truman realised that the “Communist empire” threatened the world, including America. Hence America had both a practical and moral duty to contain it by force.

If Buchanan doesn’t know that Putin’s KGB Russia is a continuation of ‘the Communist empire’, and what has changed isn’t the objectives but only the slogans, he’s ignorant. If he thinks that America no longer has a practical and moral duty to contain this empire, he’s mad.

His madcap ‘Trump Doctrine’ echoes in every detail the most nauseating propaganda emanating from Putin’s mouthpieces. (This came two days ago from Soloviov, one of Putin’s favourite TV shills: “Russia sits on a tectonic plate that stretches over the entire Eurasian continent. That’s why we simply can’t be a regional power. The Russians are an imperial people by their very nature.”)

NATO, he writes, should stop its eastward expansion, meaning it should let Putin reclaim all the former Soviet satellites. But there’s no such thing as NATO’s expansion. There’s only a welcome the West extends to the victims of Soviet monstrosity who wish to distance themselves from a KGB Russia – the memory of what the KGB did to them is still fresh.

Neither coercion nor propaganda is involved. Eastern Europeans join the West freely and of their own accord. Obviously Buchanan doesn’t realise that the West has a moral obligation to support their desire to be free. Real politik reigns.

As it did in Munich and Yalta, two exercises in real politik that emboldened two diabolical regimes. Opposing them then cost America hundreds of thousands of lives (never mind the millions of other lives; Buchanan never does), and trillions of dollars.

Considering the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, opposing Putin’s diabolical regime given a free rein would cost infinitely more in both categories. Is that real politik enough for Buchanan? Are we talking vital interests now?

Then he says we should ditch the “obsolete” Article 5 of NATO, which is tantamount to abandoning the concept of collective security and all “war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests.”

If Buchanan doesn’t see that NATO serves US vital interests, he’s displaying the same myopia as Chamberlain did at Munich and Roosevelt at Yalta. Actually, it’s more like glaucoma, characterised by a reduced field of vision.

Buchanan interprets American interests in terms that aren’t just cynical and amoral, but also practically ruinous. He thinks that betraying all America’s allies is the right thing to do, for at the moment America only needs trade partners, not allies. Such abandonment of morality and honour is incompatible with conservatism, in the real sense of the word.

But practically speaking, what if the need for allies arises, as it certainly will, when the rise of Putin’s empire begins to threaten US interests even as defined in Buchanan’s narrow terms? What then?

The man has served all Republican presidents from Nixon on. I pray that President Trump can find better advisors – and listen to them. Judging by his pronouncements so far, I fear he won’t.

 

 

The other day I read Dr Pemberton’s article The Biggest Problem With Our Crumbling NHS? Everyone Thinks It’s Free.

That reminded me of the American writer William F. Buckley, who once put down a Moscow tour guide proudly telling him that healthcare in the Soviet Union was free. “Nothing is free, child,” said Buckley, in his usual supercilious manner.

Now, being an incurable pedant, I unfailingly turn the page when reading sentences like “One patient of mine failed to show for a Saturday appointment they’d begged for.” Who did the begging, Dr Pemberton? The patient or the mysterious ‘they’?

As a lifelong champion of PC, I naturally accept that unwarranted use of singular personal pronouns (with the possible exception of ‘its’) should be treated as a felony. But presumably Dr Pemberton knew the patient’s sex, which surely would have qualified as a mitigating circumstance if he faced trial for using ‘he’ or ‘she’.

However, the offensive sentence came in the middle of the article, while at the beginning I felt I’d found a soulmate.

“I have absolutely no interest in… ensuring the survival of the current system simply because of ideology,” wrote Dr Pemberton. Neither do I, I thought, overlooking at first the word ‘simply’, which should have put me on guard.

That word suggests that, in addition to ideology, the current system ought to survive for other, more substantial, reasons. But they don’t exist. The NHS was founded by socialists as purely an ideological construct, and it indeed survives “simply because of ideology”.

Socialism is based on lies, and it’s true to form in this area. The impression conveyed by NHS champions is that until 1948, when all NHS services came on stream, people had been dying in the streets like stray dogs.

In fact, when medical care in the UK went socialist, we had about 400,000 hospital beds. Now, 68 years later, we have 150,000, even though the population has since grown by 14 million, and we have millions of visitors for whom the NHS is indeed free.

Nor did outpatients have to wait weeks for GP appointments, which is a norm today – and they were prescribed drugs strictly on therapeutic, rather than financial, bases.

Moreover – are you ready for this? – the rich and the poor received the same drugs, which is far from being the case in the supposedly egalitarian NHS, with its postcode approach to healing.

The problem with the NHS is that it’s a megalomaniac structure sitting on the subsiding, termite-eaten foundation of a defunct ideology. Hence the only solution would be to slide it off that foundation and into the real world, where the private and public components of healthcare complement each other.

To his credit, Dr Pemberton knows how awful the NHS is. He bemoans the on-going closures of hospitals along with emergency and maternity units. The NHS, he says, “is becoming increasingly unsafe”.

And yet: “The NHS is, broadly speaking, the cheapest and fairest system, so it would be wrong to simply try to move to another model entirely”. Not just PC solecisms but split infinitives as well – a soulmate first found and then lost.

And it isn’t just grammar: he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between fair (or ‘equitable’, used in an earlier sentence) and the same for all. A poor man treated by top doctors in a municipal hospital is being treated equitably – even if a rich man is treated by the same doctors in a private room complete with extensive menus and wine lists.

Yes, the NHS costs less per capita than medical care does in most developed nations. But then no medical care at all would be even cheaper – and the NHS is clearly gravitating towards this cost-saving measure.

Yet what Dr Pemberton is proposing is just a bit of tinkering. First, he says, we should solve the NHS’s “biggest problem” by realising that it’s free only at the point of delivery, not in absolute terms.

Really? And I thought that no one had to pay for those CT scans and IVF treatments, that they all came courtesy of Father Christmas. In fact, I didn’t think that – and neither did anyone else with an IQ above 70.

But fine, we’ve solved the metaphysical problem of the NHS by recognising that we pay for it through taxes. What now? How do we translate our new-found wisdom into concrete physical steps?

Dr Pemberton’s suggestions are risible. The government should spend millions on “a national campaign” telling people “how much drugs and treatments cost” – and then admonish them paternalistically whenever they miss an appointment, like Dr Pemberton’s patient with their [sic] plural personality.

That’s it. Sorted. The NHS survives and thrives.

If the first part of Dr Pemberton’s solution treats us like fools, the second seems to assume we’re clinically retarded. How much of the £116.4-billion NHS budget would his penny-pinching save? Would it even pay for the cost of the “national campaign”?

I’m afraid Dr Pemberton is in the thrall of the same ideology he professes to decry. This prevents him from realising that, in his language, the problem with the NHS is systemic, not merely symptomatic.

What he’s suggesting is tantamount to treating brain cancer with two aspirins. I’m afraid improving our pathetic healthcare will take more than ill-considered palliatives.

The news that Trump describes Norman Peale, the author of the self-motivational book The Power of Positive Thinking, as his mentor didn’t surprise me. But it did scare me.

I’d better state my position straight away: I regard such shamanistic self-hypnosis as the height of vulgarity. But then Trump’s photograph, along with representations of his taste in interior design and wives, should be in the encyclopaedia, next to the entry for Vulgarity, n.

Courses in self-motivation are all based on the assumption that, if you will your problems to go away, they’ll obediently do so – provided you repeat your wish regularly and with dervish-like repetitiveness.

This sort of thing is doubtless useful in training insurance salesmen. Trainees are brainwashed to wake up and repeat several times “I’ll make 50 phone calls today”, even though 45 targets will tell them to perform a ballistically improbable procedure on themselves. But their positive thinking would enable them to take it in stride, knowing that the remaining five punters are prospects.

I think even my American friends (and family members) will agree that the salesman is the central figure of American life. It’s inevitable that a land defined by market pursuits will see buying and selling as its focal activity.

That national mindset has made the country materially successful, albeit at some cost to other aspects of life. It has also made most Americans, including those for whom sales isn’t ostensibly their occupation, attach universal significance to what’s essentially designed as a sales training course.

‘Positive thinking’ is thus widely accepted as a virtue, and so it may be for people who flog things to one another, or campaign for political office, which in the US amounts to the same thing. But it’s lethal to statesmanship, as any vulgarity is.

This isn’t to say that a statesman must be a man of subtle mind and refined tastes. Some of the most effective US presidents weren’t. Ronald Reagan, for example, was arguably the best post-war president, and yet he acted in Westerns, dyed his hair and wore brown suits.

But Reagan was endowed with the power of realistic and moral thinking, which is the most essential quality for a statesman. Realistic means neither positive nor negative in itself, but, to remain realistic, it has to gravitate more to the negative end, eschewing bien pensant positivity.

Ever since Augustine told the story of Adam and Eve in Christian terms, the concept of original sin has shaped Western thought, including political thought.

The assumption is that we’re fallible because we’re fallen, and it’s the assumption on which every successful commonwealth was ever built. Conversely, all attempts to erect a political structure on the positive premise of man’s inherent goodness have ended in disaster.

The Enlighteners were influenced by Rousseau’s positive thinking. The Swiss postulated that man’s primordial goodness was compromised by Christendom. Remove that pernicious pimple from the noble sauvage’s face, open the paths for all and sundry, and every problem will vanish.

Inspired by this positive thinking, chaps like Robespierre and Marat culled all and sundry in apocalyptic numbers. They thus expressed their disappointment with people, who yet again frustrated a beautiful ideal, as they inevitably do.

Hence a statesman shouldn’t inspire himself the way a salesman does. Things won’t happen because he wills them to happen, especially in foreign policy. Most other countries see life differently, and they can be safely assumed to be run by imperfect –often evil – people.

Now Donald Trump is an international property developer, which is a salesman par excellence. His stock in trade is talking people into risking millions in the hope of making tens of millions.

This activity can benefit from Peale’s platitudes, and it can also turn one into an effective motivational speaker. Trump certainly is that, although his facial expressions could do with some work – unless he expects to become a professional gurner.

But this ability is secondary in his new job, and I hope his advisors will explain to him what is primary. A statesman must understand the world not in terms of deals and sales, but in terms of power relationships and how they reflect our civilisation.

Unlike a salesman, who doesn’t think beyond his next contract, a Western statesman must think back to the millennia of Western civilisation and forward to at least the next several decades. For a treaty (a deal, in Trump’s parlance) may look good and profitable in the short term, but prove suicidal over the long run.

For example, there’s every indication that Trump plans to do some horse-trading with Putin and arrive at a mutually beneficial division of sales territories… sorry, I mean areas of influence. That would make global extinction a distinct possibility, but perhaps not in the next four or even eight years.

Supping with the devil, which is Putin, Trump needs to bring the long spoon of overwhelming military force. Just delivering a sales spiel and having the punter sign on the bottom line isn’t going to do the job.

I’m not sure that Trump can think in those terms, no matter how positive he is. One just hopes he’ll have advisors who know how to think realistically, which usually means thinking negatively.

 

A few months ago I asked a friend this question, only to be put to shame over being so irredeemably ignorant. Now he’s dead, the sense of shame has come back, deepened immensely by the page-long obituaries in all the broadsheets.

One such obituary described Cohen as a “poet, songwriter and singer, whose intensely personal lyrics exploring themes of love, faith, death and philosophical longing made him the ultimate cult artist”.

It’s when reading about men like Cohen that one realises how futile one’s own life has been. There was no escaping now: I had to listen to the lyrics covering so densely the territory between first principles and last things.

However, Cohen wrote hundreds of songs and, while my own ‘philosophical longing’ is strong, it doesn’t stretch that far. A choice had to be made, and what better aesthetic guide can one wish for than The Guardian, the paper for exactly the kind of people whose own longings overlap with Cohen’s?

So I’ve dutifully listened to what The Guardian described as “10 of his best songs”, and I hope you appreciate the lengths to which I go for your sake. Had I not felt duty-bound to quench your occasionally understated thirst for my insights, I would have quit after the first couple of verses.

For Cohen instantly made me upgrade my aesthetic ranking of our ex-Chancellor’s favourite rap group N**gaz With Attitude. The musical content of both is roughly equal, which is to say equally negligible, but the rap chaps have the distinct advantage of not being cloyingly pretentious, quasi-intellectual pseuds.

 Admittedly, N**gaz and Cohen aim at different, and to me equally alien, audiences. But at least they don’t camouflage their savagery the way Cohen hides behind the mask impenetrable to Guardian readers.

Far be it from me to impose my tastes on you, or to believe that an attempt to do so would have the slightest effect. You can make up your own mind, using The Guardian’s list as a lantern lighting the path leading up to Cohen’s towering genius.

Give me crack and anal sex! Give me back the Berlin Wall// Give me Stalin and St Paul

“Terrible, terrifying fun,” says The Guardian. That’s one way to describe it. However, my first impulse is to suggest that N**gaz With Attitude sue Cohen’s estate for plagiarism – not of words but of the underlying ‘philosophical longing’.

 If you want a doctor// I’ll examine every inch of you

One would think that most people outgrow the desire to play doctors and nurses at some point. Apparently not – philosophical poets retain the urge forever. But I’m curious what kind of doctor we’re talking about here. Gynaecologist? Dermatologist? The public has the right to know.

Your faith was strong but you needed proof// You saw her bathing on the roof// Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya// She tied you// To a kitchen chair// She broke your throne, and she cut your hair// And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

There’s no better proof of one’s own strong faith than to watch a girl bathe on the roof at night (how did she carry the bathtub there?) and then have her tie one to a kitchen chair. I may be missing some of the philosophical subtlety here, being a congenitally insensitive sort. But Hallelujah isn’t the first word this pseudo-poetic rubbish draws from my lips.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin// Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in// Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove// Dance me to the end of love

Given the choice of being touched with a girl’s naked hand or glove, I’d opt for the former, provided said hand isn’t holding a burning violin, doubling as a dance partner. I’ll pass on first-degree burns, thank you very much. Again, the subtlety eludes me altogether.

There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning// They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever// While Suzanne holds her mirror

If the heroes are in the seaweed, they don’t mix with children in the morning. The heroes are dead, while the children are presumably alive. And is Suzanne holding her mirror to the drowned heroes or is she using it to spy on the precocious children gagging for love? Art’s fine line between the enigmatic and unintelligible is being overstepped here, methinks.

I’m standing on a ledge and your fine spider web// Is fastening my ankle to a stone [while in the past you] held on to me like a crucifix

It’s a man who holds on to a crucifix, not the other way around. And if there’s nothing but a fine spider web fastening Leonard’s ankle to the stone ledge, he’ll tumble into the abyss, and wouldn’t that be a shame.

You treated my woman to a flake of your life// And when she came back, she was nobody’s wife

Allow me to translate from the intensely personal, poetic and philosophical: somebody bonked Leonard’s girlfriend but wouldn’t marry her, so she came back to Leonard.

Enough? Certainly is for me. If that were the only choice, I’d take N**gaz With Attitude any day.

Leonard Cohen, RIP.

 

The EU’s megalomaniac expansionists should have heeded Kipling’s prophecy that “never the twain shall meet”.

Their rush to admit Eastern European countries brings the Trojan Horse to mind, and we all know what happened to Troy. Then again, like all wicked contrivances the EU has a knack for digging holes for itself.

The depth of this particular hole has just been emphasised by Bulgaria’s presidential election, won by Putin’s stooge Gen. Rumen Radev. As a result, Boyko Borisov’s government has resigned, leaving the field open for other Russian puppets.

Gen. Radev’s election is a fruit fallen off the tree of the Russians’ systematic campaign to undermine the West, whose part they mistakenly think the EU is. It isn’t.

The EU is an ideological construct and, as such, it transcends geography, along with every other academic discipline: history, economics (and its mathematics), political science. What the Eurocrats don’t realise is that its ideology is self-refuting.

Admitting Eastern European countries means admitting their high officials into the inner sanctum where key decisions are made. But these countries were corrupted by two generations of Soviet rule, while most of their leaders – especially those from a security or army background – are either run by Moscow or are at least receptive to its friendly suggestions.

Gen. Radev’s first post-election pronouncements made no secret of where his heart is. “I will closely work with the government and EU colleagues to achieve the lifting of the sanctions [against Russia],” he announced. He also praised President-elect Trump for “seeking more dialogue with Russia”.

Perhaps I’m unfair to the EU. Its chieftains are driven not only by ideology but also by their ignorance of some basic facts of life.

FACT 1. Communism corrupts. Everyone knows that communists kill millions. Fewer people realise that they also kill civilisations by severing their moral, religious and social roots.

FACT 2. Once the roots are severed, the civilisation dies. It can be replanted and may in due course regrow to its past luxuriance. But that takes time.

Conservatively speaking, I’d estimate that period to be at least the length of the communist rule – longer in places where the civilisation wasn’t particularly strong to begin with, or where regeneration efforts are bogus. Hence I’m more optimistic about, say, Hungary than about Bulgaria or indeed Russia itself.

FACT 3. Russia hasn’t been a communist country for the last 34 years, in the sense of being run by the communist party. That stopped not in 1991, as is commonly believed, but in 1982. KGB head Yuri Andropov became dictator in that year, setting Russia on the way to becoming a KGB fiefdom.

FACT 4. Gorbachev’s glasnost in 1989 and Yeltsyn’s perestroika in 1991 completed that process de facto, while Col. Putin’s 2000 ascent did so de jure.

FACT 5. Other than suppression at home, the KGB’s principal job has always been and still is to destabilise the West, whose desiderata the KGB correctly sees as being incompatible with its own.

FACT 6. Until 1991 de jure, and ever since de facto, much of the Eastern European elite has been made up of Russian agents or at least sympathisers receptive to KGB cajoling.

FACT 7. Therefore admitting these elites into the command structures of organisations like the EU and NATO is tantamount to injecting a patient with cancerous cells.

FACT 8. Neither the EU nor especially NATO can afford to have poisonous discord at a time when the KGB/FSB-run Russia represents what the Americans call a clear and present danger to the West.

Perhaps ignorance of these facts plays even a greater role than ideological proclivities. NATO, for example, is a non-ideological defence alliance, but it too is capable of shooting itself up with KGB poison.

For example, in 2008 the Hungarian Sandor Laborc was appointed head of the NATO Committee for Security and Intelligence, whose function is to coordinate the intelligence efforts of 28 countries.

Now Gen. Laborc is an 1989 honours graduate of the KGB Dzierjinsky Academy in Moscow. In order to study there, the aspirant had to demonstrate not only the requisite ability but also the kind of loyalty to the KGB cause that couldn’t have been faked.

Hence Gen. Laborc sold his soul to the devil, and this kind of transaction can never be reversed. Such was the man who acquired unrestricted access to NATO secrets, and he wasn’t the only one.

Now Bulgaria – a member of both NATO and the EU – has re-entered the KGB orbit. In the old days, it wasn’t so much a satellite of the Soviet Union as practically its member. In fact, Russians used to quip that “a chicken isn’t a bird, Bulgaria isn’t abroad” (a paraphrase of the old saying “a chicken isn’t a bird, a wench isn’t a person”, a misogynist sentiment I, as a lifelong champion of equality, disavow unreservedly).

If Bulgaria again starts to revolve in that orbit, and especially if it’s joined by other former Soviet satellites, it won’t be just sanctions that’ll bite the dust, but the consensus to resist KGB aggression against its former slaves. A catastrophe beckons.

Ideally the West should introduce a quarantine period before admitting Eastern Europeans into the fold, until they can be pronounced free of infection. But we all know that ideals aren’t achievable in this world.

Score one for Col. Putin, who outranks Gen. Radev.

One has to admit that Donald isn’t everybody’s idea of a pious Presbyterian. Though he still maintains some loose connection with his parents’ confession, his behaviour is, how shall I put it, more Playboy than Presbyterian.

And yet he won over Christians by a wide margin: 52 per cent of all Catholics, 58 per cent of all Protestants and 82 per cent of all evangelicals voted for him.

The Catholic vote is particularly notable. After all, some 40 per cent of US Catholics are Hispanics, and, putting it mildly, Trump didn’t go out of his way to endear himself to that group.

Why did Trump win the Christian vote? Here I recall a conversation I once had with a friend, a good Catholic and a good man, even though his politics are somewhat to the left of mine.

The conversation veered towards Franco, whom I described as a saviour of Spain. The man had no wings, but the choice Spain faced wasn’t one between Franco and an angel. It was between Franco and Stalin, and, had Franco lost, Spain today would closely resemble Romania.

My friend didn’t exactly share my enthusiasm for the Caudillo. But, he admitted, had he lived at the time, he would have supported Franco, begrudgingly. Because, he explained, “the other side was killing Catholics”.

But what about a place where no priests are being murdered? Should faith in Christ still skew a person’s political convictions and, if yes, how?

The question is valid, for the dual nature of Christ demands a synthesis of the physical and metaphysical. This is the cornerstone of Christianity, and it’s no accident that the deadliest heresies in history preached the evil of the physical world.

Yet, when Christ said that his kingdom wasn’t of this world, he meant that his kingdom was higher than this world. He thus established the primacy of the metaphysical ideal, which ought to determine how the physical life is lived.

Hence one’s faith should at least influence one’s politics. Otherwise the metaphysical thesis and the physical antithesis won’t meet at the counterpoint of synthesis, thereby flouting the dialectical essence of Christ.

Now skipping some intermediate logical steps, I’m convinced that it’s a Christian’s moral duty to vote for the most conservative (or the least socialist) candidate on offer.

For Christian Socialism (predominantly Protestant) is an oxymoron, as is its Catholic doppelgänger Democratic Socialism. Socialism can no more be Christian than it can be democratic.

Socialism, in its multiple variants, is the most toxic offshoot of that etymological cognate of Lucifer, the Enlightenment. Its animus was rebellion against Christendom, starting with its founding religion. That was the original revolt of the masses, to use Ortega y Gasset’s term.

When it erupted in a violent 1789 outburst, hundreds of thousands of Christians were killed. But the damage went even further than that: the Enlightenment also killed Christianity as the dominant social, cultural and political force.

Everything about post-Enlightenment modernity is an active denial of everything about Christianity: modernity’s statism, materialism, mendacious premises – and its natural political expression in socialism.

The essence (as opposed to verbiage) of socialism is deifying the omnipotent central state, transferring most political and economic power from the individual to a bureaucratic elite ruling in the people’s name. This is the exact opposite of Christian subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level.

Financing the giant provider state through extortionate taxation is also the opposite of Christian charity: a man giving his money to a beggar acts in the Christian spirit; one giving his money to a mugger doesn’t.

Ascribing an undue significance to the process by which the ruling elite is formed bespeaks the characteristic modern obsession with formalism. Having failed to replace the Christian content of our civilisation with anything of remotely similar value, the modern lot are obsessed with forms rather than essences.

Hence their fixation on method of government, masking the fundamental kinship of all modern governments, whatever they call themselves. Equally hostile to the traditional organic state, they’re all different parts of the same juggernaut rolling over the last vestiges of Christendom (I make this argument at length in my book How the West Was Lost).

A Christian must feel the inner need to slow down this juggernaut as best he can, even if it can’t be stopped. Hence he’s duty-bound to support the most conservative candidate, in the only valid meaning of conservatism. Only thus can he preserve his intellectual integrity.

Many Christians must perceive this viscerally, even if they haven’t thought it through philosophically. Hence their support for Trump – no matter how thoroughly most of them must be appalled by his vacuity and vulgarity.

I don’t see Trump as a fellow conservative. Had he stood against a George Canning or at a pinch a Ronald Reagan, no right-minded person would vote for him. But, even as the alternative to Franco was Stalin, not an angel, the alternative to Trump was Hillary, not a George Canning or at a pinch a Ronald Reagan.

It’s a damning comment on our time that believers in absolute truth have to become political relativists, choosing not the greater good but the lesser evil. Trump, they decided, was just that – and, God help us all, they were right.

Jean-Claude Juncker (Junk to his friends) must have his brain addled by Glenfarclas whisky, which he’s rumoured to consume in toxic amounts.

Since president-elect Trump doesn’t have much time for supranational setups, his ascent casts a dark cloud over Junk’s vocation, which is making all power in Europe concentrated in the hands of an unaccountable Brussels elite.

So much more desperate Junk is to look for a silver lining. Now he thinks he has found it in the fact that Trump’s distaste for supranational setups seems to extend to NATO.

Of course, Donald’s experience has taught him to see life primarily in terms of dollars and cents. Preferable as this outlook is to one based on ideology, it’s inadequate when applied to geopolitics.

But be that as it may, Trump’s objection to NATO springs largely from the inequitably large contribution America makes to its budget. I see his point: the US pays 70 per cent of NATO’s budget though the other 27 members have a greater combined GDP.

Moreover, only five of them comply with the NATO guideline of spending at least two per cent of GDP on defence – which number doesn’t include Germany, France, Italy and Spain. Britain qualifies, but only by including MI6 in the defence rubric. And Latvia and Lithuania, who have more than most to fear from Russia, spend hardly anything on defence at all.

All this is outrageous. But it takes an awful lot of Glenfarclas to deduce that therefore the EU needs its own army acting, in Junk’s words, as “the principal global security provider”. He must have been in his buckets, not just cups.

Leaving the logistics of this aspiration to military professionals, even a rank amateur equipped with a pocket calculator will know that, to begin to realise this aspiration, Europe will have to double its defence spending – at least.

Junk and his jolly friends surely must understand this. Implicitly, therefore, they are ready to invest in rebuilding Europe’s defences – hoping that the Russians don’t attack during the years such a massive programme would take.

But if the EU is prepared to boost its defence spending to such an extent, Trump’s major objection to NATO vanishes. Following it out of the window is the need for an EU army, presumably led by Junk as generalissimo and Tusk as the vanguard commander.

An EU army wouldn’t just compete with NATO – it would destroy it. That would surely put an end to any US presence on the continent, leaving the EU to its own devices. One can see Col. Putin’s eyes light up even as we speak.

For Russia would have Europe badly outgunned even in the unlikely scenario of Europe doubling its defence spending. At the moment, the two European nuclear powers, Britain and France, have 515 nuclear warheads between them. Russia has 7,300.

Also, Russia has 15,398 tanks, including the new generation that has revolutionised tank design. Britain, Germany and France together have about 1,300 tanks, many of which are just armoured self-propelled guns. Even doubling that number would leave Europe in dire straits.

The same picture pertains in every weapon category. The upshot of it is that Europe can’t defend itself against Russia without America’s help.

But forget armaments. The most vital weapon in any country’s arsenal is its wisdom to perceive danger and its will to defend against it. Alas, one observes a deficit in those areas on the part of both the EU and the US.

Junk’s musings have nothing to do with defence. They represent nothing but an attempt to increase the EU’s power by drawing more resources under its umbrella. Indirectly, there’s also a hope that Britain will reverse Brexit, having found herself in a military vacuum between the US and the EU.

Should push come to shove, the EU would effectively surrender faster than you can say ‘Munich’. This wouldn’t represent an intolerable change of status for Western European leaders: they’d simply become satraps to Moscow rather than Brussels.

There’s no logic to Junk’s hare-brained ideas at all, other than federalist self-aggrandisement. However, there’s no logic to Trump’s distaste for NATO either.

Europe needs America, but then America needs Europe too. To put this into mercantile terms so dear to Trump’s heart, for Europe to act as a profitable trade partner it has to be prosperous, which it wouldn’t be under Russian domination.

For historical evidence, look at the economies created before 1990 by the same Germans in the west of the country and in the east. When it comes to economies, Russia has a Midas touch in reverse, even if she doesn’t occupy the space physically.

However, the most powerful arguments for collective security lie outside Trump’s comfort zone. Americans have had an innate belief in their historical mission ever since 1630, when their leader, the Puritan lawyer John Winthrop, delivered an oration in which he alluded to Matthew 5:14 by describing the new community as a “city upon a hill”.

People – including many Americans – who see America as merely a business concern with uncertain cultural antecedents are making a bad mistake. They ignore the messianic metaphysical premise that’s as important to Americans as their vaunted pursuit of happiness.

A country can change its economy, military alliances and even laws. One thing it can’t change is its metaphysical premise, provided it’s deeply enough ingrained. Thus America has to pursue a global role to remain America. The sooner Trump realises this, the better it will be for his own country.

NATO is a proven instrument of America realising such ambitions – whatever we, or Junk, may think about them. Casting Europe adrift is simply not an option for either party.

Hence, while Junk’s idea of a Yank-free defence is downright crazy, Trump’s isolationist noises are ill-considered too. He must think again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Candidates in general and Trump in particular say an awful lot, and a lot of it is awful. But Trump has also hinted at some excellent policies.

Of course, once elected, no candidate can do all he says. Some such failures will come from his having made promises he had no intention of keeping. Others may be caused by constitutional curbs on executive power.

But every president will put into effect some of his proposed policies. While it’s too early to tell which ones Trump will realise, it’s still possible to assess those he has mentioned.

Such assessment should be dispassionate and rational. Otherwise one risks sounding as ignorant as Max Hastings did in his anti-Trump rant: “America’s Founding Fathers would be appalled by the hijacking of the democratic system they crafted so carefully”.

But the Founders didn’t ‘craft’ a democracy. They created a republic, and it’s unfortunate that people who pontificate on politics don’t know the difference.

The Founders themselves did. In 1806 John Adams wrote in disgust: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

And Thomas Jefferson added that “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one per cent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

But back to Trump now. How would we mark his proposed policies if he were a pupil?

Protectionism. Trump wants high tariffs on trade with Mexico and China. He thinks that’ll save American jobs – but it won’t. Such measures will protect underperforming industries and punish successful ones (along with consumers): E

Trade. In the same vein, Trump wants to repeal some trade treaties, such as NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Bad idea: F

Corporate taxes and red tape. “70 per cent of regulations can go,” says Trump, and he also proposes more than halving company taxes. These are proven measures to energise the economy: A

Terrorism. Trump wants to “bomb the hell out of ISIS”, “put more boots on the ground” and “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Right spirit, but one detects little subtlety in Trump’s thinking on such subjects: B-

Personal taxes. Trumps is in favour of vast simplification and overall reduction. Brilliant: A+

Rebuilding infrastructure. A good idea in itself, but Trump wants to solve unemployment thereby. That sounds like FDR’s New Deal, with its TVA and other megalomaniac socialist projects. Rotten idea: E-

Energy and climate. Trump wants to increase the production of hydrocarbons and put an end to all those New Age ideas. He also refers to global warming as “a hoax” and “weather”. Right on all counts: A

Gun laws. Gun ownership “should be legal in all 50 states,” says Trump, who sees no connection between murder rate and availability of firearms. All good: A+

Islam. Trump pledges to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”. He’d “strongly consider” closing the more radical mosques. Good luck to him, but the idea is solid: A

Immigration. Trump favours kicking out 11 million illegal immigrants and building a wall all along the Mexican border. The first is good in principle but hard to carry out. The second is silly, and I hope he didn’t mean it: C

Cleaning up Washington. Five-year ban on ex-officials becoming lobbyists, reducing the size of the state and “the corrupting influence of special interests”, a hiring freeze on government jobs. Excellent: A+

Collective security. The combined GDP of other NATO members is greater than America’s, and yet their total defence budgets are less than half of America’s. Trump is right to demand a drastic change.

But this technicality can be sorted out once the underlying principles are agreed upon. Chief among these is that Western countries should present a solid defensive bloc wherein an attack on one is an attack on all. Trump makes little effort to conceal his contempt for this principle and has made nasty-sounding isolationist noises.

He seems to think that collective security undermines American national interests, but he’s wrong. Practically from the day she was born, America has been pursuing an ever-accelerating imperial policy driven by messianic self-perception. Abandoning the policy would mean abandoning the self-perception, which might be advisable in theory but would be catastrophic in practice.

Isolationism, while always mooted, has never made serious headway in the US and never will. Nor, the national psyche apart, is it in the country’s geopolitical and economic interests: F-

Russia. I wrote about this yesterday, but repetition is the mother of all learning, as they used to say (repetitio mater studiorum est).

This is potentially the most disastrous misconception Trump has. He favours peace with Putin, which is good, provided it means neither surrender nor betrayal of all America’s allies nor a cynical ploy to divide the world into inviolable spheres of influence.

I’m afraid Trump’s views fail to satisfy those provisions. In part that’s attributable to his business background, and here I disagree with those who believe that running a company prepares a man for running a country.

Business is immeasurably simpler than politics. Nowadays it’s also amoral: a modern businessman, especially a wheeler-dealer like Trump, will do anything for a profit, as long as it isn’t illegal – or even then, if he can get away with it.

However, though a statesman can’t always act on his principles, he must have them – and they must be correct. Trump clearly doesn’t understand the evil nature of Putin’s Russia, nor sees it as an imminent danger to world peace.

If history teaches anything at all, it’s that appeasing an evil regime means emboldening it (Munich). And even an agreement on spheres of influence can only be short-lived (Nazi-Soviet Pact). America and NATO must close ranks and present a strong, united front to the KGB junta striving to destroy the West as a moral and political entity.

Trump doesn’t seem to realise any of this, and one can only hope that his advisors will talk sense into him before a calamity occurs: F-

Britain. Trump seems to see Britain as a more promising European outpost than the EU. There are also rumours that he’s considering Nigel Farage for a ministerial post. I’m not sure a non-citizen can serve in that capacity, but it’s the thought that counts. The best for the last: A+

A mixed bag, really, and I’ll leave my American friends to calculate the GPA. Donny is clearly a promising pupil, but there are some worrying, and potentially catastrophic, lacunae in his education.