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I’ve lived in four countries and have at times been treated as a foreigner in each, including the one of my birth.

So take it from me: a bit of ethnic snobbery can improve the breed on both sides, the snobs and their targets.

The success of some ethnic and racial minorities, such as Indians in Britain, Vietnamese in the USA, Germans in Russia, Italians in Argentina, Jews and Chinese just about everywhere, shows how victims of ethnic hostility can, if they so choose, put it to productive use.

If, say, a Jew is taught from birth that being merely twice as good as his gentile competitor isn’t good enough, and nothing short of 10 times as good will do, he’ll be more likely to become at least twice as good.

There will, of course, be some collateral damage – rather than being made stronger, some will be deeply damaged. But that would intensify the natural selection within the group, if you’ll forgive my waxing Darwinian in such a cold-blooded fashion.

Natural selection doesn’t explain much, and certainly not everything. But it does explain something, and this is one example.

So in a way diasporic groups should welcome all those ‘kikes’, ‘chinks’, ‘wops’ and ‘dagos’, even though I know how hard it is to react with such equanimity.

This point is easy to argue, though many, especially those blessed with heightened sensitivity, will disagree. But what about the effect ethnic prejudice has on those who mete it out? The argument in favour becomes harder, but not impossible.

It’s in people’s nature to prefer the company of their own kind and be on guard against those perceived as strangers. Not all natural qualities are commendable, but this one is too human to disparage.

The Greeks despised all outlanders, so did the Romans. The Persians saw the world as concentric circles of virtue, with themselves at the centre and goodness dissipating towards the periphery. The Japanese saw the gaijin as savages.

These days the Dutch and the French crack jokes about the Belgians, the Russians about the Georgians and the Chukchi, the Americans about the Mexicans and the Poles, the English about the Irish, the Swedes about the Finns – and everyone has fun at the expense of the Jews.

This isn’t always innocent, and sometimes the seemingly good-natured quips belie real nastiness lurking underneath.

But usually such variably funny humour and indeed ethnically pejorative terms serve simply to establish, emphasise and protect the jokers’ group identity, which can be done by stressing both sameness and otherness.

However, care must be taken for word not to become deed. Haughty disdain giving way to hatred may end up as persecution, which must be nipped in the bud.

People aren’t entitled to protection against everything they find offensive, but they are entitled to all the security civilised society has to offer, along with equality before the law.

Any attempt to deprive ethnic minorities of this entitlement offends not only them personally but society at large. Hence it must be discouraged and, if need be, punished.

Yet penalising pejorative words and ethnic jokes, even when they are manifestly innocent, is a treatment that’s much worse than the disease. In fact it may well be lethal.

When the state first encourages, then promotes and then enforces totalitarian (also known as PC) Zeitgeist, it never does so out of noble intentions. Its aim is to expand and perpetuate its own power while limiting individual freedom.

It’s in this context that we ought to view the current hysteria involving the football manager Malky Mckay and his new employer, Wigan owner Dave Whelan.

Mckay made Cardiff City hugely successful but then was fired, along with recruitment head Iain Moody, for some questionable transfer deals.

As part of the investigation Moody’s house was raided and all his computers seized. So far no evidence of criminal acts has been found or at any rate reported.

What was found were all sorts of communications suggesting that Messrs Mackay and Moody don’t always express themselves in strict compliance with the culture of diversity.

They circulated a photograph entitled Black Monopoly, where every square said ‘Go to Jail’, referred to Cardiff’s Malaysian owner Tan as ‘f***ing Chink’, pointed out the Jews’ inordinate affection for money, described a colleague as ‘gay snake’, expressed a preference for recruiting white players, suggested that it would be nice to ‘bounce on [female agent’s] falsies’ – and in general gave every indication that in their private correspondence they aren’t always guided by Debrett’s Etiquette for Young Ladies.

The ensuing outcry filled the papers for a week at least, with the severity of suggested punishments increasing towards the left end of the publishing spectrum. Capital punishment wasn’t mentioned, but only because it’s not on the books.

As a minimum, the papers were united in demanding that Mackay never work in football again. He let the side down by compromising the image of footballers’ pristine purity we like to cherish in our hearts.

A footballer, you understand, is there primarily to set an example of probity and virtue for the young generation. Even if he spends his working life trying to break opponents’ legs, in the after hours he’s expected to impersonate a Franciscan abbot.

Though these tattooed chaps frustrate such expectation every time they go out on the town, it doesn’t matter – provided they stay within the confines of Zeitgeist rectitude.

Stabbing a lit cigar into someone’s eye, taunting American visitors in the aftermath of 9/11, driving drunk with a Stop sign attached to the rear bumper, bottling or nutting a nightclub doorman – all these are, well, if not exactly forgivable, at least understandable.

Boys will be boys and all that, as long as they transgress against individuals only. But God forbid they offend the prevailing ethos – no punishment can be too severe.

Nevertheless, rather than becoming a bus driver (at best), Malky Mackay has just been appointed manager of Wigan Athletic, owned by Dave Whelan, 77, himself an ex-player.

Clearly this self-made millionaire had to have an ulterior motive that went beyond simply finding a manager with a proven record of success.

An investigation was in order, and what do you know, it established gruesome facts about Mr Whelan. Apparently – are you sitting down? – he can’t see what the brouhaha is all about. Who among you, he said – out loud! – never referred to a Chinese person as a Chink?

Moreover, he opined in a Guardian interview that “Jewish people chase money more than everybody else”, although few Jews among my friends have been as persistent in that pursuit as Mr Whelan himself.

Boorish, yes; silly, of course (just consider the paper Whelan chose for airing his observation); promoting derogatory ethnic stereotypes, no doubt; offering the traditional anti-Semitic apology along the lines of ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’, definitely.

But a criminal unworthy to be part of the saintly football community? Absolutely not.

Yet this is exactly the punishment for which our press is clamouring. Both Mackay and Whelan are supposed to be drummed out of football for ever, with the latter banned from access to his own club.

This is worse than just hysterical overreaction: this orgy of political correctness is fascism by a different name.

Admittedly, Messrs Whelan and Mckay aren’t the kind of people I often see at my dining-room table. But I’d rather break bread with these uncouth chaps than with their detractors.

I don’t mind chatting about football all evening (though my wife might). But I do mind listening even for a second to the hypocritical bien pensant inanities one can confidently expect from Guardian readers – and writers.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALEX BOOT will be talking about his latest book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick next Tuesday, 25th November at 1.00 pm sharp in the Griffin Room at The Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London EC3V 3PD.   Alex, who has proved one of the most popular (and provocative!) speakers to address The Freedom Association’s Freedom in the City events, will be signing copies of the book, which will be available for sale at the event.   Admission is free, and open to all. There will be a voluntary collection at the end of the meeting, to help cover the costs of room hire etc.   Should you wish to have lunch before or after the event, you will find that the Counting House serves a wide range of (by London standards) reasonably priced food.    I do hope that you will come and hear Alex, and look forward to seeing you at the Counting House on Tuesday.

Observing the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’.

In 2014 the mass murderer Charles Manson, 80, proves yet again that evil isn’t just banal. It’s also extremely attractive in all sorts of ways, including sexual.

This monster, serving a life sentence for the 1969 cult murder of the actress Sharon Tate and seven others, including her unborn child, has been issued a licence to marry a 26-year-old woman who says she loves him.

The bride, Afton Burton, first became smitten with the bridegroom, who had Sharon Tate’s baby cut out of her womb and butchered, when she was 17.

At that impressionable age she read Charlie’s jailhouse scribbles on the harm nasty people do to the environment and realised he was a man after her own heart.

Since then this loving daughter of Baptist parents, who inexplicably disapprove of her nuptial plans, has moved to California to be nearer Charlie’s prison. She has been visiting him regularly, though not in a conjugal way (as a lifer, he’s denied that privilege, even assuming that at his age he’d be able to take advantage of it).

The girl bears an uncanny resemblance to some murderous female members of the Manson ‘family’, and the same question can be asked of her as of them.

What exactly is the bridegroom’s attraction?

What, for that matter, is the attraction of other murderers, many of whom have panting fans ‘on the out’?

Certainly in Afton’s case this question is hard to answer in any rational terms and yet, until we hear the contrary, we have to assume the girl is sane.

Considering that the bridegroom will next be up for parole in his mid-90s, Afton can’t look forward to any domestic bliss, however short-lived. Nor will her passion for Charlie ever be consummated in any traditional way.

Generally speaking, it’s possible to love deeply flawed and violent people. Though we like for something, we love in spite of everything.

But, delving into the issue a bit deeper than Hannah Arendt, perhaps we’ll discover that the answer isn’t so close to the surface.

For I’m convinced that many people are attracted to murderers or other nasties not in spite of their being evil but because of it.

Gangsta thugs with a string of criminal convictions to their names are seldom short of middleclass girlfriends. And it’s out of ‘lurv’ that many women routinely stay with violent men who break their bones.

Looking on a larger scale, historically unprecedented mass murderers, such as Lenin, Stalin or Hitler, had millions of fans in the West.

Many of those didn’t necessarily share the ideologies behind the murders – they were driven not by theoretical abstractions but by the anomic evil within them.

The attraction was often sexual, as it was with many Bloomsbury chaps who envied the leather-jerkined commissars their masculinity, something they themselves didn’t have.

There was something irresistibly butch about all that rustling leather crisscrossed by belts supporting Mausers. Beats regular rough trade any day.

Or take women like Unity Mitford, who loved the Führer not just ideologically but erotically. Opinions differ on whether or not she sated her passion with Hitler himself, but she certainly entertained SS officers created in his image, a dozen at a time.

Evil attracts; absolute evil attracts absolutely. That never changes, and today one sees hordes of so-called conservatives, both male and female, pining for the muscular masculinity of Col. Putin (Peter Hitchens, ring your office).

And I doubt that all those British Muslims who join the ranks of ISIS cannibals do so out of Islamic piety. It’s much more likely that they are attracted by the horrific violence that they can both admire and perpetrate.

That sort of thing may or may not have sexual overtones. But even when it does, those aren’t the initial impulse.

Rather sex in such instances is the expression of deep-seated evil, whose origin is not in the libido of Freud’s fancy but in the workings of the hideous creature to which an earlier source refers as ‘the prince of this world’.

I hope when the long-awaited wedding takes place, whoever is officiating will say “What therefore Satan hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

The rest of us should perhaps take some time to ponder evil, and why it’s so much more than just banal.

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

It has taken 20 years after female ordination for the Church of England to go completely, as opposed to partially, bonkers.

The C of E Synod yesterday rubber-stamped the consecration of women bishops, thereby confirming its PC credentials at the small cost of relinquishing whatever residual claim it had to being a Christian ecclesia.

To reinforce the impression that we’re dealing with a clinical, rather than merely theological, aberration, the Archbishop of Canterbury mournfully admitted that it might be as long as 10 years before the episcopate faithfully reflects the demographic makeup of mankind… sorry, personkind is what I mean.

This reminds me of the Soviet story of an alcoholic looking at an “Alcohol is slow death” poster and saying “Well, we’re in no rush.”

In the overall state of euphoria some Synod members confidently predicted that before long we’d be blessed with gay bishops as well, and they didn’t mean it as the antonym of morose.

They missed a trick for it’s likely that two birds, as it were, will be killed with one stone. If malicious rumours are to be believed, some of the women candidates for bishoprics combine the two essential qualifications by being both female and homosexual.

Considering their general take on theology and Christian tradition, they probably see this as a reflection on the dual nature of Jesus Christ.

Commenting on the historic ruling, for which he had campaigned with nothing short of maniacal persistence, Archbishop Welby couldn’t contain his joy: “Today we can begin to embrace a new way of being the church and moving forward together. We will also continue to seek the flourishing of the church of those who disagree.”

I’m not sure I fully understand the second sentence. If His Grace meant conservative Anglicanism within the C of E, then some may accuse him of hypocrisy. For years now, under the leadership of its principal prelates the Church has been marginalising conservative, which is to say real, Christians.

They have been effectively silenced at church assemblies, such as this Synod; their priests have been pushed out on the slightest pretexts; their continued use of the Prayer Book and the Authorised Version has been discouraged and mocked.

Not long ago I met an intelligent young man who had matriculated at a seminary and was about to be ordained in the Church of England. He enthusiastically admitted that he had never in his life attended a 1662 service, which ought to tell you all you need to know about the meaning of ‘moving forward together’.

Probably coming up next: making rock ‘n roll music mandatory for all Anglican liturgy.

Contrary to the misconception dominant for 2,000 years, when Jesus said “you are the rock on which my church will be built”, he wasn’t making a pun on the Greek word for Peter (Petrus). As we have to acknowledge now, Jesus presciently foresaw the advent of rock ‘n roll and saw its vast potential as the building block of Christian worship.

When, by way of moving forward together, the proposed measure goes into effect, such services will gradually start to downplay the God part of the masses, turning them into out-and-out pop concerts. Ushers at the door will be making sure that all three sexes are proportionately represented in the audience (formerly known as congregation).

Clearly, the Catholic Church has much to learn from the Anglicans. For the time being, Pope Francis, whose natural instincts are similar to Archbishop Welby’s, has been forced to accept grudgingly that “children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother.”

Personally, I would have tried to express the same thought in the terms of the God-given natural order, rather than relying on the purely secular construct of rights. But hey, let’s not quibble – we must be grateful for whatever we get.

However, His Holiness didn’t specify the sex of either parent, which, depending on how you read it, may be either a careless or deliberate omission. After all, two homosexuals wishing to adopt a child may nominate each other for these formerly ‘gender-specific’ roles.

If, as I optimistically believe, the Pope hasn’t yet realised that such old-fashioned terms might these days need qualifying, then it’s clear that orthodox Christians still exert some influence at the Vatican.

This may point out the direction in which orthodox Christians among the Anglicans may consider ‘moving forward together’.

Swiftly shifting from religion to politics, one has to compliment the Tory party for its restraint – while wishing it had been more decisive.

Desperately trying to keep the projected  margin of Ukip victory at Rochester and Strood in single digits, a Tory spokesman kindly explained to the local electorate the dangers of voting wrong.

Should you in your folly, he proclaimed, decide to vote for Ukip, the value of your house will drop like a rock. Potential buyers wouldn’t want to move into the otherwise desirable area knowing that Ukip voters roam free at night.

Truer words have never been spoken in any lunatic asylum of my knowledge. But more strident words have.

In this instance, the threat would have carried so much more punch had the voters been told that a cheaper house would be the least of their worries.

Vote Ukip, the Tories should have said to complete the clinical picture, and your wife will have an affair with your best friend, who will then join forces with her to poison you and reclaim your devalued house. Alternatively, your brakes will fail at a motorway speed, you’ll contract Ebola at your Aids clinic and you’ll never see an openly homosexual bishop in your area.

I’ll keep you posted on any future developments. Meanwhile, may I suggest installing another lock and a more up-to-date alarm system?

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

Sir John, who, I don’t mind admitting, is my political, moral and intellectual idol, hit the nail on the head the other day, with Ukip being the nail and Nigel Farage the head.

Ukip, explained my idol, “is peddling sheer nastiness” that is “profoundly un-British in every way”.

In my case he was preaching to the choir, for I never diverge from Sir John’s judgement on anything. But, for the benefit of the nay-sayers among my readers (and God knows there are plenty of those), I rang Sir John up and asked him to enlarge on his concept of Britishness, so egregiously betrayed by Ukip.

The great man kindly took some time from his busy schedule of planning his season at the Oval and Lords to talk to me and, vicariously, to you. This is what he said:

“They are anti-everything. They are anti-politics, they are anti-foreigner, they are anti-immigrant, they are anti-aid.

“That’s un-British. Real Brits are never anti-anything. Except Ukip, that is, especially when they’re about to commit the ultimately un-British, treasonous act of winning another parliamentary seat from the Tories.

“For example, both Norma and Edwina are real Brits. That’s why they’re up for anything and down on nothing and, well, no one.

“So I asked them if they agreed with my judgement of Ukip. Now Norma and Edwina don’t always agree on everything and hardly ever on me, I mean with me.

“But here they refused to sit on the fence, or anything else for that matter. Yes, John, they said, you’re absolutely right.

“You were the best prime minister Britain has ever had, and you were for things, not against them. You were a pro kind of bloke and never a con.

“False modesty aside, I had to concur. I have deep convictions that are none of them negative, like Ukip’s. They’re all positive, even if the consequences of practising them sometimes weren’t.

“For example, I was very positive about Maggie when she was positive about me, all the way to making me Chancellor.

“Then I was equally positive about the chaps who stabbed Maggie in the back after she turned negative on me. John, she said, could make a good doorstop and that’s about it. Well, served her right, that… Sorry, I must remain positive.

“When I became prime minister, I was positive about Europe or, to be specific, the European Union.

“That’s why I signed the Maastricht Treaty with nary a negative thought in mind.

“Why? Because we’d had a good innings as an independent nation and what did we have to show for it? That… Maggie Thatcher.

“I felt it was time to say yes to all the good things in life: German bratwurst, Italian pasta, French wine, Romanian… well, you know what I mean.

“And the only way to enjoy all those wonderful things was to hand our so-called sovereignty to the Germans, French, Italians and yes, I stand by my convictions, Romanians.

“Hanging on to our so-called sovereignty was putting the negative cart before the positive horse, or leg before wicket, if you’d rather.

“I also felt positive about the single European currency. Part of the reason is that on my European travels I could never quite figure out how much a pack of Y-fronts cost in real money.

“Arithmetic was never my strong suit, which is why in my youth I failed the bus-conductor exam and decided to become prime minister instead.

“So, in my positive state of mind, I put Britain in the ERM and on course to joining the single currency designed to make us as successful as our oldest ally Portugal.

“The anti-everything bastards point out that as an immediate result Britain lost £3.4 billion, but I like to look on the bright, British side: my true Brit friend George Soros made £1 billion out of it and, apart from the EU, who better to spend our money for us?

“And I’m still as positive about the EU as I’ve always been. Outside the EU we’ll never become as prosperous as our oldest ally Portugal is. Or our newest ally Bulgaria.

“That’s what being British is all about. It’s also about sharing, and Norma and Edwina agree wholeheartedly, in that particularly British way of theirs.

“So I applaud my very British friend Dave for being ready to share our wealth, which we owe to the EU in any case.

“Dave is about to spend another £600 million on flood defences in Africa, which is a British thing to do.

“Those anti-everything Ukip bastards scream that Somerset is about to be hit by the worst floods in history, and there’s no money in the kitty to do anything about it.

“Charity, they say, begins at home, and trust them to come up with a phrase no real Brit has ever heard.

“What begins at home, you negative un-British bastards, isn’t charity but sheer nastiness.

“Transferring funds for fighting Ebola and Children in Need, I mean helping children in need, not fighting them, is British. Voting for Ukip isn’t.

“Why do people do it? Even though these bastards are anti-children and Ebola victims?

“Out of sheer frustration with the ongoing recession, the belief they are being left behind our oldest ally Portugal and our newest ally Bulgaria.

“The counterpoint to that, and I hope, Alex, you don’t mind the posh term, it means the British alternative, is to banish the negative thoughts and vote Tory or, at a pinch, Labour.

“You know and I know and your British readers know, that the economy will improve soon, by the end of next April to be exact.

“For as long as the coalition remains positive about getting our national debt up to two trillion, that’s 2.25 trillion euros by the way, the economy has nowhere to go but up.

“And once my friend Dave gets it up, people will again feel positive. They’ll feel British – unlike those nasty nattering negativists of Ukip.”        

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

Arithmetic and statistics are useful tools for liars. A little massaging here, a little bending there, and suddenly a lie sounds plausible.

When it comes to liars in our government, they don’t have to distort their sums to make a false point. All it takes is applying arithmetic to issues that cry out for more sophisticated tools, those requiring more than just the ability to add and subtract.

The recently released report on the economic effects of EU immigration is a case in point.

Reducing the whole complex argument to a simple calculation, our leaders added up the amount of tax EU immigrants have paid, subtracted the amount of benefits they’ve received, including their use of social services, and declared triumphantly that the difference is plus £5 billion or some such.

Considering such clear-cut advantages, the likes of John Major must be downright daft when they beg those stern EU officials to agree, in their munificence, to let us reduce the scale of immigration.

If the 243,000 migrants arriving from Europe in the year ending in March 2014 delivered five billion to our economy, then, say, 20 million of them would add half a trillion, a third of our national debt. And 60 million would wipe the debt off altogether. So why not fling our doors open even wider?

This report deceives by asserting implicitly that the economic effect of mass immigration is easy to calculate. It isn’t.

A little illustration, if I may. Confronted with a choice of earning £2,000 a month at a local garage or receiving £1,500 from ‘social’, a Polish welder commendably chooses the dignity of honest labour.

Ostensibly the Exchequer thus saves £1,500 it otherwise would have to pay out, while getting an extra £600 or thereabouts in tax.

Granted, the welder and his family will be using the NHS and his children will get the full benefit of our ‘free education’ (which is in fact neither). But the net effect of his presence in England still looks positive, which is what the report seeks to prove.

However, do let us take a closer look at the arithmetic, before we consider more serious matters. If the Pole hadn’t graced our shores with his presence, how would the welder vacancy have been filled?

When a garage needs a welder, it can’t do without one. Hence it would have hired a native-born worker, and don’t tell me that, even considering the catastrophe going by the name of our comprehensive education, a Brit can’t be taught how to weld.

That same Brit now goes unemployed, collecting instead the same £1,500 the Pole would have picked up had he not taken the job.

Also, had the garage hired Kevin instead of Zbigniew, the Brit would probably have been paid more.

As I can tell you from my own experience going back to the time long before either Kevin or Zbigniew was born, new arrivals are so desperate for a job they’ll accept derisory pay. To expect that employers wouldn’t take advantage of their plight constitutes a woeful misreading of the innate fallibility of man.

A higher pay would have meant a higher tax, making the Exchequer even better off. By contrast, the overall downward pressure on wages exerted by new arrivals, makes employment less desirable for Brits, and welfare more so. After all, expecting people to work when they can get the same income by doing nothing would again be presuming too much on human goodness.

All things considered, the economic balance sheet begins to look much less attractive than the government report wants us to believe.

These are just the most transparent falsehoods. Among the hidden costs, quite apart from the unbearable extra pressure on our already creaking social services, is the toll exacted on the whole infrastructure.

Take our streets and roads, as one example among many. With a quarter million new arrivals every year (and this is just from the EU), British thoroughfares are becoming more crowded than ever, which increases the number of accidents, especially since not all immigrants come from countries where they have to take a stringent driving test.

And, again spoken from personal experience, even a competent driver needs quite some time to adjust to driving on the left. Meanwhile he’s likely to cause an accident, potentially requiring more NHS time.

Also increasing is the wear and tear of road surfaces, necessitating more frequent repair works and again making accidents more likely.

These are small and seemingly trivial examples, but they add up with sufficient persuasiveness to make us abhor the statistical larceny of the report.

Another, still purely arithmetical, falsehood is treating all immigrants from the EU as a homogeneous group, wherein average numbers actually mean something.

If you take the Duke of Westminster, Richard Branson and every member of my family, our average annual income will be in eight digits. On the basis of this perfectly accurate statistic, what do you think you’ve learned? The square root of zilch, is the answer.

Contrary to the assurances of EU champions, there isn’t, nor will there ever be, such a thing as a single European nation. Europe may cease to be an aggregate of states, but it will for ever remain an aggregate of nations.

And looking at, say, France and Bulgaria, it takes a blind man not to see they’re as different from each other as either of them is from Peru or Mexico.

Lumping together a French banker pulling down £1,000,000 a year in the City and a Romany beggar harassing pedestrians in Piccadilly can be done for one purpose only: to cheat.

All in all calculating the overall economic effect of mass EU immigration is difficult, but it’s not impossible. It would, however, take serious thought along with much gathering and classification of information, putting into the equation infinitely more variables than the half dozen or so used in the report.

What’s impossible to calculate is the cultural and social damage.

All arrivals from the EU have been raised in a culture and under a legal system based on different or, in the case of Eastern Europe, diametrically opposite principles from ours. The aforementioned French banker may be trusted to adapt, but what about the aforementioned Romany beggar?

Again the government resorts to the same trick of lumping the two together. This is sufficient to claim that crime falls, rather than rises, in areas where many immigrants live.

True enough, the arrival of thousands of French families into my part of London hasn’t noticeably made the streets unsafe to walk. But areas blessed with the blight of heavy Romanian and Bulgarian influx report altogether different results.

Yet even supposing that all EU immigrants are well-behaved, law-abiding and generally angelic, their presence beyond a certain critical mass is destructive.

A few thousand Poles here or there would add to the rich panoply of life, and I for one like the odd authentically Polish meal in a local restaurant. However, a few million of them, plus tens of millions of other foreigners, may well change England beyond a point where it remains England.

Such an outcome is precisely what the EU, aided and abetted by our ruling elite, craves. And, considering the credulity, or perhaps indifference, of a growing swathe of our population, they may just get what they want.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

The famous, if probably apocryphal, headline in a London newspaper said “Fog over Channel, continent cut off.”

Whether real or made up, the phrase has become proverbial for the same reason proverbs become proverbial: it conveys a simple truth.

People tend to view geography from the vantage point of their own country. It is central; other lands are peripheral.

Never mind that the continent is somewhat larger than Britain. For an Englishman his country is larger than life.

The headline proceeds from this assumption and yet also has a chuckle about it. Sure enough, most Englishmen would agree with Cecil Rhodes that “to be born English is to win first prize in the lottery of life.” But they’ll do so with an ironic and self-deprecating smile.

It’s partly because of its ability to laugh at itself that this island has never become insular. While singing about England’s green and pleasant land providing the site for a new Jerusalem, the country has always happily intermingled and traded with other nations in every corner of His creation.

Russia lacks this ability. Her patriotism is served neat, undiluted by self-irony, good taste or any sense of history and her real place in it. That’s a heady drink, with enough punch to intoxicate the nation into crazy behaviour.

Thus for much of her history Russia, despite straddling two continents, has found herself in isolation from the rest of the world. Or rather, it is the world that has been isolated from the glorious Third Rome, if the Russians are to be believed.

If the world refuses to share Russia’s view of herself, she can go it alone. If the world isn’t with Russia, it’s against her, and so much the worse for the world.

It’s in the context of this mentality that Putin’s Russia and her current actions are to be viewed. Perceiving correctly that the demob-happy West has neither the stomach nor the wherewithal to fight, Putin has begun an aggressive war against a sovereign European state.

In spite of that the West has refused to let on that it’s aware of the savage nature of Putin’s Russia. In spite of imposing mildly painful punitive sanctions, Western leaders continue to wipe Putin’s sputum off their faces and invite him to come back into their eagerly awaiting embrace.

One such invitation was to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, and you’d think Putin would RSVP with an enthusiastic acceptance.

Here’s his chance to present Russia’s case, which does need presenting. As the sanctions, feeble though they are, begin to bite, gnawing at Russia’s brittle economic bones, and the price of oil drops below $80 a barrel (at least $20 under the level at which Russia’s Nigeria-style economy can remain solvent), what better moment to negotiate? What better time to fake friendliness even if it’s not sincerely felt?

Instead Russia crumbled the proffered invitation and flung it into the West’s face. Neither Putin nor even his poodle Medvedev will be attending the Davos talk shop, it has been declared.

The underlying message is as simple as it’s eternal to Russia. If the West, and industrialised East, choose to isolate themselves from Russia, let them. With Putin in the lead, and his poodle on the lead, Russia will henceforth decline any mollifying peace offers.

Meanwhile, Russian tanks and personnel carriers are driving into the Ukraine, with President Poroshenko honestly admitting they can’t be stopped by any military means. The Ukraine has to rely on ‘negotiations’ instead, which is akin to negotiating with a mugger to leave you two quid for the bus fare home.

For the first time since 1945 a European country is being dismembered by invaders. However, in this instance the invader has no just cause.

The situation is fraught with danger. By refusing every overture offered by the West, Putin is painting himself into a corner and may feel he has to fight his way out.

The West doesn’t have much room for manoeuvre either. Just like those Left Bank Parisians shrugging their shoulders and asking rhetorically “Mourir pour Danzig?” in 1939, it’s reasonably clear that Europeans won’t want to die for Kiev in 2014.

Even if they felt differently, Nato no longer has enough presence in Europe to stop Putin’s tanks in their tracks. The only possible restraining mechanism is the same one that so far has prevented major wars in Europe since 1945: and it’s not the EU, as it mendaciously claims. It’s the American nuclear umbrella.

However, by effectively declaring war on what’s left of our civilisation, Putin implies he has no fear that this umbrella will be opened over Russian cities as he’s devastating Ukrainian ones. He’s probably right.

So what countermeasures are left? More sanctions? Driving the price of oil down artificially?

Such measures may prove devastating to a country where millions already subsist on the brink of starvation. Yet anyone who thinks that starving Russians are ever a burning concern for Russian leaders, should read a few textbooks on modern Russian history.

Putin’s billions are intact in Western banks, and so are the billions of his cronies. If not all of them can have access to their purloined wealth at the moment, so what?

Their money will simply accrue interest, while Russia finds herself one on one with the world – not for the first time, nor for the last. It’s just that at this time the world seems more impotent than ever.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being constitutionally unable to admire demagogues, whatever their sermon, I could never warm up to Martin Luther King.

This isn’t to say that his cause, as generally perceived, wasn’t just. Racial discrimination is abominable on every level, moral, practical, legal, intellectual – and above all religious.

How self-professed Christians, who had equality inscribed even on their secular banners, could enforce Jim Crow segregation laws until 1965, is a question I’ve always found baffling.

The same way, I suppose the answer should be, as Thomas Jefferson, the man who did the actual inscribing, could whip his slaves to mincemeat for trying to escape or breed them (at times personally) using the same husbandry methods that worked a treat on livestock.

It’s clear that even in his time, to say nothing of ours, there was a large gap between a politician’s actions, indeed beliefs, in private and his pronouncements in public. Demagoguery is there to fill the gap, and it generally does a good job unless what’s to be filled isn’t so much a gap as a chasm.

When this is the case, private actions can jeopardise the cause championed by the politician. Res privata can destroy res publica.

The destruction can be especially severe when the politician spends his spare time in Sodom and Gomorrah while preaching from the pulpit the moral delights of the garden of Eden.

Yet King’s public cause was so just that it survived his wholehearted attempts to undermine it by his private dissolution. What is truly amazing is that his personal reputation has also survived intact. In fact, King has been elevated to secular sainthood, and woe betide anyone attempting to remove or sully his halo.

It’s in this context that one should read a letter written to King by one of J. Edgar Hoover’s deputies, generally believed to be William C. Sullivan.

(I inserted the disclaimer simply because the author of the letter describes King as “a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes”, and Sullivan appears to be white in his photographs.)

In a way the precise authorship of the missive is a matter of academic interest only, for it’s clear it came from the highest echelons of the FBI.

The author attaches the tapes secretly recorded by FBI taps on King’s phone and bugs in his hotel rooms, a surveillance programme authorised by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

He issued that authorisation because an investigation had shown that Stanley Levinson, one of King’s trusted advisers, was a CPUSA member and Soviet spy through whom KGB funds were pumped into the civil rights movement.

In other words, the Soviets were using the movement for their own nefarious purposes in exactly the same way they used their entire network of front organisations, such as our own dear CND.

This justified the taps, yet they yielded results that had more to do with perversion than subversion. For King’s sex life, as revealed by the recordings, made Sodom look like a kindergarten outing to the Science Museum.

The author of the letter enclosed the tapes and commented on their content in a language of moral outrage that no politician of today would either feel or dare express.

Suggesting that King’s “immoral conduct [was] lower than that of a beast”, the author vented his feelings with unremitting gusto. Here are some scattered fragments (I retain the original syntax and spelling):

“You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that.”

“…a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile…”

Listen to the tapes and “you will find yourself and in all your dirt, filth, evil and moronic talk exposed on the record for all time…”

“…you will find… your filthy, dirty evil companions, male and female giving expression with you to your hidious abnormalities.”

“Satan could not do more.”

“Listen to yourself you filthy abnormal animal…”

The author then promised to publish the transcripts in 34 days, thereby destroying King for ever. However, he offered the addressee the honourable way out: suicide.

This was akin to an officers’ court convicting one of their comrades of dishonourable conduct and leaving him in a room alone with a bottle of whisky and a loaded revolver.

Since Martin Luther King was neither an officer nor a gentleman, it wasn’t his own bullet that ended his life. Yet the facts caught on tape, apart from the allusion to homosexual orgies, were widely known at the time.

Both King’s wife Coretta and his second in command Ralph Abernathy begged him to modify his behaviour, but in vain. King ignored Ralph and beat Coretta, another practice that doesn’t exactly jibe with secular canonisation.

The transcripts were never published in King’s lifetime, and he denied all charges of dissolution, prompting Hoover to call him “the most notorious liar in the country”.

Hoover judging someone else’s sexual morality may make the words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’ pop up in one’s mind. But, unlike King, Hoover neither sought nor received a posthumous reputation for rectitude.

Don’t know about you, but I experience intense Schadenfreude every time a leftie idol is brought down a peg or two. The question is, does a leader’s personal behaviour cast aspersion on his cause?

I can only answer this with a resounding ‘it depends’ – on the nature of the cause and the degree of misbehaviour. Privately though, I have to fight nausea every time I see someone living in the gutter trying to claim high moral ground.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

No doubt remembering that the devil finds work for idle hands, my friend Vlad has been a busy boy.

Thereby he has stayed on the side of the angels, even though not every one of his numerous exploits can be truthfully described as angelic.

For example, his Chinese hosts took exception to Vlad’s chivalrous gesture of wrapping a shawl around the shoulders of Peng Liyuan, President Xi Jinping’s wife.

That act of avuncular kindness was mistaken for a flirtatious pick-up attempt, which it probably wasn’t. The only thing Vlad could be accused of was ignorance of foreign mores, but that’s only a minor misdemeanour.

Other accusations fall more into the area of felony. For example, Vlad’s tanks are driving into the Ukraine, in defiance of the treaties, which, to be fair, no one this side of Peter Hitchens ever took seriously.

At the same time Vlad has been sending his warplanes on missions either invading the airspace of still independent nations or coming dangerously close to it.

Nato interceptors are being scrambled on a scale not seen since the Cold War, with Putin’s nuclear bombers overflying, well, the world. His tireless airborne activity has scared the wits out of Norwegians, Estonians, Swedes, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Canadians and even Californians.

At the same time Vlad has made arrangements to flog eight nuclear reactors to Iran, and there I was, thinking he was concerned about the Islamic threat. That bit of news upset me.

After all, since all the world leaders agree, in deed if not yet in word, that Iran is going to become a nuclear power come what may, it would be better if the Ayatollahs’ billions went to a Western country, such as France.

But what caught my eye more than anything else is Vlad’s foray into scholarly pursuits, specifically history.

Displaying the catholicity of interests not seen in any Soviet leader since Stalin, Vlad gathered historians together and taught them, well, history.

Or, to be more exact, he taught them how to teach history, to what purpose and based on which premises.

Vlad began by saying “Russia’s past was amazing, her present is more than marvellous and, as for the future, it’s greater than anything the wildest imagination could picture – that is the point of view for examining and writing Russian history.”

Oops, I’ve failed to check my sources yet again: Vlad didn’t say that. The author of that stimulating directive was actually Count Benckendorff (d. 1844), head of Russia’s secret police in the reign of Nicholas I.

Mea culpa, but I do plead extenuating circumstances. For what Vlad actually said faithfully reflected the spirit of Benckendorff’s command, and came close to reflecting the letter as well.

Not to cut too fine a point, Putin ordered historians to fiddle facts in the interests of the state.

A historian’s task, he orated, consists in defending “our views and interests”. He, the historian, must “convince the overwhelming majority of citizens that our approaches  are correct and objective [or rather]… win the battle for the minds, encouraging the people to adopt an active position on the basis of the knowledge you present as objective.”

To achieve this ambitious goal, “the content must be good, and the wrapper must be lurid and impressive”.

Benckendorff expressed himself more eloquently, but it’s the thought that counts, and the similarity between the two secret policemen that charms. Then again, Putin did say on 9 May that “continuity of generations is our chief asset”.

Another parallel I’ve unsuccessfully tried to suppress is between Putin’s lesson to historians and Stalin’s to writers.

In 1932 Putin’s idol assembled as many scribes as could fit into Gorky’s house and unveiled socialist realism, one artistic discipline obligatory for all.

The perplexed heirs to Tolstoy were more than ready to comply but, in order to avoid potentially fatal mistakes, begged the leader for a clarification. What exactly is socialist realism? “Write the truth,” explained Stalin. “That’s what socialist realism is all about.”

Eighty-two years later similarly inspired historians asked today’s leader to illustrate his meaning on the example of any event of the past.

Vlad kindly obliged, overturning with a magisterial swipe of hand every fact accepted as such by any historian pursuing the truth, rather than ‘our interests’.

An example, is that what you want? Well, here it is: the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Toxic falsifiers of history claim that it pushed the button for the Second World War. The two most satanic regimes in history formed an ad hoc alliance to divide Europe between them.

Both predators intended to attack the new ally at the first opportunity, with the victor feasting on the spoils of pan-European, and prospectively global, conquest. Meanwhile, they kicked off history’s most devastating war by assaulting Poland from two sides.

Yet, if we accept Putin’s belief that truth is anything that advances his interests, none of this is true.

The pact, explained Vlad, proved Stalin’s peaceful intentions. And as to Poland, she had only herself to blame. Didn’t she grab a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938, when the Germans moved in?

Well then, the subsequent bilateral rape of Poland merely evened the accounts (“scored an equalising puck”, was how Vlad put it, somewhat frivolously, in the terms of his beloved ice hockey).

Hence Poland was at least as culpable for starting the war as Hitler and infinitely more than Stalin – such is the truth, as the word is used in the name of Putin’s favourite newspaper (Pravda is the Russian for truth).

The real truth, as known to every serious historian beyond the reach of Putin’s thugs, is somewhat different. None of them disputes that Stalin planned to conquer Europe, striking the Nazis in the back when they were bogged down in the western theatre.

The only disagreement concerns the date of the planned invasion. Some think Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by days, others by weeks, still others by months. The question to all of them isn’t if but when.

Such historians have facts on their side. For the Soviets had embarked on a military build-up unseen in history either before or since. By turning his enslaved, starving nation into a military cum concentration camp, Stalin mobilised the country’s resources to one end only: achieving military supremacy.

That things didn’t quite pan out the way Putin’s idol had planned shouldn’t distract us from the gruesome reality.

As of 1 June, 1941, the Soviets had 25,479 frontline tanks, as opposed to Germany’s 6,292, and 24,488 warplanes against Germany’s 6,852. The quality of the planes was comparable, but the quality of the tanks wasn’t: the Soviet machines were infinitely superior.

Their KV and T-34 didn’t have any German analogues until Stalingrad, and most of the Soviet ‘obsolete’ tanks, such as the 25.2-tonne T-28 armed with a 76mm cannon, were more than a match even for the Germans’ best tank T-IV (20-22.3 tonnes, 75mm).

The Soviets had more airborne troops than the rest of the world combined, and paratroops are only ever used for offensive purposes. These formed a significant chunk of the Soviet forces deployed in the west of the country before Hitler struck on 22 June, 1941.

The Soviets enjoyed a more than 2:1 superiority over the Nazis in the armies facing each other in Poland (with infinitely greater reserves), and both juggernauts were deployed in a strictly offensive battle order, putting a premium on first strike.

Stalin’s army formed two long salients aimed at the heart of Germany. This formation made them exceedingly vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike, as Nazi generals went on to demonstrate.

Cutting the Lvov and Bialystok salients at the base rendered them ripe for a series of lethal envelopments, which the Germans executed with well-drilled élan. The ensuing rout of Stalin’s regular army gave rise to the subsequent lies about his ‘peaceful intentions’.

Scientific historians have long since dispelled the lies for what they are. But Vlad doesn’t want Russian historians to be scientists. He wants them to be agitprop hacks – and I for one trust Vlad to get exactly what he wants.

This fiddler on the hoof can be as persuasive as Stalin, albeit still on a smaller scale.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

The debate about the European Arrest Warrant  predictably produced an ungainly mess. The pro and con sides mounted their rhetorical steeds and rode them into the joust, with only our constitution unsaddled in the end.

In the process Dave came within nine votes of losing the Commons, which may yet become a big problem for him. What is already a gigantic problem for us is that neither side seemed to understand the real issue at stake.

The Warrant effectively replaces, yet again, the law of our nation with the quasi-legal denationalised regulations imposed by the EU.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the English Common Law is inadequate when it comes to extradition, which inadequacy may at times be detrimental to justice.

Yet superseding it with a law of foreign provenance will do infinitely more damage even in the short term. Over time this will prove catastrophic.

Essentially the Warrant will enable police officers from any EU country to arrest, or demand practically instant extradition of, any British subject for any transgression, regardless of whether or not it would be illegal in the UK.

The argument in favour of this crypto-totalitarian measure is that career criminals will presumably find it harder to stay on the run. That may be, although I doubt that the few lifelong fugitives one has heard of will ever present a serious danger to our constitution.

But one way or the other it doesn’t really matter. The constitutional issues at stake are much more vital than the purely utilitarian considerations.

Britain has by far the best and the oldest system of justice in Europe. It’s not ideal, for nothing in this world is, except perhaps a decent single malt after dinner.

However, eschewing absolute standards in favour of relative ones, there’s nothing about our laws for which we have to apologise to anyone in Europe, including its most civilised parts.

If our laws are being abused or not applied properly, then such mechanical problems must be fixed internally. However, replacing our laws with those of different provenance, different principles and different design is tantamount to ditching a car because its ashtray is full.

Many cornerstones of the English Common Law, such as jury trial, the right to refuse to provide self-incriminating evidence, double jeopardy, habeas corpus etc., either don’t exist in many European countries or are treated as mere statements of intent.

And even in places where they do exist, such cornerstones have no patina of age that can only come from centuries of trial and error.

I for one would hate to be tried in a country where a mere generation ago people were put into concentration camps for disagreeing with the government, especially if my crime wouldn’t be treated as such in Britain.

If, after committing such a non-crime in, say, Bucharest and then returning home, I’d hate to find at my London doorstep a couple of Romanian cops armed with handcuffs and the European Arrest Warrant. So would any Brit, and some have suffered this outrage already.

By debating this vital issue solely, or even mainly, on the basis of utilitarian considerations, our MPs show how little they understand the very essence of their country.

Dave’s flagship policy, that of scrapping the Human Rights Act and replacing it with a new Bill of Rights, guaranteeing, among other novelties, freedom of the press we’ve had since at least William III, shows exactly the same failing.

Given the choice between the two documents, any right-thinking person would instantly cast his vote for neither.

The very philosophy of the English law precludes any need for a written document to enshrine a practice that has already been enshrined by centuries of experience.

We don’t need the state to protect our traditional liberties. We need to have our traditional liberties protected from the state.

When the state attacks such liberties, which it does with increasing regularity, the counterattack can be launched in the time-honoured battleground of our own courts and Parliament – no help from a piece of paper is needed, thank you very much.

That Blair’s Human Rights Act, policed by the European Court of Human Rights, is toxic is beyond dispute (just consider the source). But Dave’s brainchild, another Bill of Rights, is just as defective in the context of the world’s most ancient extant constitution.

And you know what is the scariest thing of all? That such things need saying at all – in a country that centuries ago showed the world the value of just laws based on national experience lovingly collected and passed on from one generation to the next.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752