Blog

On 23 August, 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov signed an agreement known as the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

The two predators divided Europe between them, pushing the button for history’s bloodiest war. A week later the Nazis attacked Poland. In another 17 days the Soviets followed suit. A year later Nazi bombs began to rain on Britain, many of them made in the USSR.

All this is so well-known that it’s hardly worth another comment. What’s truly significant is that the Pact caught the West by surprise, proving yet again that civilised nations have no real understanding of fascism (Col. Putin, ring your office).

In fact, the Pact was the culmination of a long process that started even before the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and Nazi takeover in 1933. The Allies overlooked that development and ignored those who knew better.

One of them was the NKVD defector Walter Krivitsky. He told the Allies as early as in 1938 that a marriage between Hitler and Stalin was imminent. This invaluable intelligence was mocked and discarded, with Krivitsky eventually suicided by the Soviets in Washington. 

The cooperation between German and Russian extremists started in 1917, when the German General Staff used bacteriological warfare by transporting what Churchill accurately described as the ‘bacillus’ of Lenin’s gang into Russia.

The contagion worked – Lenin usurped power and promptly took Russia out of the war. Germany’s defeat in 1918 turned both countries into pariahs and they fell into each other’s embrace by signing the 1922 Rapallo Treaty.

Several years later the Soviets helped Germany cheat on the terms of the Versailles Treaty. They set up several training facilities for German officers in Russia, the most prominent of them being the Kama tank school at Kazan.

There Soviet and German tank commanders worked out the tactics of pincer manoeuvres at depth. In the summer of 1939 the Soviets were the first to use the trick to defeat Japan’s 6^th Army in the battle of Khalkin Gol.

The Germans also put the tuition to good use, first in the West and then, on 22 June, 1941, against Russia herself. Such Kama graduates as Model, Thoma and – most illustriously – Guderian enveloped and destroyed whole Soviet army groups, with 4.5 million Soviet soldiers finding themselves in Nazi captivity by the end of 1941.

Many books have been written about the differences and similarities between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. Yet most of them overlook the most important feature of fascism, clearly visible in both regimes.

This is understandable, for the authors tend to analyse the political ends pursued by fascists and the means of achieving such ends. Yet the essence of fascism isn’t political. It’s ontological.

Neither the Nazis nor the Soviets wanted to create a new political system or a new world order. They wanted to create the new man.

Both were teleological materialists with an occult dimension who accepted unequivocally the false notion of evolutionary progress. Both believed that state action could accelerate the evolution, directing it towards creating an Olympus of demigods.

Within that paragraph you can glean a definition of fascism that’s both broader and more precise than one based on politics. Both the Nazis and the Soviets realised this, which is why they stated that their explicit desiderata, German nationalism and Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat were not the destinations but the vehicles. Once the destinations were reached, the vehicles would be tossed away.

One way of accelerating what they perceived as natural evolution was to destroy large groups of people seen as slowing the process down. By far the most critical group was one that held the Judaeo-Christian view of man, a view that rejected social Darwinism.

Thus both regimes set out to wipe out Jews and Christians with equal gusto, if in a different order. The Nazis started with Jews, leaving the Christians for later; the Soviets reversed the sequence. Neither atrocity was an aim in itself; they were evolutionary tools.

Hence Hitler: “Creation is not finished. Man is clearly approaching a new phase of transformation… The entire creative force will be concentrated in the new breed… It will be infinitely greater than today’s man… Those who understand national-socialism as only a political movement do not know much…”

That was the end. Here’s the means: “I had to use the idea of a nation for temporary convenience, but I already knew that it could have only a transient significance… The day will come when not much will be left of the notion of nationalism, even in Germany. The Earth will witness the appearance of a global brotherhood of teachers and masters.”

In the same vein, Marx’s fascist ideas, later developed by his followers Lenin and Stalin, interpreted class war as a means of creating a classless society, where the very notion of class would be meaningless.

The Soviets and the Nazis, while realising their superficial political differences, were also aware of their deeper spiritual kinship.

That’s why Ribbentrop wasn’t dissembling when saying that he felt in the Kremlin as if he was among his Parteigenossen. And neither was Stalin insincere when proposing a loving toast to Hitler after the Pact was signed.

Western intelligence services never accepted the possibility of an alliance between Stalin and Hitler, an incompetence they have since shown consistently when assessing regimes different from their own.

More worryingly, Western thinkers failed to grasp the true nature of fascism and the two satanic regimes it begat. That’s why none of them predicted the likelihood of a Nazi-Soviet rapprochement, which bespoke a deficit of not only education but also of intellect.

And that’s why yesterday’s anniversary barely rated a comment in our press. Such insouciance shows that no lessons have been learned – and no measures will be taken to prevent calamities in the future.

Lest I might be accused of Islamophobia and summarily imprisoned (shot?), I don’t reject out of hand everything of Muslim provenance.

For example, I like the Moorish splendour of southern Spain, Avicenna, Persian rugs, Averroës, Lebanese food and Hafiz. I’m also greatly inspired by Caliph Omar’s terse explanation of why the Library of Alexandria should be burned.

“If these books say the same as the Koran,” he’s alleged to have said, “they are redundant. And if they say something different, they are dangerous.”

The story may well be apocryphal, but that doesn’t matter. For I’ve found the aphorism useful as a way of explaining my attitude to opinion pieces in our press and the people who write them.

Take Peter Hitchens for example, and, to paraphrase the American comedian Henny Youngman, please take him.

Whenever Peter delivers himself of views on Russia, his Trotskyist past shines through his conservative present. Putin, according to Hitchens, is the strong leader he wishes we had.

However, his idol is part of a package. If we accept him as an ideal leader, we must also accept having nothing but government-controlled media, an economy dominated by organised crime, millions of people half-starving, murder as a routine way of dealing with political opponents, government officials keeping ill-gotten billions in foreign banks, frequent acts of aggression towards neighbours, fixed elections – the lot.

Hence I put my Omar’s hat on and describe Hitchens’s effluvia on this subject as dangerously idiotic or idiotically dangerous, if you’d rather. Out comes a box of matches (only figuratively speaking, as I hope you understand before calling the police).

Yet on most other subjects Hitchens makes perfect sense, which is to say he agrees with me. That is yet another cause for a figurative auto-da-fé cum bonfire: everything he says I’ve probably said many times before.

For example, in his today’s blog Hitchens vouchsafes the information that, according to the former minister Andrew Lansing, Cameron’s negotiations with the EU are nothing but a planned fix, “right down to a fake table-thumping row with the French to make the Prime Minister look like John Bull.”

‘I told you so’ are among the most despised words in the English language but, at the risk of causing your contempt, here’s what I wrote on this subject on 25 June, following Her Majesty’s speech:

“The Queen, God bless her, doesn’t speak her own mind in public. She speaks the PM’s mind, in this instance Dave’s.

“That’s why one can’t really blame her for joining the campaign portrayed by the government as an epic struggle between David (Cameron) and Goliath (the EU).

“Against overwhelming odds, David claims to be swinging his slingshot loaded with the stone of reforms. The composition of the stone remains unknown, but then it’s only a tool.

“Any tool is designed to do a certain job, and Dave’s courageous efforts are no exception. The job is to get the Yes vote in the upcoming referendum, thus shutting up all those Little Englanders attached to our centuries-old sovereignty.

“The EU fanatics play along by playing hard to get, only to make Dave’s eventual ‘victory’ so much more effective. Thus a youthful French minister explained to Dave the other day that there’s no such thing as ‘à la carte Europe’.

“The culinary idiom comes naturally to the French, and they tend to use it with precision. True enough, no compromise is possible to the founding aspiration of the EU: a single European state.

“However, tactical concessions aimed at pacifying some restless natives are possible, indeed inevitable. When the time comes, Dave will bang his head together with the federasts, and they’ll figure out the sufficient minimum of concessions needed to swing the referendum the right way.

“Whatever it is, one can be certain that the concessions will be both meaningful and irreversible. However, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, the meaningful ones won’t be irreversible, and the irreversible ones won’t be meaningful.”

I almost feel sorry for Peter Hitchens. He just can’t win with me: everything he says is either wrong or redundant.

Still, he’s lucky that the laws of the land and my own pacific disposition combine to make the Omar solution impossible. If Peter ever burns, it’ll be from shame for having talked such utter nonsense on Russia.

 

 

There’s something aggressively irritating about this phrase, isn’t there? Or is it just me?

Any demand issued by any country, even one without Germany’s track record, presupposes the possibility of enforcing compliance. That in turn implies a position of superiority, legal or otherwise.

Such a hierarchical relationship can’t possibly exist outside some kind of imperial setup, with the metropolis lording it over the colonies.

Hence, when newspaper headlines start with the words “Germany demands…”, and the countries on the receiving end belong to the EU, the inference has to be that Germany is the metropolis and the other 27 members are her dominions.

That may be the case de facto, but not yet de jure. Thus, for propriety’s sake, and also not to provoke a hostile reaction, German officials would be well-advised to refrain from butch demands and replace them with polite or, as need be, grovelling requests or pleas.

How much nicer it would be to see a headline saying “Germany begs Britain to take more migrants if at all possible”, rather than “Germany demands Britain urgently takes more migrants”, as it appeared in today’s Mail.

The more polite version would incidentally also be more grammatical, though it’s churlish to expect modern hacks even to know the word ‘subjunctive’, never mind use it properly.

Anyway, should Germany come pleading rather than demanding, one would be inclined to sympathise, if not necessarily comply. However, when Germany’s interior minister Thomas de Maiziere reminds Britain that “all EU countries must become more aware of their responsibilities”, one feels contrary. The word ‘must’ tends to have this effect.

That the Germans are getting hot under the collar is understandable. They are about to be inundated with 800,000 asylum applications, mostly from Muslims. If most of them are approved, as experience suggests they will be, the country’s social services, already bursting at the seams, may well implode.

Most approved applications will be followed by requests for family reunification. Add to this thousands of those who’ll get in without bothering about legal niceties, and Germany is looking at a massive growth to its already sizeable Muslim population of 4.3 million.

Faced with such a prospect, de Maiziere understandably ignores the fact that Britain isn’t one of the 26 parties to the Schengen agreement (one removing border checks and passport controls) and can therefore decline to accept any more migrants.

Yet treaties mean nothing when Germany demands. Britain MUST realise that the EU is the politically correct version of the German Reich – and act in a suitably servile manner. “Jawohl, Herr Minister!” would do nicely, not “we already have enough Muslims, thank you very much”.

As a useful illustration of how well the Schengen agreement works, a Moroccan immigrant yesterday embarked on a high-speed train going from Amsterdam to Paris. This being a Schengen area, his passport wasn’t checked.

More important, neither was his luggage that contained such essential travel items as an AK assault rifle, an automatic pistol, a knife and enough ammunition to murder all 554 passengers on board.

Just as the Muslim began firing he was heroically subdued by three US off-duty servicemen and a British expat. Another massacre prevented, many more to come – some conceivably with deadlier weapons than a Russian-made rifle.

There’s no point debating the advisability of having no border controls across a vast continent at peacetime, although one could think of a few valid arguments against.

The critical thing to understand, Herr de Maiziere, is that, watch my lips: WE. ARE. NOT. AT. PEACETIME. Verstehen Sie?

Criminally idiotic action by America and Britain has injected murderous energy into the Islamic world. This fanned up the hostility to the West that Islam has felt – and practised – ever since its birth 1,400 years ago.

Just like the 100 Years’ War didn’t involve 100 years of non-stop fighting, the war waged by Islam on the West has been intermittent, and outbursts of violence have alternated with periods of relative calm.

Largely by our own fault, Islam is currently going through a period of peak passion, spilling out all across the globe, especially in the Middle East and Europe. Since no one has yet repealed the law of self-preservation, we have the right to defend ourselves.

This involves applying wartime rules to all possible sources of danger, of which the burgeoning Muslim population of Europe is emphatically one. Once such a shift has been accepted as necessary, specific measures can be worked out by those with more expertise in this field than I possess.

Suffice it to say that the overall objective has to be not increasing but reducing the current, suicidally large presence of Muslims in Europe. That might involve, for starters, banning all Muslim immigration, curtailing the Muslims’ freedom of travel, suspending the peacetime limitations on surveillance – as I say, let the experts decide.

However, it would be naïve to expect anything like that ever to happen barring a nuclear explosion in a European city centre – perhaps not even then. Not as long as Germany demands and our own spivs obey.

 

All of you, my readers, doubtless espouse and practise Judaeo-Christian morality, which condones only marital sex in the missionary position. Perhaps a special dispensation can be obtained for one or two more adventurous postures, but that’s it.

Hence, since all deviations are unequivocally off limits, it’s a safe assumption that none of you has ever tried or indeed desired rapture with a species other than Homo sapiens of the opposite sex.

However, the very fact that you are my readers proves beyond any doubt that you are blessed with fecund imagination. Thus it would be no hardship for you to picture another species with which you’d prefer to have sex if you had to.

If your imagination doesn’t stretch that far, as mine doesn’t, then you ought to know that, according to The Sexual Pathology medical journal I once read in a professional capacity, the most abused species in the UK are, in descending order, dogs, seagulls [sic!], cats, sheep and pigs.

These are very different creatures, but they all have one feature in common. Should they reject a man’s advances, they are unlikely to communicate their displeasure in a murderous way.

That means British seekers of perverse pleasure are not only unsporting and unfair, but also out-and-out wimps. Projecting this last characteristic onto their martial potential in case our armed forces require their services, one has to fear for the battle worthiness of the British army.

Now, if you still doubt which side will be the likely winner of the next world war, you should follow the relevant story in today’s papers, complete with an amateur video.

For the amorously enterprising Russians, in addition to targeting the usual defenceless species, also seek non-consensual gratification with animals who can say ‘no’ in an extremely emphatic way – namely bears.

The video shows one such animal barely (no pun intended) escaping rape by virile Russians in Siberia, who ran the bear over with their SUV. As the poor animal lay trapped under their wheels, the Russians instantly improvised the subsequent steps.

They would first have their jollies with the bear and then knife it to death. The articles don’t specify the animal’s sex, but I cordially hope it was female – I’d hate to find out that my former countrymen are perverts.

Unfortunately for them, the potential victim managed to get itself (herself?) free before that ambitious plan could be realised. It (she?) then proceeded to destroy the tyres of the attackers’ vehicle with its (her?) claws and teeth.

Had the pleasure-seekers not had by some miracle another vehicle handy, the (she-?) bear would have done similar damage to their bodies. As it was, they fled, adding a new twist to Shakespeare’s stage direction from Act III of The Winter’s Tale (“Exit, pursued by a bear”).

In due course they were arrested and charged with cruelty to animals, with a few months in prison a distinct possibility. There they may expand their romantic horizons even further, this time on the receiving end.

I suppose a moral, or even moralising, conclusion is in order, but I can’t really think of one. Other than repeating the old up-country adage “Nowt as queer as folk” – especially if the folk happen to be Russian.

 

      

 

 

 

  

 

 

Just as Mayisyahu, the Jewish-American reggae singer was due to appear at a Spanish festival, the organisers asked him to state his “positions on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.

When he refused, his invitation was withdrawn, an action that resulted from a hysterical campaign by the anti-Israeli organisation Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

Apparently Mayisyahu had said things about Israel that suggested that his values differed from those of the festival, listed as “peace, equality, human rights and social justice”.

Leaving aside the matter of how such commendable values tally with the implicit advocacy of firing rockets at Israeli villages, one must welcome this long-overdue initiative.

It’s just and proper that, before reggae lovers are allowed to bask in the mellifluous sounds of their choice, the performer must be vetted for his political views.

If these are in any way objectionable to anybody, especially professional anti-Semites and those whose politics are coloured various hues of red, the performer must be banned.

However, as a lifelong champion of equality, I have to scream foul.

What about people who are offended by performers spouting moronic drivel on every subject under the sun? What about those who dislike performers expressing Nazi sympathies? And why limit this valuable initiative to reggae? Why not extend it to classical music as well, including the recordings of artists long since dead?

Hence here’s my modest proposal, starting with another question. What do pianists Walter Gieseking and Alfred Cortot, singer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, conductors Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Richard Strauss and Willem Mengelberg have in common?

Yes, they were all sublime musicians, but that has nothing to do with our cosmically significant initiative, does it? The right answer is that they all collaborated with the Nazis to one extent or another.

Karajan actually went the whole hog by joining the Nazi party twice, first in his native Austria and then in Germany. Moreover, whenever der Führer graced Karajan’s performances with his august presence, the conductor arranged the audience in the shape of the swastika, thereby proving his unwavering loyalty.

Now, are you ready for this? Recordings of all these musicians, including the Nazi twice over Karajan, are widely available on CDs – this though not many music lovers approve of Nazism. There’s only one solution to this injustice: the CDs must be removed from shops, libraries, private collections and summarily burned. Fair’s fair, right?

And let’s not stop there. Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Richter, Oistrakh and all other Soviet musicians were tainted by association with the regime that murdered six times as many people as the Nazis managed to do.

What a nice bonfire their CDs would make! And let’s not forget boycotting concerts by all living Russian performers, some of whom, such as Pletnev, Spivakov, Matsuyev and Bashmet, are enthusiastic supporters of Putin’s version of fascism.

Actually there’s no need to name names. Once we’ve established the principle of political vetting, the specifics will suggest themselves.

I doubt there’s a musician anywhere in the world who doesn’t represent a political regime or philosophy many would find offensive. The conclusion is as sweeping as it’s natural: in compliance with the sacred principle of equality emblazoned on the banners of reggae fans, we must ban all music, live or recorded, altogether.

Of course another possible solution would be to ignore the musicians’ politics and instead listen misty-eyed to their artistic offerings (although the desire to listen to reggae must be investigated from the anthropological and psychiatric angles).

But that possibility is clearly not on. Neither is boycotting all musicians who are even tangentially associated with politics someone out there doesn’t like.

No one is going to boycott Karajan’s or Cortot’s records. No one will boycott Putin’s performing poodles. No one will boycott musicians from countries where Christians are murdered. It’s only those who prefer our Israeli friends to our Islamic enemies who merit such treatment – especially if they themselves are Jewish.

And it’s not just musicians. Our scientists bravely bar their Israeli colleagues from scientific conferences, or else, like Stephen Hawking, refuse to attend congresses held in Israel.

All in the name of “peace, equality, human rights and social justice” of course. What did you think?

Sir Patrick Stewart is a fine Shakespearean actor, but he can’t be immune to the typical foibles of his profession.

One such is a rather light burden of intellect (having grown up in an actor’s family always surrounded by his colleagues, I feel qualified to generalise).

This stands to reason: a man who slips into various personalities as easily as Sir Patrick does is unlikely to have much of a personality of his own, though I’m aware of a few exceptions here and there.

In the 80s Sir Patrick abandoned his career at The Royal Shakespeare Company and went to America to act in Star Trek. Not a silly move by itself, provided it was made for the right reasons: fame and money.

But, being an actor, Sir Patrick claims his real motive was to get away from Britain’s vile class system. He expected to find unadulterated classlessness in America, an expectation in which he was thoroughly and predictably frustrated.

Before his departure, the actor would have done well to read Paul Fussell’s excellent 1983 book Class, in which the author shows that America is more class-ridden than Britain.

Having lived in America for 15 years and now in the UK for almost 30, I can vouch for that.

The class system in any commonwealth of recent standing can’t possibly be based on centuries of selective breeding and careful nurturing. It can only be founded on money, the distinguishing feature being its overall amount and the length of time money has been in the family.

That being a contrived and therefore brittle structure, Old Money families in America guard it with greater vigilance than even the outer reaches of the royal family in Britain, never mind lesser aristocracy. This creates a class that Fussell calls ‘top out of sight’, which doesn’t exist in Britain this side of the inner core of the royals.

Hence the popular ditty: “Here’s good old Massachusetts, the land of the bean and the cod, where the Lowells talk only to Whitneys, and the Whitneys talk only to God.” Well, English aristocrats readily talk to mortals as well. 

When I lived in the States, there was no path I could have taken into the mansions of American Old Money (not that I wanted to). Within a few months in London, however, I found myself rubbing shoulders with people whose titles go back to centuries before Americans stopped sporting war paint (not that I deliberately sought such company either).

Americans, especially those on the East Coast, can tell a person’s class from yards away, relying on such telltale signs as his clothes, posture, car and so forth. Fussell shows that even musical instruments are class giveaways (the higher the tone, the higher the class: the flute sits several rungs above the tuba).

And if any doubts still persist, they disappear the moment the stranger opens his mouth and says either ‘how do you do’ or ‘how are ya’. The class distinction between, say, ‘evening wear’, ‘dinner jacket’, ‘black tie’, ‘tuxedo’ and ‘tux’ is an unfordable watershed.

Contrary to socialist mythology, the British class system has always been permeable, of which Sir Patrick, born to a working class family, is living proof. In fact, only about two per cent of all English peerages go back further than 100 years, suggesting a high social mobility, both upwards and downwards.

An actor (or an intellectually challenged politician like John Major) can be forgiven for dreaming about a classless society. People who think more deeply know that classlessness is neither achievable nor desirable.

Whenever people have tried to achieve it, they’ve only ever succeeded in massacring or banishing the traditional upper classes and then replacing them with new ones, infinitely less suited for the role.

God clearly creates people unequal in every respect that matters: intelligence, character, talent, enterprise – you name it. And it’s to be expected that, when such qualities are put into effect, society will become stratified.

Even the church, while asserting the equality of all before God, never suggests that people ought to be equal in any other respect. According to one of Jesus’s parables the kingdom of God is a place where “many are called but few are chosen”.

It’s not only birds of a feather but also roughly similar people who flock together. Naturally, once a cohesive group is formed, it tries to protect its integrity. Class barriers fall in place, and they are only ever raised with reluctance.

But raised they are, for any group needs an influx of fresh blood to keep itself viable. Even European royalty occasionally admits commoners into the fold, with variable results.

Our class-tortured Sir Patrick found that starring in a hit TV series made him a Hollywood proletarian. The upper classes were formed of the big-screen stars, who tended to look down on TV upstarts. Even such a cloistered society arranged itself hierarchically.

Thus Sir Stewart’s fondest but rather silly dreams were frustrated. I hope he has learned his lesson: classlessness exists only in a mass grave. And mass graves always proliferate whenever those who aren’t only thick but also wicked try to make such dreams come true.

Sledging in sport means unsettling one’s opponent to gain an unfair advantage. Referring to his race, intelligence or the sexual record of his mother/wife/girlfriend has been known to work a treat.

If you think that’s not cricket, you ought to know that the term was first used during the Adelaide Oval in the mid-sixties, when one player suggested that an opponent’s wife was having sex with his team mate.

Thenceforth, whenever the wronged party came to bat, the other team greeted him with a rousing chorus of When a Man Loves a Woman. I don’t know what that did to his performance but, judging by the fact that since then sledging has become commonplace, it must have worked.

Cricket had its Gentlemen vs. Players matches, starting in 1806, but the distinction referred to the sportsmen’s social class, not their conduct. In those days, and for a century and a half thereafter, they were all expected to behave like gentlemen.

The 1960s Walpurgisnacht destroyed gentlemanly behaviour, along with any notion of propriety. This coincided with a huge influx of money into many professional sports, including tennis.

The combination of the ‘liberating’ effect of the time and the chance to become a millionaire in one’s teens gave tennis a mighty push, and decency began to go off the rails. By the mid-70s it had crashed.

In times olden, tennis players, even Australian ones, were gentlemen par excellence. The great Aussies Laver, Rosewall, Newcombe, Emerson et al may have consumed copious amounts of beer off court, but their behaviour on court was impeccable. They showed dignified respect for the game, umpires, opponents – and themselves.

Then came the brats, the Nastases, Connorses and McEnroes of this world, and suddenly, in line with Dostoyevsky’s dark prophesies, everything was permitted. Out went fair play, in came every dirty trick possible.

Playing against a morbidly superstitious opponent, Nastase once brought a black cat to the court and let it out of his tennis bag as the opponent was about to serve. Connors would make foul gestures towards his opponent, use delaying tactics, scream obscenities at the umpires, other players and paying public. And McEnroe… well, he was McEnroe.

Boris Becker remembers playing McEnroe for the first time and being treated to a steady litany of “motherf***er-c***sucker” at every changeover. Sledging had left its native shores and original game to catapult into tennis. And because tennis had become a massive money-spinner, officials were reluctant to do anything about it.

Since then sledging has become a constant factor in the sport, of which 20-year-old Aussie Nick Kyrgios has kindly reminded us.

This chap, adorned with tattoos and gold chains, stands out even against the background of widespread rotten behaviour. He mutters obscenities while the ball is in play, swears at everyone within earshot and tanks matches when he feels wronged or doesn’t feel like playing.

Then last week he used a changeover to proffer useful information to his opponent Stan Wawrinka: “Kokkinakis [another young Aussie player] banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate.”

The girlfriend in question was the Croatian teenager Donna Vekic, Kokkinakis’s mixed doubles partner for two years. Wawrinka has had an affair with her since leaving his wife earlier this year, a split that affected him badly.

His game suffered and he only began to recover a couple of months ago. Nonetheless he was clearly vulnerable to being unsettled by such a remark, which Kyrgios knew and exploited with the savagery of the young barbarian he is.

An outcry ensued. Kyrgios apologised and was fined £6,400, pocket change to him. The ATP also gave him a ‘notice of investigation’, suggesting he could be suspended for any number of matches or months.

I can’t recall any other player being banned for on-court misconduct – positive drug tests are the usual reason. But then neither do I recall such an outburst of public hypocrisy.

The chorus was led by Martina Navratilova, who champions traditional mores so much that she formally went down on one knee to propose to her girlfriend in a restaurant, with paparazzi in close attendance.

“There needs to be more than a fine,” she pronounced. “There is no place for such behaviour.”

Since when? Certainly not since I started watching tennis in the mid-70s. And certainly not since Navratilova in her playing days waged a full-scale war against Steffi Graf, off the court and on.

The problem isn’t just with Kyrgios, an ignoble savage though he is. Nor is it with merely tennis or sport in general. What’s going on there is merely a symptom of a disease afflicting us all. It’s called modernity, and there’s no cure for it.

So by all means run Kyrgios out of the game – I don’t think it’ll be any the poorer for it. But please spare us the emetic holier-than-thou hypocrisy, which is in even worse taste than Kyrgios’s jibe.

 

 

 

 

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey must be India Knight in disguise. Unlike India, he’s professionally qualified to ask “What would Jesus do?” Just like her, he answers the question badly.

India was sure that Jesus would share her opinion on the Calais stowaways. Lord Carey has co-opted Jesus as an ally in the matter of legalising assisted suicide. By way of proof both offer a couple of tear-jerking examples, wrapped in woolly thinking and threadbare morality.

Lord Carey’s example is a woman who killed her paralysed friend to stop her suffering, and was charged with murder for her trouble. That, he says, made him change his mind about legalising assisted suicide.

In the past, before Lord Carey was vouchsafed Jesus’s presumed views on the matter, he “argued [legalised assisted suicide] was taking the issue of autonomy too far and would lead to a massive breakdown between doctors and patients.”

Well, he was right then and he’s wrong now. Such a breakdown has occurred in every country where euthanasia in various shapes was legalised. Holland led the way by passing this awful law in 2002, and since then thousands have been killed by physicians (4,050 in 2010 alone).

Most of these deaths are “by request” (assisted suicide) but many aren’t. The legal requirement in Holland is that the patient have “hopeless and unbearable” suffering, which definition is open to interpretation and subjectivity.

What’s unbearable for one person is bearable for another; a condition one physician finds hopeless, another might find less so – and they all know cases of miraculous recovery in cases identified as terminal.

One way or the other, the trust mentioned by Lord Carey was certainly broken. Many old Dutch people are scared of going to hospital because they think doctors may kill them. They realise that what’s legal today may become advisable tomorrow – and mandatory the day after.

This isn’t to say that physicians, prone to error as they might be, aren’t qualified to judge a patient’s condition. They are – and they’ve always done so.

Any hospital doctor will tell you that he has hastened a patient’s death by, for example, withdrawing treatment for therapeutic reasons, when he knew the medicine would prolong suffering more than life. He has also probably administered opiate painkillers in doses he knew would be likely to result in death – without the state’s stamp of approval telling him that was acceptable.

The real problem with legally assisted death is neither the noun nor the adjective, but the adverb. Legalising assisted suicide or any other form of euthanasia indeed gives both doctors and patients too much autonomy, which Lord Carey used to fear but doesn’t any longer. The likelihood of error on both parts would increase greatly.

This law would also give the state an inordinate power of life and death over the people. It’s not up to the state – in this instance represented by judges – to decide whose life may or may not be worth living.

Such are the rational arguments that the rankest of atheists could make, provided he were capable of rational thought. But a Christian, especially a prelate, would – or rather ought to – argue the issue differently.

He’s duty-bound to remind our increasingly atheist world that a man doesn’t have autonomy over his own life. He’s not free to dispose of it as he sees fit because his life doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to God because He gave him life in the first place.

Due to this ownership and this provenance, human life is sacred, and its sanctity is affirmed by Christian law, on which all human laws used to be based in the West. Therefore any human law that encroaches on the sanctity of human life contravenes Christian beliefs, which Lord Carey was sworn to uphold at his ordination.

Instead he opines that Jesus “would expect us in these modern times, with all the skills that doctors have, to tend the very vulnerable at the end of life and help them cross into the place of peace that they are craving”.

This is nonsense on many levels. First, “the skills that doctors have” “in these modern times” have nothing to do with it. Since time immemorial doctors have had poisons at their disposal, along with the skills to administer them, intravenously or otherwise.

It’s not so much that the doctors’ skills have increased as that Christianity has been shunted aside, and hence our commitment to the sanctity of human life has diminished.

Lord Carey should stay within his lifelong professional remit to fight this tragic situation tooth and nail, reaffirming the Christian position resolutely and unequivocally.

Instead he does an India Knight by dousing us with tear-jerking demagoguery that should be left to others – along, for that matter, with the kind of rational arguments I outlined earlier. A clergyman may or may not be a great thinker, but he must always be a great Christian.

It’s the church’s sacred duty to oppose legalising assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, homomarriage or any other perversion of Christian morality. A priest must never kowtow to secular fads, which is exactly what Lord Carey has done with his sermon of pseudomorality and pseudocompassion.

The hack India Knight, who has a unique insight into Jesus’s mind, suggests in today’s Times that he would.

He’d gently pick up all those rioting stowaways in Calais, carry them across the Channel and then soften our hearts enough for us to extend a warm welcome to all persecuted Christians.

She doesn’t exactly say that, relying instead on laying a smokescreen of emotive subtext out of which Jesus’s message (as transmitted through India) would emerge as a ghostly apparition.

In common with all demagogues, India limits herself to puffery, eschewing anything concrete, especially – God forbid – numbers.

Nor does she make any specific recommendations, trusting the reader to reach his own conclusion. A deft kick at Nigel Farage, who heartlessly opposes unlimited immigration, is also there, to focus the reader’s mind.

India tugs at our heart strings by reporting her conversations with the Middle Eastern Christians fleeing from persecution to Calais. One is to infer that they’re the dominant group among the refugees.

I doubt it. I suspect that most of them aren’t Christians seeking safety but Muslims seeking money.

Admittedly I don’t know that for sure. But then neither does India or, if she does, she’s reticent about proffering such information.

What nobody knows is how many in that crowd are terrorists trying to infiltrate into Britain to blow it up or recruit others to do so. Common sense suggests there must be some, although I wouldn’t venture a guess at the exact proportion.

Some figures, however, are available, and India should have cited them. For example, approximately 100 million Christians are persecuted for their faith somewhere in the world, 90 million of them in Muslim countries.

For any Christian, or anyone blessed with a conscience, this is an unbearable tragedy. It’s also a problem demanding a solution.

‘Tragedy’ is an emotional word, coming from a compassionate heart. But ‘solution’ is a cold-blooded word coming from a rational mind.

We’ve identified the problem: 90 million Christians (and many Jews, let’s not forget them) are suffering murderous persecution in Muslim lands. Now what’s the solution?

Sheltering them in Britain would be a humane, Christian thing to do. It would also be suicidal, for no country could survive a rapid 150% increase in her population. The refugees would find themselves in the middle of riotous strife that would make them feel nostalgic for their birthplaces.

No, the solution isn’t to welcome Christians fleeing from Muslim persecution. It’s to stop Muslim persecution of Christians.

I’d suggest that the first step in that direction would be to declare, against all available evidence, that our civilisation still remains Judaeo-Christian.

Therefore, persecuting Jews and Christians is a hostile act tantamount to an attack on our family. Since most of its victimised members live in Islamic countries, Islam is an enemy.

Those prevented from reaching this ineluctable conclusion by their PC piety resort to particularising subterfuge. They’ll talk your ear off insisting that all Muslims can’t be held responsible for crimes committed by relatively few ‘fundamentalists’, ‘Islamists’ or ‘Islamofascists’.

It’s like ‘Bomber’ Harris refusing to bomb German cities because not all Germans were Nazis. He didn’t though. He knew there was a war on, and it had to be won.

Just over a century ago, the West’s commitment to protecting its own hadn’t yet been corrupted.  

In 1904, when the Moroccan brigand Raisuli kidnapped a Greek-American named Perdicaris, President Theodore Roosevelt immediately sent warships to Morocco. The ships levelled their guns on Rabat and flew the signal “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!”

One Muslim. One Christian. Yet there were no phoney pronouncements on how few Moroccans were brigands. Give us our family member back or we’ll wipe out your capital – that was the simple yet effective message.

Rather than asking her readers “What would Jesus do?”, India ought to have asked “What would Teddy Roosevelt do, seeing not one Christian violated in Muslim lands, but 90 million?” The answer would have offered itself.

Instead she doused her readers with the spray flying off her bleeding heart, co-opting Jesus to prop up her own understated honesty and intellect. Just the stuff of which today’s journalism is made.

The prevailing wisdom is that politics, along with its economic offshoots, has to be amoral to be successful. Some call it healthy cynicism, others prefer the 19^th century German term Realpolitik.

Whatever it’s called, this belief is wrong. As often as not, the most moral course of action is also the most practical.

For example, it would have taken no more than police action for the West to stamp out Russian Bolshevism at any time between 1917 and 1922.

That hygienic operation would have rid the world of its most dangerous contagion, making the action moral.

And in practical terms, it would have saved not only the millions of lives, but also the trillions in whatever currency you care to name it took to fight the resulting pandemic over the next 70-odd years (a fight, incidentally, that’s far from over).

Similarly it would have been both moral and practical for the West to kill Nazism before it killed millions. This would have amounted to a cakewalk at any time between the 1936 remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the 1939 capitulation of Poland.

In 1936 the Nazis were bluffing: the Wehrmacht was then weak and far from the efficient machine it went on to become later.

And in 1939 it was still so much under strength that the attack on Poland sapped Germany’s resources – so much so that the Nazis couldn’t afford to keep a single tank on their Western border.

By contrast France alone, even without the British Expeditionary Corps, had over 1,800 tanks poised on Germany’s border. That force could have rolled all the way to Berlin practically unopposed – but didn’t. We all know what happened next.

Yet what provoked my thoughts about practical morality was matters economic, not martial. Specifically, the current troubles of China’s economy, threatening a global economic catastrophe.

The USA, along with the rest of the West, has been happy to ‘outsource’ production to China, whose population is consigned to what only Protagorean sophistry would prevent one from calling slave labour.

We choose not to ponder the ethical implications. Yet if we were to add up the cost of raw materials, utility prices, depreciation of the factory plant, manufacturer’s mark-up, cuts taken off the top by various middlemen and retailers, cost of transportation and storage, customs duties etc., we’d realise that the poor devils who make the cheap products we enjoy still subsist on a bowl of rice a day.

However, before amalgamating China into the global economy, wherein the collapse of a large part might destroy all, we would have done well to remember that slave economies aren’t just immoral but also moribund.

At the slow-moving time of Egypt or Rome it took millennia for the slave-drivers to come to a sticky end. When the pace of life quickened, slave economies could hang on for a century or two (Britain’s American colonies, especially the southernmost ones), almost a century (the USSR), or a couple of decades (China).

But sooner or later they do a Jericho and come tumbling down. And if they are as massive as China’s they may well bury us all under the rubble.

Such is the economic history. And if you look for its current validation, you need to look no further than China.

Most indicators suggest that, to mix the metaphorical clichés just for the fun of it, the bubble has burst and the chickens have come home to roost.

For the last several years, the Chinese have been pumping massive borrowing into the corporate sector, mostly construction. A high-rise town after town has been going up, with most of them becoming ghost towns due to lack of demand.

Predictably last month the Chinese market crashed, wiping trillions off the economy already margined to breaking point and moaning under the weight of rapidly multiplying derivatives. 

In response the Chinese declared they were abandoning their export-based economic model. Then they belied their declaration by unpegging the yuan from the dollar and thrice devaluing it this week.

Such measures usually point at a desperate attempt to lower unit costs even further and make exports even cheaper – this against the background of rapidly declining Chinese exports.

In a parallel development China has cut her interest rates by 1.25% to a record low. This, as most economists (including those in China) agree, is way too excessive and evidently desperate.

The communists also lie about their annual growth rate or, to be charitable, fail to measure it properly. They claim a current figure of 7%, but in reality it’s closer to 3%. This would be respectable for most Western economies, and unachievable for the EU, but for China it represents a massive slowdown from almost 15% a decade ago.

The signs are that China is incapable of managing the slowdown properly – and that, unlike her communist, slave-owning government, solid economic theory doesn’t lie. The danger is that the slowdown could turn into a meltdown, putting us all at deadly risk.

Hence a principled refusal to admit communist China into a global economy would have been both practical and moral – and Realpolitik be damned.