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Yesterday I described the French Revolution as a prominent landmark on the road to perdition. A few hours later came an awful illustration.

Or rather 84 illustrations, which is how many people were murdered in Nice by yet another exponent of what we’re under orders to call a ‘religion of peace’. So far I haven’t heard any new reassurances on the peaceful nature of Islam, given a bad name by a few rotten apples. But that’ll come.

It’s a macabre coincidence that the carnage happened on Bastille Day, when France was celebrating the priming of delayed-action mines buried under our civilisation. One of them went off in Nice, with the French – and the rest of us – watching on helplessly.

It’s impossible for a civilisation to defend itself without a sense of its own righteousness. If a conflict is seen as a clash between good and evil, the combatant can feel empowered to take on even a superior foe. In the absence of that perception, no amount of brawn can repel even a small, determined force.

I’m writing this a few miles from the Burgundian town of Vézelay, where on 31 March, 1146, St Bernard of Clairvaux delivered his famous oration on responding to the Muslim threat:

“…Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed on Christian people? …Fly then to arms; let the holy rage animate you in the fight, and let the Christian world resound with these words of the prophet: ‘Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood!’ ”

Thus spoke a civilisation sufficiently self-confident to defend itself against a mortal threat – and sufficiently clear-headed to realise that a mortal threat did exist. Every ringing word was striking a note no modern leader would be able to produce.

For the event France celebrated on the day of the appalling tragedy signposted the protracted suicide attempt of our civilisation. The snowball of wishy-washy anomie was pushed down the slope, to get bigger as it rolled towards the abyss.

Absolute truth was declared nonexistent, and a multitude of truthlets, roughly equal to the number of individuals, each endowed with inalienable rights, were all pronounced equally valid – provided they had nothing to do with the founding truth of our civilisation.

The snowball went over the edge and disintegrated into a myriad fragments, each supposed to be equal in substance, if perhaps slightly different in detail. Eventually God was swiped off his perch and replaced with the Demiurge of Diversity.

No one can go against this vengeful deity and get away unscathed. Our will has eroded and our mind has dimmed – we simply can’t enunciate the only thought that, once uttered, would enable us to stop Islam in its tracks: we aren’t at war with ISIS, Islamic fundamentalism or Islamofascism. We’re at war with Islam.

Except that it’s a phoney war, waged by our enemies only. They know they’re at war and they know who the enemy is. We aren’t fighting the war because we don’t even acknowledge it’s under way.

The Demiurge of Diversity demands that we atomise every group into its individual constituents. Some individuals may be quite nasty, and we can resist them, if only half-heartedly. But no group can possibly have anything wrong with it, and certainly no religion.

They’re all equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. Only the creed of the Demiurge of Diversity is worshipped in earnest.

Without a clear understanding of what we’re fighting for or against, no war can be either just or successful, as proved by the criminal 2003 foray initiated by the US neocons.

Refusing to acknowledge that Islam is a religion of war, and has been since 627 AD, when its founder personally murdered hundreds of Jews in Medina, they singled out a few bad Muslims for punishment. Once the bad ones were deposed, the good Muslims would supposedly enjoy an American-style democracy in their newly built nations.

Show me a wrong strategic goal and I’ll show you a lost war. Now, 13 years later, we’re still suffering casualties, and there’s no end in sight. The Demiurge of Diversity doesn’t let us do what has always been done at wartime.

We must prevent any Muslims from entering our countries and regard every Muslim resident here as an enemy alien. Those who’ve already shown their hand by voicing support of jihad must be summarily deported, and every mosque in which such words were uttered summarily shut down and razed.

At the same time Islamic states must be held responsible for every atrocity committed by Muslims against Westerners – with appropriate punitive measures. My favourite one would be taking over their oilfields and holding them until Islamic passions have quieted down, but I’m sure we have people better qualified than me to work out the appropriate tactics.

We have an overwhelming physical superiority over Islam, but it takes a clear sense of purpose to bring it to bear. That’s what we’re lacking, which is why we must brace ourselves for more enemy action, such as the atrocity in Nice.

Because our enemies are stronger than us metaphysically, they’re prepared to die for their beliefs. We aren’t even prepared to live for ours – in fact, we aren’t even sure what they are. The Demiurge of Diversity doesn’t let us have any.

The telltale sign of ideological contrivances is that their origin – unlike that of organic commonwealths like England – can be pinpointed to a concrete date. One should always be wary of such states, especially if their date of birth is associated with a revolutionary outburst.

The three dates bemoaned by everyone who despises our vulgar, soulless, materialistic modernity are the dates on which said modernity found its quintessential physical embodiments: 4 July in America, 7 November in Russia and 14 July in France.

(One could legitimately add to this roster 31 October, 1517, when the Reformation started, but today is the occasion for focusing on specifically political subversion.)

‘Liberty’ arrived in France exactly 227 years ago, when 300 thugs stormed the Bastille, kicking off the revolution. The event inspired Edmund Burke to write his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France, which should be at the top of the reading list for anyone interested in modern politics – or wishing to understand the inherent evil of revolutions.

By the looks of it, Reflections wasn’t on Immanuel Kant’s reading list at all, which is why he lied by writing that “…this revolution finds in the heart of all observers the kind of sympathy that borders on enthusiasm.”

Not quite all, Herr Professor. The only enthusiastic hearts were those stuffed to the brim with the ideology of hatred and destruction going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment – the denial of the very reason it inscribed on its banners.

Such hearts ruled their possessors’ heads, overriding reason regardless of whether it was of a high order, like Kant’s, or an abysmally low one, like Robbie Burns’s. Scotland’s national poet responded to the upheaval with the poem The Tree of Liberty:

“It stands where ance the Bastile stood, //A prison built by kings, man,// When Superstition’s hellish brood //Kept France in leading-strings, man.”

At the time of its demise, the ‘prison built by kings’ and sanctified by ‘Superstition’s hellish brood’ (Christianity, that is) kept ‘in leading-strings’ a grand total of seven prisoners: four counterfeiters, one sexual deviant, a failed regicide, along with a chap who believed he was Julius Caesar and, once liberated, was immediately transferred to a lunatic asylum.

Now that liberty has had a free run for 227 years, France boasts a prison population of 66,678, which is impressive, if paling by comparison to the corresponding figures for the other two reference countries of modernity, Russia (651,360) and the US (2,217,947). The US leads the way, but then it is the world’s leader.

However, that disastrous event is best assessed in philosophical terms, rather than arithmetical ones. For, while the French Revolution didn’t produce intellectual, cultural and social perdition either immediately or singlehandedly, it was surely one of the foremost landmarks on the road to it.

The Enlightenment, whose pent-up animus burst out 227 years ago, was inspired by hatred of Christianity (‘Superstition’s hellish brood’) and the urge to destroy the civilisation begotten by it. The vestiges of that civilisation are still hanging on by the skin of their teeth, but something vital was indeed destroyed: humanity as a cohesive entity.

It’s an idiotic modern perversion to perceive man in strictly physical terms. The destructive consequences of such a puny misapprehension are clear, for possessing the same number of limbs or internal organs doesn’t bring people any closer. Only metaphysics can do that, by imbuing most people with the same understanding of truth.

This can only happen when truth is perceived as absolute and hence, by definition, the same for all. To act in that capacity, truth has to be infinitely higher than quotidian life: it must be accepted as the end, not the means.

Once such truth is shunted aside, it’s not just religion that suffers. Reason itself is compromised, deprived as it now is of a teleological aspect. Dostoyevsky wasn’t talking about reason when he wrote that “without God everything is permitted”, but he might as well have been.

Absolute truth is the gauge by which thought can be verified; it’s also a control valve by which thought can be regulated. Remove it, and reason loses discipline, meaning it also loses definition and ultimately any kind of sound content.

Suddenly anything, no matter how illogical or downright stupid, can be said, and inanity demands equal time with intelligence. It’s only in such an intellectual atmosphere that our politicians can rise to power: any brainless slogan mouthed by brainless nonentities can appeal to brainless masses.

What goes for reason also goes for morality: relativism damages both, with moral egotism joining intellectual solipsism to reign supreme. The Enlightenment ordered man to look for truth only inside himself – which he did, but to his horror found only himself there.

For having to spend an eternity with oneself only, as an atom disconnected from its molecule, is a working definition of hell – doing so in this life defines hell on earth. That the hell in which we live is physically comfortable makes the contrast between the physical and metaphysical even more terrifying.

It was that ultimate Reign of Terror that was adumbrated by the French Revolution. This is what the French are celebrating today, along with other victims blissfully unaware of their victimhood.

 

 

According to Jean-Claude ‘Junk’ Juncker and Martin ‘Papa’ Schultz, heads of the European Commission and Parliament respectively, we have a crisis on our hands. Britain is holding the whole continent hostage, and it’s up to Junk and Papa to negotiate its release.

Having donned their bullet-proof vests, Junk and Papa whipped out their trusted megaphones and offered a penetrating analysis of the situation.

Junk led the way: “In the end, the British didn’t vote to leave because of the euro. They’re not even members of the currency union.”

It’s reassuring to know that Junk has his facts down pat: he knows that only 19 EU members are in the euro and nine aren’t. Moreover, his perusal of a huge corpus of data yielded the startling discovery that Britain is one of the nine and not of the 19.

“Even the refugee crisis hardly affected the country,” continued Junk, somewhat less convincingly. In the last 10 years Britain’s population has grown by five million, almost exclusively due to immigration. I suspect what my friend Junk really meant was that, since the EU is one continuous refugee crisis, there’s no point singling out the current peak.

Having thus explained what didn’t cause Brexit, Junk then kindly told us what did: “Britain has never been able to decide whether it wants to fully or only partially belong to the EU.”

Junk is much better at splitting infinitives than hairs. Actually, the referendum has shown that Britain wants to belong to the EU neither fully nor even partially, but that’s what Junk doubtless meant. He doesn’t always express himself clearly, and never after his first breakfast Scotch – but then I’m always there to act as his trusted interpreter.

Then Papa chimed in, in his unique plaintive way: “For many people, politics in Brussels and Strasbourg might as well be happening on another planet.”

Hence the current situation, with Britain having abducted the continent, nay the whole planet, and now holding it for ransom. “First,” said Papa, “David Cameron initiated the referendum in order to secure his post. Now, fellow Conservatives want to delay the start of exit negotiations until they’ve held a party conference.”

The first sentence shows impeccable judgement: it’s true that Dave called the referendum because a) he was sure of victory and b) he thought that as a result he could bring the whole party under his heel by finally making those sceptics shut up.

The second sentence is factually true too. But there Papa wasn’t so much complaining as rejoicing. He knows that the longer the delay, the more time he and Junk will have to bring in the rescue team armed to the teeth.

Actually, the EU’s SAS are already making headway. Under their tutelage more than four million Britons have signed a petition to vote again and keep voting until the EU hostage has been released by its captors. Patience is a critical virtue in a hostage situation, and the feeling is it doesn’t matter how many polls this is going to take – as long as the EU stays alive, there’s no giving up.

As a result, Parliament (our own, not Papa’s) is about to debate the situation and decide whether the four million who demand another referendum outweigh the 17.4 million who decided to take the EU hostage by leaving it.

The four million have called on the Government to introduce a rule that, if the vote was less than 60 per cent to either side, there should be another referendum. By inference, they’re also demanding that, once introduced, the rule be made retroactive, which takes jurisprudence to an exciting new level.

This raises interesting questions. Are we going to re-run any elections failing to produce a landslide result? If so, I’m all for it: what can be more fun than reading a dozen opinion polls every day of one’s life? After all, landslide victories are rather rare, and we may well be regaled by a few general elections every year.

With this particular hostage crisis, what if a second referendum produces roughly the same result, a four-percent victory for Leave? Sorry I asked – the answer is obvious: the stern examiner will tell us to re-sit the test until we get it right.

But what if Remain were to win, by a similar margin? Would we go two out of three, or again keep voting until the widely grinning EU hostage is released safe and sound? Or perhaps decide that it’s only wrong votes that should be invalidated?

The opportunities are as exciting as they’re endless. But somehow I’m sure Junk and Papa will take full advantage of them. They’ve got their hostage-release tactics spot-on in Ireland, Denmark, France and Holland. If it worked there, why not in Britain?

And this once they’ll be able to deputise local support, starting no doubt with our new prime minister. Britain, that vile abductor, stands no chance: Junk and Papa will never countenance defeat.

 

The Darling Bud’s surname starts with the same letter as Mrs Thatcher’s Christian name, and vice versa. By the sound of her, this is as closely as Theresa will ever resemble Maggie.

A new government must be given the benefit of the doubt, and I’m not going to offer macabre predictions for Mrs May’s tenure. However, contrary to Bertrand Russell’s view, the past is the most reliable predictor of the future – and the immediate past even more so.

Mrs May’s record as Home Secretary doesn’t fill one with confidence that she’s anything other than an unprincipled apparatchik in the Blair-Cameron vein: (http://www.tfa.net/judge-theresa-may-on-her-record/). However, that article omits Mrs May’s belief that “many Britons benefit a great deal” from Sharia law.

Many Britons may also benefit from devil worship, but one would think that a Home Secretary should be concerned with the general good of society, rather than obscure practices at odds with that good. One hopes Mrs May was talking only about some aspects of Sharia law, rather than its entirety. Support for the stoning of adulterers, for example, might erode her popularity.

But my today’s subject is a past even more immediate than that, namely the speech Mrs May delivered yesterday. It’s not immediately obvious that, had Jeremy Corbyn suddenly ascended to 10 Downing Street, his speech would have been any different.

Mrs May pledged to deliver “serious social reform”, which would fill every conservative heart with horror even if no clarification were on offer. This promise dovetails neatly with Mrs May’s previous brainwave at whose crest she repudiated George Osborne by declaring that Britain needs “not austerity but prosperity”.

She clearly thinks the two concepts are mutually exclusive, whereas in fact the latter is impossible without the former. Mrs May seems to hint at reverting to promiscuous public spending, which has been the cause of every economic disaster over the last century.

What George meant by austerity was merely slightly less profligacy, but even that trumps what Mrs May appears to have in mind. Abandoning austerity would have not only dire economic consequences but also profound social ones, even without the “serious social reform” Mrs May is promising.

In broad strokes, she seems to think that the answer to our economic woes lies in squeezing the fat cats until they disgorge their ill-gotten gains. If I were Jeremy, I’d sue Theresa for stealing his thunder.

The thought of restricting executive pay and bonuses may be appealing, but any reasonable person must realise that the only way for the state to achieve this outcome would be to increase its power to a catastrophic level.

The same goes for Mrs May’s idea of forcing companies to put consumers and staff on the boards. She calls it standing up for the working man, which is sheer demagoguery. Mrs May ought to study the experience of France, where such measures are among the nooses suffocating the economy.

The demagoguery was liberally etched with the usual waffle, along the lines of “We believe everybody – not just the privileged few – has a right to take ownership of what matters in their lives.”

Apart from the fact that, being a singular antecedent, ‘everybody’ requires a singular personal pronoun this side of the PC assault on language, her statement comes straight from the Corbyn (or Marx) catechism. For all the state’s efforts over the last few decades, the British are still among the world’s freest and wealthiest people.

This would have been impossible if only “the privileged few” had “a right to take ownership…” – which has been proven in every place where socialist flimflam was put into practice. Mrs May’s oration makes one wonder what she has to do with conservatism, but then she did say that “This is a different kind of Conservatism, I know. It marks a break with the past.” New Conservatism is indistinguishable from New Labour.

Then of course there’s Brexit, which Mrs May reassuringly promises “means Brexit”. That’s like saying liberty means liberty: to some it means licence, to others anarchy, to still others (French and other revolutionaries come to mind) the state putting its foot down.

As a Cameronian apparatchik, Mrs May is viscerally attached to the EU, which she proved by campaigning for Remain. Hence it’s possible that to her Brexit doesn’t mean the country recovering her full sovereignty.

It may mean, for example, leaving the EU de jure but complying with all its laws de facto, thereby suffering all the evils without having even a 1/28^th of the voice. It may also mean a gradual sabotage of the referendum results.

One possible scenario: when the reforms Mrs May promises deliver a major recession, as they certainly will if they’re as serious as she claims, this could be blamed on Brexit. Brexit does mean Brexit, Mrs May might then say, but are you my fellow Britons sure you don’t want to change your mind? Let’s vote again, shall we?

All this may prove unfounded, and I do pray it will be so proved. TM may yet become like MT or even better. Time will tell, but the early signs aren’t encouraging.

On 7 July, five racial murders involving white policemen were committed in Dallas. The policemen weren’t the murderers. They were the victims.

The murderer was Xavier Johnson, a black veteran who saw killing white people, especially cops, as his mission. What ostensibly made him open fire was the killing of two young blacks by white policemen. That galvanised Johnson into action, but he was ready for it.

The killer’s ideological blanks were filled in by a party whose fan, possibly member, he was. Called The New Black Panthers, the party preaches hatred of whites. It also makes a valuable contribution to history, having discovered that Jews were responsible for the slave trade and 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy.

New Black Panthers is only one such organisation. There’s also The Nation of Islam, while The Afro-American Defence League’s mission statement has the simplicity of genius: “Attack everything in blue except the mailman.” Chelsea FC would be well-advised to change their strip, especially when touring the US.

Thus primed, armed with a high-power rifle and trained by the US Army in infantry tactics, Johnson was ready to highlight yet again the problem of race relations everywhere.

Riots terrorising the country are reminding Americans of the severity of the problem, while creating troubled waters in which assorted demagogues can then fish. Especially coming to the fore is the activist network Black Lives Matter (BLM).

Its presupposition is that racist policemen go out on the prowl looking for blacks to kill. For BLM it goes without saying that every black killed by a cop is an innocent victim of racism, hunted in a never-ending open season on specifically blacks.

Though facts shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with heart-felt convictions, they’re worth mentioning anyway. The principal datum touted by BLM is that, while blacks make up only 13 per cent of the population, they account for 26 per cent of police shootings.

However, blacks are charged with 62 per cent of robberies, 57 per cent of murders and 45 per cent of assaults. In New York City, blacks are responsible for 75 per cent of all shootings, 70 per cent of all robberies and 66 per cent of all violent crime. Since they dominate the group likely to offer armed resistance to police, the 26 per cent figure falls below the statistical expectation.

While police are responsible for 12 per cent of white and Hispanic homicides, the corresponding figure for black homicides is only four per cent. Also, 40 per cent of cop killers are black, and a policeman is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than an unarmed black man to be killed by a policeman.

BLM’s case therefore doesn’t stand up to facts, but this doesn’t mean no case exists. For the problem of black alienation in America is real, as witnessed by the blacks’ disproportionate representation in crime statistics and on welfare rolls.

As Richard Weaver put it, ideas have consequences. So do actions, and in America it’s the ideas and actions of the whites that are largely responsible for the problems with the blacks.

Ideologues like BLM trace their animus back to slavery, and for once they have a point. Trade in people is moral and social poison. Even when discontinued, it leaves a toxic residue in the soil.

The English knew this, hence the 1772 ruling by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield: “The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political…” Even earlier, in 1569, the judge presiding over the Cartwright case declared that “England [is] too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in.”

American slaves were emancipated in 1862, a year later than even the abolition of serfdom in Russia, a country not priding herself on being a paragon of liberty. But the poison in the soil never quite disappeared.

Back in the 1970s, my black friends in Texas were telling me that, as children, they had had to ride in the back of the bus. Indeed, segregational Jim Crow laws survived until 1965 in the South, leaving a lasting memory of resentment.

Doing the damage is always easier than undoing it. White liberals jumped on the wagon on desegregation and drove it into the buffers of reverse discrimination and the culture of entitlement. Leftwing trendies like Leonard Bernstein would throw parties for the original Black Panthers and applaud the likes of Huey Newton spouting Black Power hatred.

Blacks were told, if not in so many words, that black racism was acceptable: it was payback time. Blacks were entitled to preferential treatment. Coyly called ‘affirmative action’, the only thing it affirmed was growing alienation.

Rather than blacks simply being offered equal opportunities to pursue productive lives, their resentment was encouraged to fester in hellhole inner-city ghettos, financed by welfare handouts.

The wounds inflicted by slavery weren’t healed; they became gangrenous. The air of the US is no longer breathed in by slaves, but white liberals have exhaled the poisonous atmosphere of marginalisation.

The law of unintended consequences has never been repealed, and evil begets evil. It then takes more than bien pensant hot air to make the atmosphere clean again.

Lunacy seems to be contagious, and the strain Russia is spreading is particularly virulent.

One symptom is the coverage of Brexit on Russian state television. For example, Dmitry Kisilev, affectionately described by some as Putin’s Goebbels, used his talk show on Rossiya 1, the government’s TV mouthpiece, to accuse Dave of murder.

You see, Dave tried to prevent Brexit by “a sacral sacrifice: the murder of MP Jo Cox… And what now? He divided the country, even spilled blood, but lost ignominiously.”

Putin’s dummy didn’t clarify whether Dave murdered Jo Cox personally or by proxy, but in either case it’s a shame that the British media failed to inform the public that Russia is openly accusing the British PM of violent felony.

Bugles scream and drums rattle all over the Russian media, and it’s not just empty posturing either. Since the same Kisilev threatened in 2014 to “turn the US into radioactive ash”, Russia’s military muscle has got a shot of steroids. Her military expenditure now equals 5.5 percent of GDP and close to a staggering 50 per cent of the federal budget – something seldom matched by any country even at wartime.

Since Putin’s land grab in the Ukraine, the first attempt for decades to rearrange European borders by force, Russia has saturated her western areas with troops deployed in an offensive formation. Dozens of new weapon systems have been brought on stream and moved into advanced positions. This is accompanied by a torrent of hysterical threats against the Baltics, Poland and other neighbours Russia sees as being within her sphere of influence.

Hardly a day goes by without Putin’s TV mouthpieces bewailing the plight of Russian minorities in places like Estonia (which plight is all about having to learn the local language) and threatening to defend the consanguine brethren by whatever means necessary.

What Russia considers necessary includes deliberate mass murder of civilians with weapons banned in the civilised world. One such weapon is thermobaric bombs, the most powerful explosives this side of thermonuclear warheads.

These Russia rains on the residential neighbourhoods of Aleppo and other Syrian towns, causing what we call collateral damage and what for the Russians is the intended effect.

Equally illegal are incendiary cluster bombs that the Russians, in their efforts to prop up Assad’s regime, have used on numerous occasions. Another government channel, RT, formerly known as Russia Today, inadvertently blew the whistle on this by showing RBK-500 cluster incendiaries being loaded up on Russian ground-support planes. The footage was hastily edited out, but not before experts identified the weapons.

That Russia increasingly resembles a rabid dog is beyond question. But rabies is infectious, and dogs can pass it on by biting unfortunate victims. One such victim is Peter Hitchens, who hardly misses an opportunity to declare any Russian threat nonexistent.

“Nobody who knows anything about Russia,” he writes, “thinks this is true”. Well, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know considerably more about Russia than Hitchens does, but this isn’t about an erudition contest. It’s about facts, such as those I’ve cited above.

But Hitchens obviously shares Stalin’s belief that, “if facts are stubborn things, so much the worse for facts”. Hence, “a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.”

This is disingenuous. First, rather than being secret, our involvement was widely reported. Second, the government isn’t constitutionally obliged to seek parliamentary approval for sending a small contingent to participate in an exercise explicitly requested by the host country’s government, in this case the Ukraine.

Also taking part were the Ukraine herself, the US, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey. All of them are either NATO members or countries vitally concerned about Russia’s shenanigans. Echoing Hitchens, ‘I can find no record of’ any of these countries asking legislative permission at home, which makes me think that was another example of empty rhetoric on Hitchens’s part.

Speaking of empty rhetoric, lame-duck President Obama expressed the hope, and lame-duck PM Dave the assurance, that Brexit wouldn’t diminish Britain’s commitment to repelling the Russian threat.

Such reiteration is redundant to the point of, well, madness. It’s like saying that England’s abysmal exit from the UEFA Championship doesn’t diminish her commitment to do well at the Tour de France. The two things have nothing to do with each other.

Brexit means leaving the EU, not NATO, and it’s NATO, not the EU, that has kept Russia at bay for the last 71 years. One has to be mad not to realise this or not to see the grave danger presented by Putin’s kleptofascist regime. Or else one has to be François Hollande who has declared that he regards Putin as a partner, not a threat, and NATO should have no say in Europe’s dealings with Russia.

Without NATO, France and the rest of Europe would have been a Russian colony for at least half a century. But then Messrs Hollande, Hitchens et al are too insane to realise this.

This isn’t a figure of speech. The blood of 179 British servicemen and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is on Tony ‘Yo’ Blair’s hands.

Sir John Chilcot’s report, every one of its 2.5 million words, leaves no room for doubt, reasonable or otherwise: Blair is as guilty of those deaths as he would be had he murdered all those people himself. He lied to the people, Parliament and even his cabinet colleagues to draw the country into a criminal war initiated by a harebrained US president expertly primed by the neocons.

“I am with you, whatever,” Blair wrote to George W. Bush, a blanket commitment he had no constitutional right to make without prior parliamentary endorsement. But how else could Tony be seen as a global statesman if not by riding the neocons’ coattails, kissing what was between them as he went along?

In reality Blair was seen as something else: a poodle to Bush’s master, someone who could be summoned with a contemptuous “Yo, Blair!”. But then he would have responded to “Yo, Fido!” if such self-debasement could have paved the way to a place at the top table.

Though Dave has given him a good run for his money, Blair is the most revolting personage ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street in my lifetime. He personifies everything objectionable about the modern world driven by the ‘Enlightenment’ into the pitch-darkness of soulless, mindless anomie.

He’s the quintessential type of modern leader: an important nonentity. For the public, corrupted by the toxic cult of celebrity, responds with enthusiasm to any display of the same qualities that in the past were seen as a mark of a smug, not particularly bright nobody obsessed with self-aggrandisement.

If we listen attentively to a retarded footballer pontificating on the delights of European federalism, why can’t we elevate someone like Blair to Number 10? No reason at all.

All it takes is a vacuous grin permanently pasted on a rather effeminate face, an accent showing signs of efforts to bring it down a few notches, a chiseller’s knack at lying effortlessly – and presto, we’ve got the kind of PM we deserve.

The accent alone is a sufficient telltale sign: Blair knew he had to drop his aitches and do glottal stops to have any credibility with the chaps who belt out Internationale and Bandiera Rossa at their party conferences. However, the aitches had to come back and the glottal stops to drop out whenever he schmoozed his Islington friends or solicited funds at black-tie soirées. It would have taken a superhuman effort not to get things wrong, and Tone would occasionally blunder, though not often.

One charge Blair can be absolved of is that of immorality. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral in that he has no real concept of right and wrong. Whatever suits him at the moment is right, whatever doesn’t is wrong – there’s something Leninist about that, which is what Tony ‘Anthony’ was in his student days. (By all accounts, he was a few other things as well – just Google ‘Miranda’ Blair and ‘public lavatory solicitation’, see what you get.)

The other day Stephen Glover wrote a good article, arguing that such dedicated amorality has to be a sign of mental illness. I’m not qualified to pass clinical judgement, but if amorality, Blair style, is indeed a kind of psychopathology, it’s nothing short of pandemic.

Most modern politicians suffer from it, although admittedly in Blair’s case the disease seems to appear in its severest form. Just look at his relationship with Rupert Murdoch.

Blair could be justified in changing his surname to Murdoch: Murdoch created Blair politically just as he created his children physically. Without Murdoch’s News Corporation, Blair would have been an obscure Labour MP shunned by his parliamentary colleagues for his insane ambition unsupported by any discernible qualifications.

Gratitude would have been in order, but what does Blair do? He has an affair with the old man’s young wife, doubtless causing him no end of grief. But when that happened, Blair was no longer a PM. He was a millionaire socialite, and that’s the sort of thing socialites are expected to do to be taken seriously.

Speaking of his millions, every one of them was made in ways consistent with Blair’s take on morality. Tone has never met a bloodthirsty tyrant he couldn’t love, provided the checques didn’t bounce.

For example, no self-respecting man would want to sully his hands with the dirty money paid out by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who turned Kazakhstan into one of the world’s biggest Mafia families. Yet Blair is proud to have that criminal among his clients, one of many such personages on his list.

“If I was back in the same place with the same information, I would take the same decision,” said Blair about his criminal decision to be with Dubya, whatever.

We can’t expect remorse from an amoral psychopath, but we should expect reasonable grammar from someone who went to good schools. Oh well, Blair may not know that it should have been “If I were…” but he knows something much more important. How to get away with murder.

The OED defines xenophobia as “deep-rooted fear towards foreigners”, but who cares about dictionary definitions any longer?

In its true sense, xenophobia is a relatively rare psychiatric condition that I, for one, have never encountered, although I believe the experts who say it exists.

In its corrupted sense, ‘xenophobe’ is used in the UK to describe anyone who loves England; wants it to remain England; objects to the English becoming a minority in their country, as they already are in their capital; thinks our laws should be passed by Parliament, not Angela Merkel, and based on our legal tradition, not the Koran; likes to deal with English-speaking service personnel in England; has voted Leave in the recent referendum.

It also describes the security guard at Canterbury cathedral, who dared display that quirky, if slightly savage, sense of humour that’s a distinguishing, and to me appealing, characteristic of the English working class.

Argentine dance teacher Silvinia Fairbass, resident in Britain for 12 years, visited the cathedral but somehow couldn’t find her way in. She asked the guard for directions, who, having detected a foreign accent, said, pointing southwards, “Dover’s that way, love.”

This is so much more subtle than what I heard some 40 years ago in Texas, when complaining about slow service at a garage. “Boh,” said the grease monkey, “if y’all doan lahk it here, whah dontcha go back where y’all cum from?” That remark hurt and I took all of 20 seconds to recover my composure.

Mrs Fairbass took a while longer, proving that, though of foreign origin, she has already been imbued with The Guardian way of reacting to transgressions against the prevailing ethos.

“I think since the referendum, unfortunately, there has been a minority who see a platform to voice their opinions against foreigners,” she wrote on Facebook.

“Yes, I’m a foreigner living in the UK. I’m also a British citizen, a hard-working person, a mum, a wife, a house owner, a teacher who inspires young people, I’m also an enthusiastic and positive person. I can speak two languages, I have two bilingual children, I have an amazing husband and I run my own successful little business.”

Easy, love. This isn’t a job application you’re writing. It’s a silly complaint about an off-hand snide remark that any normal person would have forgotten before reaching the cathedral’s stained glass depicting Thomas à Becket.

The guard deserves a reprimand. But do let’s keep our hair on: the referendum has nothing to do with the sentiments he expressed. Long before Maastricht one could hear similar feelings communicated at football stadiums every time England faced foreign opposition.

When England were playing against Holland, the fans chanted “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts.” Against Turkey: “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk”. Against France: “You’re French and you know it”. (If you don’t understand this one, you probably don’t follow English football, but I’d rather not translate. It’s offensive enough, trust me.)

None of this is praiseworthy, but do let’s dismount our high horse. A bit of savage humour is far from the worst thing English football fans have been known to perpetrate. And anyone who thinks people can be cured of primal tribalism must be living on a different planet.

Switching from psychology to physics, let’s remind ourselves of Newton’s Third Law that says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Now switching back to psychology, let’s also accept that most people prefer to be surrounded by those who are broadly similar to themselves. This means not only race or ethnicity, but also other factors, such as class.

From my own experience (and I hope my CV protects me from any charge of Little England xenophobia), the English welcome foreigners with more real cordiality, if less shoulder-slapping conviviality, than even Americans, who pride themselves on being descendants of immigrants.

London in particular is the most cosmopolitan capital city in the world, actually a bit too cosmopolitan even for my taste. But there’s a limit to English hospitality, especially when it comes to welcoming hordes of migrants who aren’t just alien to our culture but actively hostile to it.

It’s when our governing spivs set out to dilute Englishness the better to lord it over the English that Newton’s law kicks in. The deliberate action of demographic subversion (to which the likes of Blair and Mandelson own up with pride) causes an equal and opposite reaction of hostility towards foreigners – especially when the subversion is imposed by a vile pan-European contrivance over whose actions the British have no say.

When the proportion of those who speak funny reaches a certain critical mass, people rebel, as they have done everywhere throughout history. Witness the 1282 rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers, when the locals murdered 6,000 people who either didn’t speak their language at all or did so with a French accent.

The English so far are limiting themselves to dubiously humorous remarks, but there’s only so much they can take. Hence Mrs Fairbass should count her blessings: if we indeed leave the EU and stem the influx of foreigners, she ought to say thanks to the referendum. It might yet succeed in keeping blood off our streets.

Normally, there are only two possible courses of action.

The most natural thing would be for the victim to report the crime and assist the police as best she can. Alternatively, some women may be so traumatised that they may choose to suffer in silence.

‘Normally’ was actually a disclaimer, for our time is far from normal. Witness the dilemma that gored Selin Gören with its horns.

Selin, 24, is a German woman, a prominent member of the Linksjugend Solid, an extremist far-left youth organisation. Her remit is to make sure the millions of aliens cordially invited by Angela Merkel suffer no racist abuse.

If what happened on 27 January weren’t so disgustingly awful, one would be prepared to suggest there was poetic justice to it. For three of those potential victims of understated hospitality grabbed Selin off the street and dragged her into a dark playground.

There she was forced to ‘perform a sexual act’ on two of them, with the third assailant providing a blow-by-blow commentary, accompanied by hissing abuse at the victim. At least that’s what she thought it was, for her assailants were Arabic-speaking migrants.

Eventually the girl broke loose and ran to the nearest police station, where she experienced a severe conflict of pieties. Yes, she had been subjected to a violent and degrading assault. However, she was concerned that, should the details of the gang rape become known, anti-Muslim feelings would become even stronger.

Hence the third possible course of action, one I didn’t think of: Selin went to the police but lied to them. Omitting the rape, she only said that her handbag had been stolen – by “foreigners and Germans alike”, all speaking German.

However, having discovered the next morning that the libidinous Mohammedans had raped another woman in the area, she owned up. Presumably out of sympathy for her ordeal, the police didn’t charge her with perverting the course of justice – to the regret of those who refuse to accept against all evidence that we now live in a madhouse.

But Selin then suffered another attack, that of remorse. Consequently she did what anyone experiencing such feeling would do: she apologised, using her Facebook page as the medium. Addressing a hypothetical collective Muslim, a recent arrival in Germany, Gören wrote (I’m abridging her rambling message):

“Dear male refugee,

“I am so incredibly sorry! I am happy and glad that you made it here. But I fear you aren’t safe here.

“You aren’t safe here because we live in a racist society. I am not safe here, because we live in a sexist society.

“But what truly makes me feel sorry is the circumstances by which the sexist and boundary-crossing acts that were inflicted on me may make you beset by increasing and more aggressive racism.

“I promise you… I will not stand by idly and watch as racists and concerned citizens call you a problem.

“You are not the problem. You most often are a wonderful human being, who deserves to be free and safe like everyone else.

“Thank you that you exist, and glad to have you here.”

In other words, “the sexist and boundary-crossing acts” were inflicted on Selin by Germany’s society, not by those three “wonderful human beings”. Absolved of any personal responsibility, they’re as much the victims of the gang rape as Selin is.

According to the same post, many other women are also driven by their flaming conscience not to report being raped by Muslims. God forbid someone might suggest that the country’s immigration policy ought to be more selective. They’d rather suffer in silence and let the innocent victims of society go on raping to their hearts’ content.

One wonders if Swedish women, 40 of whom have so far been raped during the ongoing Islamic festival, are equally forgiving. Some judges from here to Australia certainly are: they often let Muslim rapists off, citing ‘cultural differences’ as an extenuating circumstance. Does the compulsion to stone adulterers or castrate young girls also fall into that category, Your Honours?

Does suicide bombing? It could be plausibly argued that, while our culture encourages us to build skyscrapers, the Muslims’ culture makes them fly hijacked airliners into those skyscrapers. Vive la différence and all that.

The problem indeed isn’t with the Muslims, Selin is right about that: they are what they are. The problem is with us: we are what we’ve become.

We’ve jettisoned absolute truth as the ballast holding us down. As a result our reason has lost any teleological aspect – in other words, it has stopped being reason. Instead we’re each encouraged to have our personal sets of little truths: you like one thing, he likes another, they like a third – who’s to say which is right?

The only judgement we accept is not to be judgemental: nothing is right or wrong, anything goes. If in the past people like Selin would have been confined to the margins, possibly to the lunatic asylum, today they set the tone for the whole society. Increasingly they are the whole society.

Saying that they ought to be confined to the margins, possibly to the lunatic asylum, is already difficult; before long it’ll become illegal. Brace yourself: before long Selin will become an EU Commissioner. She’s amply qualified.

 

“Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

Truer words have seldom been spoken, and do you wonder who was that inveterate reactionary speaking them? Who was that vermin who dismissed at a stroke the keystone events of our glorious modernity?

That arch-Tory Dr Johnson who said, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”? No, it was John Adams, America’s second president, writing in 1811, when Adams belatedly realised what he and his friends had perpetrated.

Say what you will about the Founders but, unlike their today’s heirs, they weren’t deaf to semantic distinctions. For example, they knew the difference between a republic and democracy.

‘Democracy’ never appears in their writings, except in pejorative contexts. Thus Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

The Founders didn’t realise that a republic adhering to Enlightenment tenets will always become a democracy, while the latter will avoid ‘mob rule’ only by turning itself into a giant bureaucracy increasingly detached from the people it governs.

I’m always wary of countries whose origin can be traced back to a particular date. They’re inevitably contrivances, owing their existence to a violently expressed ideology rather than organic development.

The US too is the living embodiment of Enlightenment principles realised by ideologues. Like most revolutionary demagogues, the Founders had to concoct legitimising grievances, portrayed as unendurable but in fact mythical.

Thus they described that nice George III as a tyrant. In fact, if anything, his American subjects were a privileged lot compared to the English themselves.

One made-up grievance was taxation without representation. In fact, a typical colonist was taxed at barely a third of a metropolitan subject (many of whom weren’t represented either). With the advent of ‘liberty’ their taxes instantly went up, the Americans realised they didn’t like them even with representation and have been studiously avoiding them ever since.

One would guess that, given the choice of being taxed at half their income with representation or at 10 per cent without, a majority would opt for the latter. But the expensive toothpaste of centralising statism (otherwise known as modern democracy) cannot be squeezed back into its tube.

Add to this the founding claim that, self-evidently, “all men are created equal”, and the ostensible justification for the revolutionary outburst begins to look even more nebulous. (As a clever American once quipped, “This truth had better be self-evident, because you sure as hell can’t prove it.”)

But that doesn’t mean there was no justification. There was: the advent of our soulless, anomic modernity adumbrated by the ‘Enlightenment’, whose clarion call the Founders heard in every tonal detail.

The ‘Enlightenment’ was animated by hatred of Christendom, its civilisation, philosophy and above all religion. It wasn’t by accident that most Founders were, at best, deists and haters of Trinitarian Christianity. (Many were also Masons, and the republic’s livery includes much Masonic imagery. It’s also worth noting that both the architecture of the shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin, and the inscriptions inside, frankly proclaim their pagan origin.)

Jefferson was among them, and he rejoiced that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church and State”. To make this wall impregnable, he created his own patchwork gospel, pasting into a notebook the bits he liked and omitting those he hated, which is to say anything miraculous.

St Augustine must have had a premonition of Jefferson when he wrote, “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe but yourself.” In fact, solipsistic belief in self, curiously mixed with pandemic conformism, became a distinguishing feature of Americans, and not the most endearing one.

What was born on the 4^th of July was the battering ram of modernity, the debaucher of everything sublime in our civilisation and the creator of “happiness”, understood in the crudest, materialistic sense.

The American dream, summarized by Kennedy so forthrightly as “two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage”, is the stuff of which nightmares used to be made, vulgarity raised to the altar of neo-pagan deities. Alas, the chickens and the cars aren’t strong enough adhesives to keep society together.

Hence the founding American anomie, while producing the ‘happiest’ society the world has ever known, has also created the most atomised and disjointed one. Moreover, Americans evince the characteristic smugness of a provincial autodidact, certain that he has solved all the little problems of life and now must teach others the only true way.

I hope you understand that everything I say is underpinned by an unspoken “with notable exceptions”. I do know many cultured and civilised Americans; in fact, I’m proud to number many among my friends and readers.

Those Americans I cordially congratulate on their 240^th anniversary – except that I suspect they may not see it as a cause for celebration.