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As our re-elected PM embarks on a whirlwind tour behind EU lines, one hopes all those little-Englander vermin in Ukip feel suitably ashamed of themselves.

For, contrary to their vitriol, Dave has drawn a list of iron-clad conditions for Britain to stay in the EU, regardless of the results yielded by the referendum our re-elected government has promised.

Should the EU wisely choose to comply with these conditions, Britain will regain her sovereignty, and never mind the referendum:

1) The EU undertakes not to refer to the euro as ‘the single currency’. Henceforth, it shall be known as ‘the solitary currency’, ‘soccur’ for short.

2) The British pound shall be pegged to the soccur only under duress and definitely not in the next six months.

3) The French undertake not to refer to the English as ‘les rosbifs’. Instead the English shall be known as ‘les hautes cuisines’.

4) The EU will let Britain decide how many Australian-American billionaires she will allow to own British newspapers and TV stations.

5) Britain shall likewise decide how many Russian, Chinese and Arab oligarchs she admits, provided they have not secured EU citizenship beforehand.

6) When applied to Britain, Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen shall be known as Declaration of the Rights of Man/Woman/Other and of the Subject.

7) The Germans undertake to keep their bloody beach towels to themselves.

8) Britain’s right to buy as many German cars as she wishes shall in no way be curtailed.

9) Ditto, Britain’s right to buy French wine – even though our own Kent product is clearly superior.

10) Ditto, Britain’s right to buy anything continental at the asking price.

11) The EU undertakes not to send in its own police to arrest British subjects unless it must.

12) The EU shall not impose on Britain more than 60 (sixty) per cent of her new laws, give or take a few.

13) Those Eastern Europeans promise to stay in their own countries, crossing their hearts and hoping to die.

14) Britain shall be allowed to sign unilateral trade treaties with whomever she pleases, provided the EU does not mind.

15) The EU undertakes at least to match HMS’s funds required to launch a sensible campaign for the In vote in the upcoming referendum, provided it indeed upcomes.

16) The EU undertakes to adopt as its official anthem the British football chant ‘If It Wasn’t for England, You’d All Be Krauts’, adding the words ‘And Now You Will Be’ at the end.

17) The EU shall replace the words ‘ever-closer union’ with ‘ever-tighter union’.

18) Angela Merkel and members of her government undertake not to end their public speeches with ‘Gott Strafe England’ or any shout that includes the word ‘Sieg’.

19) The French shall take an enthusiastic part in celebrating the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June.

20) The EU undertakes not to tell us how much deficit we can run. We will borrow as much as we bloody well like.

21) No continental drinking establishment shall henceforth ban British stag and/or football parties.

22) Britain shall retain the right to abbreviate Jean-Claude Juncker’s name to ‘Junk’.

23) The Queen shall be allowed to renounce her EU citizenship, thereby becoming stateless.

24) Those Europeans who speak what they call English shall abandon their pathetic attempts to imitate the American accent. To provide a reliable guide to proper English pronunciation, EastEnders shall be taught as a compulsory subject in all continental schools.

We must all admire the diplomatic skill with which Dave has painted those Eurofederalists into a corner.

If they accept these conditions, on pain of Britain’s leaving the EU, nothing will ever again compromise our sovereignty. And if they reject them, Dave will think up some new ones.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love Thy Neighbour, says a poster prominently displayed in Dublin. A welcome reminder, one would think, except that this Biblical fiat appears under a secular one: VOTE YES. In tomorrow’s homomarriage referendum, that is.

I don’t know, it may be just me, but the two fiats seem to be at odds. I’m not sure that sexual perversion sanctified by the state is quite what either Testament meant by loving one’s neighbour. Then again, love comes in many different shapes, and scriptural texts do leave room for interpretation.

Offering it is one of the functions of the Church, and it still hasn’t wavered in its opposition to this particular step in the march of progress. But the Church no longer wields the same influence in a historically pious Ireland: only 35 per cent admit to following ecclesiastical guidance in such matters.

It may be a pure coincidence, but the polls are predicting a Yes vote of 65 per cent. Since 65 is the balance between 100 and 35, arithmetic indicates where the watershed runs in the Republic.

The country has come a long way since 1993, when she finally bowed to the diktat of the European Court of Human Rights and decriminalised homosexuality. Nonetheless, the distance Ireland has travelled towards perdition still remains somewhat shorter than elsewhere in Europe.

True, the referendum on divorce delivered a Yes vote in 1995. But the government still hasn’t called a referendum on liberalising abortion, which is wise. Why fight a battle you’re likely to lose? Let’s wait until the influence of the Church has dropped down to zero, which it will soon enough under the sage guidance of the European Union.

This, in spite of the EU supposedly being a direct descendant of the Holy Roman Empire, a claim often made by the more fanatical and less clever fans of European federalism.

Well, not quite. The Empire’s adhesive was Christianity, whereas the EU’s is brought together by Germany’s urge to conquer Europe by peaceful means. This is underpinned by France’s fear that Germany might change her mind and again opt for the old way.

Still, it isn’t the EU that’s responsible for originating most of the existential ugliness of modernity. Starting from the counterintuitive pronouncement that all men are created equal, that distinction belongs to the USA by right (or wrong, as the case may be).

Step by step, that dubious idea has degenerated into political correctness, the most pernicious tyranny of our time. Part and parcel of it is the conviction that all men are created equally entitled to marry one another.

Since America is the natural leader and flag bearer of modernity, Europe is often eager to push her subversive notions to their logical extreme, with Holland tending to lead the way. And when Europeans are a bit slow on the uptake, Americans are increasingly eager to lend a helping hand.

As they have done in this case, in the shape of a massive transfer of funds to the Yes campaign and other LGBT causes in Ireland. Specifically, the US charity The Atlantic Philanthropies has pumped £25 million into four influential organisations: GLEN (the Gay and Lesbian Network), Marriage Equality, TENI (the transgender Equality Network Ireland) and LGBT Diversity.

Has the money been well spent? The columnist Bruce Arnold thinks so: “In my opinion, The Atlantic Philanthropies has bought this referendum.”

The other side doesn’t disagree. Brian Sheenan, director of GLEN, isn’t bashful about giving credit where it’s due: “Atlantic’s commitment to GLEN allowed GLEN to follow the strategy of building a majority from a minority…”

Broden Giambrone, director of TENI, explains that “Atlantic’s multi-year commitment allows for TENI to employ core staff, which was unprecedented in the trans community.”

And Marriage Equality’s director Healy puts it in a nutshell: “…We have unleashed that potential and that passion that the supporters of marriage equality have, but more than that we’ve been able to channel it into political change.”

While congratulating the Irish on the upcoming political change, I feel sorry they have to rely on American support to promote the noble cause of debauching marriage. We in England managed to do it all by ourselves.

But then we are blessed with an all-powerful domestic resource, called DAVE (Destroy Any Vestige of Ethics).

 

Belfast-based Christian baking company Ashers (so named after a Biblical tribe of Israel boasting many skilled bakers) got off easy. A paltry £500 fine plus court costs? I’m amazed the bakers weren’t all sent down. Or, better still, put down.

Their crime is much worse than, say, burglary or mugging. For such indiscretions only hurt individuals, whereas the Christian bakers struck against the very essence of modernity. Its essence, as I see it, is an unquenchable desire to uproot the last vestiges of Christendom and then sow the field with coarse salt to make sure nothing ever grows again.

Those wishing to contest this observation could do worse than to consider the Asher case.

‘Gay rights’ fanatic Gareth Lee staged a fiendish, well-timed provocation by asking the bakers known for their staunch Christian beliefs to put the slogan ‘Support gay marriage’ on the cake he ordered.

The provocation was fiendish because Lee knew they’d refuse. It was well-timed because Northern Ireland is at present debating the issue of homomarriage. Lee and his fellow fanatics clearly felt that the ensuing publicity would serve their cause well, and they were proved right.

Homosexuality no longer has much to do with merely an act of sticking certain body parts into receptacles not manifestly designed for that purpose. It has become a political movement, a sort of cross between sexual democracy and homosocialism.

Campaigners for homomarriage like Gareth Lee – or, for that matter, our re-elected PM – are the shock troops of the movement, the present-day answer to Hitler’s SA or Mao’s Red Guards. They might as well call themselves Pink Guards and, if Peter Tatchell runs with this designation, I’ll demand royalties.

The less said about these gentlemen the better. What’s truly worrying is that the law plays along. Perversion of justice seems to be in synch with the sexual variety.

For the wronged Mr Lee immediately ran to the good offices of the Equality Commission, which was more than happy to file a discrimination lawsuit on his behalf. Such parasite organisations couldn’t possibly exist in civilised society, and even in our uncivilised one they still have to earn their keep somehow.

The worst was still to come. For Belfast County Court district judge Isobel Brownlie ruled that the bakers “have unlawfully discriminated against the plaintiff on grounds of sexual discrimination… This is direct discrimination for which there can be no justification.”

Given our tradition of common law, this ruling establishes a precedent that in one fell swoop wipes out many civil liberties the Brits have taken for granted since God was young.

One of them is freedom of religion, which for devout Christians means more than just freedom of worship. It also means organising their life in accordance with the moral demands of their faith.

For such people homosexuality is a deadly sin, and legalising homomarriage means that the state endorses, institutionalises and thereby promotes the deadly sin.

Hence the Ashers bakers have not only the right to refuse to participate in the propaganda of homomarriage, but indeed the duty to do so. They have to regard reneging on this duty as a sacrilege that might jeopardise their salvation.

It has to be said that theirs isn’t some obscure cult but the religion that lies at the foundation of our constitution. To prove this point, this perversion of justice occurred in the same week in which our new MPs swore this oath of allegiance:

“I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.”

Another liberty violated here is that of enterprise. A privately owned company ought to be able to decide which custom to accept and which to turn down – within reason.

The qualification is important here, for refusing to serve, say, Jews, blacks or Muslims in a restaurant is sheer savagery, which ought to be discouraged with or without law. Members of such groups don’t ipso facto violate any moral traditions of our society.

However, propaganda of aberrant sexuality does – again whatever the law says. To demand that pious Christians actively participate in it denies them not only religious but also commercial freedom.

This affront is aimed not against religion in general, but specifically against Christianity. If you doubt this point, I suggest you stage a little private experiment.

Go to a Muslim bakery in Brick Lane and ask them to decorate a cake with the inscription “Support Israel”. Then, if you are still in one piece, ask an Orthodox Jewish baker in Golders Green to put “Support Hamas” on his cake. When they refuse, ask the Equality Commission to sue both businesses for discrimination. See what they say.

The Asher bakers should count themselves lucky. A few years from now a crime like this will surely bring about a custodial sentence. That is, if the country is still there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

My friend Vlad is working hard to make sure I never run out of subjects. At a time when Dave has gone quiet, Vlad manfully steps in to fill the gap.

Actually, neither Dave nor any other Western politician possesses the epic élan with which Vlad so generously provides material for my vituperation.

For example, I can’t for the life of me imagine the somewhat wimpish Dave donning full ice-hockey gear and scoring eight goals in an exhibition match against Canadian professionals who have just won the World Championship in Sochi.

Yet Vlad has done just that, and at the venerable age of 62. Not just a judo master, tiger tamer, long-distance swimmer, hunter, lawyer, intrepid KGB spy, musician, national leader, bare-torso horse rider – a hockey star too. Verily I say unto you, Vlad’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the entry for ‘Renaissance man’.

Or rather pre-Renaissance, according to his admirers who have just unveiled near St Petersburg a bust of Vlad as a Roman emperor. Vlad is depicted wearing a toga adorned with Russia’s escutcheon.

The style is neo-Classicist, favoured by Vlad’s role model Stalin. The facial expression is dreamily stern, making Vlad look like a cross between Caligula and Nero, surely not the desired effect. He should have been sculpted to look more like Caesar, whose martial exploits he is clearly out to emulate.

Whichever emperor Vlad sees as his pre-Stalin role model, one wonders how long before the Russians march around the bust, chanting “Ave Vlad, morituri te salutant”.

And speaking of morituri, Vlad suffered a minor setback the other day though, when two Spetsnaz commandos, Cap. Yerofeeyev and Sgt. Alexandrov, were captured behind enemy lines, meaning deep in the Ukrainian territory.

When interrogated, they revealed the details of their search-and-destroy mission, providing yet again incontrovertible proof that it’s the Russian regular army that’s raping the Ukraine, not some mythical local enthusiasts acquiring tanks and AA missiles at local hardware shops.

Vlad’s Defence Ministry hastily claimed that the two commandos weren’t on active service. Well, the service didn’t look passive to me, considering that the two gentlemen carried current army ID, their mission was terrorist, and they shot several Ukrainian officers when being taken. If I were them, I’d be rather upset by being disowned in such a dismissive manner by the government they serve so bravely.

That takes us from Luhansk, Ukraine to Weybridge, Surrey, where a young and healthy Russian oligarch Alexander Perepelichny collapsed and died while jogging in 2012. Perepelichny’s heart had been no doubt weakened by his grassing up the Russian participants in the Magnitsky case, and also in the newly traditional Russian pastime of money laundering.

(For details, see my article posted at the time http://alexanderboot.com/content/surrey-jogger-could-run-he-couldn%E2%80%99t-hide.)

Anticipating the onset of heart trouble, Mr Perepelychny had taken out a multi-million life insurance policy, with the attendant medical examination missing the fatal cardiac defect. At the same time he had reported multiple death threats, which must have contributed to his ill health.

Death by natural causes, ruled Surrey police at the time. However, the newly released results of the chemical analysis show that the grass died by, well, grass. I suppose this does qualify as a natural death in that it was caused by a naturally occurring substance.

The culpable plant is called gelsemium, which has several varieties, all highly toxic, all found only in the remote areas of China. In the spirit of the burgeoning Sino-Soviet alliance, the Chinese kindly make their native flora available to Russia’s emergent industry, contract killing.

Vlad evidently has a taste for exotic methods of chastising those whose loyalty he has reason to doubt. Polonium and gelsemium are so much more elegant than a bullet in a dark alley, and, on a more practical note, so much harder to detect.

Yet one has to admit regretfully that Vlad still hasn’t quite matched the fecund imagination of his North Korean counterpart, who dispatches his enemies either by ripping them to shreds with AA machineguns or by using wild beasts for that purpose.

Vlad has no shortage of either, and in fact he has been photographed on numerous occasions bear-back [sic] riding and whispering into a tiger’s ear. A suspicion grows that he was briefing the animal on a mission designed to show that anything Kim can do, Vlad can do better.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

In good hands, and none are better than those moved by a journalist’s brain, a technically accurate quote can lie as successfully as a made-up one.

Hence the quote “John can make any shop girl…” is legally unimpeachable but ethically mendacious if the full sentence was “John can make any shop girl laugh.”

Now it’s the Pope’s turn to find himself at the receiving end of such sleight of hand. For His Holiness didn’t call Mahmoud Abbas ‘an angel of peace’, as is universally reported by every paper I’ve seen.

The Pope did use the phrase when talking to the Palestinian chieftain, but it was an expression of hope, not a statement of fact. This is what His Holiness actually said: “May the angel of peace destroy the evil spirit of war. I thought of you: May you be an angel of peace.”

Along with faith and charity, hope is of course a principal Christian virtue, going back to three martyred saints. Peace is also among important Christian desiderata. The Pope was thus speaking within the remit of his job, although, in our secular world, one may argue that vesting the hope for peace in Abbas betokens touching naivety.

After all, since 1961 he has been a member of Fatah, a patently terrorist organisation, where he first earned his spurs by channelling the funds used to finance the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.

Neither does Abbas’s record at the Palestinian Authority point at his inclination towards pacifism, as the thousands of rockets fired at Israeli civilians suggest.

However, one of the requirements for Christian ministry is the belief that no one is irredeemable because we have all been redeemed. Therefore I, for one, find nothing objectionable in the Pope’s expression of hope, much as I suspect it’s misplaced.

That, alas, is more than one can say for the Vatican’s announcement that it will soon sign a treaty recognising ‘the State of Palestine’, the first time this term will have been used in an official document.

This effectively cuts Israel out of the process that can conceivably end in her obliteration. Understandably the announcement has caused much consternation in Israel, where Pope Francis is widely regarded as a friend of the Jews.

In fact, writing in the Holy See’s Evangelii Gaudium, the Pope says: “We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked… Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’s disciples.”

The Pope’s whole CV shows that this statement came from the heart. Unfortunately in His Holiness this organ seems to house not only philo-Semitism but also a leftward political slant, with its attendant affection for ‘national liberation’.

The two are in conflict, and one hopes Pope Francis finds a resolution in the city of God (Civitas Dei) rather than in the secular realm ruled by ‘the prince of this world’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Allow me to remind you of the facts, on the assumption they’ve been buried under the avalanche of politicised verbal rubble.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a disease that, if left untreated, will leave the sufferer with an average life expectancy of about 10 years.

AIDS can be successfully controlled with anti-retroviral drugs that are as effective as they are dear. But the value of a human life can’t be weighed against a few quid, or rather up to 25,000 of them, which is, give or take a few thousand, the annual cost of such therapy.

So far we’ve stayed within the realm of medical or, if you will, medico-economic facts. With any other disease, this is where we’d remain.

But AIDS isn’t just any old disease, and HIV isn’t just any old virus. For this organism attacks not only the immune system but also every precept of our multi-culti PC culture of share, care, be aware.

It has been known since AIDS first became fashionable that the disease has a pronounced anti-homosexual bias, nowadays known as homophobia. Without going into unsavoury graphic detail, HIV is typically (at first, almost solely) transmitted through amorous practices seldom favoured by straight men and, due to certain anatomical limitations, never by women.

This means that, while all progressive mankind celebrates homosexuality as a perfectly valid ‘lifestyle’, equal to the hetero kind socially and superior to it aesthetically, one biological organism insists on indulging in what my Texas friends used to call fag bashin’.

When this medicalised homophobia was first established, progressive mankind’s initial reaction was to deny that HIV had any homosexual bias. Much evidence was suppressed – until there was too much of it to suppress without losing all credibility.

Progressive mankind had to regroup then and give the matter some serious thought. Fine, they said, AIDS kills homosexuals. Now who else does so, or rather would love to, given the slightest chance?

Correct. All those homophobic, sexist, racist, misogynistic reactionaries who collectively add up to what Tony Blair so aptly called ‘the forces of conservatism’, from which he had proudly ‘liberated… the extraordinary talent of the British people… to create a model 21^st-century nation’.

This observation could then be easily parlayed into a course of action. A fight against AIDS was no longer a medical challenge. It became a form of political struggle.

Though only deeply deranged fanatics go so far as to blame the ‘conservative establishment’ for having synthesised the virus deliberately, many make such allegations syllogistically.

The Hegelian syllogism works like a charm. Thesis: HIV hates homosexuals. Antithesis: so does the conservative establishment. Synthesis: ergo, it’s all the conservatives’ fault.

Flaming passion serves to plug the obvious logical gap, and passion, real or trumped up, is what progressive mankind has aplenty. It has also gradually acquired that powerful tool of all tyrants: control of language.

Hence they are able to insist that, while people dying of, say, cancer or multiple sclerosis are to be pitied, those dying of AIDS are to be sanctified. Their names must be entered into the martyrology of other victims of the conservative establishment: racial minorities, women, Muslims et al.

At a time when doctors routinely refuse to treat smokers because their diseases are caused by behavioural bloody-mindedness, no one is allowed as much as to suggest that a behavioural change is the most reliable way of keeping HIV at bay.

At the same time billions in whatever currency you care to name have been channelled out of research into, say, cancer and multiple sclerosis and into AIDS. This had an overall negative effect on mortality, but it wasn’t just about saving lives – it was about saving victims of conservatism.

No politician can now say anything along the lines of what I’ve said so far and hope to keep his career. Suggesting that most cases of AIDS are the sufferers’ own fault is a combination of sacrilege and suicide note.

It’s in this context that one can understand Douglas Carswell’s comments on Nigel Farage’s attack on health tourism. Those HIV carriers, said Mr Farage, come to Britain specifically to sponge off the NHS to the tune of £25K a year, give or take.

Mr Carswell, Ukip’s only MP, agreed that health tourism is a bad thing, but took exception to Mr Farage’s illustration. Using HIV for that purpose was, according to the parliamentary mouthpiece of true conservatism, ‘ill-advised’.

Why, pray tell? HIV is a better example than, say, cancer or multiple sclerosis, because not only is it comparably expensive to treat, but it’s also contagious. Predictably so, because many HIV carriers, especially those from places where AIDS is most prevalent, are less than prudent in keeping their condition to themselves.

This is a serious problem, and a deadly aspect of our overall immigration disaster. After all, many of our new arrivals come from sub-Saharan Africa, where 25 million people carry HIV. Africa in general, while having only about 15 per cent of the world’s population, accounts for 69 per cent of the world’s AIDS deaths.

The way to help those people is for HMG not to invite them here but to give pharmaceutical companies incentives to send anti-retroviral drugs to Africa at greatly reduced prices. What’s ill-advised is giving them access to Britain’s population in general and the NHS in particular.

Mr Carswell knows this as well as I or even Mr Farage. What he objected to wasn’t the substance of the argument, but the blasphemous disregard for the creed of share, care, be aware.

This means that the PC tyrants have won: they’ve imposed the terms of debate and can punish anyone for lack of compliance. If even our supposedly conservative politicians offer abject, supine surrender, what hope do we have? Don’t answer that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the Russians were about to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of their great victory, the Byelorussian writer Svetlana Alexiyevich, a 2014 Nobel Prize nominee, received this taped account in the post and couldn’t resist publishing it. Neither can I, so here’s the transcript in my translation – but without my commentary. None is needed.

“There was this Jewish girl Rosa in our partisan unit, pretty, she always carried books with her. Sixteen years old. Our commanders took turns sleeping with her… ‘She has baby hair down there… Ha-ha…’ Rosa got pregnant… They took her into the woods and shot her like a little puppy. Children were born, no way around it, with a forest full of young bucks. Usually, when a baby was born, it was sent to a village straight away. To a hamlet. But who’d take a Jewish baby? Jews had no right to give birth. I came back from a mission: ‘Where’s Rosa?’ ‘What’s it to you? This one gone, they’ll find another one.’

“Hundreds of Jews would escape from the ghetto and roam the forests. Peasants would catch them, deliver them to the Germans for a sack of flour, a kilo of sugar. Write about this… I’ve kept silent too long. A Jew is scared of something all his life. Wherever a brick falls, it’ll hit a Jew.

“We didn’t get out of burning Minsk because of Gran… Gran had seen Germans in 1918 and kept telling everyone Germans were cultured, they wouldn’t hurt peaceful people. A German officer had been quartered at their place back then, played the piano every evening. So Mama began to doubt: should we run or stay? All because of that piano of course… That’s how we lost a lot of time. Germans rode in on their motorbikes. Some locals in embroidered shirts were greeting them with bread and salt. Joyously. There were many who thought: here come the Germans, so normal life will start. Many hated Stalin and stopped hiding it.

“I heard the word ‘kike’ in the first days of the war… Our neighbours would knock on the door and yell: ‘That’s curtains for you, kikes! You’ll pay for Christ!’ I was a Soviet boy. Aged 12, five years of school. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. Why were they saying it? I still don’t understand… Our family was mixed: Papa a Jew, Mama a Russian. We celebrated Easter, but in a certain way: Mama would say it was the birthday of a good man. She baked a cake. And at Passover (when God spared the Jews) Papa would bring home some matzo from Gran. But the time was such that we didn’t advertise that… had to keep silent…

“Mama sewed yellow stars on to our clothes… No one could leave the house for several days. We were ashamed… I’m old now, but I still remember how I felt… Ashamed… There were leaflets strewn all over town: ‘Off commissars and kikes’, ‘Save Russia from kikes and Bolsheviks’. One leaflet was slipped under our door… Soon… yes… Rumours were spreading: American Jews are collecting gold to buy Jews out and bring them to America. Germans like order and dislike Jews, that’s why Jews will have to spend the war in the ghetto… People were trying to make sense of this… find some meaning. A man wants to understand even hell. I remember… I remember well how we were moving into the ghetto… Thousands of Jews were walking through town… with children, pillows… I brought with me, this is funny, my butterfly collection. Now it sounds funny… The locals came out to watch, some with curiosity, some with glee, some with tears. I wasn’t looking around, was afraid to see some of the boys I knew. I was ashamed… I remember that constant shame…  

“Mama took her wedding ring off, wrapped it in a handkerchief, told me where to go. I crawled under the barbed wire at night… A woman was waiting at a prearranged place, I gave her the ring, she poured me some flour. In the morning we saw that I had brought home chalk, not flour. A whitener. That was Mama’s ring gone. We had no other valuables… Began to swell from starvation… Peasants with big sacks kept vigil outside the ghetto. Day and night. Waiting for the next pogrom. When Jews were taken out to be shot, the peasants were let in to rob the houses. The local polizei were just looking for valuables, but the peasants stuffed into the sacks everything they could find. ‘You won’t need it no more,’ they’d tell us.

“Once the ghetto went quiet, like before a pogrom. Though no shots were fired. They weren’t shooting that day… Cars… lots of cars… They unloaded children wearing nice little suits and shoes, women in white pinafores, men with expensive suitcases. Great suitcases! They all spoke German. The guards were at a loss, especially the polizei, they weren’t shouting, hitting anyone with truncheons or letting barking dogs loose. Like a show… theatre… That day we found out those were Jews from Europe. We got to call them ‘Hamburg Jews’ because most were from Hamburg. They were disciplined, obedient. They didn’t play tricks, didn’t try to dodge the guards, didn’t hide… they were doomed… They looked down on us. We were poor, badly dressed. We were different… didn’t speak German…

“They were all shot. Tens of thousands of ‘Hamburg Jews’…

“That day… everything is like in a fog… How were we dragged out of the house? How transported? I remember a large field next to the forest… They picked out strong men and told them to dig ditches. Deep ones. And we just stood waiting. First they tossed little children into the ditch… and began to fill it in… The parents weren’t crying or begging. It was quiet. Why, you ask? I was thinking about that… If a man is attacked by a wolf, he won’t plead, beg for his life. Or if a wild boar would attack…The Germans were peeking into the ditch, laughing, throwing sweets in. The polizei were all sloshed… had pockets full of watches… The children were buried… Then they told everyone else to jump into another ditch. So there we were, standing there, Mama, Papa, I and my little sister. Our turn came… The German in command, he saw Mama was Russian and waved her away: ‘You can go.’

“Papa shouted to Mama : ‘Run!’ But Mama was clinging on to Papa, to me: ‘I’m with you’. We were all pushing her away… begging her to go… Mama was the first to jump into the ditch… That’s all I remember…

“I came to when someone hit me hard on the leg with something sharp. I cried out from pain. Heard the whisper: ‘This one’s alive’. Peasants with spades were digging up the ditch and taking off the corpses’ shoes, boots… anything they could take off… They helped me climb out. I sat down at the edge of the ditch and waited… and waited… It was raining. The earth was so warm. They sliced me a piece of bread: ‘Run, little kike. You may get away.’

“The village was empty… Not a soul, but the houses were all there. I was hungry, but there was no one to ask for food… So I roamed on my own. Here and there I’d see a rubber boot on the ground or a galosh… a headscarf… Saw charred bodies behind the church. Black corpses. Smelled of petrol and something fried… I ran away back into the forest. Survived on mushrooms and berries. Once I bumped into an old man, logging. He gave me two eggs. ‘Don’t go,’ he warned, ‘near the village. The peasants will tie you up and deliver you to the Germans. The other day they caught two kike girls that way.’

“Once I fell asleep and was woken up by a shot fired next to me. Jumped up: ‘Germans?’ But there were some young lads on horseback. Soviet partisans! They laughed and started arguing among themselves: ‘And what do we need the little kike for? Why not…’ ‘Let the boss decide.’ They took me to the unit, put me in a separate hut. Left a sentry outside… I was called to interrogation: ‘How did you get to the unit base? Who sent you?’ ‘No one sent me. I climbed out of the execution ditch.’ ‘And maybe you’re a spy?’ They punched me in the face twice and kicked me back into the hut. In the evening they shoved in two young men, also Jews, wearing good leather jackets. They told me Jews without weapons weren’t taken into the unit. If you had no weapons, you had to have some gold. They had a gold watch and cigarette case – demanded to see the commander. Soon they were taken away. I never saw them again… And later I saw the commander with the gold cigarette case… and the leather jacket… I was saved by Papa’s friend, Uncle Yasha. He was a cobbler, and cobblers were valuable to the unit, like doctors. I began to help him…

“First piece of advice from Uncle Yasha: ‘Change your name.’ My name is Friedman… I became Lomeiko… Second piece of advice: ‘Keep your mouth shut. Or you’ll catch a bullet in the back. No one will be punished for a Jew.’ That’s how it was…

“War is like a swamp, easy to get in, hard to get out. Here’s another Jewish proverb: when a strong wind blows, the trash flies highest. Nazi propaganda had infected everyone, the partisans were anti-Semitic. There were eleven of us Jews in the unit… then five. They’d start conversations for our benefit: ‘What kind of fighters are you? Taken like lambs led to slaughter…’ ‘Kikes are cowards…’ I kept silent. I had a mate, real daredevil… David Greenberg… he talked back. Argued. He was shot in the back. I know who killed him. Today he’s a hero, walks around with chest full of medals. Strutting!

“Two Jews were killed for allegedly falling asleep on duty… Another one for his new Luger… they envied… Where could I run? Back to the ghetto? I wanted to fight for my country… to avenge my family… And the country? The commanders had secret instructions from Moscow: don’t trust Jews, don’t take them into the units, kill them. We were considered traitors. Now we’ve found it all out, thanks to perestroika.

“An order came: burn this polizei’s house… Together with his family… The family was large: wife, three children, Granny, Grandpa. At night the house was surrounded… the door was nailed shut… Doused it with kerosene and lit it up. They were screaming there, bellowing. A little boy tried to climb out of the window… One partisan wanted to shoot him, another wouldn’t let him. They tossed him back into the fire.

“I was fourteen… I understood nothing… I memorised what I could, all of this. And now I’ve told the story… I don’t like the word ‘hero’… there are no heroes in the war… 

“Many years have passed… half a century… But I still remember… that woman… She had two children. Little ones. She hid a wounded partisan in her cellar. Someone informed… The whole family were hanged in the middle of the village. Children first… How she screamed! Humans don’t scream like that… animals scream like that…

“Should a person make such sacrifices? Don’t know. [Silence.]

“Nowadays they write about the war without ever seeing it. I don’t read that stuff… No offence, but I don’t read it… Minsk was liberated… That was the end of the war for me, I was turned down for the army. Fifteen. Where should I live? Strangers had settled in our flat. ‘Dirty Jewboy…’ Wouldn’t give anything back, our flat, our things. They had got used to the idea that the Jews would never come back.”

 

 

The other day the BBC’s Norman Smith, when talking about Nigel Farage’s ‘personality cult’, mispronounced the second word in a rather unfortunate way.

Apparently though, the resulting inadvertent epithet is being bandied about quite a lot at Ukip’s headquarters, with no slip of the tongue involved.

This looks like a most ungainly squabble, accompanied by the bump-bump sound of heads rolling. Two of Farage’s closest staffers have been sacked, he himself first announced his resignation, then came back because the ‘overwhelming support’ within the party ranks just couldn’t be ignored, then again faced eminently ignorable calls for his resignation.

Now, even though I know quite a few Ukippers, including some senior ones, I have neither much knowledge of the rough-and-tumble of party in-fighting nor any interest in it.

I do have an interest in Ukip survival though, because I see it as the only political force in the country that has a fighting chance of developing into a real conservative opposition to our mainstream spivocrats. And it’s that very survival that seems to be in jeopardy.

Mainstream parties, those with vast staffs, generous funding, and millions of supporters cultivated over decades if not centuries, can accommodate a bit of factional disunity without collapsing. Outsiders fighting guerrilla action can’t.

Only by acting – or at least presenting the image of acting – as a monolith can such parties survive temporary setbacks or capitalise on (just as temporary) successes.

This general election delivered to Ukip both failure and success, although in my view considerably more of the latter. The failure is obvious: the party not only didn’t build on the number of the two parliamentary seats it had, but in fact lost one of them.

This presented a shocking contrast to some of the optimistic predictions, ranging from a cloud-cuckoo-land 100 seats some six months ago to a dozen a month before the election to half a dozen on its eve.

But looking on the bright side, this was the first time Ukip secured a seat in a general election. It also enjoyed the support of almost four million voters, making it in that respect our third party by some distance.

The vagaries of our FPTP electoral system are such that this massive support wasn’t translated into a commensurate parliamentary representation, but such is life. I won’t repeat what I said about the FPTP a few days ago, which in broad strokes was that, for all its unavoidable unfairness, it’s still the best possible system.

One way or the other, this is the way politics is played in Britain, and it’s no good crying foul and complaining about the rules just because one lost the game.

It is undeniable, however, that, even though Ukip’s parliamentary presence doesn’t reflect the party’s popularity, its influence comes closer to being such a prism.

The threat of Ukip clearly pushed the Tories further to the right than they are naturally inclined to go, as Dave’s jolly men tried to prevent a split in the right vote. This term is inaccurate, wrongly presupposing as it does that the Tories are a party of the right. In fact, Ukip couldn’t split the right vote. It was the right vote, and it made its voice heard.

As party leader, Nigel Farage can both claim the credit for Ukip’s success and take the blame for its failures. I realise that opinions may differ on which outcome was more skewed by his personality, and I have none of my own to offer.

However, it wouldn’t be illogical to suggest that perhaps more could have been done to parlay Ukip’s popular support, greater than that of the LibDems and the SNP combined, into a comparable number of MPs.

We now know – and some of us knew all along – that Ukip’s support mostly came from those fundamentally conservative voters who wouldn’t vote Labour on pain of death and yet didn’t feel their views would be represented by the Tories.

Many of such disaffected individuals included intuitive Tories like me who felt betrayed by Dave’s take on conservatism. The only difference between him and Blair is that Dave fights against ‘the forces of conservatism’ surreptitiously rather than explicitly.

Such intuitive conservatives didn’t get their way in some Labour constituencies because, unlike me, many of them just couldn’t vote against the Tory party they had supported all their lives. Hence in such constituencies it wasn’t so much the Tory vote that was split by Ukip, but vice versa.

The way to prevent such an outcome would have been to form an electoral pact with the Tories. As a result, the Tories wouldn’t have contested the election wherever they trailed Ukip and a serious threat of a Labour victory existed – with Ukip repaying the favour.

It’s a safe bet that, if allowed to fight Labour one on one in, say, a hundred constituencies, Ukip would have gained more than one parliamentary seat at Labour’s, not the Tories’, expense.

Yet, as I predicted in the 29 September, 2014, article Conservatism in Crisis, such a pact didn’t materialise. Messrs Cameron and Farage just couldn’t overcome the palpable contempt they felt for each other.

This was the kind of political naivety that Dave could afford, as it happened, but Nigel couldn’t. Whether one should commend him for his principled stance or rebuke him for letting ideological concerns trump political ones is a matter of taste.

In any case, I hope Ukippers, with or without Farage at the helm, will resolve their internal problems. They should remember the words of that famous proto-conservative: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

 

 

 

 

Those EU chaps just don’t get it. The Tories promised the referendum not to regain British sovereignty but to bury it for ever.

What part of tricking the electorate don’t they understand? Don’t know, but it must be an important part, judging by Germany’s brush off to George Osborne.

Our newly returned Chancellor went to Brussels trying to explain the facts of life to the Europeans who seem to be slow on the uptake. We, the Tory government, have a mandate to introduce far-reaching reforms, he said. Hence the upcoming referendum.

I’m sure his German interlocutor and counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble didn’t object at this point, although an objection might have been in order. It’s only to a mind utterly corrupted by half a century of one-moron-one-vote democracy that carrying less than 37 per cent of the electorate equates a sweeping mandate to do whatever the government wants.

But old Wolfgang possesses just such a mind, or he wouldn’t be where he is. So he just shrugged and said “Zo vot?”

George winced: once again he had to spell it out for those with learning difficulties. So, he said, we want you to massage the EU Treaty in such a way that it looks different, even if it remains essentially the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as you Germans put it, added our multi-lingual statesman.

Vee don’t say zis, Herr Osborne, objected Herr Schäuble. Ze French say zis, and zey agree wiv us zat ze Anglo-Saxons can go suck an Ei. Himmelherrgott! Ze EU isn’t a yo-yo manipulated by ze Anglo-Saxons. You made your Bett, you lie in it.

Can’t you see? pleaded Herr Osborne. That way we’ll guarantee the right vote in the referendum. Give us a change or two, let us secure the IN vote, and afterwards you can take them all back. See if we care. And then Britain will be all yours.

Ja, ja, said Wolfgang. I know you Anglo-Saxons. Give you a centimetre and you’ll grab a kilometre. Ze EU Treaty is like ze Decalogue. Huff and puff all you vant, but every commandment stays. Including adultery, as your Freund Boris should keep in mind.

In sheer exasperation, George turned to Hans Jörg Schelling, Austria’s finance minister, who happened to be passing by. “Hans, will you please explain to Wolfgang what’s what? Doesn’t he know what the bloody referendum is all about?”

He may not know, but I do, replied the Austrian. It’s about you lot being cowards.

“I sink politicians have to act decisively. And when ze politicians believe zey have to ask ze people, it’s an indication zat zey zemselves are not villing to make ze decisions and carry ze consequences,” he said.

“Are you out of your mind?” screamed George. “You want the dim-witted 20-year-old lesbians in our parliament to decide on serious matters?”

“Zat, mein Freund, is your problem,” said the German and the Austrian in unison. “Zat’s vot your Anglo-Saxon democracy is all about.”

All this is most annoying, but Dave and George shouldn’t despair. Those EU chaps are only playing hard to get to make a point. Once the point has sunk in, they’ll do what it takes to make sure the Brits vote the right way, which is to say the wrong way.

That’s why I share Herr Schelling’s view of democracy by plebiscite – even if we radically differ on the kind of decisive action we want our government to take.

But governments these days aren’t concerned about taking decisive action and making the right decisions. Their principal task is to make sure the make-up of our governing bodies faithfully reflects the population’s proportion of women, homosexuals, cripples and ethnic minorities.

This doesn’t mean they don’t know what the right decisions are. They do. But the nature of modern democracy run riot is such that doing what’s right is a guarantee of a severely curtailed political career, and that’s not a price modern politicians will ever pay.

As Jean-Claude Juncker, Europe’s Gauleiter, once said, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being rather pressed for time today, I had to turn for inspiration to the Russian ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Putin) websites, those that  are blocked in their country of origin for being, well, anti-Putin.

They have a field day with Vlad’s major contribution to mathematics, acknowledging that something in this vein is long overdue.

You see, Vlad isn’t merely a president. He is a ‘national leader’, a title that places him somewhere between a president and God, but closer to the latter.

In that demiurgic capacity, Vlad is expected to transcend politics and revolutionise areas seemingly outside his field of expertise.

For example, Stalin, Vlad’s idol and role model, made a seminal contribution to linguistics that he analysed from the lofty vantage point of Marxism.

Thus armed with the most universal and the only true philosophy, Stalin wrote a brochure Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, in which he contemplated whether language falls into the category of base or superstructure.

Stalin’s epochal discovery that language was neither took some linguists aback, and they had to be hastily re-educated in their chosen discipline at the institution of higher learning under the auspices of the State Administration for Camps, GULAG for short.

Khrushchev, being more of an empiricist, revolutionised agricultural sciences by deciding that if maize grew so abundantly in Iowa, there was no reason it couldn’t grow just as well in the sub-Arctic areas of Russia.

To test that hypothesis, he had many traditional rye and wheat fields ploughed and the cultures replaced with maize. As an immediate result of that trailblazing venture, Russia had to begin to import cereals and has been doing it ever since.

My friend Vlad switched back to less practical and more abstract sciences, in this instance mathematics.

Yesterday he delivered a Russian version of the State of the Union Address, in which he said, inter alia, that the mortality rate in Russia is stable, if unfortunately growing. Since there was no intrepid individual present who dared ask which it was, stable or growing, Vlad pressed on, putting a positive spin on the announcement.

The reason more people are dying is that Russians these days live longer, he explained. And the older we are, the sooner we die – no one could possibly argue against that.

Definitely not, though some might suggest that mortality rates are inversely, rather than directly, proportionate to life expectancy. Hence if, say, turtles live on average to 100 years, then it’s realistic to expect that their mortality rate would be about one per cent a year. And, if seals’ life expectancy is about 10 years, their mortality rate would be roughly 10 per cent. I don’t think that replacing animals with humans ought to change the arithmetic, but Russian national leaders have their own maths.

In a parallel and related development, Vlad played another mathematical trick on the ‘Immortal Regiment’ movement.

Some 15 years ago, people began to march through the streets carrying blown-up photo portraits of their parents and grandparents killed in the war. This, rather moving, practice started spontaneously and each year has been attracting more and more people.

Except that spontaneity is discouraged in Vlad’s Russia, especially if he feels left out. So this year he decided to lead the procession, proudly carrying the photograph of his father who had to have been killed in the war to qualify for the honour.

I’m sure he was, but, since Vlad was born seven years after the war ended, the late Mrs Putin had a gestation period whose length is highly unusual, among humans at any rate.

Every period of Russia’s history in which she is blessed with the presence of a strict but fair national leader invariably overlaps with an era of great discoveries. I’m glad that Vlad is keeping this fine tradition alive.