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We’re often so hung up about the specks of difference among various ‘isms’ that we ignore the motes of similarity.

Fascism, Nazism and bolshevism, for example, are all logical developments of socialism, which should become instantly clear to anyone capable of stripping socialism of its bien pensant sloganeering.

Socialism isn’t about sharing and caring. It’s about the state controlling every aspect of life, robbing the individual of his liberty, supplanting his God-given free will with the will of the state.

As such, socialism isn’t Christianity without Christ, which was a popular fallacy back in the ’60s. It’s the Antichrist, someone able to put on benign expressions and utter kindly phrases while pursuing evil ends.

All socialist states, whether ‘democratic’, ‘fascist’, ‘international’ or ‘national’ have more traits that unite them than those setting them apart.

My favourite exercise, for example, is comparing Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s Four-Year Plan and Roosevelt’s New Deal. All three documents are so identical that they might have been written by the same men (the last two actually were to a great extent, but that’s a different story).

Some socialists are more carnivorous than others, but none of them deserve a reputation for goodness, something fostered by most Western papers and accepted by their less intelligent readers.

On the contrary, we should never be surprised when even so-called ‘democratic’ socialists display evil traits normally associated with their ‘national’ cousins. Such as anti-Semitism, which is supposed to be the prerogative of conservatives.

True, some tweedy, clubbable gentlemen would rather not see Jews at their oak-walled Pall Mall hangouts. But over the last century or so the worst anti-Semitic atrocities have been committed by socialists, of various red and brown hues.

This ought to be kept in mind by anyone who raises an eyebrow at the news that the Labour party welcomes activists whose attitude to Jews isn’t a million miles away from Julius Streicher’s.

Such as Vicky Kirby, who was suspended in 2014 for speaking her mind a tad too loudly and unequivocally. Here are a few examples of her tweets:

“I will never forget and I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is.”

“Anyone thought of asking [ISIS] why they aren’t attacking the real oppressors, Israel?”

“Who is the Zionist God? I’m starting to think it’s Hitler.”

But of course. Hitler is worshipped in every synagogue all over the world, but especially in Israel. We have Miss Kirby to thank for bringing this to our attention.

Lest one might think that Miss Kirby is merely anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic, she added another tweet: “What do you know about Jews? They’ve got big noses and support Spurs.”

Some of us also know that six million Jews were murdered by people with Miss Kirby’s mindset, but she did point out the most salient facts. (‘Spurs’, for the outlanders among you, are Tottenham Hotspur, a football team affectionately called ‘Yids’ in some circles. Tottenham is a poor area in North London, where many Jews live, hence the nickname.)

The amazing (or rather predictable) fact about Miss Kirby isn’t that she was suspended in 2014, but that she has just been readmitted — and appointed vice chairman of her party association.

This is to be expected in a party whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, numbers Hamas murderers among his friends and never bothers to conceal his sympathy for their cause.

Nor are such sentiments reserved for the less educated Labour members. For example, the Oxford University Labour Club is currently being investigated for anti-Semitism.

Actually, the only surprising thing about these revelations is that so many people are surprised. They’ve fallen victim to socialist propaganda.

For socialism is an ideology of envy and therefore of hatred. And Marx, the patron saint of this evil creed, showed in his own warped personality how naturally hatred of the rich segues into hatred of the Jews.

Jews, even the manifestly poor ones living in Tottenham, are all filthy rich, aren’t they? Hence a socialist gets two hate objects for the price of one. And one doesn’t have to be Jewish to be unable to resist such a good deal.

 

 

Barack Hussein looked at Europe and saw it was good.

Crowds of rather feral-looking individuals, many of them his namesakes, are overrunning every high-rent country on the continent. Though they all flee from something or other, they sagely choose rich places to flee to, not the Albanias or Kosovos of this world.

That shows the same enterprising spirit as that displayed by the first American settlers, and also subsequent arrivals from places like Nigeria. Of course the first settlers had to live in a wasteland but, given the option, they wouldn’t have.

Yet, lo and behold, some Europeans, especially those who, if qualified, would vote for Trump in the US elections, want to put an end to the arrangement enabling many Baracks, Husseins and Barack Husseins to practise Sharia law in a society they dislike, the way Obama himself would have practised US law had he not chosen to become a community organiser in Illinois.

Hot damn, thought Barack Hussein, those folks don’t know what’s good for them. But trust the good old US of A to give them the lowdown. It’s the American mission in the world, and hence Barack Hussein’s personal mission, to teach wayward nations the facts of life — for their own good, natch.

If a continent-wide federation worked for the US of A, then, hot damn, there ain’t no reason it can’t work for Europe. Mind you, Barack Hussein is no square from Delaware, or for that matter Nigeria. He knows that the folks in, say, Greece and Holland are more different than the folks in Illinois and Michigan.

But then American folks from Nigeria aren’t the same as them Minnesota Swedes or Pennsylvania Dutch either. Yet look at them, one happy family. Playing together, staying together and being kind enough to teach the rest of the world how to live. For its own good, natch.

Them uppity Brits are especially in need of a good lesson on the benefits of a US of E (Geddit? US of E, like the US of A.). When it comes to oppressing folks in Nigeria, them Brits don’t mind being international. It’s only when it comes to belonging to the good ole US of E that they go all little England.

But Barack Hussein will sort’em out. To that end he’ll touch base with the Brits next month to tell’em what’s what. He called it having ‘a big, public reach-out’, like in that commercial for the phone company, ‘Reach out, reach out and touch someone…’ Barack Hussein is a real American, not some Nigerian, so he likes quoting ads. That’s what real Americans do.

Of course in some quarters such ‘reaching out’ may be called interfering with the internal politics of another country, but hot damn — as far as Barack Hussein is concerned, there ain’t no internal affairs anywhere that ain’t America’s business — and there haven’t been since 1832, when another president, James Monroe, told the world how it was.

Barack Hussein, he don’t want those Nigeria-oppressing Brits to quit the US of E and leave behind the same ‘s**t show’ they left behind in Lybia or, for that matter, Nigeria. No sirree, Bob. (At this point, Barack Hussein made a note for his speechwriters to update his slang. They make him sound like some Nigerian who learned his ‘merican from old novels.)

You’d think them Brits would be grateful to Barack Hussein for giving them a hand in sorting out their affairs. But those perfidious folks are up in arms, like they were back in the 1770s (Note to speechwriters: look up the exact goddam dates).

Some 15,000 of them have already signed a petition saying they can decide on such matters themselves, thanks very much, Barack Hussein. They’ve launched a campaign on the UK Parliament website called ‘Prevent Obama From Speaking In Westminster Regarding the In/Out Referendum.’

Who do those folks think they are? And they can’t even find snappy names for their campaigns, like ‘reach out and touch someone’ or ‘It’s Miller time’. (Note to speechwriters: find a snappy name for Barack Hussein’s visit, like ‘Obama way is OK’. Note to the Joint Chiefs: can we do an Iraq to them Brits, but without having to hang Cameron? Dave, he’s a regular stand-up guy, sees things Barack Hussein’s way.)

No, Barack Hussein will put federal fire in the Brits’ belly, like JFK did in Germany with his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, and a good job he wasn’t speaking in Frankfurt or Hamburg. Barack Hussein can do that sort of thing too.

‘I am British of Nigerian descent!’ Note to speechwriters: find a snappier phrase. This one may upset some folks back stateside.

 

 

 

Every time I travel, all sorts of dishevelled thoughts overlap with scattered questions in my head.First a question, and I do hope someone can provide an answer. I’m in Verona now, a large city in the north of Italy. Comparing it to Newcastle, a similarly large city in the north of England, one can’t help noticing that Verona is much more beautiful.

In fact, it’s much more beautiful than any British city (I’ve never been to Glasgow, but something tells me a visit there wouldn’t change this assessment). Why?

Verona is an old city, but then Newcastle too goes back to Roman times.

Strategically, Newcastle was in the Middle Ages even more important to Northumbria than Verona was to Veneto.

Economically, both cities have had ups and downs but, averaged over a millennium, their fortunes have been roughly the same. And at present Italy is supposed to be an economic basket case, while England is presumably thriving.

So why does Verona have impeccable architecture filling every perfectly proportioned street and square, and Newcastle, well, doesn’t? And why is Verona full of buildings going back 700-1,000 years, and Newcastle isn’t? Where did they all go? Was nothing built there for 18 centuries?

Both cities have fought their fair share of battles over the last millennium, so war damage wouldn’t be a satisfactory answer.

Neither can I accept easily the argument that the Italians are more aesthetically gifted than the English, or that they knew how to build structures that would last centuries at a time when the English didn’t. I’m not saying this isn’t the case; only that I can’t accept this argument easily.

But forget the Middle Ages. Why is even the relatively new residential architecture in Verona so much more pleasant than in Newcastle? In fact, one seldom sees an ugly house in Verona, while in Newcastle… well, one does.

Could it be that the Italians in charge of such matters love their city more than the Tynesiders love theirs? Could it be that they take more pride in the way their city looks?

And another thing. In the five days I’ve been roaming the streets of Verona, I haven’t seen a single tattoo parlour, nor a single tattooed individual.

Here any question why would be rhetorical. This side of Easter Island, the number of tattoos in a place is inversely proportional to its civilisation. This is a tell-tale sign that’s both necessary and sufficient.

But, comparing Verona and Newcastle, one instantly detects other signs as well, such as the way people are dressed. Fine, that there are infinitely more elegant people in Verona could be put down to the Italians’ obsession with bella figura, keeping up appearances.

But also, while I’ve seen many well-dressed people filling numerous bars and restaurants to the brim, not a single drunk has reeled into my line of vision. Hand to heart, would that be the case over five days in Newcastle? Including a whole weekend?

Neither has any Veronese inquired what I was looking at or referred to me as ‘sunshine’ (Cosa stai guardando, luce del sole just isn’t heard much in Italian streets) — nor metonymically described me by the crude word typically reserved for a certain part of the female anatomy. This in spite of my absentminded tendency to bump into people accidentally. Do you know why?

But enough questions; it’s observation time now. Apart from the cathedral, the two most prominent churches in Verona are the Romanesque St Zeno basilica and the Gothic St Anastasia, both highly ornate.

Less than two centuries separate the two buildings: St Zeno was completed in the 13th century, St Anastasia in the 15th, at the height of the Renaissance. Presumably in the intervening 150 years the Veronese didn’t lose their aesthetic sense — why, they still haven’t lost it, by the looks of it.

Moreover, I have a particular distaste for ornate interiors, which is why I hate Baroque buildings, especially those in Italy. For example, I couldn’t spend more than five minutes in Rome’s basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, whose interior is disfigured by horrendous Baroque excesses.

And yet, while St Anastasia reinforced this idiosyncrasy of mine, St Zeno punched a hole in it. For while St Anastasia’s interior is to my taste an ugly eyesore, the equally ornate St Zeno is one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen.

An observation like this leads to a generalisation: with a few exceptions here and there, the earlier the architecture, the better it is. Here I wouldn’t mind suggesting an explanation, though I know many will disagree.

Pre-Renaissance architecture was produced to the glory of God; Renaissance architecture began to celebrate the glory of man. The earlier builders and stonemasons glorified Him; the later ones glorified mostly themselves.

That alone was sufficient to produce an aesthetic gap: where the artist starts largely determines where he finishes. True enough, the Renaissance did produce many fine paintings, though again — with notable exceptions — the earlier, the better. But architecture preceded painting as the quintessential expression of out civilisation. Hence it suffered attrition much earlier.

Well, there we are. Observations, questions and precious few answers. Blame this on Amarone, the devilishly strong local wine. Someone ought to tell these people that 15 per cent is ridiculous for a table wine.

 

 

Never in the history of sociology has so much been made of so little by so many.

I’m abroad at the moment, but I can hear triumphant noises thundering from our press as if they came from around the corner. Apparently University of Nottingham researchers staged a rather crude experiment proving that the Brits are the most honest people in His Creation.

About 2,500 students from different countries were locked up in a room with some dice and told to roll them. The higher the score, the greater the cash reward they would receive. Unbeknown to the guinea pigs, they were secretly videoed for the researchers to see if they were lying about their roll.

British students, just ahead of those from Sweden, Germany and Italy, were found to be the most honest, while those from Tanzania, China, Morocco and Vietnam the most cheating.

So far so good. Alas, the conclusions drawn from this exercise weren’t so much far-reaching as far-fetched.

Honesty, said the researchers with that Eureka smugness that’s their stock in trade, isn’t a universal trait. It depends on the corruption level in the country’s government. The more corrupt the politicians, the more dishonest the populace, and vice versa.

Actually, the presence of Italians among the most honest people should have alerted the academics to the foul-smelling rat somewhere. After all, in Italy the dividing line between government and organised crime is more smudged than anywhere else in Europe, this side of Russia.

But this is a minor matter. Much more worrying is the researchers’ obvious ignorance of what constitutes corruption in politics. They, along with even such respectable pundits as Tom Utley, seem to think that politicians who don’t take backhanders aren’t ipso facto corrupt.

By those standards, Edmund Burke, one of our history’s greatest parliamentarians and political thinkers, was crooked as a corkscrew — he accepted large donations for raising questions in Parliament. So large, in fact, that he could afford a sizeable estate in Buckinghamshire solely from the proceeds.

And Benjamin Disraeli was even worse: his aristocratic patrons actually gave him an estate down the road from Burke’s so that he could be gentlemanly enough to found the Conservative Party.

At the same time, a respectable pundit like Tom Utley is cloyingly proud that, with the possible exception of Tony Blair, our politicians are exemplars of incorruptibility. If only it were so.

If only Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Hague and their ilk practised fiscal corruption and no other. If only they could take a few quid here and there while discharging their duties with statesmanlike integrity, we’d be so much better off.

Even on the most elementary of levels, can you name off-hand a politician who, when in office, does all he promises when campaigning? Surely going back on a promise constitutes lying, which is rather the opposite of honesty?

I won’t bore you with the list of campaign promises and pledges all our PMs, including the present one, broke. The list would be way too long for this space.

But even that isn’t as bad as their corruption goes. For every day of their miserable lives they corrupt the very constitutional integrity of the realm in their charge.

They routinely corrupt Britain’s sovereignty, an effort of which Cameron’s cynically mendacious IN campaign is a glaring example.

They corrupt Britain’s financial integrity, saddling future generations with a ruinous debt that can never be repaid and that already costs us more than our defence budget to service.

They corrupt Britain’s security by refusing to spend enough on defence, laying the country bare to attack.

They corrupt British families by creating a welfare system that makes the father redundant, by encouraging cohabitation instead of marriage and by promoting homosexual marriage that destroys the very notion of matrimony.

They corrupt Britain’s education by failing to teach children to read and write, while stuffing their heads full of subversive, egalitarian, multi-culti rubbish.

They corrupt Britain’s ancient institutions by destroying the Lords and reducing Parliament to the dictatorship of the Commons, stuffed to the gunwales with unprincipled spivocrats.

They, with their Midas touch in reverse, corrupt everything they can — and our pundits, including such respectable ones as Tom Utley, scream hosannas because our spivs don’t take bribes, thereby allegedly setting a shining example of incorruptibility for us all.

I wonder how many of those British students who didn’t lie about their dice rolls think it’s perfectly fine for the state to marginalise the church, to operate its finances as a pyramid scheme, to turn Her Majesty the Queen into merely an EU citizen, to teach pupils how to use condoms instead of how to add up, to have an army barely fit to perform police duties, to legalise homosexual marriage, to abort hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, to admit millions of cultural aliens, to… well, this can go on indefinitely.

My bet is that most of them do, because these are the sort of things they learn from our ‘incorruptible’ politicians and our respectable pundits. If this is honesty, I’ll take corruption any day. And twice on Sundays.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Then, under the influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a secular holiday without any religious overtones whatsoever. That’s understandable: our delicate sensibilities can no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping.

Now that secular but basically unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts the propensity for murdering millions just for the hell of it as an essential aspect of progress.

For, not to cut too fine a point, 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people with the gusto and on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

The event actually originated in America, where the Socialist Party arbitrarily chose that date to express solidarity with the 1909 strike of female textile workers. Yet the holiday didn’t catch on in the States, doubtless because the Socialist Party never did.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only consternation and the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosa, boxes of chocolates – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day, on 9 March. For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for the fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken is no bird, a wench is no person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change philosophy of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or moving. However, according to the writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism. Ideology does work in mysterious ways.

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time this was written, and it still has the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were housetrained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted them, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Brits, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by the ghastly capitalists. Why not spread the festivities more widely? I mean, May Day is celebrated in Russia, so what better reason do we need?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery. I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 28 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

A reader of mine suggested that those who celebrate IWD should perform the ballistically and metaphysically improbable act of inserting the holiday into a certain receptacle originally designed for exit only. While I don’t express myself quite so robustly in this space, I second the motion.

Cherie (Mrs Tony) Blair predictably expressed her support for IWD, ending her letter to The Times with “Count me in”. Well, count me out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, the good news. Speaking to French Christians, Pope Francis has described the influx of migrants into Europe as an ‘Arab invasion’.

That’s exactly what it is, and one can only applaud his disdain for PC equivocation. Just to think that there I was, tactfully trying to avoid such forthright terms.

Then comes the bad news, and the palms about to come together with a thunderous clap stop in mid-air. For His Holiness happens to think the invasion is a good thing.

But don’t let my feeble paraphrasing take anything away from the actual words. Here they are: “Today we can talk about an Arab invasion. It is a social fact.” Thereby Europe “will go forward and find itself enhanced by the exchange among cultures” which will “bring about a certain unity to the world.”

One doesn’t immediately see the mechanisms by which such desirable effects can be achieved, unless the Pope means that we’ll all be united in a mass grave.

I wonder how the families of those murdered in Paris last year responded to the papal address. Did they agree to take the rough with the smooth? Did they feel that the benefits of multiculturalism outweighed the grief of their loss? Had His Holiness given their feelings the slightest thought before orating?

His Holiness seems to think that what’s currently under way is some kind of a cultural exchange programme, a reading of the situation that doesn’t naturally tally with the concept of invasion. We teach them how to use modern indoor facilities, they teach us… what exactly? How to embark on a short-lived career of a suicide bomber?

But then Pope Francis is like the heart, which, according to Pascal, “has its own reasons that reason knows not of” (Le pape a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point, to paraphrase ever so slightly). For it’s much easier to see how the arrival of millions of cultural aliens or rather hostiles, with several thousand trained terrorists among them, will have an effect diametrically opposite to the idyll the Pope sees in his mind’s eye.

Just about every European country already has vast and growing enclaves where Sharia law takes precedence over the law of the land, where Christians and especially Jews fear to tread and where the denizens venture outside only to ‘enhance’ the country’s crime rate. For example, Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city, and one blessed with a heavy Muslim presence, has more murders than the rest of Scandinavia combined.

Such an ‘enhancing’ effect is being achieved with only about 50 million Muslims present in Europe. What if that number were in short order doubled, as seems eminently possible? Or tripled, if Turkey were admitted to the EU?

The only effect one can foresee is that Christianity will be relegated not so much to the background as to the skip. Or does His Holiness seek to emulate Prince Charles and present himself as defender of all faiths, rather than merely the one he’s institutionally obligated to defend?

Both the royal multiculturalist and his clerical doppelgänger clearly misunderstand their brief. The pontiff also displays a rather shaky knowledge of history.

For his church gratefully venerates such early opponents of multiculturalism as Charles Martel who in 732 stopped an Arab invasion at Tours (or Poitiers, if you’d rather), Don John of Austria who in 1571 did so at Lepanto, Jan Sobiesky who did it in 1683 at the gates of Vienna – not to mention Pope Urban II who in 1096 blessed the first of several crusades aimed at checking Arab aggression.

None of those gentlemen overemphasised the culturally enhancing aspects of Arab invasions. This at a time when the Arabs actually did have some culture, though not one as lofty as proponents of multi-culti rectitude like to claim.

So what has changed since then, other than Arabs now favouring explosive belts over sabres and Christianity losing much of its cultural and social dynamism? What makes the Pope believe that an Arab invasion would be more beneficial today than it was way back then?

Modern Islamic ideologues see the current demographic shift in Europe in different, and more realistic, terms. “Our victory,” the president of Algeria once said, “will come from the womb of every Muslim woman.”

And the guiding lights of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt clarified what is meant by victory. Thus Mohamed Akram: the Muslims’ task “is a kind of grand Jihad eliminating and destroying the Western civilisation from within… so that God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” And thus Kamal El-Helbawi: “Our ideal is a global Islamic state”.

Such tirades can’t be dismissed as extremist rants: they are wholly consistent with Islamic scriptural sources, including the Koran (9:33, among many other verses). So what kind of response would be consistent with our own history, along with our cultural and social tradition?

As the founder, president and so far only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity, I’d suggest that Martel comes much closer to it than Pope Francis. Why oh why did Benedict XVI have to leave? I for one am sorry he couldn’t stay.

 

 

On 11 February I wrote a piece titled Communism Does Funny Things to Tennis, pointing out that 10 out of the 16 top players accused of match fixing came from either Russia or Eastern Europe.

The reason for this is fairly obvious: communism corrupts – surely and enduringly. A country may call itself something else now or it may actually (and counterintuitively) become something else. But her whole system has been poisoned by the toxin of the most cannibalistic politics in history, and – even if all the good intentions are there and all the right moves are made – it’ll take generations to produce effective antibodies.

This explains why Russia is home to 70 per cent of the murders committed in Europe. Going down the scale of criminality and corruption, it also explains why most doping scandals in sport involve Russians or Eastern Europeans.

So, when Maria Sharapova called a press conference yesterday to announce that she had failed a drug test, only those who ignore the geopolitical factor in corruption were surprised.

To be sure, the desire to get ahead in life isn’t limited to former denizens of the Warsaw Pact countries, and neither is the propensity to cut the odd corner in pursuit of the good life. But the maniacal, almost universal amorality of such a pursuit is surely more endemic in Russia than in, say, Finland.

Solzhenitsyn writes about the concentration-camp mentality pervading every pore of Russian society: you die today, I’ll die tomorrow. When survival is in peril, people toughen up in direct proportion to their moral standards loosening up.

Extreme circumstances do produce more heroes than one would expect from the conditions of comfort and security. But they produce infinitely more amoral scrappers, ready to use tooth and claw to fight their way to the top.

Maria Sharapova left Russia when she was 15, technically after the ‘collapse’ of communism. But ‘technically’ is the operative word. The moral decrepitude of the Soviet Union seeped into Sharapova’s genetic makeup, turning her into a fanatical pursuer of success, defined – as it almost invariably is in that supposed paragon of selfless spirituality – in crassly material terms.

Since then she has parlayed her tennis talent, commercial acumen and good looks (personally, I’m turned off by her harsh, thin-lipped, cruel face, but my taste is neither here nor there) into a £130-million fortune, of which only £25 million has come from tournament prizes. The rest came from endorsements and flogging her personal brand of sweets.

You might think that the urge to get ahead would abate when one is already so far ahead of the game, but avarice isn’t like hunger for food: it’s never satisfied. Hence, since Sharapova’s success off court is partly contingent on her performance on it, and since modern tennis places a particularly high premium on endurance, she was taking meldonium, a stamina-enhancing drug.

When she was caught red-handed, Sharapova used the trick recommended by Putin and common to all Russian street brawlers: strike first. She called a press conference and offered a few pathetic excuses.

She didn’t know meldonium was declared illegal in January. She had been taking it for 10 years as a prophylactic therapy for angina and diabetes.

Such conditions must be pandemic among professional athletes, for 182 of them (mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe) have been caught taking meldonium since it was banned. Those poor souls must have been unaware of the drug’s endurance-boosting properties.

As to her supposedly being unaware of the ban, two points are worth mentioning. First, ever since Roman law was thought of, one of the guiding legal principles has been ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

Second, Sharapova isn’t just a basher of yellow balls. She’s the leader of a vast team of coaches, trainers, masseurs, doctors, racket stringers, marketing consultants, investment consultants – and lawyers.

It’s inconceivable that no one in that team would have caught the news of the ban. And even should that have happened, surely the grapevine of the tennis circuit was abuzz with the latest development in anti-doping laws.

However, the same mentality that tells amoral thugs like Putin or Sharapova to land the first blow also teaches them that no such thing as truth exists. They’ll say anything they find expedient at the moment, even if it’s the most transparent of lies.

Sharapova will probably get a ban, a year at least, possibly longer. Some commentators mention a lifelong ban, which is just as well for her health. Playing professional tennis must be hard on the poor thing suffering from cardiac problems.

No one dares suggest a multi-million fine, depriving Sharapova of some of her ill-gotten gains. More important, no one dares ascribe her malfeasance to her origin and early upbringing.

This is a shame because such benevolence will prevent the public from learning a valuable lesson that goes well beyond tennis, pharmacology or unscrupulous athletes. It’s the lesson in the terrible moral blight afflicting half of Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day I quoted Paul Valéry (d. 1945) who said that lessons of history are never heeded. He probably meant times olden, but in our own time history is compressed and accelerated.

Never mind learning the lessons of centuries ago – we today are so advanced that we can successfully ignore the didactic value of the economic crisis that supposedly ended in 2008-2009.

Oh we know exactly what caused it: a bubble of public and personal indebtedness, burgeoning money supply taking reality out of currency, irresponsible banks flogging unsecured mortgages and piling layers of derivatives sometimes amounting to 10-15 times the underlying market value of the collateral. In 2008 the combined value of outstanding derivatives equalled three times the GDP of the whole world.

But learning the aetiology of a disease isn’t tantamount to treating it, or preventing a relapse. It’s in this sense that the lessons of 2008 have never been learned.

Personal indebtedness in Britain is growing at the same pace as in the run-up to that calamity. So is our national debt: it has grown from about 80 per cent of GDP then to over 90 per cent now (so much for austerity).

Banks are dangling unsecured low-interest loans before people’s eyes, which predictably light up with acquisitive zeal. New cars, exotic holidays, expensive consumer goods are all being bought on credit with nary a thought for tomorrow. This isn’t just us: in the 10 years preceding the 2008 crisis, personal expenditure in the US had run at three times personal income.

In Britain households are borrowing over £1 billion each month. In total, household debt stands at almost £200 billion, excluding mortgages. Actually, most people don’t take mortgages into consideration, seeing them as sound investment because house values always go up. This ignores Isaac Newton, with his sound observation of things that go up only to come down in due course.

The economic problem is so obvious that even economists, whose crystal ball tends to be murky, are talking about a new bubble swelling and a new crisis looming. Yet the way they put it shows that they don’t understand the situation well enough to offer a practical solution.

For, just like its predecessor, the looming crisis is neither new nor economic. In the sense that it’s woven into the very fabric of modern society, it isn’t new. In the sense that its causes are moral and existential, it isn’t economic.

Because economics is really a study of human behaviour, it’s closer to the humanities than to natural science or maths. It’s human nature, when it’s unfettered by moral restraints, that causes crises, not any immutable economic laws or government policies.

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost eschatology, the realisation that life has an ultimate meaning that extends beyond our earthly existence. Hence it’s the process of life that illogically has got to be seen as its meaning.

Rather than preparing ourselves for eternity, we try to cram as much comfort and pleasure into every waking moment. America’s Founders called this process ‘the pursuit of happiness’, while today we more accurately refer to it as seeking instant gratification.

Just as our progenitors pursued their ultimate goal, so are we pursuing ours, sweeping all obstacles aside. One such obstacle is the lamentably gaping chasm between our incomes and our appetites, and all modern economies are designed to bridge this gap.

That’s why most Western governments manage their finances on the same pyramid-scheme principles that a few years ago landed Bernie Madoff in prison for a surreal term. That’s why they run up national debts that can never be repaid (servicing our debt already costs more than we spend on defence). That’s why individual Westerners pile up debts driving them into bankruptcy and insolvency. That’s why bankers lend irresponsibly, trying to drive their bonuses up.

As always, economists try to explain the world in the terms of their own profession. But the world can’t be squeezed into such narrow confines. It stubbornly refutes theories and rejects remedies. It keeps reminding us that the economy is merely an aspect of human behaviour, and not the most important aspect at that.

With apologies for self-quoting, this is how I put it in my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis:

“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures. We now live in a virtual world – so is it at all surprising that we live on virtual money?”

We already know that the economic crisis is systemic, not symptomatic, and its next act is just round the corner. We don’t know how calamitous it’ll be, but such crises tend to outdo their predecessors. Meanwhile, back to the really important news of Leonard DiCaprio finally winning an Oscar.

As any true Russian worthy of the name will tell you, Russia towers over the materialist West in every respect that matters. And the respects in which it doesn’t tower over the West don’t matter.

Unlike Westerners who only care about scented loo paper, the Russians are animated by their mysterious souls, and hence are positively bristling with spirituality. This is just as well, because in every down-to-earth respect the country finds herself in the lower reaches of the Third World.

Russia’s characteristic disdain for physical life, much vaunted by her great writers, inspires the Russians to take literally the biblical advice “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.”

Hence Russia comfortably leads Europe in bodies killed. According to UN data, 70 per cent of all murders on Europe’s territory are committed in Russia, home to only 19 per cent of Europeans. The country’s murder rate is 20 times higher than in Norway, which makes one wonder if perhaps soulless materialism isn’t without its advantages.

Russia comes in at 51 out of 56 countries rated for quality of life, behind Pakistan and Egypt, but then true Russians, living as they do off the legacy of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, don’t care about such quotidian nonsense (until they come to the West, that is, where they are seduced into soulless materialism while still clearing passport control).

Alas, however, the country doesn’t do much better in the more spiritually elevated categories either.

For example in the freedom of the press rating compiled by Freedom House, Russia stands at 181 out of the world’s 199 countries, below Sudan, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Burundi and Chad.

At 195 out of 198 countries in the Verisk Maplecroft corruption rating, Russia also finds herself in a similar neighbourhood, next to Sudan and Burma.

The country’s democracy rating of 129 puts her below that famous bastion of political pluralism Saudi Arabia (!), but – and here one must doff one’s hat – just a whisker above Somalia.

I won’t bore you with any more statistics, but just take my word for it: every survey one cares to look up shows that Russia’s domestic life comfortably fits the cliché of hell on earth.

Her international behaviour doesn’t evoke many serene images of paradise either. During Putin’s tenure Russia has launched unprovoked attacks on Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014.

Currently Putin’s army is busily vaporising Syrian schools and hospitals. The kind of collateral damage that for Nato members can only result from unfortunate accidents, for Russia represents deliberate policy aimed at terrorising the country into submission to Assad, who’s rapidly turning into a Russian puppet.

Russia’s aggressive forays into Turkey and non-stop violations of other Nato members’ air space are pushing the world towards the devastation of another world war. Hardly a day goes by that either Putin or his mouthpieces don’t threaten the world with nuclear extinction, a threat that’s getting more credible by the day.

And still Col. Putin’s kleptofascist regime produced by a fusion of the KGB and organised crime finds its champions in the West, across the whole political spectrum.

Fascists, swelling the membership rolls of France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party have for Putin that warm feeling politicians reserve for those who bankroll their movements – which a newly pious Putin does with nothing short of Christian generosity.

Conservatives, especially those of a slightly authoritarian inclination, praise Putin for being a strong leader who takes no nonsense from liberals and won’t allow homosexual marriages in his own backyard. We should have such a leader, bleat the Hitchenses and Bookers of our press.

(Presumably they’d also be happy to accept as an inevitable corollary routine political assassinations, arbitrary justice dictated by the state, money laundering as the principal economic activity and suppression of the very press in which they make a living. One can only applaud such selfless devotion to public good.)

Businessmen hail Putin’s disdain for environmental red tape, his dispensing with casuistic legality and treating the taxation system as merely a statement of intent.

Lefties adore Putin’s anti-Americanism, along with his constant diatribes against the West’s decadence and materialism. Being lefties, they aren’t bright enough to weigh the fascist alternative in the balance, for Putin offers no other.

In fact the unreconstructed KGB colonel enjoys as much benefit of the doubt today as Hitler did in the 1930s. The ghoulish führer too was admired by fascists like Mosley, assorted anti-Semites, leftie liberals like Lloyd George, businessmen like Henry Ford, conservatives like Lady Astor’s Cliveden set, some of the more prominent royals and, between 23 August, 1939, and 22 June, 1941, while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, even the communists.

This climate of benign toleration mixed with adulation created by way of precipitation a demob, appeasement mentality across Europe, which in turn had well-publicised consequences, expressible in millions of corpses.

History is never short of such useful, often life-saving lessons. But then, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry correctly observed, we never learn them.

 

The Nazi poison infecting most of Europe in the 1940s had a longer half-life than we like to claim. It left a legacy of all sorts of sinister ideas and practices.

For example, the current idea of a European federation revolving on a Franco-German (or, to be precise, Germano-French) axis goes back to the fruitful cooperation between Nazi, Vichy and other European bureaucracies during the war.

Still in its embryonic state, the notion of a single pan-European state was pithily expressed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who during the war served as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands: “The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed.” My friends Angie and Jean-Claude would readily sign their names to this heartfelt statement.

A Nuremberg noose prevented Seyss-Inquart from seeing his dream come true in the new guise of the European Union. But the political philosophy he so ably brought to life in the Low Countries left more than one poisonous legacy.

The Nazis firmly believed that individual lives had nothing but utilitarian value. The extent of their usefulness to the state was determined by, well, the state. If the value was perceived as negative, the state felt it had the right to take the useless life away the better to maintain the spiritual health of society.

Gypsies and especially Jews had to be expelled, exterminated or otherwise removed from the Aryan body brimming with spiritual health – that much was instantly obvious not only to Nazi leaders but, at the time, to most Germans.

But Jews and Gypsies weren’t the only offensive groups. Also blocking the way to achieving the Nazi muscular ideal of mankind were homosexuals, cripples and the mentally ill. By virtue of their deformities they forfeited their right to life, which point was driven home by the cyanide-loaded syringes wielded by German doctors.

That medical procedure was called ‘euthanasia’, which means ‘good death’ in Greek. Indeed, what could possibly be better than killing a few thousand for the noble goal of producing a GM race of unbounded mental and physical health?

The underlying belief that it’s neither God nor the person but the state that has the ultimate sovereignty over human life is common to every brand of socialism, national, international or ‘democratic’ (‘democratic socialism’ is the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). The wording will differ, as will the scale on which this principle is implemented. But the principle will remain the same.

Hence in 2002 Seyss-Inquart’s former bailiwick became the first European country to legalise euthanasia, albeit only for terminally ill patients expressing a “voluntary and well-considered request” to be done in.

Without going into the philosophical and – God forbid – theological aspects of that cannibalistic law, suffice it say that many so-called terminal cases are marginal. Even when all the doctors involved agree that the patient is on his last legs, miraculous recovery may still happen. (Much as I hate using myself as an example, doctors thought my Stage 4 cancer was terminal. Since then you’ve been exposed to 10 years’ worth of my vituperative prose.)

The issue of “voluntary and well-considered request” becomes even murkier when the patient suffers from a mental, rather than physical, illness. By definition, his competence to issue such a request has to be doubted – as should be the ability of psychiatrists to agree on an unequivocal diagnosis in this notoriously obscure branch of medicine.

Yet nothing would hold back the irrepressible Dutch. Between 2011 and 2014 the Dutch state put to death 110 mental patients, of whom some were only diagnosed with autism. (Altogether 5,036 patients were put to ‘good’ death there in 2014 alone.)

Analysing 66 of those 110 cases, psychiatrists from the National Institute of Health concluded that in many instances consulting physicians disagreed on how precisely the legal criteria had been met. Moreover, doctors proceeded with euthanasia in the 37 cases where patients had refused potentially effective treatments.

No one was bothered by the logical inconsistency of it all. If the patients were so mad that they had to be put down for their own good, and ultimately for the good of the state, how could they be deemed sufficiently compos mentis to decide on accepting or rejecting treatment?

This is the thin end of the wedge being driven into the very heart of our civilisation. If there is one founding principle that can be regarded as its cornerstone, it’s the certainty that every human life is sacred – and only God can decide when it ends.

Remove this understanding, and the ostensible differences among all those socialisms, state, national, democratic, international or Soviet pale into rhetorical triviality. They are distinctions, not differences.

The primacy of the state over the individual underpins all modern states – whatever modifiers they attach to their names. We have Holland to thank for continuously reminding us of this fact.

May I suggest that, if at times you act eccentrically, as many Englishmen do, you watch yourself very closely when visiting Holland, especially if you’re of a certain age. By getting off the plane at Schiphol, you may implicitly forfeit personal sovereignty over your life.