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In welcome contrast to his predecessor, Pope Leo XIV has so far kept a rather low profile, refraining from comments on quotidian issues.

However, His Holiness has recently delivered himself of a statement I find puzzling:

“Someone who says, ‘I’m against abortion, but I am in favour of the death penalty,’ is not really pro-life. Someone who says, “I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States,’ I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”

Let’s see if I can decipher this message, and if I can’t I’ll appreciate all the help I can get.

Starting from the end, the Pope seems to believe that immigrants to the United States are treated inhumanly, which denies their right to life. The statement is so earth-shattering that I for one would like to see some supporting evidence.

To begin with, I can testify from the personal experience of someone who arrived in the US as an immigrant 52 years ago, that no inhuman – nor indeed inhumane – treatment was anywhere in evidence. Granted, unlike illegal arrivals in today’s Britain, I wasn’t put up at a four-star hotel. All I got was a Broadway fleabag with a carpet of cockroaches that made a crunching sound whenever I got out of bed.

Still, I didn’t suffer from any encroachment on my essential rights. Quite the contrary, for the first time in my life I found myself in a country where my essential rights were recognised and upheld.

I don’t know whether that situation has changed in the intervening half century, but, even if it has, I’m convinced that new arrivals aren’t slaughtered en masse. If they aren’t, then I can’t see how their treatment violates their right to life.

From where I sit, the US government is indeed trying to limit the right of illegal immigrants to life in the US, but that’s hardly the same thing. Unless, of course, His Holiness can demonstrate, facts in hand, that all those huddled Mexican masses legitimately fear for their lives in their native land.

Barring such proof, let’s charitably put the tail end of the Pope’s statement down to a rhetorical flourish that amounts to little more than a non sequitur. However, the rest of what he said deserves closer examination.

His Holiness clearly finds opposition to abortion incompatible with support for the death penalty. Someone who combines both beliefs is thus disingenuous if he insists he is pro-life. Decide, my son, he seems to be saying to me, if you are against abortion or in favour of the death penalty. You can’t be both.

I’m afraid I disagree, with every requisite deference.

We have to assume that the head of the Roman Catholic Church is anti-abortion. If we can’t make that assumption, we might as well pack up and go home. That would be worse than believing that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner sees no need for law enforcement, although at times one can be forgiven for getting that impression.

Logically then, His Holiness thinks that both abortion and the death penalty constitute the denial of the right to life, which makes them wrong. Any Christian, actually anyone capable of logical thought, will agree that abortion discontinues a human life without due process, which violates that sacred right.

However, an argument can be made that the death penalty actually asserts the value of a human life, rather than denying it.

By sentencing a murderer to death, society sends a message orbi et urbi that the wanton taking of a life is a crime so heinous that it can’t be offset by any length of imprisonment. Only the death penalty is a punishment truly commensurate with the crime.

Neither a theological nor historical argument against the death penalty cuts much ice. Yes, the Church has always taught that the taking of a human life is wrong. However, it may be righteous if it prevents wrongs that are even worse.

Logic and any understanding of human nature suggest that the death penalty has deterrent value: any sane person would risk prison more readily than the chair. Any murder statistics in states or countries practising capital punishment are a priori meaningless. While irrefutably showing the number of murders the death penalty didn’t deter, they give no inkling as to the number of murders it did deter.

While no statistics are available on the number of lives taken by recidivist murderers who’ve served their sentence and then killed again since the death penalty was abolished in Britain, it’s generally believed that number runs into hundreds, possibly thousands. Any number greater than one proves the positive net effect of the death penalty, and any newspaper reader will agree it’s much greater than one.

But deterrence apart, since at least the time of St Augustine of Hippo, the Church has recognised the doctrine of just war. Since any war, just or unjust, presupposes killing, no Christian prelate can argue persuasively that any killing is ipso facto abhorrent.

Most theologians believe the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” means “Thou shalt not murder”. This leaves room for capital punishment, with the state acting as a divine agent. (As Burke wrote in his Reflections, “He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed therefore the State”.)

This view is supported by the distinction between the Hebrew words for lawful killing and murder, as well as by Scriptural accounts legitimising lethal force used in self-defence, warfare and under divine law.

To use the expression borrowed from His Holiness’s native variant of the English language, any unequivocal statement on capital punishment invariably opens a can of worms. These invertebrates crawl out and curl around logical and theological inconsistencies.

This isn’t to say that no opposition to the death penalty can ever be sound. One could, for example, cite the corrupting effect it has on the executioner, or else doubt the right of mortal and therefore fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that the modern lot are uncomfortable with, but the very idea of punishment as such.

More and more, they betray their Enlightenment genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice. More and more, one detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law ought to be only an aspect of the social services.

Far be it from me to suspect His Holiness of holding such essentially irreligious views. One can only wish he recognised that the issue of capital punishment has to be discussed in a broad secular and theological context. It can’t be resolved with a simple yes or no statement.

Good job then that the Pope wasn’t speaking ex cathedra, and infallibility doesn’t apply.

Our established church has just received a coup de grâce, which could be loosely translated in this context as a blow delivered by Her Grace Sarah Mullally, the Bishop of London.

At least, that’s what she had been until yesterday. Now she has been consecrated to the highest clerical post in the Anglican Church, she is the Most Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury.

Or scratch that ‘Lord’ business. As a self-described feminist, Dame Sarah will doubtless insist on being called ‘Lady Archbishop’. And since she sits in the House of Lords, that chamber should drop its misogynistic, transphobic name and call itself the House of Lords, Ladies and Others.

I’m not sure Dame Sarah will insist on making such changes, but I do know they would be close to her heart. She is also described as a ‘theological liberal’, which, again contextually, means theologically illiterate and aggressively antagonistic to church tradition.

Dame Sarah claims to respect those who are less theologically liberal than she is, specifically on the subject of female ordination, but her “belief is that Church diversity… should flourish and grow; everybody should be able to find a spiritual home.”

You could see me genuflecting even as we speak. Yet no one disputes that “everybody should be able to find a spiritual home”. However, for some that home is at the altar and for others it’s in the pews, and for over 2,000 years women resided in the latter.

And of course she finds nothing wrong with blessing homomarriage. “We can offer a response that is about it being inclusive love.” Dame Sarah has missed her true calling, She’d be perfect running a DEI department at some corporation.

The Church, she adds, “reflects the God of love, who loves everybody.” True.

God does love everybody. But He doesn’t love everything, which even cursory familiarity with Scripture would establish. In fact, He positively loathes those little transgressions He calls sins. If Dame Sarah is unsure whether that rubric covers sexual perversions, she should read Leviticus or, in the second half of the Bible, Romans and Corinthians.

The new Archbishop can be equally woolly on a whole range of subjects. Such as abortion, which is abhorrent to any Christian, and has been for the same 2,000 years. But it’s not abhorrent to the Most Reverend Lady. Neither, by the looks of it, is talking gibberish:

“I would suspect that I would describe my approach to this issue as pro-choice rather than pro-life although if it were a continuum I would be somewhere along it moving towards pro-life when it relates to my choice and then enabling choice when it related to others.”

One can never be sure what this lot mean, but it sounds as if she finds no theological objections to abortion. She herself would rather not scrape a foetus out of her womb, but she has no problem when other women do that if they so choose. Considering Dame Sarah’s age, her personal pro-life preference doesn’t amount to a meaningful commitment.

I could go over Dame Sarah’s views one by one, but there is no need. Just name a woke abomination, and she’ll support it. Deportation of illegal immigrants, for example? You know exactly where she stands. The Tory government’s Rwanda policy should, to her, “shame us as a nation”.

Do you ever wonder why just about every woman ordained or especially consecrated in the Anglican Church is a raving leftie? Many of their male counterparts are too, but a sizeable minority remain conservative politically, socially and certainly theologically.

The minority of such fossils among the female clergy isn’t sizeable. It’s infinitesimal to the point of being non-existent, and I have a ready explanation for this tendency.

Any woman seeking ordination invokes a purely secular fad, and a perverse one to boot, defying scriptural authority and church tradition. Both have chiselled in stone the rule that apostolic ministry is the business of men.

Contrary to what hysterical advocates of female priesthood claim, this doesn’t mean women should play no role in church life. No Christian would ever suggest anything like that – the examples of hundreds of great woman saints, starting with the Mother of God, speak for themselves.

It was women who, when the male disciples cowered out of sight, had the courage to witness the Crucifixion; women who attended Christ’s burial; women who found his tomb empty – women who kept the Christian tradition alive by running convents, monasteries, schools; women who inspired the Crusades; women who were martyred for Christian proselytism.

Women’s contribution to Christianity is equal to men’s, but that doesn’t mean women should be priests. Any woman who insists she has a right to ministry has little knowledge of Christian tradition and no respect for it. What she does respect and enforce is woke diktats, in this case feminism.

And any woke person is ipso facto wicked, which failing has to reveal itself in any activity such a person undertakes. This is my a priori conviction, and Dame Sarah has done nothing to disprove it.

Her consecration may be the final blow to finish off the Church of England – at least as the Church of England. While parishes all over Britain are haemorrhaging communicants, various Anglican communities in Africa and Asia are doing well.

Unlike the mother Church, they tend to be conservative, which means properly Christian. This is the only thing any Church should be, the only way it can survive.

I’m not an Anglican myself, but our established Church is an essential part of British polity. Hence what’s happening to Anglicanism has the makings of a constitutional catastrophe, not just an ecclesiastical one. That’s why even those Britons who don’t care about the latter, should care about the plight of the Church of England. And weep.

It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Even secular Jews, those who give the synagogue a wide berth 364 days a year, feel compelled to offer their devotions on Yom Kippur.

Crowds gather outside synagogues, people’s eyes lowered, their heads bowed, their expressions solemn. For some, this is a chance to come to terms with God and expiate their sins. But others see the crowd as easy pickings, a target to hit by way of venting their own hatred as demanded by their own God.

One such evil man was appropriately named Jihad Al-Shamie, 35, who, as the papers hastened to inform us, was a British citizen of Syrian descent, naturalised as a child. A perfect Briton, in other words, bred if not born.

You know what happened. Al-Shamie drove his car into the crowd of worshippers outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester. The fallen bodies acting as a brake, he jumped out of the car and went to work with a knife. Two people died and four were injured before the police arrived and shot the murderer dead.

No one was surprised that his name wasn’t something like Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones. Jihad Al-Shamie? Of course, he was. He was a Muslim, wasn’t he? That’s what Muslims do. No, hold on, officer, I didn’t mean to say that most Muslims kill Jews. What I meant was that most people who kill Jews are Muslims.

But most people who root for Muslim murderers aren’t Muslims themselves. They are what Americans call liberals, Europeans call left-wingers, and I call scum. They may espouse any religion or usually none, but the adhesive gluing them all together is hatred of Jews as an extension of wider animosity.

These are the yahoos who march through great Western cities chanting “From the river to the sea!”, thereby demarcating the killing field for millions of Jews. Or are they really demarcating it?

The usual assumption is that they mean ‘from the Jordan to the Red Sea’, but this is unnecessarily limiting. Like their hatred, the slogan is open-ended. They might as well mean from the Thames to the North Sea, or from the Rhine to the Mediterranean. The scum want to kill Jews wherever they can be found, everywhere, not just in Israel.

Muslims may act as the catalyst of this anti-Semitic rampage, but they don’t make up its greatest numbers. Most faces contorted with venomous hatred on Free Palestine marches belong to the kind of scum who might as well be named Nigel Smith or Kevin Jones.

They are the ones who cancel concerts of Israeli musicians throughout Europe, most recently in Holland. They are the ones who refuse to invite Israeli scientists to conferences or Israeli lecturers to campuses. And they are the ones who densely populate our governing party.

They are also the ones who last night went on anti-Semitic rallies in Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and elsewhere, openly celebrating the murders. The police were watching on with bored insouciance, as they always do unless they themselves are attacked.

If Israel and Hamas didn’t exist, the scum would have to invent them. Without that eternal conflict in the Middle East, they’d have to resort to scrutinising birth certificates, taking cranial measurements and drawing swastikas on Jewish-owned shops. That, however, may still be frowned upon in the wider community.

But as long as they use Zionists or Israelis as the shorthand for Jews, they are on safe grounds. They can claim the usual scum affection for noble, which is to say Third World, causes. They can insist they are driven by love for the oppressed Hamas terrorists, not by hatred of Jews.

When they aren’t out screaming “Free Palestine!” and “From the river to the sea!”, they put on sanctimonious expressions and pronounce on diversity, equality and inclusion – but not for the Jews, is the unspoken refrain.

This is yet another conflict of scum pieties, far from the only one. The same pro-Hamas marchers swear by feminism, even though their ‘Palestinian’ idols treat women as livestock. They regard rape as the worst crime but welcome the mass immigration of those most likely to commit it. Their feminism happily coexists with their commitment to transsexualism, which real feminists abhor. They scream their support for LGBT rights, while professing solidarity with those who throw LGBT practitioners off tall buildings.

I call this a conflict of pieties, but the term somewhat misses the mark. No pieties exist for real, they are merely rhetorical window dressing, an outer expression of inner hatred.

The scum don’t really love ‘Palestinians’; they hate Jews. They don’t love LGBT; they hate traditional morality. They don’t love ‘the underprivileged’; they hate those they see as privileged. They are an anomic, deracinated mob, a rudderless ship cast adrift and propelled by winds of hatred.

It’s telling that the Manchester outrage occurred days after Starmer’s government rewarded anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli, anti-Western hatred by recognising the non-existent Palestinian, aka Hamas, state. This inconceivably idiotic act can be partly understood in light of domestic British politics.

Apparently, Labour has been losing support in communities with sizeable Muslim populations, who now have their own parties to vote for. Recognising Hamas and treating Israel as an enemy state are thus the sops thrown to potential blocs of votes.

But this is only a part of it. Starmer, a man of little intellect but much cunning, has a visceral understanding of the scum ethos from which he himself comes. It’s not just about the rivers and the seas, but about the undercurrents of hatred and resentment sloshing underfoot in a vast group shaped, directly or otherwise, by Marxist tenets.

Jew hatred is but a brook flowing into a raging maelstrom of anti-Western animosity, where it joins the vortex drawing in throngs of malcontents. They are told loud and clear that they no longer have to be coy about hating Jews. They can do so openly and to the accompaniment of ‘liberal’ hosannas, provided they scream abuse of Israelis, not Jews.

That’s today. Tomorrow their hatred many be channelled into other conduits, besides, not instead of, anti-Semitism. Give them the cause, and they’ll find the mob.

The ambient air is full of hateful electricity, and some scum individuals are occasionally galvanised to do murder. Starmer will shed crocodile tears and promise support for the victims, this time the Jews. But he’ll do nothing because he himself is whirled around by the same vortex, imbued with the same ethos.

Starmer and his ilk are the epicentre of this ethos. The likes of Jihad Al-Shamie are merely its cutting edge.

What’s the greatest sin of all, one that’s unconscionable, unforgivable and irredeemable? A transgression, as one must assert with uncompromising vigour, that has been negligently omitted from those biblical commandments and lists of deadly sins?

Correct. It’s racism, and I’m proud of you for giving this answer without any hesitation. You are a man of your time, the most progressive time in history.

And what’s the greatest possible crime, perhaps even more heinous than murder? If you instantly thought of rape, full marks. Forcing sexual attentions on a woman leaves a wound festering over a lifetime, one much worse, as we all know, than any physical injury and arguably even death.

Now we’ve agreed on the two most fundamental tenets of modernity, we must accept with hand-wringing anguish that they are at odds. Though racism doesn’t necessarily presuppose a proclivity to rape, rape, or rather rape statistics, may turn even some impeccably progressive people into racists.

How do I define racism? If you have to ask this question, my faith in your progressive credentials gets a dent. Obviously, I don’t just define it as hatred of other races. Such a narrow understanding goes back to the time when racism was still called racialism.

No, I define it as Sir Keir Starmer does: a racist is anyone who resembles Nigel Farage in his urge to reduce immigration of cultural aliens. After all, Sir Keir is our prime minister, while Farage is but a lowly MP. Whom would you rather trust in such sensitive matters? Exactly.

Regrettably though, it’s this definition of racism that’s in conflict with rape statistics. What if a racist like Nigel Farage were to claim, data in hand, that incidents of rape increase pari passu with a growing immigrant population? Would we then have to admit that curtailing immigration isn’t such a bad idea after all? Would we then incline towards racism?

No, of course not. As progressive people, we are impervious to facts. We know that only one explanation can possibly exist for wanting to reduce immigration: xenophobia, racially expressed.

But what if some retrograde individuals out there still aren’t fully paid-up members of the progressive community? What if they are still trying to decide whether or not they are racists? Well, rape statistics from different countries may deepen their confusion.

Just compare two sets of figures for four of the five most populous European nations, England & Wales, Germany, France and Poland. (Rape statistics for the Ukraine are artificially skewed upwards by the presence of Russian soldiers on her territory.)

The first set of figures is the number of rape reports in the year 2000: England & Wales, 8,593; Germany, 8,133; France, 7,500; Poland, 2,399.

The second set is made up of the same statistics for 2023: England & Wales, 68,109; Germany, 32,029; France, 42,400; Poland, 1,127.

The numbers differ so drastically that they call for an explanation. Why, for example, did the number of rapes in the three Western European countries increase by an order of magnitude, while halving in Poland?

Did our population increase during that period? It did, but not that much, not enough to account for a seven-fold hike. Did testosterone levels go up so much in Western Europe that men there became more aggressive and more virile? There are no data to that effect, nor to the effect of Polish men growing more docile and effeminate.

Help me out here, I’m struggling. Were rape victims in Western Europe more likely to report their ordeal in 2023 than in 2000? Possibly. But we aren’t talking orders of magnitude there. In any case, why would Polish women become more reticent by half?

Logic suggests that, if one variable changes dramatically and most of the others don’t, we must search high and wide for another variable that undergoes a similar change at the same time. Once we’ve found it, we’ve found the explanation for the first variable. Sherlock Holmes would be proud of us.

Let’s not bother the great detective though. We don’t need his prodigious skills to identify our culprit. Between 2000 and 2023, millions of Muslim immigrants arrived in Britain, Germany and France. Hardly any chose Poland as their destination.

Therefore, at the risk of being accused of, or even charged with, racism, we have to accept mournfully and apologetically that there is only one explanation for the statistical disparity in question. Western Europe being overrun with swarms of new arrivals who flout our laws and ignore our tradition of pursuing amorous favours.

They bypass such silly preliminaries as flowers, chocolates and dates at overpriced restaurants, instead taking a shortcut to gratification. To quote the old commercial, they take the waiting out of wanting.

But where are the cops when we need them? Glad you’ve asked. They are busy attending DEI classes and indoctrination sessions on racism, institutional bias and Islamophobia. They are taught to respect the customs of other cultures, and, when such customs clash with ours, they are trained to believe ours are in no way superior.

Most of them despise all that nonsense, but, like you and me, they don’t want to complicate their lives. They know that arresting a Muslim on suspicion of rape, especially if the chap wasn’t caught in the act, may get them in trouble with their DEI department.

Even if it doesn’t, there will be endless forms to fill, countless interviews to sit through, more training sessions to suffer – all for a case that may never even go to court or, if it does, will probably end in acquittal.

So good cops, those who lost their idealism years ago, wash their hands on the crime or else chew on that old chestnut about the woman egging hotblooded males on by wearing suggestive clothing. Life’s easier that way.

Suddenly I’ve realised that I am myself sounding like a rank racist. I assure you that’s not the intention. I’m just not imaginative enough to think of any other explanation for the cited rape statistics. My fault entirely.

I’m also worried that such statistics may turn progressive people away from progress and towards its enemies. Such as Nigel Farage and everyone else Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t like.

Dr Frankenstein, call your office. You are about to be put out of business.

American scientists in Oregon have put young Victor to shame. They’ve found a new way of producing sapient human beings, one that involves no hanky-panky, in fact no human contact whatsoever.

They harvest DNA from people’s skin cells, fertilise it with sperm, and Frankenstein is your uncle: there we have it, a human embryo. The story was first broken in Nature Communications and then migrated to other journals via the BBC website.

The journals politely give credit where it’s due, as in: “Normally, reproduction happens when a man’s sperm meets a woman’s egg, creating an embryo that grows into a baby after nine months, as reported by BBC.”

Crikey. So that’s where babies come from? Who coulda thunk. Thank you, BBC, for opening our eyes to that startling fact.

Oh well, yes, but not quite. That’s where babies used to come from, normally. Now they’ll come abnormally, from a tiny cell scraped off human skin. From there they’ll go into a test tube, replacing in vivo with in vitro. A fertilised cell will become an embryo, then presumably a baby, then an adult, then even perhaps a stem cell biologist, but only if his genetic makeup allows for no scruples.

When they grow up, those vitreous babies will be able to describe themselves proudly with the words in the title above. And they won’t even have to refer to the glass jars as ‘Mum and Dad’.

All such dystopic discoveries are invariably hailed as science’s gift to mankind. This skin flick is no exception.

The BBC is effusive: Now even old women can have babies. Splendid news. I for one look forward to watching octogenarian ladies push prams down the King’s Road. That conveyance could also act as a Zimmer frame, which is an extra benefit any way you look at it.

Infertile women and impotent men can all rejoice: help is on the way. And you can forget about women: fertile or otherwise, they’ve been made redundant.

Now two homosexual men can have a baby genetically related to both of them. One man’s skin can be used to produce an egg, which will then be fertilised by the other man’s sperm. Don’t ask me how, I’m way out of my depth in this field.

This discovery, gushes the BBC, “re-writes the rules of parenthood”. I’ll say. It definitely does that, in spades.

“We achieved something that was thought to be impossible,” says Prof Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the director of the Oregon Health and Science University’s centre for embryonic cell and gene therapy.

Applause all around, the audience stands up and chants “Test tube, born and bred!” until every throat goes hoarse. The scientific journals where I’ve read the story echo the ovations as best they can, although they feel duty-bound to commiserate that so far the success rate is lamentably low, nine per cent or thereabouts.

It’ll take at least another decade before Grannies can become Mummies, and two men can have babies they can each rightfully call their own. I just hope I’m still around to take part in the celebratory festivities.

However, as a lifelong proponent and occasional practitioner of the archaic, so-called ‘normal’, reproduction method, I have to admit to feeling some sadness. And as a commentator, I must feign surprise at a notable omission in every story I’ve read on the subject.

My surprise is only feigned because deep down I’m feeling none. It’s par for the course that apolitical journals and the politically woke BBC would only talk about the feasibility of this method, never giving a second’s thought to its morality.

They never do: the prevailing thought is that, if something can be done, it must be done. For example, experiments in interbreeding humans and apes have been going on for decades.

The idea is to produce a ‘pithecanthropus’, thereby plugging the missing-link hole in Darwin’s theory. I’m not privy to any technical, or shall we say amorous, details of such experiments, but I do know that they stubbornly continue to fail. This, though the primates involved share 98 per cent of their DNA with humans.

Apparently, it’s the remaining two per cent that account for our humanity, and no number of people copulating with chimpanzees will change that. But trust scientists, such as Prof Mitalipov, the pride of Kazakhstan and Oregon, to deliver another slap in the face of decency.

As decency is defined in our Judaeo-Christian civilisation, I hasten to add. It insists that human life is made in the likeness and image of God, not in the image and likeness of a skin cell reared in a jar.

Someone living within that civilisation, whether or not a religious believer, feels sorry for infertile women who can’t have babies the normal way. For many it’s a tragedy they suffer, but suffering is an unavoidable part of life, not to mention the starting point of our civilisation. Re-writing the rules of parenthood (and thereby re-defining humanity) isn’t a price worth paying for relieving those women’s distress.

Cry for them, pray for them (if such is your wont), feel their pain by all means. But let whatever is left of traditional propriety survive – even if it means no grannies using baby prams as Zimmer frames.

However, more and more people find themselves, willingly, enthusiastically and often unwittingly, outside our civilisation. Such people see nothing wrong with a world in which Mary Shelley’s fantasies read like reportage. A world inhabited by Igors, run by Frankensteins and sooner or later destroyed by them.

Sooner rather than later, I’d suggest, but that’s progress for you.

Switzerland hasn’t just given the world timepieces, chocolates and money laundromats. It also boasts two of the greatest 20^th century playwrights, Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Max Frisch.

It was Frisch who wrote arguably the century’s most significant and eternally universal play, The Arsonists (also known in English as The Firebugs or The Fire Raisers).

If you ever wonder why the West is meekly looking on as Russia advances on it step by step, just read the play written in 1953, six years after the Second World War. Switzerland hadn’t taken part in it, Hitler was dead, and Putin was a year old. Yet, in common with other products of artistic genius, The Arsonists transcends its time and place.

Anyone doubting this is possible has to believe that Antigone is strictly about burying Greek war casualties, Hamlet about dynastic succession in Denmark, and The Master Builder about the state of Norway’s construction industry.

Whatever their immediate subjects, those plays shine a light on the otherwise inaccessible recesses of human nature, elucidating traits that escape philosophers and psychologists, especially the latter. The Arsonists is another such play.

Frisch hints at universality by naming his principal protagonist Biedermann, which means Mr Everyman, a worthy philistine. You know the type: self-satisfied, happy with how he and his life have turned out, certain that great upheavals befalling others will pass him by.

There he is, reading newspaper articles about a spate of arson haunting his town. Apparently, firebugs pretending to be hawkers insinuate their way into someone’s home and settle down in the attic, only then to set the house on fire.

Biedermann shakes his head. How stupid and gullible can people get? He’d never be taken in by such ruses. The warm, cosy aura of his dwelling would never be punctured by evildoers with or without matches. Let them turn up – he’ll show them what’s what.

And what do you know, a hawker does appear on Biedermann’s doorstep within minutes. Expertly combining persuasive arguments with veiled threats, he talks himself into spending a night – just one night, Herr Biedermann! – in the attic.

Don’t sell Biedermann short: no dummy, he. He senses something is wrong, suspects that the hawker is one of the firebugs. But a suspicion isn’t a certainty.

What if he is wrong? What if the poor fellow indeed only needs a bed for the night? Confronting him now, before he has really done anything wrong, would be churlish and, well, improper. It could also be unnecessarily dangerous: the fellow looks quite muscular and there’s a touch of cruelty in his grin.

Considering what’s going on in the town, Biedermann would find it hard to convince anyone with such lame arguments about no danger threatening his house. Anyone but himself, that is. He falls for his own craven musings because he wants to fall for them. Not doing so would mean taking decisive action, but that’s not what the Biedermanns of this world ever do.

Before long, another hawker joins the first one, and they begin to cram the attic with oil drums full of petrol. And still Biedermann does nothing to stop the criminals. Moreover, in common with many sedentary philistines, he succumbs to the gravitational pull of evil, readily falls under the spell emanated by wicked men.

Rather than trying to expel the arsonists, he helps them by giving them matches and making sure the detonating fuse is the right length. By now Biedermann knows his lodgers are harbouring evil designs, but surely they are after other townsfolk, not him. He feels a sense of safety ever so slightly tinged with excitement and the pride of belonging with such men of action.

Due to his cowardice, Biedermann becomes an agent of his own downfall. His house burns down to cinders, and the flames segue into the fires of hell. Meeting Biedermann and his wife at the gates are their two lodgers, who turn out to be aspects of Beelzebub. They sneer at the couple, refusing to waste their satanic time on what they call “small fry”.

There are hints strewn all over the narrative that Frisch meant it as a metaphor for Nazism and the shilly-shallying acquiescence of civilised countries in the face of evil rapidly gaining momentum. But great plays, or works of art in general, are never strictly topical even when the author wants them to be.

Like Gospel parables, they only seem to be telling stories of good Samaritans, bad tenants, mustard seeds and bakers. These may be the narrative strains but not the real subjects. The real subject is always human nature, fallen and therefore fallible, courting perdition and needing to be saved.

The stories of Antigone, Hamlet or the Master Builder could have been just as easily set in any other place and at any other time without losing any of their poignancy. So could The Arsonists, which makes it worthy of mention in the same breath as other sublime plays.

I shan’t insult your intelligence by explaining how the play applies to our time, who are today’s Biedermanns and arsonists. This must be as transparent to you as the Nazi references were instantly grasped by Frisch’s contemporaries.

Art joins history on the faculty of a great educational institution teaching how people and societies perish, and how they can save themselves. The teachers are knowledgeable, eloquent and in full command of the relevant facts. But their best efforts are invariably undone by their indolent, complacent, harebrained pupils – us.

We never learn the lessons or, even when we do, we never heed them. So there is Biedermann, Mr Everyman, hospitably opening his doors to the firebugs, hoping against all hope that they really may be door-to-door salesmen. And even if they aren’t, surely they must be after his neighbour’s house, not his own comfy nest.

And then the flames burst out, consuming Biedermann and consigning him to hell. The tale is eternal; the message, up-to-date.

You probably notice that political movements are at their most coherent when defining what they are against, not what they are for.

They know what they hate and have no trouble identifying their bugbears in concrete terms. By contrast, when outlining things they love, they often begin to talk in slogans and utopian generalities.

In that sense, British conservatives are lucky. While sharing most of our hates with conservatives elsewhere, we have our positive desiderata delivered to us on the platter of history. A British conservative wishes to conserve whatever little of Christendom the Enlightenment has so far neglected to destroy.

The pre-Enlightenment triad of ‘God, king and country’ is thus a slogan, but not, as it were, a very sloganeering one. Unlike most slogans, it’s not general but specific and substantive. British political conservatism is out to preserve what’s left of Christendom, including the country’s constitution built around church, monarch and Parliament.

American political conservatives face a harder task. They can’t possibly advocate conserving pre-Enlightenment virtues because their country is essentially a post-Enlightenment construct. The Founders rejected throne and church as the linchpins of statehood, concentrating instead on such Enlightenment entitlements as liberty, rights and widespread happiness.

Since they couldn’t ground such good things in the traditions of Christendom, they had to create a secular, materialistic republic – this regardless of how many Americans remained pious. That’s partly why Locke became more influential in America than in his native land.

Guided by his hand, American conservatives moved protection of property higher up the pecking order of political virtues than it traditionally was in British conservatism, where it was regarded as a vital derivative of the country’s ethos, not its centrepiece.

There was still plenty of room left for cultural conservatism in America. The country’s state, constituted along secular, materialist lines, had to co-exist with a largely religious population – just as the British state, largely constituted along religious lines, co-exists with an increasingly irreligious population.

But American political conservatism, bereft of positive ideas it didn’t share with libertarianism, found itself in the doldrums of an identity problem. However, it came to life when Roosevelt’s socialist New Deal gave it a target to snipe at. Unable to define itself as anti-Enlightenment, American conservatism now happily defined itself as anti-New Deal.

Once the world began to rush towards a major war, conservative opposition to the New Deal turned isolationist. The America First Committee led the way in attempts to keep the US out of the war, with some of its spokesmen, such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, openly expressing pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic sympathies – just as many MAGA adherents are today sympathetic to Russian fascism.

(Ford had been financing Hitler’s movement since before the Putsch, which was first reported by the New York Times in December, 1922. In recognition, Hitler had a wall of his private office decorated with a portrait of Ford. In 1938 Henry Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest Nazi decoration for foreigners.)

Not that the AFC was just conservative. It was a broad coalition including many Republicans, Democrats, progressives and even communists who had all arrived at a common isolationist destination from different starting points. But until 7 December, 1941, conservatives occupied the largest wing in that house.

Three days after Pearl Harbor the US declared war on Japan, and the AFC had no way to go but out. New Deal interventionism laudably won the argument about foreign policy in the 1940s, just as it had regrettably won one about the economy in the 1930s.

In the 1950s, new conservatism began to take shape. The anti-Communist cause championed by Sen. McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities had a galvanising effect, injecting new energy into the conservative cause.

It was in the 1950s that conservatives like Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, Leo Strauss and especially William Buckley became household names. They wrote best-selling books, made speeches attended by thousands, debated liberals in all media, published articles and essays, founded journals and began to command a sizeable share of voice.

That was perhaps the most prosperous decade in American history, and conservatives couldn’t credibly attack the government as insufficiently capitalist. It was however possible to attack it as insufficiently anti-Communist, and even poor old President Eisenhower was accused of being a crypto-commie.

The danger of defining conservatism in largely negative terms was inadvertently highlighted by Strom Thurmond who once said that Eisenhower was a communist. “Not at all,” objected his interlocutor. “Ike is an anti-communist.” “I don’t care,” retorted the indomitable senator, “what kind of communist he is.” He probably didn’t mean that the way it sounded but, as an initiator of political thought, anti-communism is indeed nothing but communism with an opposite sign.

Still, the anti-communist crusade coalesced the conservative movement into a cohesive entity, giving it a sustaining momentum that lasted for four decades. But when communism collapsed, or rather transformed itself into fascisoid imperialism, US conservatism found itself at a loose end.

The time came to ask the perennial Quo vadis? question. The old interventionist mantra had been usurped by neoconservatives, who harmonised it with essentially statist, welfarist strains. The genesis of neoconservatism was described by its founder, Irving Kristol:

“I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neosocialist, a neoliberal, and finally, a neoconservative.” That is why, “… in 1964, only a few neoconservatives supported Barry Goldwater while the rest of us went along with Hubert Humphrey.”

Kristol evidently saw no contradiction in reconciling what he tried to pass for conservatism with supporting liberal candidates for high political office. He sensed the inner logic of neoconservatism: habitual interventionism to either evangelical or imperial ends cried out for a big, powerful state.

That being anathema for conservatives, they had no way forward. They had to shift into reverse and move back, towards the area that used to be occupied by America First.

This explains the current MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. The idea of America’s greatness as a goal to achieve or, if somehow lost, restore isn’t unique to Trump. It’s the essence of America’s self-deifying creed, first succinctly enunciated by the first settlers.

America was to them a collective apostle called upon to carry out a divine mission. However, even as monasticism eventually split into hermetic and proselytising strains, so did the concept of America’s greatness, as understood by conservatives, acquire aspects of both interventionism and isolationism.

The collapse of communism left conservatively inclined Americans gasping for air. Russia was no longer an enemy threatening the American way of life. Moreover, the noises coming out of Russia were consonant with their own beliefs: traditional values, religiosity, strong family leaving no room for assorted perversions, private enterprise.

That sounded as if new Russia was closer to their heart than their own governments jammed to the gunwales with liberal Ivy Leaguers. And yes, subsequent developments suggested that Russia wasn’t such a close friend of American conservatives after all. But the initial momentum still wouldn’t let them regard Russia as an enemy.

Hence the urge to leave those senile Europeans to their own devices and concentrate on what it was that made America great in the first place: thrift, enterprise and Weberian Protestant work ethic. And America didn’t need any foreign stimulation to practise such virtues. If any country could be a successful autarky, America was it.

The moment any country begins to clamour for grandeur, the door is flung open for demagogues defining greatness in ways that suit them best. For example, an equally persuasive argument could be made that it was Wilsonian and Rooseveltian interventionism that was largely responsible for turning America into a global empire, the world’s greatest superpower.

But that argument was now associated with liberal internationalism, something alien and hostile. America, a conservative, great America, was happy to stay in her own comfy shell for the whole family. That’s what greatness meant.

American political conservatism thus found itself at a crossroads with every arrow pointing backwards, and it’s happy to let Trump do the driving. Getting closer to current issues, this explains MAGA’s widespread reluctance to come to the Ukraine’s aid. But there is also a wider, more general lesson to learn.

Opposed as it is to the Enlightenment view of the world, real Western conservatism is incompatible with the post-Enlightenment world. Everything we see in Britain, Europe and especially the US is a melange of conservative simulacra, be it neoconservatism, liberalism, anarchism or MAGA.

British conservatives are also bereft of self-confidence, but at least we have something to hang on to, a frayed rope we can still use to climb back to a conservative Britain of yore. Alone among Western nations we combine a monarchy with an established church, and our head of state is still anointed, not elected or appointed.

Such are the pitons we can use for a successful ascent before the rope snaps. The likelihood of any such rise is slim, but it’s still better than none. And British conservatism, unlike its American counterpart, doesn’t have to rely on the catalyst of a foreign enemy to come back to life.

In the absence of such a foe, MAGA just may be the best America can hope for. I wish the country the best of luck – when all is said and done, America’s success is to some extent ours as well. But America’s understanding of conservatism isn’t ours. To borrow Mark Twain’s phrase, it’s our second cousin thrice removed.

Below is the letter written by a secondary school pupil in Samara, industrial city on the Volga. The boy wrote it in hospital, where he was recovering after a failed suicide attempt.

His suicide note was a poem, the last line of which said, “Life in Russia is nothing but rot”. I learned about this from an article the boy’s teacher wrote for a dissident on-line magazine.

When the teacher visited him in hospital, the boy asked, “Why are intelligent people hated so much in this country?” Though not himself Jewish, he couldn’t stand casual anti-Semitism everywhere, he felt suffocated in a country waging a criminal war.

The teacher wisely advised the boy to keep silent about his thoughts on such matters, not sharing them even with his doctors. In the good tradition of Soviet psychiatry, they could confine him to a prison loony bin. Instead, he should write his thoughts down. Hence this letter:

“I began to hate Russia all the time after the start of the ‘special military operation’. It dawned on me that Russia is a country alien to me. A country of liars, in which the lying president and members of his government aren’t the worst. It’s much worse when the whole nation is mired in lies, though it’s not really a nation but a herd of imbeciles. Plebs, as the liberals call them.

“I live in a bog standard five-storey pre-fab, where my neighbours are out-and-out scum. They spit in the stairwell, talk loudly at all hours. They consider it normal to poke one in the chest when one runs into them. I’ve told them it’s rude, to which they replied, ‘Just being neighbourly’. When I found out that my teacher published on a dissident website, I realised I wasn’t alone in the view that my townsfolk have turned into rabble.

“But my teacher is an optimist. I believe that Russia is a country where the level of scum has reached the critical mass.

“I experienced a shift after the start of the ‘special military operation’. I wanted literally to run away from this concentration camp. What I want to say to Russia is ‘Begone!’.

“I’m ashamed of being a Russian. My ancestors worked diligently for the good of this country. But I walk down the street, see how people behave and feel disgust.

“My classmates are all engrossed in their mobiles, impossible to have a conversation with them. The teachers talk twaddle, mouthing ideologically correct tosh even in literature classes, where Solzhenitsyn’s works are off limits. I visit my relations on weekends, where I have to smile listening to them gushing about the war and ‘the real men who bomb and whack the Ukies’.

“I’ve often wanted to spit into the mug of my motherland which regards as the highest patriotism mindless repetition of the ideological crap streaming out of the TV set. In general, I avoid talking politics with my family: they wouldn’t understand and simply think I’m mad. Since my childhood, I’ve been an idealist, dreaming of becoming a teacher or engineer and working for my country. But looking at the scum around me, I want to have nothing to do with these people.

“I’m not political. I’ve always dreamt of acquiring a profession and working normally. But after the special military operation started I no longer want to work for this fascist state. I decided to top myself, but even that didn’t work out. And, having restored my nerves, I realised that the only way out is to leave this cesspit called Russia.

“Meanwhile, I’ll continue to despise the people of this country, with their bigotry, prison-guard habits, criminal ideology raised to the official creed. I despise them for acquiescing to the murder of Nemtsov and Navalny, Kasparov’s emigration, Yashin’s and Kara-Murza’s languishing in prison.

“I wanted to quit school and go to the Ukraine, to fight against Russia. But that’s not an option. If I did that, my family would be persecuted back home. Becoming a pro-Ukrainian saboteur within Russia is also impossible: I’m not much of an extremist and then again, Russia as such hasn’t harmed me. But I hate the people of this country; I don’t see them as my people, my country; I feel nothing in common with this rabble.

“The only thing left to do is finish school and emigrate. But how can I do it if I’m not even a Jew who could go to Israel? Ours is a regular family, there isn’t much money. But I do want to emigrate, even to the Ukraine, to say ‘Begone!’ to this land of crooks and thieves. And to pray to all gods that Russia perish as soon as possible.”

This is perhaps not the best prose I’ve ever read, but the boy wants to be an engineer when he grows up, not a writer. However, he is obviously intelligent and sensitive, and Russia has seldom been a natural home for such people, and never over the past century.

What’s good news for the country though, and rotten news for the rest of the world, is that intelligent, sensitive, cultured people have always been in an infinitesimal minority there. That’s why it’s wrong to generalise on the basis of heart-rending accounts seeping out of Russia, similar to this one.

The temptation should be resisted to suggest that such sentiments are prevalent or even widespread, and for precisely the reasons the boy outlined. The trouble with Russia has always been its people, not just its government. The former is primary, the latter secondary and derivative.

The myth of the saintly Russian peasant in direct touch with God is just that, a myth. And the best Russian writers, though not all of them, knew it perfectly well even when assisting the government in spreading that falsehood around.

The best-known mythologists were Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, who were never short of emetic panegyrics for the hidden spiritual depths lurking in the breast of the Russian muzhik. Tolstoy in particular was full of gooey sentimentality, with his unerring eye of a genius artist suddenly going blind whenever he cast a glance at Russian peasantry.

But Gogol desperately tried to create a single positive Russian protagonist and burned the second volume of Dead Souls because he couldn’t. Chekhov, Bunin and Gorky didn’t even try: they described peasants, at that time over 80 per cent of the population, as feral, degenerate beasts red of tooth and claw.

Chekhov’s novella Muzhiks takes no prisoners, neither does Bunin’s book Accursed Days, while Gorky’s long 1922 essay On Russian Peasantry talks about his subjects’ ignorance, superstition and cruelty in the darkest terms. And he was writing as their social equal, not, as Tolstoy, their lord and master.

The boy who wrote the letter above lacks the mastery of those literary giants, but not their sensitivity. He grasps perceptively what has happened to the nation now formed by the descendants of the yahoos so poignantly described by Russian writers of the past.

These descendants are still semi-Asian yahoos, now clad and shod like Europeans, and operating the same gadgets, but still untouched by European civilisation, nor really any other. The small minority of good, cultured, morally perceptive people have few options at their disposal.

They can flee the country, which hundreds of thousands have done in the past few years, and millions in the past couple of decades. They can meekly go about their daily business, keeping themselves to themselves and suffering in silence. Or they can commit suicide, and I’m glad that the author of the cited letter failed in that attempt.

I hope he can get out of what he calls a concentration camp of a country and go West. We need more people like him – even if his own country doesn’t.

You may never be able to walk into the same river twice, but no matter how the river changes, you can still drown in it. This is a metaphorical way of rephrasing the French epigram, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

I grew up in a country where most of the economy was nationalised, the state had vast powers and individuals next to none, freedom of speech – along with all other civil liberties – was curtailed, people could be imprisoned for what they said or wrote, religion was despised but the state’s ideology was supposed to be worshipped – and all citizens older than 16 were supposed to carry ID cards on pain of arrest.

We grumbled, some of us dissented and took their concomitant lumps, but deep down everyone knew that was par for the course. We lived in a Marxist state, and Marxist states do as Marxist states are.

Expecting such a state to act differently was like expecting dogs not to chase cats, the sun to rise in the west, and winters to be warmer than summers. A leopard and a Dalmatian may have different spots, but neither is going to change his.

It would be an exaggeration to say that I still live in a country like that. No, not quite. Then again, political systems are never static, they are always in flux. They turn, twist and meander, but they always develop. And the curve of their development may look jagged, but an attentive observer can always detect the overall vector, the destination towards which the state is moving.

If the observer can justifiably say “been there, done that”, his power of discernment becomes more acute, the analogies he can spot more obvious. It’s on the basis of such experience that I can state with absolute certainty: the country in which I grew old, Britain, is inexorably moving closer to the country in which I grew up, the Soviet Union.

Look at the features of a Marxist state I enumerated above, and you’ll see that Britain already shows all of them, or at least is conspicuously moving in that direction. Labour’s plan to introduce compulsory ID cards puts another tick on that list.

I keep repeating like a broken record that trying to find rhyme or reason in anything Starmer’s government does is a pointless exercise, akin to an attempt to figure out why dogs chase cats. They do so not because they think it’s a jolly good idea, but because they are dogs.

The overarching urge of socialism is to transfer the maximum amount of power from the periphery to the centre, and ultimately from the individual to the state. The ideal every socialist sees in his mind’s eye is the omnipotent state lording it over the impotent individual. And Marxism is the extreme version of any socialism, one towards which it endlessly gravitates.

Marxists, especially those running what used to be civilised countries, are glossocrats, rulers relying on language as the instrument of power. Unlike their totalitarian brethren, they can’t yet back up glossocracy with concentration camps and execution cellars, which makes them ever so more loquacious.

They’ll never say outright that everything they do is solely designed to increase state power. Instead, they’ll wax sanctimonious and solicitous round the clock, explaining how citizens will benefit from yet another turn of the thumbscrew.

That’s why those who put forth rational arguments against compulsory ID cards are merely spinning their wheels without moving any closer to reality. And the reality of this Marxist measure is that it’s Marxist. That’s all.

Yes, Starmer and his accomplices may not be excessively bright, but that’s not the point. They aren’t so stupid as not to realise that none of their declared aims for this totalitarian law holds water. ID cards won’t prevent illegal aliens from coming to our shores. They won’t stop anyone from working in the black market. They won’t reduce crime. They won’t curb tax evasion.

They’ll do nothing but enable the state to say in English what totalitarians of yesteryear used to say in Russian or German. Instead of Dokumenty or Papiere, it’ll be “Let’s see your ID card”. But the meaning, both text and subtext, will be exactly the same.

I’m not sure I agree with Joseph de Maistre’s maxim that every nation gets the kind of government it deserves. Not without reservations at any rate, not where modern democracies are concerned.

The statement would be unequivocally true if the people casting their votes understood clearly what kind of government they are ushering in. But they don’t, for two reasons.

First, glossocrats are useless at creating free, secure, prosperous commonwealths, but they are real wizards at duping people with pious pronouncements and phony promises. Show me incoming government officials who don’t make grandiose promises they have no means or intention of keeping, and I’ll show you a fairy tale.

Second, people fall for such canards because they haven’t been trained and educated to think properly. There again, some well-meaning commentators talk about the failure of our education system. They are wrong. If we define failure as an inability to achieve the desired outcome, then our education is a huge success.

A one-eyed man can become king, but in order to do so he must blind everyone else. It’s on this logic that our education system is designed. Our socialists, Lite or full Marxist strength, don’t want Britons to be able to invoke studies in economics, political science, history, philosophy or, God forbid, theology to challenge and defeat glossocracy.

They want people to lap up whatever falsehood is tossed their way off the top table of the glossocrats. And our system of comprehensive ignorance is a perfect training ground for such uncomprehending docility.

British democracy has degenerated to a level where ignoramuses cast their votes for nonentities and predictably get governments that are both incompetent and increasingly evil. But with this damnation sometimes comes a blessing in disguise, as it does in this case.

Marxist governments are not only wicked but also incompetent. Hence it’s almost certain that the ID card project will never get out of the foreplay stage. This government will take years and squander billions of pounds devising the system, but then the democratic blessing in disguise will kick in: Labour will almost certainly lose the next election before this totalitarian scheme can come on stream.

It’s far from guaranteed that the next government will be much better but, in the good democratic tradition, one can be certain it’ll undo most things done by its predecessor. One of its easiest and most visible claims to virtue will be to ditch the ID card scheme and write off all the billions wasted.

I can’t cover every aspect of this exercise in sinister Marxist tyranny, nor is it my intention. I’m only proposing a methodology for decorticating anything this government does. And the starting point is realising that things like ID cards can only be analysed in the light of Marxist ideology. An evil ideology practised by evil people to achieve evil ends.

P.S. The other day, I saw a video of a Russian Archpriest whose name I didn’t catch railing against the soulless, godless materialist West. Nothing new there, but the sample list of principal Western culprits gave me a start.

Father Whatsisname singled out Charles Darwin, Adam Smith and Duns Scotus. I can understand Darwin or, stretching things a bit, perhaps even Smith. But Duns Scotus?

That important Scottish theologian was a contemporary of Aquinas, with whom he sometimes disagreed. Yet even a confirmed Thomist would hesitate to describe anyone who isn’t one as a godless materialist. Duns Scotus was a Franciscan friar, for God’s sake.

This goes to show that, when a church attaches itself to a wicked state, it itself becomes wicked – and in this case also moronic.

If you think that, you may be right. Or you may be wrong. I really have no way of knowing and, much as it hurts me to have to say this, neither do you.

Neither – and this is the salient point – do Western economists who pronounce on the matter with all the weight of authority conferred by their degrees, grants and tenures. And you can confirm this scathing conclusion by giving them a simple test.

You’ll find that these chaps know exactly how to assess the state of an economy. They read charts, graphs, and indicators as easily as you read your morning paper.

They can juggle 10-digit numbers as dexterously as you can move the 10 fingers on your hands. Ask them anything about debt-to-GDP ratios, inflation rates, manufacturing indices, exchange mechanisms, stock market quotations, and they’ll talk your ear off, telling you more than you want to know.

And most of the time, they’ll be right – not necessarily in their predictions, but certainly in their analysis of the data in the public domain. That way they’ll pass the first half of our test, earning some right to pass judgement on the economy of any country from Spain to Sweden any everywhere in between.

That gives them the reason, albeit a rather spurious one, to look down on economic ignoramuses like you and me.

Want to wipe that smug smirk off their faces? Then ask them all the same questions about the drug economy in Venezuela, the people-smuggling economy in the south of Europe or the mafia economy in Italy. What exactly are their gross turnovers and net profits? Personnel costs? Staff fluidity? Growth prospects?

Ask them anything at all – they won’t have a clue. Yet they pass confident judgement about the state of the Russian economy, which is much closer to that of a mafia than that of any country from Spain to Sweden and everywhere in between.

The criminal government in the Kremlin casts a giant shadow on the economy, and it’s in this shadow that the economy operates. The Kremlin gang may have more or less accurate answers to the hypothetical questions we’ve asked our hypothetical economists. But no one else does.

That’s even in Russia herself, never mind the proverbial groves of Western academe or assorted consultancies and think tanks. They may know that a giant shadow economy exists there, but they have no idea about the production rates of shadow factories, the shadow profits enterprises derive by selling their goods in the shadow world.

But in spite of their understandable ignorance, they look at the figures published by the official Kremlin sources or in the Russian and Western economic journals, and make confident predictions about how soon that country’s economy will bite the dust.

They’ve been coming up with such prognoses since massive Western sanctions were imposed in 2022, supposedly giving the Russian economy just months before collapse. Yet there it is, still ticking along nicely, still churning out enough hardware to kill a most satisfying number of Ukrainians.

Speaking of the Russian armament industry, a groundbreaking report in the Italian newspaper Linkiesta has shed some light on the aforementioned shadow. Apparently, vast amounts of Russian infantry weapons, including both assault and sniper rifles, are reaching the Italian mafia through Sicilian ports and the Friuli province to the north of Venice.

The Kalashnikovs were manufactured by the state-owned Tula factory in 2010-2020, which makes them newer than most of the weapons used by the Russian frontline troops in the Ukraine. All these rifles miss a small but telling part: serial number.

Experts believe that at least 20 per cent of Russian weaponry is made specifically for international mafias and the black market. Moreover, mountains of arms and ammunition reach Russia from sanction-busting factories in China, North Korea, Azerbaijan and other countries. A good chunk of those illegal exports go straight into the shadow economy.

All this creates mighty financial streams, with numerous rivulets diverted into the shadow economy and, which is roughly the same thing, into the Kremlin coffers. The Russian army is doing its best to keep up.

As the war escalates, more and more weapons and ammunition reach army units, which then sell some of the arms on to third parties – and I bet these don’t include legitimate states. That’s partly why Russian troops often have to fight with antediluvian weapons: the newer ones disappear in the maelstrom of the shadow economy.

In fact, Linkiesta estimates that the army is right up there in the long list of corrupt Russian institutions.

The routes of arms traffic are roughly the same as those for transporting fuel, oil and other contraband. The principal transit points used to be in Syria, but now Egypt, Tunisia and Libya are the main intermediaries. Though Linkiesta’s investigation focused on Italy, it’s obvious that Russian weapon contraband reaches other European countries as well.

An important point is that this isn’t just a display of unsanctioned entrepreneurial spirit. The management of the state-owned Tula factory would never dream of making vast numbers of rifles without serial numbers barring a direct order from the Kremlin.

Illegal traffic in weapons and oil has always provided a source of finance for Russia’s war on the Ukraine. This has been going on for at least 10 years, since before the full-scale invasion.

Actually, the Italian mafia may not be the end user of illegal Russian weapons, not all of them at any rate. These days it’s not just legitimate economies that go global, but criminal ones as well.

In fact, more and more organised crime is so seamlessly fused with rogue states that it’s hard to tell them apart. Russia has taken advantage of some aspects of this convergence and pioneered some others.

Rogue regimes and criminal gangs flood international markets with arms and drugs, while residually civilised countries look the other way. Trump, for example, finds it easier to chastise Canada and Mexico for the smuggling of the synthetic narcotic fentanyl than to take issue with China that manufactures much of it.

Most of the income generated by smuggling bypasses the usual monitoring channels by being denominated in cryptocurrencies. This is an ingenious tool custom-made for contraband and money laundering. The Russians take full advantage.

Over 80 per cent of all Russian commercial transactions, including the official ones, are denominated in cryptocurrencies. This detail escapes the eagle eyes of Western economists, those who can’t understand why the Russian economy hasn’t collapsed yet, but nevertheless keep insisting that it soon will.

The Russian state is unique in history. It’s formed by a homogeneous blend of secret police and organised crime, combining the knowhow, methods and resources of both components. That’s why normal standards applied to above-board economies are useless when trying to understand Russia.

There is only one way to assure the collapse of the Russian criminal economy: destroying the criminal Russian state. But that’s a task for statesmen and generals, not economic consultants insisting that another tranche of sanctions will bring Putin to his knees. I hate to break the news, but it won’t.