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For those of you who don’t follow such things closely, Daniel Barenboim is a musician who’s much better at tooting his own horn than playing the piano or conducting.

Having failed to develop his natural gifts into serious musicianship, he has instead devoted all his inexhaustible energy to developing his unrivalled talent for self-promotion, that sole guarantor of success in the modern musical world.

As a result, rather than becoming the great musician he could have been, Danny has become something much more lucrative: a musical celebrity. And nowadays celebrity of any kind demands expansion into adjacent, or not so adjacent, areas.

Hence Danny Boy has been pretending for quite some time that he could single-handedly put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is basically the Palestinians trying to kill all Israelis, with the latter trying to prevent such an outcome.

To emphasise that he carries Middle Eastern peace in his own breast, Danny has taken out dual citizenship in Israel and Palestine, which is an amazing achievement considering that, though Israel is a state, Palestine isn’t. It’s more or less a combination of eternal refugee camp and terrorist base.

But Danny vowed to change this lamentable situation by founding the Divan, a so-so orchestra featuring Israeli and Palestinian musicians. “Once young Israelis and Arabs agree on how to play just one note together,” explained Danny Boy, “they will not be able to look at each other in the same way again.”

By ‘they’ he didn’t just mean the musicians themselves, who tend not to be particularly bellicose anyway – he meant that the anodyne sounds produced by his orchestra would force Palestinians to stop killing Israelis, and Israelis killing Palestinians in self-defence.

This would be idiotic if accepted at face value. But Danny Boy didn’t mean it literally. The purpose of the exercise was to promote not peace but Danny, and in that it has been a success, having failed miserably to achieve its declared goal.

But Danny isn’t the type to be deterred easily. “My point,” he persisted, “is that when Israelis and Palestinians play the same music… in the end we don’t give a damn whether we are enemies or not. But will that bring a solution to this conflict? No.”

I’m confused. I thought solving the conflict was the whole purpose. If that isn’t, what is? Surely the world has enough second-rate orchestras already.

Then Danny proceeded to utter the kind of drivel one doesn’t expect even from him: “I still think the idea of combining social engineering with music is wonderful. It gives music a real place in society.”

English isn’t Danny’s first language, and probably not even his second, but he knows it well enough to realise that ‘social engineering’ is a pejorative term.

First introduced at the very end of the 19^th century, it refers to refashioning traditional society and forming ‘the new man’, one divested of any traces of our Judaeo-Christian civilisation.

Predictably social engineering is the ideal pursued by all totalitarian regimes of modernity. The assumption is that, since mankind is a machine, its working can be influenced by elect mechanics, specialists endowed with the ability and authority to tweak the mechanism as they see fit.

This is fascism at its purest, whatever the theoreticians and practitioners of social engineering call themselves, and their chosen monikers run towards ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’ or ‘humanist’.

It’s also staggering to hear from someone who fancies himself a musical guru that, unless music is used for the purpose of social engineering, it has no “real place in society.”

Such a utilitarian view of music would have appalled Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, though it would have been welcomed by Lenin, Hitler or Stalin.

Music’s real place in society is to express the highest spiritual and aesthetic reaches of our civilisation – not to act as the battering ram of modernity. By music, in case Danny misunderstands, I mean Messrs Bach, Mozart et al, not the Internationale or the Horst-Wessel-Lied so beloved of Danny’s fellow social engineers.

I was about to sign off by suggesting that Danny stick to what he does best, but then it occurred to me that talking such self-serving gibberish is exactly what he does best. And people listen!    

 

 

 

Following the news these days makes one feel not so much like a viewer or reader as a psychiatrist, trying to come to grips with a pandemic of madness.

What’s going on in Calais proves that, while paradise on earth is unachievable, hell on earth isn’t. All it takes is British home and foreign policy to come together with French labour relations, and there you have it – a creditable reproduction of hell, complete with clouds of black smoke.

The smoke comes from the tyre fires started by disgruntled French union members, but people from all sorts of downmarket countries also do their best to enhance the image. They throw themselves into and under lorries and cars, attach themselves to a train’s undercarriage and get crushed to death, charge into clouds of tear gas.

When they deign to speak to journalistic vultures circling around Calais, they prove they’re ready to become modern Brits. They may not quite walk the walk, but they certainly talk the talk.

“We know our rights!” they scream, and among those rights is the one involving residency in Britain. I hate to disappoint our African friends, but no such right exists.

What does exist is the modern tendency, going back to the pernicious American and French revolutions, to confuse wishes with rights. To be fair, this fallacy is strictly of Western provenance, but the Africans seem to have absorbed it thoroughly, doubtless in preparation for their exodus.

Forgetting about bogus rights for a second, the numbers don’t add up either. It’s fair to assume that at least half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants would rather live in Britain than in their own native hellholes.

Even if we round the number down to three billion, it’s clear that our small island can’t accommodate them all. There has to be a limit, even though Ed Miliband didn’t think so when asked just before the general election.

Both the limit and the criteria for admission have to be set by HMG, which still retains this prerogative in relation to Africans – even though it has criminally relinquished it in relation to Europeans.

Our government has not only the right but indeed the duty to turn back in any numbers those it doesn’t wish to admit. How it does so is irrelevant. There’s only one requirement for any method of expulsion: that it works.

Instead even those who break through our flimsy cordon illegally are treated as welcomed guests. They are put up at hotels, given three meals a day and some walking-around cash – all at the taxpayer’s expense.

Perhaps, and it’s a very remote possibility, HMG spivs are feeling pangs of conscience, for their own policy is responsible for much of this blazing inferno.

A dozen years ago, immediately after Tony ‘Yo’ Blair joined the foolhardy American foray into the Middle East, I was trying to explain how ill-advised that was to one of Britain’s leading neoconservatives.

“We feel,” he said, his ‘we’ referring mostly to American neocons to whom he was tied by a tighter bond than to any properly British group, “that it’s still a good idea to poke the hornet’s nest.”

Well, the nest has been poked and the hornets are flying all over Calais and Kent, threatening to sting Britain out of existence. Our social fabric, already threadbare thanks to decades of inept spivocracy, provides a highly insecure protective net.

I hope my neocon friend, who has since our conversation embarked on a glittering journalistic career, is happy. Judging by his current output, he isn’t, but then neither does he feel any remorse. Neocons on either side of the ocean seem to be impervious to such humble feelings.

The Calais hell is but one symptom of the madness pandemic. Another is the public response to two major tragedies: the alliterative deaths of Cecil and Cilla.

My understanding is that Cilla Black was some kind of entertainer, who, according to Sky TV, “deeply touched us all”. Well, she didn’t touch me, deeply or otherwise, for the simple reason that, though I had heard the name, I didn’t have a precise idea of who she was.

Since I’ve only lived in England for less than 30 years, I’m keenly aware of my limitations in the knowledge of the lore. Hence I asked my wife, English born and bred, whether she could fill the gaps in my ethnographic education. She couldn’t. “Some sort of entertainer,” she explained, but then I already knew that.

Don’t get me wrong: unlike Cecil, Cilla was human, which is why her death at a statistically premature age of 72 is no doubt a tragedy to her family, friends and fans. But it falls far short of being the international disaster and irreplaceable loss to mankind it’s depicted to be in the media.

Then of course she was that cultural fulcrum of modernity, a Celebrity (capitalisation always implied). Being human isn’t an ironclad requirement for this status, as proved by Cecil the Lion, shot dead by some trigger-happy American dentist.

I’ve seen a picture on the net of Cecil tearing an antelope apart limb from limb. The picture shocked me: there I was, thinking that Cecil was a cuddly, thoroughly anthropomorphised kitten, the best pet a man could wish for. Turns out he was a savage beast devoid of the free will it takes to live down his DNA.

Apparently Cecil was shot illegally, which sort of thing ought to be punished and discouraged. But making him one of the top news items for a week is as reliable a symptom of collective mental illness as one can think of.

One gets the impression that we live in a lunatic asylum that isn’t run by anybody, not even by its inmates. It’s sheer deranged anarchy, with normal life going up in the black smoke of Calais.

 

 

 

  

 

  

One must compliment Vlad for making no attempt to embellish his impressionable youth. And his grown-up life makes it hard to doubt the veracity of this particular recollection.

The ongoing inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has already established Putin’s complicity, and the in camera part is still to come.

Speaking for the victim’s family, Ben Emmerson, QC, called Putin an “increasingly isolated tinpot despot” and a “morally deranged authoritarian”, who, “beyond reasonable doubt”, ordered the murder.

Mr Emmerson added that Putin and his cronies are “directly implicated in organised crime”, and it was for his investigation of those activities that Litvinenko was ‘whacked’, to use the term Vlad favours.

In response, the Kremlin called the investigation “biased and politicised”.

Well, if there was a certain bias it could have been put straight by the testimony of Lugovoi and Kovtun, Vlad’s two KGB colleagues who dropped polonium 200 into Litvinenko’s tea.

Neither gentleman, however, took advantage of this glorious opportunity to clear their names and that of their paymaster. Kovtun originally agreed to testify via a video link, but then he, or rather Vlad, thought better of it.

As to the inquest being politicised, it pains me to admit that this is exactly what it is. What’s politicised about it isn’t its findings but its timing.

The findings are hardly earth-shattering. Everyone has known from the word tea that the two KGB thugs ‘whacked’ Litvinenko. The esoteric weapon they used, the old cui bono principle and the knowledge that such a high-level action in the middle of London had to be ordered by Putin left little doubt as to the culprit.

The use of polonium, in the first act of nuclear terrorism against the West, is particularly telling. Had Messrs Lugovoi and Kovtun ‘whacked’ Litvinenko with their service Makarovs, doubts would have been possible.

But radioactive isotopes aren’t as easily available as Soviet-issue automatics. The polonium had to come from a state laboratory, and even in Russia such materials are kept under lock and key. Thus Putin had deliberately telegraphed the murder – pour encourager les autres.

However, the murder took place in 2006 and every fact mentioned in the inquest has been known since then. Why then has it taken nine years to point an accusing finger at Putin?

The truth has been suppressed until now because our powers that be didn’t want to upset Vlad. Justice has been held hostage to political expediency.

It’s only when Putin attempted to do to the Ukraine what he had done to Litvinenko, threatening the West with nuclear weapons in passing, that the nature of political expediency changed. And there I was, thinking Britain is ruled by law, rather than by spivs playing their little political games with the truth.

Now, one hopes, Western governments will release the information on Putin and his gang siphoning hundreds of billions into Western banks, information that’s already in the possession of the FT and The Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of the Ukraine, last week my friend Vlad made a valuable contribution to jurisprudence. He created the precedent of a criminal vetoing the investigation of his crime.

The UN Security Council gathered to establish an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17.

The plane carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew was shot down over the Ukraine a year ago. The AA missile was evidently fired from a Russian BUK launcher either by Russian soldiers or by their proxies, the so-called Ukrainian separatists.

In the manner of a thief screaming ‘Stop thief!’ the Kremlin came up with an alternative and manifestly mendacious version of the airliner having been downed by a Ukrainian missile – or even possibly a Ukrainian fighter plane.

Hence the need for an independent tribunal, an international body authorised to identify and prosecute the guilty party. Vlad, however, has been saying all along that convening such a tribunal would be ‘untimely’ and ‘counterproductive’.

The Security Council put the matter to a vote, receiving 11 affirmative votes, three abstentions (Angola, China and Venezuela) – and one decisive and predictable veto cast by Russia’s representative Vitaly Churkin.

Mr Churkin was a perfect man for the job for he had form. In 1983, in his capacity as Press Secretary to the USSR embassy in Washington, the young KGB diplomat Comrade Churkin (as he then was) solemnly declared that the Soviets had had nothing to do with a similar accident befalling Korean Airlines Flight 007.

The airliner carrying 267 people, explained my new friend Vitaly, had committed suicide by veering off course and plunging into the Sea of Japan west of Sakhalin.

A few days later the Soviets admitted that an SU-15 interceptor had lent the Koreans a helping hand – and Churkin’s career was launched to culminate in his present ministerial post.

Amazingly, over half of the Russian population disagree with the veto that to any halfway intelligent person is tantamount to an admission of guilt.

On the contrary, they want a tribunal to take place because they’re certain that Russia will be exonerated. The tribunal, they believe, will establish the guilt of either the Ukraine or – are you ready for this? – the USA.

One has to congratulate Vlad yet again: his propaganda is more effective than anything the Soviets could muster. In 1983, even before the Soviets admitted responsibility, not a single Russian had doubted their guilt.

Some welcomed the action, some didn’t, most were indifferent – but not a single Russian in command of his faculties doubted the Soviets had done it.

Soviet propaganda made Russians cynical; Putin’s propaganda makes them idiotic, which is a much greater achievement.

One can only wonder why Vlad’s approval ratings still languish at a mere 86 per cent. Then again, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s last rating stood at 95 per cent. Three days after the poll he was shot like a mad dog in a gutter – and overjoyed crowds danced in the streets.

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warm waves of euphoria are wafting over George Osborne, whose crack-papering budget is being hailed as the apex of sagacity.

Actually its chief feature is that it’s less damaging than Ed Ball’s would have been had he been in a position to draft one.

While improving Tory ratings and paving the way to George’s personal ascent, his budget doesn’t mend the structural flaw of our economy: having to service a national debt inexorably heading towards two trillion, if at a slightly slower rate than under Labour.

The only way to alleviate the problem is to halve our public spending, which effectively means eliminating the welfare state. This George hasn’t done, and neither he nor any other Chancellor will ever do it.

The prosperity we seem to be enjoying is phoney and therefore transient. The major reason we have it at all is that our ties with the moribund EU aren’t quite so strangulating as they would be had we joined the euro.

Young George’s talents are held in such high esteem that, now our economic woes seem to be over and some of his time has been freed up, he has been given an additional role: renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU.

George outlined his goals in a recent interview, in which he demonstrated he has every quality required in a modern PM: mediocre intellect, a rubbery elasticity of conscience and a single-minded devotion to power for its own sake.

He sees his new mission as “convincing ourselves that it is right for Britain to remain in the EU”. ‘Ourselves’ meaning whom? George and Dave are already convinced they want a sizeable piece of tangible power, which in Europe resides in the EU.

What George means is that he wants to convince those who aren’t sure that Britain’s best interests lie in becoming a cross between a German gau and a French département.

Only one trick has worked historically: lying that we’d be wealthy inside the EU and destitute outside it. This lie must be set up by another one: claiming that the EU is devoted to the economy above all else. Yet those even remotely familiar with EU history know that it’s a political project, not an economic one.

This is proved by the existence of the euro, a mechanism by which the economies of 19 countries have been to various extents sacrificed for a political cause: the creation of a European superstate run by an unaccountable, seemingly supranational, bureaucratic elite.

‘Seemingly’ is the key word there, for the hub around which the EU revolves is the Franco-German partnership cemented at Vichy circa 1943.

Germany is clearly the senior partner in this Vichy-washy arrangement, with France still reeling from the collective Stockholm syndrome she suffered in 1940. Like Patty Hearst falling in love with her SLA rapists, France is now eager to bring up Germany’s rear, kissing it as she goes along.

Hence any claim that the EU pursues purely economic goals is mendacious. And George can do mendacious with the worst of them: “But for Britain I always felt that the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one.”

When 40 years ago I joined my first tennis club, its chief attraction was scantily dressed girls one could ogle and, at a braver moment, try to pick up. However, I discovered that ultimately that wasn’t what the club was about.

“I prefer to talk about [the EU] as a single market of free trade,” said George, as I preferred to talk about the tennis club as a pick-up place until realising that one had to play tennis.

“It’s free trade with the rules that enable the free trade to be a real success,” continued George. This suggests there was something unreal about Britain’s past success built solidly on the free trade the country more or less pioneered – amazingly without abandoning her sovereignty.

George’s remark sounded as if he foresaw Britain’s relationship with the EU becoming a purely economic one, and the interviewer asked if that understanding was correct.

A modern politician’s answers to such question are a Möbius strip, not a straight line. Hence George answered neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but merely paraphrased what he had said before.

That merry dance continued throughout, with the interviewer paraphrasing the same question and George paraphrasing the same answer, adding the odd irrelevant bit, such as “the security work that we do with the French” (I’d be embarrassed to mention this in the present situation, but I am not the PM-in-waiting).

The only way to have a purely economic relationship with the EU is to be outside it. It’s no more possible for a member to have such a relationship with the EU than for, say, Armenia to have had it with the USSR.

George knows this of course – and doesn’t care. The purpose of his and Dave’s machinations is to keep Britain in the EU at any cost, thereby perpetuating their own power and that of the wicked elite to which they pledge allegiance.

By George, the man’s ready to be our next PM. One just hopes that, when he occupies the post, it won’t be called ‘gauleiter’.

 

 

Our true opinion formers are neither politicians nor businessmen nor even pundits, though some of them may have a bit of influence.

But not nearly as much as ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’. It’s possible to define those in either category as people I’ve never heard of, but this definition isn’t precise. After all, many of those who are unknown to me are also unknown to everyone else, other than their own families, friends and colleagues.

Even though I’m stuck for a tight definition, I can easily discern certain qualities ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’ have in common. They, with probably some exceptions of which I’m lamentably unaware, are stupid, immoral, photogenic and devoid of any talent or attainment recognised as such throughout the first 5,000 years of recorded history.

Since Katie Hopkins is both a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’, she possesses all those fine qualities to a hypertrophied extent, a fact she has to keep advertising in order to remain a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’.

Her latest gem came in a Radio Times interview. When asked what she’d do if she ruled the world, Katie came up with a masterpiece.

She’d solve the world’s most pressing problem, she replied, which is that “We just have far too many old people. It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.”

One can accept that Katie’s frank self-assessment has led her to believe that some people are in no way superior to dogs intellectually or morally. What has escaped her attention is that, for old times’ sake if nothing else, human beings do enjoy a special status in the animal world.

So special in fact that some sticks-in-the-mud still believe – and the law still grudgingly accepts – that human life is so valuable as to be sacred, while dogs’ lives aren’t.

Moreover, the memory of two satanic creeds of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism, still hasn’t been expunged. Some – one hopes most – people may be put off by the prospect of killing 20 million people, which is roughly the number of those who may be classified as ‘old’ in Britain.

No such problems for our TV personality. The solution, she explained, is easy: “Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – they would come to your home… They might even have a nice little tune they’d play… I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans.”

Alas, Katie’s chosen solution to all our troubles lacks novelty appeal. It was the Bolsheviks who pioneered the use of such vans as a solution to pressing problems, in their case political rather than demographic ones. The design was as simple as all things of genius.

A hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and routed into the back of the van, which was hermetically sealed. The vehicle was then densely packed with political undesirables and locked up.

The driver would start the engine, those inside would begin banging against the van walls. After a few minutes the noise would die down. The driver would wait a while longer to make sure, then the van doors would be opened and the operators would unload the blue corpses, their faces distorted by the kind of grimaces Goya depicted in his Capriccios.

The innovation was so effective yet simple that it found a broader use when the Nazis took over. Cooperation between the NKVD and Gestapo started immediately, long before the world was treated to the spectacle of the Pact.

The SS and Gestapo knew they had a lot to learn. After all, by the time Hitler came to power the Soviets had been practising mass murder for 15 years, and the Germans respected their accumulated know-how.

As part of the friendly exchange, the technologically-minded Germans presented their Russian colleagues with a state-of-the-art machine for pulling fingernails. The Soviets in their turn taught the Germans how to save valuable ammunition by using ‘euthanasia vans’.

The idea caught on, and the Germans put it to wide use in Eastern Europe. In time they abandoned the practice in favour of one that utilised the advances of their chemical industry, and ‘euthanasia vans’ went the way of all outdated gadgets.

But now our own ‘TV personality’ has revived the concept, so far only in theory, as an ideal but alas still unattainable goal towards which we must strive.

It’s comforting to observe how euthanasia fans and birth-control enthusiasts converge in their longing for mass murder. Margaret Sanger, for example, the founder of Planned Parenthood who coined the term ‘birth-control’, was capable of uttering pearls like “Coloured people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.”

Sanger, who in her day was even more of a celebrity than Katie is now, didn’t mind letting wrinklies die a natural death. But modernity is nothing if not progressive, and it fell upon our own ‘TV personality’ to take Sanger’s idea to the next level.

What kind of society would allow such deranged monsters a public platform and an adulating audience? The single-word answer can be found in Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph: Circumspice.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repeat after me, 10 times: NOTHING unspeakable done by any ethnic or religious group comes from its character or history.

Good, now you’re ready to be a modern person, for you’ve just enunciated the core belief of PC modernity.

Though applicable to any group, these days it’s most widely practised in relation to Islamism, as Islam is fashionably known.

Hence Muslims regale us with videos of thieves having their hands chopped off because it sounds like a good idea on the spur of the moment – not, repeat NOT, because they take on faith Koran 5:36: “As to the thief, male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in power.”

Similarly, if you listen to any Russian chauvinist, Bolshevism had nothing to do with the Russians.

Never mind peasant revolts, ranging from local Jacqueries to full-scale wars, that started a few years after Russia became Russia and continued non-stop throughout the country’s history.

Never mind the aristocratic uprising of December, 1825, the attacks on the government throughout the 19^th century, the murder of the reforming Tsar Alexander II by predominantly Russian terrorists, the escalating bloody war between government and society throughout Nicholas II’s reign – indeed anything showing any Russian roots of the Bolshevik nightmare.

No, all Bolsheviks were Jews and other aliens who landed from Mars in such huge numbers that, without any support from the native population, they managed to kill about 15 million people while Lenin (his grandfather a baptised Jew!) was still alive and before Stalin – Georgian! – got going.

As to Nazism, I once had an entertaining conversation with an American Germanophile professor of political science. The good professor indignantly denied my suggestion that Nazism had something to do with the German character.

Trademark Germanic bellicosity, first mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic Wars? Nonsense!

The obsession of German mythology with sylvan mysticism, all those witches, hobgoblins and blood-thirsty Erlkönigs? Rubbish!

General propensity for paganism, which makes the Reformation intelligible? Claptrap! 

German Romanticism, as typified by Wagner, glorifying all of the above and adding a touch of virulent anti-Semitism to spice things up? Nothing of the sort!

Having run out of possibilities, I had to ask if, in the professor’s learned opinion, Nazism actually happened and, if so, what if anything had caused it. He reluctantly answered yes to the first question and refused to answer the second.

Nothing caused Nazism. It just happened. Out of the blue (or brown, as the case may be).

As a believer in the First Law of Thermodynamics, expressible in layman’s terms as ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes out of nothing), I disagreed and we left it at that.

Then recently I came across Joachim Raff.

In 1863 this German-Swiss composer won a prestigious prize from the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde for his 70-minute symphony To My Fatherland.

Frankly, I haven’t heard this work and nor am I ever likely to do so. What caught my eye was the composer’s programme notes:

“First movement: Allegro. Image of the German Character: ability to soar to great heights; trend towards introspection; mildness and courage as contrasts that touch and interpenetrate in many ways; overwhelming desire to be pensive.

“Second movement: Allegro molto vivace. The outdoors: through German forests with horns-a-winding; through glades with the sounds of folk music.

“Third movement: Larghetto. Return to the domestic hearth, transfigured by the muses and by love.

“Fourth movement: Allegro drammatico. Frustrated desire to lay a foundation for unity in the Fatherland.

“Fifth movement: Larghetto – allegro trionfale. Plaint, renewed soaring.”

Now try to replace the word ‘German’ with ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘Italian’ or any other adjective denoting nationality, and you’ll instantly find out how futile such an exercise is. Nothing but ‘German’ fits.

There we have it, the German character in a nutshell. A useful illustration to my argument with the American professor, wouldn’t you say?

The rattle of jackboots and the Sieg Heil!!! roar of millions of throats can be heard loud and clear. Or else my ear is oversensitive, my taste for historical causality overdeveloped, and my sensibilities hopelessly retrograde.

My American friend probably thinks so. 

Obama’s triumphant tour of the African half of his roots was marred by Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate.

Now I dislike any politician of a certain age who insists on being known by the diminutive version of his Christian name. However, Mr Huckabee’s ability to rile Obama entitles him to calling himself even Mickey if he so chooses. This is what he said:

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history… he would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven.

“We forget Iranians have never kept a deal in 36 years… There’s no reason to think they will suddenly start doing it.

“The Iran deal is a bad deal, bad for America and bad for Israel.”

Obama was so incensed he had to interrupt his Kenyan tribal dance in mid-step. The drums fell silent, and only the president’s voice was heard once he had regained command of it.

That statement, said Obama, “would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad…” And his acolyte Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mr Huckerbee’s statement as “grossly irresponsible”.

This is good knockabout stuff, but it falls short of being a cogent argument. Trying to offer one, Barack Hussein proved he is as hard of hearing as he is hopeless at rhetoric.

“I have not heard another argument [against] that holds up.” That makes the president deaf, for every conceivable medium all over the West has been screaming devastating arguments against the deal.

These come from strategists, armament experts, political analysts, weapon inspectors – not all of them in the pay of the Republicans, Mossad or aliens from the planet Islamophobia.

But hold on, Obama has an argument of his own: “99% of the world thinks it’s a good deal.”

I congratulate the president on the proficiency of his polling service. Surveying a population of six billion in such a short time is a feat of monumental proportions.

So monumental in fact that one is tempted to think that no such poll has been conducted, and Obama’s calculation was pulled out of the portion of his anatomy he shakes when whirling to the sound of African drums.

But do let’s suppose for the sake of argument that what he said is true. In that case, his statement is a classic rhetorical fallacy, known as argumentum ad populum (if many believe it, it’s true.)

Of course modern, and especially American, politics is based on fideistic worship of majority opinion, which is one thing that’s wrong with modern politics.

But forget generalities of rhetoric or politics. Forget even Mr Huckabee’s oratorical flourishes that are as hyperbolic as to be expected from a politician in the throes of a campaign. Forget also the variously disparaging adjectives used by Obama and his retinue to describe Mr Huckabee’s statements.

Let’s just look at the points he made and, rather than calling them (and him) names, see if they’re true or false. Mr Huckabee believes this is a rotten deal because:

1) Iran has been trying to get nuclear weapons for decades.

2) Iran’s leaders honestly say such weapons will be used to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, presumably killing every Israeli.

3) Since Iran is a major sponsor and perpetrator of global anti-Western terrorism, her acquisition of nuclear weapons presents a danger not just to Israel but to us all.

4) Contrary to what Obama claims, the deal involves a great element of trust, for its provisions for verification are inadequate.

5) However, Iran is untrustworthy in view of her record of breaking or sabotaging every agreement she has signed since 1979.

6) Judging by the Iranian leadership’s publicly expressed belief that the deal constitutes America’s surrender, and huge Iranian crowds celebrating it with ‘Death to America’ chants, Iran’s view of it is different from Obama’s.

7) Hence the deal is awful first because it puts at the ayatollahs’ disposal billions that may be used for nefarious purposes and, second, because it practically guarantees their acquiring a nuclear capability within a decade.

8) Therefore Obama’s deal with Iran may well lead the world to nuclear holocaust.

These eight points, unchallengeable factually or intellectually, unpack the epigrammatic brevity of Mr Huckabee’s statement. Obama may call it what he wants, but I’ll call it what it is: true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In his capacity as the Lords’ Deputy Speaker and Chairman of the Privileges and Conduct Committee, Baron Sewel, 69, was in charge of enforcing good behaviour in the Upper House.

His own behaviour, however, didn’t always meet the high standards whose guardian he was. The other day Lord Sewel resigned his posts after starring on hidden camera.

The video depicts His Lordship snorting cocaine through a rolled £5 note while cavorting with two prostitutes in his Dolphin Square flat. It’s unclear whether the pink bra His Lordship wore in some of the sequences belonged to him or was borrowed from one of his friends for hire.

Personally, I’ve never felt the need either to own a brassiere or to put one on after removing it from a woman, but I realise that some men have more sophisticated tastes. So my hat’s off to Lord Sewel.

As each of the young ladies comes with a £200 price tag, they set Lord Sewel back £400 – unless they came cheaper for two. As well they should have done, for the session came complete with valuable political insights.

Between sex acts his Lordship took breaks, understandably prolonged on account of his venerable age. Rather than wasting the downtime, he imparted on the young ladies some unsolicited pearls of political wisdom, enlightening them on the fine points of his colleagues.

Cameron, he said, “is false. He makes one-off commitments and cannot deliver… He just shoots from the lip… He’s the most superficial, facile Prime Minister there’s ever been.” The garment Lord Sewel sported when offering this observation takes nothing away from its accuracy, as far as I’m concerned.

Boris Johnson?  “A public school upper class twit… an a***hole [to be regarded as such up North]”.

One suspects that, being a career Labour man, His Lordship probably feels that all public school chaps fit this description. If so, he’s patently wrong. But there’s no gainsaying his judgement that Boris will be viewed in those terms “in Preston, in Burnley, in Manchester”. Why, I even know some people in higher-rent parts of the country who feel the same way.

Lest one might accuse Lord Sewel of bias against Tory politicians, he also took a swipe at the man to whom he owes his political career, Tony Blair.

In fact, he attributed the present, most pleasingly disastrous, state of the Labour Party to Blair’s dragging the UK into the “pointless” Iraq War: “He went to war because of this sort of love affair with George Bush… Blair fell in love with George Bush, absolutely.”

Love-related metaphors must have really rolled off His Lordship’s tongue under the circumstances, but one does detect a grain of truth in his diatribe. He might have added that Blair could give Cameron a good run for his money in the “facile and superficial” stakes, but party loyalty must have kicked in at that point.

In fact, he partly exonerated Tony by opining that his apparent obsession with money is inspired by his wife Cherie, who’s money-mad because she “comes from a working-class Liverpool background”.

One may think that the implicit contempt for such a lowly descent sounds odd when coming from a Labour peer, but in fact it’s par for the course. No one seriously thinks that there’s anything labour about the parliamentary Labour Party, or indeed anything conservative about the Conservative Party or anything liberal and democratic about the LibDems.

Blair, in fact, has a background similar to Cameron’s, and I’m sure that, just between them and a Krug bottle, they talk about the proles in equally derisory terms. And when Nick Clegg stops over for a quick glass, he must join in the fun.

Once Sewel got on a roll, there was no stopping him. The Labour leadership contest is “in a f***ing mess”. Again his judgement can’t be faulted.

Jeremy Corbyn is “a typical romantic idiot… Useless.” True, although I’m not sure about the ‘romantic’ bit. Communists are in my mind associated not so much with romanticism as with concentration camps, but hey, Sewel is a Labour man after all.

“Andy Burnham… goes whichever way the wind is blowing.”

Yvette Cooper is “not strong.”

Liz Kendall, whose name Lord Sewel couldn’t recall offhand, “is just too naïve”.

In short, “there’s nobody bright enough, or who has the leadership qualities…” And they’re all more or less run by union bosses like Len McCluskey who is “a f***ing idiot.” Yes, among other things, I’d be tempted to add.

And the SNP leaders aren’t much better. Alex Salmond, for example, is a “silly pompous prat.” And so on in the same vein, until His Lordship’s amorous vigour was restored by cocaine, and the young ladies stopped shirking and started working.

I don’t know if afterwards they agreed that the session was valuable in more than just monetary terms. I certainly think so – it’s not often that one can hear a politician talk in such an uninhibited fashion, or tell the truth about the sorry state of British politics.

Perhaps all our parliamentarians ought to be obliged by law to wear bras. Except of course the female MPs, who are likely to regard such a diktat as an expression of latent misogyny and the male desire to dominate women.

 

This, as the British cyclist Chris Froome found out, isn’t a figure of speech, at least not just that.

On course to win his second Tour de France, Chris has got up the nose of many a French spectator. They vent their frustration through other orifices, by spitting on the cyclist as he speeds by and throwing urine in his face.

Such acts don’t just defy fair play, a notion that has left a negligible imprint on the French mentality. They are actually against the law.

It’s hard not to notice in general, and this summer in particular, that commitment to observing the law is in France somewhat understated.

There’s a riot season on, or rather a current spike in one contiguous riot season. Access to the Channel Tunnel is regularly blocked by rioters taking advantage of the French take on labour relations.

Some thugs represent various unions, some just express their pent-up hostility, some others come along for the ride out of a peculiarly Gallic sense of fun. All are breaking the law, with the law looking on with avuncular kindness.

Cars are overturned and burnt, tyres are set aflame, with noxious fumes turning the Tunnel into a low-scale answer to gas chambers, revolting stuff is smeared over the road surfaces, frenzied crowds clash with the police on the rare occasions that the police try to interfere, thousands of refugees attack British vehicles – all of this is going on practically non-stop.

France, I’d like to remind those who may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, is a core country of our civilisation. One can’t help realising this when walking through, say, our local cities of Auxerre and Bourges.

The British simply don’t have places with such a concentration of monuments to a once-great Western civilisation; nowhere in England can one see so much unspoilt and lovingly preserved medieval grandeur.

The loving preservation is a phenomenon of rather recent standing, it has to be said. Following their Walpurgisnacht going by the name of the Revolution, the French spent the next century busily destroying the very same Romanesque and Gothic buildings – 80 per cent of them, according to the late, great medievalist Régine Pernoud – that enchant today’s cultured visitors.

But the remaining 20 per cent is still more than any country, with the possible exception of Italy, possesses. We certainly have nothing quite like it – but then neither are our more modest towns consumed by the wildfires of riots to anywhere near the same extent.

England – and les autres Anglo-Saxons who have come out of England the way Eve came out of Adam’s rib – has something the French and other continentals don’t have: intuitive respect for the law.

This, I dare say, is more important than great buildings only those few endowed with real aesthetic sense can properly appreciate. For being governed by just laws accepted by consent is a factor of freedom, whose fruits are equally nourishing to everybody.

The French will tell you that they too have the rule of law, but that’s not exactly true. What they have is the rule of lawyers.

For, in contrast to English Common Law based on precedents accumulated over centuries, the French have positive law, one imposed by government. Hence the two legal systems are vectored in the opposite directions: from bottom to top in England, from top to bottom in France.

This has been the case since God was young but, under the organic governments of Western civility, the French kings’ need for legislative activism was limited – their power was mainly restricted by their own conscience, which in turn was guided by the Church.

With the advent of a society inspired by the Masonic slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité (personally, I would have preferred Aligoté, but I wasn’t asked) it all changed.

Lacking an organic claim to legitimacy, the revolutionary government – and all its kaleidoscopically changing successors – flooded the population with a deluge of laws, constitutional or otherwise.

All in all, in the 226 years since 1789 France has had 17 different constitutions, an average of 13.2 a year (to be fair, the latest one goes back 57 years). As to the number of different laws spawned by the constitutions, one would need a mainframe computer to calculate those.

Most of those laws come from the fecund minds of avocats who bang their clever heads together to devise legislation that’ll hasten the arrival of paradise on earth.

I’m not qualified to judge the level of legal thought that goes into this process and nor am I particularly interested. What is to me patently obvious, however, is that this system doesn’t foster a visceral, intuitive respect for the law – of the kind the English used to have predominantly and still have residually.

Positive law has one visible social effect: it divides people into ‘us’, those who are supposed to obey the laws, and ‘them’, the powers represented by the clever lawyers sitting on the Conseil d’État and similar bodies.

The ‘us’ will obey the law not out of respect but out of fear, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient inducement. When the ‘they’ lose the spunk to disperse riots with unrestricted violence and ship the organisers off to some hellhole like Devil’s Island, there exist no mechanisms strong enough to stop the outrage.

England has built a solid capital of justice, accepted as such by all. We are living off the interest on that capital, rapidly frittering it away. But at least there’s some left, and we must both give thanks and remain vigilant.

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barack Hussein, who owes 100 per cent of his ascent to 50 per cent of his genes, has generously given Britain the benefit of his geopolitical wisdom.

Britain, he hectored, ought to stay in the EU because that’ll give the USA “much greater confidence in the state of the transatlantic union”, and America hasn’t got “a more important partner than Great Britain”.

Britain must stay, explained Barack Hussein further, because the EU “has made the world safer and more prosperous”.

Now one suspects that Barack himself knows little about the EU and understands even less. But it’s shocking that his advisers failed to point out how ignorant and idiotic that statement is in general, but especially at this time.

There’s a war going on in Europe at present, with the EU comfortably sitting on its thumbs. At the same time, EU policies are directly responsible for the burgeoning social unrest across Europe, accompanied by a rapid rise to power and influence of various extremist parties.

And it’s bizarre to talk about the world made more prosperous by the EU at a time when most economies within it are in the doldrums. Never mind Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland or Eastern Europe, but even Germany’s economy is at a point of stagnation, and France’s well beyond that point.

None of this would be worth talking about if Barack Hussein shooting off the lip were an isolated event. But in fact the USA has for the past hundred years been a passionate, if not always open, advocate of a world government or its near approximations.

The motives behind this passion are often misunderstood, especially by people who think simplistically that America pursues nothing but commercial interests. From that standpoint it’s indeed hard to understand why the United States has always been a supporter of the manifestly anti-American United Nations, or, for that matter, of European federalism.

After all, the express economic purpose of the EU is to create a protectionist bloc aimed against America. Is America cutting off her nose to spite her face? Not at all.

The United States is more than just a giant commercial concern with an uncertain cultural background. It is the messianic flag bearer of modernity. And modernity loves uniformity of any kind.

The Americans aren’t just international traders but also international proselytisers. As such, they know that a single government would probably be easier, and definitely quicker, to convert to their way of life than many sovereign governments.

For a single European state can never be a traditional European institution. Its links with any culture, be that local European or general Western, are severed. Its traditional patriotic loyalties are nonexistent. Its only loyalty is pledged to the internationalist political elite and, if this elite isn’t Americanised already, it can be trained to be. If training proves difficult, it can be bought or browbeaten.

A single world (or European) government can be achieved only by an irreversible destruction of the traditional political and legal institutions. These institutions are, of course, traditional in form only. Their substance has long since been perverted by modernity.

Still, even if they’re nothing but a skeleton, there’s always the danger that some unexpected upheaval may put new flesh on the old bones. Hence the Americans will welcome any political development that’ll push traditional Western institutions closer to extinction.

Incidentally, the Americans’ unswerving devotion to the EU gives the lie to their much-touted commitment to fostering worldwide democracy. Even European federasts stop short of making the demonstrably false claim that this institution has anything to do with democracy. In fact, its whole political modus operandi is about as undemocratic as it’s possible to be this side of North Korea.

One begins to suspect that the word ‘democracy’ inscribed on the American banners under which so many Americans  died in the Middle East is nothing but a slogan of imperial expansion.

If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, fine too. Whoever is president at the moment will talk about ‘peace and prosperity’ instead.

And speaking of Americans dying, Barack Hussein isn’t better at arithmetic than at geopolitics. “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism,” he said, “it’s less than 100”.

His calculator is as out of kilter as his moral sense. For using Muslim terrorism as a pretext, the USA set out in 2003 to bring democracy to Iraq, predictably succeeding only in creating a sea of blood.

Drowning in it have been, according to The US Department of Veterans Affairs, tens of thousands of Americans killed, along with untold and uncounted millions of other nationals, and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

This ill-advised action created, and is continuing to create, enough local employment opportunities for Muslim terrorists not to seek much action in North America or Europe – for the time being.

But Obama sees the only downside of his presidency in his failure to take a few peashooters away from his own people. He doesn’t realise that his policies, and those of his predecessors, are directly responsible for the howitzers, soon to be loaded with nuclear charges, aimed at the West.

I’m terrified that at this critical juncture of history the West’s most powerful nation is led by this… Sorry, I’ve promised my wife not to swear in writing.