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French tabloids are screaming in 60-point type that Prince Jean of France has got married.

This must be big news, for otherwise popular magazines wouldn’t give it such prominence. The French then, 225 years after their revolution, are still keenly interested in the Bourbons, and I don’t mean the whiskies.

Perfectly synchronised with this outburst of latent French monarchism is an article in our own Sunday Times, in which Philip Collins bemoans his Christian – sorry, he’d probably prefer ‘first’ – name.

Apparently he was named after the Duke of Edinburgh, and Collins finds this accident of birth hard to reconcile with the hatred of monarchy he feels in his republican heart.

There’s a paradox there somewhere: England after all is a monarchy and France is a republic. Yet republican sentiments are festering in our country, whereas the French follow royal news the way the English follow Kim Kardashian.

Why do people living in republics of long standing still seem nostalgic for the monarchies of yesteryear?

And why do so many European countries still keep their kings and queens even though they don’t seem to serve any practical purpose – and despite the resentment for monarchy dripping off silly pundits’ pens?

Perhaps people sense that modern republics are all ideological contrivances lacking any historical, as opposed to merely legal, claim to legitimacy.

Such a claim can only be based on continuity, something traceable so far back that it can’t be pinpointed to any one event or to any political idea.

St Paul wrote that all power is from God, on which Joseph de Maistre, a French monarchist who never lived in France and a constitutional scholar who despised written constitutions, made an interesting comment.

Because monarchies are organic, he wrote, their origins go so far back that we might as well assume they derive from God. They can’t be reliably attributed to any other source.

Aware of this continuity, the people of organic European realms have preserved their monarchies (with minor hiatuses here and there), even though they may have divested them of executive power.

However, they understand intuitively that dispensing with even the seemingly powerless monarchs would represent an irreplaceable loss.

As all those countries are now enthusiastically secular and ideologically democratic, few people there would be able to identify what it is that they’d be reluctant to lose. If pressed, they’re likely to refer obliquely to ‘tradition’, without fully realising what that means.

Many would resent the thought that monarchies link their secular present with their Christian past, yet this is precisely what monarchies do. They are Christendom’s envoys to modernity, and even those who’d throw up their arms in horror at this suggestion will still hear vague, intuitive echoes in their souls.

Royal families remind them of the origin of their own families – kings and queens are their link to the past they ostensibly no longer cherish and to God in whom they ostensibly no longer believe.

This is whence they derive their sense of organic continuity, something they desperately, if often unwittingly, crave – and something that’s denied to nations where monarchies no longer exist or have never existed.

They may not know exactly what they’re missing, but rest assured that deep down they realise they’re missing something vital, something they won’t get from any secular creed.

Moving from psychology to politics, one can’t help noticing that conservatism sits uneasily with republicanism.

Ultimately, a conservative has to decide what it is that he’d like to conserve. In the West, only one answer to this question would brook no easy refutation: the legacy of our civilisation, which historical honesty demands we call by its traditional name of Christendom.

Today’s secular conservatives all talk about small government, which they correctly believe is superior to a giant, omnipotent state. In this they display sound instincts but poor logic.

For, while a small central state is an essential feature of a Christian monarchy, it goes against the grain of a modern republic. Like the Church, traditional monarchies were based on the principle of subsidiarity, the devolution of power to the lowest sensible level.

That’s why the fundamental political institutions of Christendom were all patterned after the family, the most fundamental institution of all.

This kernel of our polity was protected from central power by a thick shell of familial organisations: local government, magistrate, guild, parish, village commune, township and so forth.

The king had precious little power over those, and Louis XIV’s famous pronouncement “L’état, c’est moi” was a lament, not a boast. That most absolute of monarchs knew that he could lord it over his loftiest courtiers more easily than over the lowest peasants.

This reflected the triumph of res privata over res publica: Christianity privatised the spirit, thereby stressing, among other things, the supremacy of the individual over the state.

The modern revolutionary republic – and all modern republics are revolutionary to some extent – destroyed subsidiarity, as it had set out to do. That’s why a modern president or prime minister boasts power unimaginable to a Christian king.

As its name suggests, res publica presupposes universal participation in public affairs. Hence American Founders, such as Adams, were illogical in the horror they felt at observing their cherished republic being undermined by a centralised democracy.

Saying that centralisation undermines a republic is like saying that pregnancy undermines sex. Such inability to discern a clear-cut causal relationship is most unfortunate.

A republic has to become either a democracy or an oligarchy or, as our modern republics prove, both. Sooner or later it has to empower ever greater numbers to take part in governance.

But great numbers can’t govern, if for no other than purely practical reasons. They have to transfer their sovereignty to those who govern in their name and, once relinquished, the sovereignty is no longer reclaimable.

That’s why it’s wrong to say, along with Plato and Aristotle, that democracy is mob rule. The mob (‘We, the People’) never rules, not for long at any rate.

Sooner or later that function will be usurped by a small group presumably governing in the mob’s name, but in fact increasingly pursuing its own interests – hanging on to power being the primary, and eventually the only, one.

Republicanism and democracy, its natural extension, represent an aggressive denial of political tradition based on the founding tenets of our civilisation.

Such nihilism can’t go unpunished, and all our crises, be it social, cultural or economic, are directly attributable to it. That’s why, before proudly declaring his republicanism, Philip Collins would be well-advised to think about it more deeply.

Assuming he can, which is an unsafe assumption about our ‘opinion formers’. 

 

 P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, coming out this autumn, makes this argument without journalistic shortcuts. You can pre-order from roperpenberthy.co.uk 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No tyrannies, including totalitarian ones, rely wholly on violent coercion.

Violence is merely a default stratagem, used to deal with those in the population who won’t have their brains washed as thoroughly as the tyrants would like.

Such diehards may number in hundreds of thousands, as they did in revolutionary France; in millions, as they did in Soviet Russia; or in thousands, as they did in Nazi Germany.

These numbers are testimony to the propagandists’ success: the fewer people need to be coerced, the greater the brainwashing mastery.

Hence my hat’s off to Putin and his Goebbelses: their efforts lack the passionate drama of a Nuremberg rally, but overall they deliver better results.

The Russians are buying into the claims of Putin’s propaganda – and the more madcap the claims, the more readily they are accepted.

Being an inveterate sceptic, I find it easy to disbelieve Putin’s approval ratings, which top those of Obama, Cameron and Hollande combined.

Putin’s electoral majority is also easy to dismiss – after all, as his role model Stalin once remarked, it’s not how the votes are cast but how they’re counted that matters.

Yet here I am, looking at the kind of data that have to be taken seriously. Levada-Centre, Russia’s independent polling organisation, has run a large survey in Moscow, Petersburg and four other major cities.

The respondents were asked just one question: “Have you heard about the crash of the Malaysian airliner in the Ukraine and, if yes, what do you think caused it?”

Now, Flight MH-17 was brought down by a SAM fired from a Russian BUK system deployed on the territory controlled by Putin’s proxy troops.

Whether the chap who actually pushed the button was wearing a uniform with or without Russian insignia is immaterial. Putin controls the ‘separatists’ as tightly as he controls the Russian army proper.

Such are the facts, as they are known to everyone outside Putin’s immediate reach. Within that span, however, a different story is told. The ‘separatists’, you see, have no BUK systems in their possession.

Never mind the incontrovertible evidence to the opposite, such as radio intercepts, satellite intelligence and photographs showing BUKs in position days before the incident (the last one I’ve seen was in Le Figaro).

Never mind the interviews in which ‘separatist’ chieftains admitted to having such SAMs and actually firing one on the Malaysian airliner, albeit by mistake.

If the ‘separatists’ had no SAMs, they had no means of defending their skies against Malaysian airliners flying at 30,000 feet. They may have reported destroying several Ukrainian military aircraft at the same altitude, but presumably this had been done with catapults.

So why did the ill-fated plane crash? We do know it did, no argument there.

Putin’s propaganda answers this question with its customary élan: it’s the bloody Ukies what done it. The Ukrainian fascist government in the employ of the CIA, the EU and the Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy.

Why would they do such a thing when they desperately need all the international support they can get? Trust you to ask such a naïve question.

The Ukies committed this vile act in order to incriminate Putin, thereby besmirching his sterling reputation earned in the ranks of that great international charity known as the KGB.

To say that this version of the events stretches credulity would be a gross understatement. No one whose brain isn’t addled by the abrasive detergent used by Putin’s brainwashers would believe a single word of it.

So how did the survey go? Here are its statistically significant results:

“The airliner was shot down by a Ukrainian SAM” – 46%

“It was shot down by a Ukrainian Air Force fighter” – 36%

“It was shot down by the separatists” – 3%

“It was shot down by the Russians” – 1%

The remaining respondents cited such causes as pilot error, technical malfunction and so on. In other words, 82% of the Russian population buy Putin’s lies wholesale, against a mere four per cent rejecting them, with a few not quite sure.

I don’t know if you’ve ever studied the techniques of mass propaganda or, better still, been exposed to them. I’ve done both, and let me tell you: no other fascist propagandist has ever achieved the same hit rate – and no non-fascist propagandist has ever attempted to achieve it.

Such giant coups are impossible even to contemplate in the absence of a total, not to say totalitarian, state control over the flow of information – a reliable hallmark of any fascism, including its klepto- variety.

Sure enough, all Russian mass media are crushed under Putin’s thumb. All TV channels and mainstream papers are spewing nothing but lies, and even the Internet is tightly controlled. Anti-Putin sites, such as Grani (Facets) and Yezhednevnyi Jurnal (Daily Journal) have been blocked. And a diktat was issued two days ago that even blogs the size of mine must comply with government regulations.

Such is the context of Dave’s call to ‘rethink’ Nato’s relationship with Russia.

The verb ‘rethink’ implies some prior thinking. This is as much of a lie as Putin’s propaganda, the difference being that 82% of us aren’t going to believe it.

No thinking has ever gone into formulating the West’s policy towards post-communist Russia, at least none meriting the lofty word ‘thought’.

Our governing spivs gobbled up the perestroika propaganda with the same alacrity as the Russians are now swallowing Putin’s lies.

Suddenly an opportunity presented itself to get fat on the peace dividend, to stop spending billions on maintaining a creditable military presence. Who needs armies if we no longer have enemies? And the money can be more profitable spent on bribing the underclass into voting right.

The whole world loves us, liberal democracy has won a decisive victory. History has ended, declared Francis Fukayama, that most toxic of the neocon fools and knaves.

The world reeled under the influence of the triumphalist spirit, ignoring naysayers like me, who were begging the West from the word glasnost to be prudent at least, sage ideally.

After the inebriation comes the hangover. Suddenly Dave and other spivs have discovered that the leopard still proudly sports his spots. What do you know, seems like the Russians regard Nato as an ‘adversary’.

Forget intelligence services doing their job. Anyone who has read the Russian press over the last 20 years could have told Dave the same thing all along, before those 298 poor people suffered a horrible death.

Negligent myopia in domestic policy can destroy the country’s economy, morality and social fabric. When applied to foreign policy, it can destroy the world. A useful thing to remember exactly 100 years after August 1914.

Plato taught that ‘forms’, which is to say substantial ideas, are more real than anything perceived by the senses.

It may be argued at a moment of levity that Christ came into the world partly to correct Plato by showing how the physical and metaphysical can be one.

Be that as it may, if Plato were able to look at today’s politics, he’d have to revise both his terminology and the underlying notions.

Forms have now shed substance and hence any link to reality – they are phantoms, delusions, make-believe.

Democracy is one such, but this isn’t the place to debate its intrinsic qualities. What bothers me is the status it has acquired in modern times, that of moral superiority to any other political arrangement.

Democracy is a method of government, better than some, worse than others. Both its pluses and minuses have been incessantly pondered since Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, and these are still open to discussion.

What is to me beyond dispute is that democracy – as it has evolved – has no claim to being the most moral, just or effective way of organising public affairs.

Yet we in the West today have lost the ability to look beyond the outer shell of politics to see what kernel of substance hides underneath. We worship the form and not so much ignore the substance as forget that such a thing exists.

Hence we equate the democratic shell with the substance of freedom, justice and political virtue, maintaining that those lovely things hadn’t existed before people were empowered to cast their votes for the likes of Hitler, Allende, Putin, Lukashenko, Obama or Tony-Dave.

A dispassionate look at history will show, however, that everything of spiritual, cultural and moral value – including just political institutions – had been created in the West long before the advent of the Enlightenment and its political cutting edge, one-man-one-vote democracy.

The political path of the Enlightenment was signposted by four revolutions: English in the 17^th century, American and French in the 18^th, Russian in the 20^th. Three of them culminated in regicide, that symbolic rite of passage to ‘enlightened’ modernity.

In all four instances the putatively oppressive reigns of Charles I, George III, Louis XVI and Nicholas II were replaced by infinitely more oppressive revolutionary Leviathans. In due course they either devoured or at least, as in the case of America, horrified their very midwives.

Thus John Adams, America’s second president, wrote in 1806: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

This, by his correct if belated judgement, had a disastrous effect not only on America but on the whole world. In 1811 Adams rued, “Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

Since Adams had no benefit of our hindsight, he couldn’t fully admire the handiwork of post-Enlightenment modernity, with its concerted effort to wipe out every vestige of Christendom and replace it with either its opposite or, typically, its perversion.

Two calamitous wars (one of which was presumably fought ‘to make the world free for democracy’), two satanic regimes spawning dozens of similar ones, concentration camps, democide and genocide, hundreds of millions dead, tortured and starved to death – these are the sights that John Adams was spared.

He didn’t even witness the devastation of the Civil War, the second act of the American Enlightenment drama, in which the country suffered greater casualties than in all her other wars combined.

All of these were a direct result of modernity’s assault on Christendom, meaning Western civilisation. Unchecked democracy – whatever its theoretical value – has in practice been used as the political tip of modernity’s battering ram.

Now bereft of the traditional Western substance, the world looked at the available political options and cringed. It was faced with two Enlightenment offshoots: either nihillistic totalitarianism, a small elite ruling with no regard for law, or philistine democracy, a small elite ruling within some rapidly weakening but still partly extant restraints.

Both spelled destruction, but in the first instance it was instant, akin to that produced by an explosion, while in the second it was deferred, like that caused by slow if ever-accelerating erosion.

The West sighed and opted for the second, lesser evil. To assuage its sense of guilt over that submission to the vice slowly crushing its civilisation, the West then decided to let democracy mongers have a free rhetorical run.

Even intelligent Westerners began to pretend they believed the propaganda of democracy as the sole redemptive creed of modernity. The less intelligent ones, those constituting an overwhelming majority actually liked what they heard: they, Tom, Dick and Harry, had been blessed with the epiphany denied to the previous 100 generations of Western polity.

Quite apart from lethal long-term damage, the resulting totemistic worship of democracy as the political panacea for the whole world creates a vast potential for immediate disasters. 

It leaves an opening for wicked regimes to pull a fast one by hiding behind a camouflage of democratic cardboard cutouts that cater to the foreign observers’ wishful thinking.

Such Potemkin villages don’t have to be real or even realistic – those seeking a democracy fix will get just as high on a placebo.

Thus, taking their cue from the ‘people’s democracies’ of yesteryear, numerous Third World tyrannies have learned that if they scream ‘democracy’ with histrionic conviction the West will pay them in coin – and if they don’t, the payment may come in the shape of drones and bombing raids.

The current troubles in the Middle East are a prime example of a theoretical folly leading to practical catastrophes. For it was in the name of democracy that American and British spivs unseated the unsavoury regimes that alone could maintain stability in the region.

“I’m afraid the bitter truth is Iraq and Libya were better off under the tyrants toppled by an arrogant and naive West,” writes Stephen Glover in The Mail. Those of us who knew this was the case since before the US-led coalition flexed its martial muscle in 2003, ask the inevitable but futile question:

Where was Stephen and his colleagues on the right, left and centre then? The answer is, castigating the bestial nature of Saddam, Gaddafi and Mubarak, appearing so much nastier in the light of goodness shone by Democracy (capitalisation implied).

Looking at a foreign regime, we’ve lost the ability to ask “Is it good?”. Instead we ask “Is it democratic?” and, if the answer is yes, we heave a sigh of relief.

Thus we leave ourselves open to disinformation blows raining on us from every direction. We – well, some of us – extol Putin’s kleptofascist clique because it was brought to power by seemingly free elections.

On similar grounds we accept that the frankly bolshevik nastiness of Lukashenko’s regime in Belarus is offset by the quasi-democratic elections that brought him to power – or that Putin’s puppet Yanukovych boasted the kind of legitimacy that’s denied to the people who overthrew him last year.

Democracy worship is a lazy man’s answer to sound political thought. That such people make up the bulk of the electorate is another powerful argument against our democracy-run-riot.

 

 

P.S. My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, coming out this autumn, makes this argument without journalistic shortcuts. You can pre-order from roperpenberthy.co.uk 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My friend Richard believes in human evolution, meaning that all of us, including the chaps who wrote St Matthew Passion and built Chartres Cathedral, evolved from primitive organisms.

I’ve been known to remark unkindly that in his case this assertion springs from frank self-assessment. My friend Richard is indeed not a particularly complex creature, and he’s fairly easy to understand.

Understanding some of his critics and all of his admirers is more difficult, and I find this task baffling.

What gives me a particular problem is that on those rare occasions when poor Richard says something sensible he’s attacked mercilessly. Yet his same detractors, millions of them, then buy and extol the books in which he writes utter drivel.

Last year Richard was widely attacked for making this statement: “All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge.”

The only way to contest this statement is to show it’s untrue. Since I cherish every instance of Richard getting something wrong, I did the requisite research. To my disappointment, Richard was proved right.

He didn’t stoop to citing the exact numbers, which are 32 Nobels won by Trinity scientists versus 10 by the Muslims. But had he been more specific, he’d have had to add that only two of those 10 Islamic overachievers were scientists, two others writers, while six were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which has little to do with science, or indeed peace.

Richard’s statement was thus factual and therefore unassailable. His motives for citing those facts may be a different matter.

Facts have little significance unless they’re used to prove a point. And some points are less worth making than others. For instance, it’s a fact that blacks have a lower median IQ than whites. Yet those who insist on citing it ad infinitum may be confidently assumed not to be great champions of the Negroid race.

Likewise, Jews are more lavishly represented in banks, academic institutions and symphony orchestras than their mere proportion in the population would warrant. This fact is demonstrable calculator in hand, but those who whip out the calculator for that purpose not always do so out of admiration for Jews.

One way or the other, Richard was savaged by the very people who see nothing wrong about the aggressively stupid things for which he gets paid his millions.

Here are two examples of his inanities, which faithfully represent the general intellectual quality of his output.

Example 1: “Darwin told us why we exist and that’s not an easy question to answer. It’s not just us, it’s all living things.”

Example 2: “Life evolved out of nearly nothing, some 10 billion years after the universe evolved out of literally nothing, is a fact so staggering that I would be mad to attempt words to do it justice.”

Now some savants have rightly held poor Richard to account for his ignorance of philosophy, theology, history, rhetoric and, well, just about everything. For example, his critique of Aquinas’s Five Ways displays a command of the problem for which many a pupil has been expelled from Sunday school.

Yet I’m prepared to overlook Richard’s ignorance – we’re all ignorant of something, though not all of us pontificate on issues about which we know next to nothing. Alas, the two examples I cited point at Richard’s inability to think logically, and that is a more serious problem. 

The question mentioned in Example 1 is indeed not easy to answer. That’s why Darwin never attempted to do so. He merely tried to explain how all living things that already were got to be as they are.

Simple logic that escapes my friend Richard should have told him that, before things evolve, they have to exist. Think what you will about the evolution theory, but its very name suggests that a) it deals with the development of something already in existence and b) even then, it’s merely a hypothesis, not a fact.

The words Richard thinks he’d ‘be mad to attempt’ in Example 2 were actually uttered 2,500 years ago by Parmenides: ex nihilo nihil fit or whatever it was in Greek. Nothing comes out of nothing, an idea Newton later expressed as his First Law of Thermodynamics.

A casual statement to the contrary, when not accompanied by a coherent refutation of both the philosopher and the scientist, may indeed be ‘staggering’ but it’s far from being a ‘fact’. Insisting on it betokens a certain deficit of intellectual rigour, which is a polite euphemism for stupidity.

Suddenly, out of the blue, Richard at last said something that adds up: “X is bad. Y is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of X, go away and don’t come back until you’ve learned how to think logically.”

In other words, gradations of evil exist. Richard’s logic is incontestable, if a tad simplistic.

If I wanted to substitute real things for the algebraic symbols, I could take issue with some of my good friends whose mind’s eye is blinded by their distaste for the European Union. They thus find good things to say about Putin, whom they see as a St George slaying the EU dragon over the Ukraine.

Using Richard’s newly found logic, I’d object that X (the EU) is bad but Y (Putin) is worse. It implies no endorsement of X to say that I’d rather live under the unquestionably hideous EU autocracy than under Putin’s kleptofascism – and so would my friends if they knew more about the latter.

In fact, had my friend Richard fleshed out his statement in this way, he wouldn’t have been criticised by anyone other than Peter Hitchens and his friends, of whom Peter can’t possibly have many.

Alas, he chose other substitutes for his X and Y: “Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.” And: “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”

Personally, I find nothing objectionable about this, other than the fact that Richard doesn’t know how to spell paedophilia. But then he’s a scientist, so that’s understandable.

But others have been much less kind to poor Richard. For example, the human rights activist Shami Chakrabarti screamed bloody murder: “There is no mild rape, there is no mild paedophilia. These are terrible, terrible crimes.”

No doubt. But in Western law some terrible crimes are more terrible than others. For example, both accidental killing and premeditated murder involve the terrible crime of taking a life. Yet the second is regarded as more terrible than the first.

Having sex with a nubile 15-year-old girl is paedophilia, as is having sex with a babe in arms. Surely Miss Chakrabati doesn’t think they’re equally terrible crimes?

A woman who gets into bed with her boyfriend and, after prolonged foreplay, says no at the last moment, which the man ignores, may be the victim of a crime (I’m referring to an actual case). The same woman raped at knifepoint in Hyde Park definitely is. Are they equally ‘terrible, terrible crimes’?

Miss Chakrabati and many others who’ve attacked Richard with similar venom are definitely guilty of the crime of which he accuses them: inability to think logically.

But both they and Richard are guilty of a more ‘terrible, terrible’ crime: adherence to a pernicious ideology. The ideologies may be different, but their cause is the same: hatred for every founding tenet of our civilisation.

 

 

Tyrants rely on wars to tighten their grip on power.

The Russian liberal Alexander Herzen expressed this historical truth epigrammatically back in the 19^th century: “The strongest chains binding people are forged out of victorious swords.”

The stratagem of using foreign wars to bolster domestic power wasn’t invented by the Russians, but it was certainly perfected by them.

Yet Col. Putin has set out to prove that rigorous logicians are wrong to insist that perfection is unquantifiable. A tyranny knows how to make perfect even more so.

The good colonel shot to well-nigh absolute power in the wake of the second Chechen war he conflagrated just for that purpose. Russia cheered: she felt acutely nostalgic for the role of ‘Europe’s gendarme’, the soubriquet she earned when Herzen was young.

There at last was a real muzhik, man’s man, at the helm. Russia was ‘getting up from her knees’, the advantage of the upright posture being that she was now able to knee anyone else in the groin. Isn’t that what greatness is all about?

Russia’s third world economy was thus reconnected with her Third Rome mentality, and Putin thrived.

Then came the Georgian war of 2008, when it took Putin a mere five days to prop up his puppet regime in South Ossetia, historically a part of Georgia.

Apart from Russia, the independent state of South Ossetia was recognised by the great powers of  Nicaragua, Venezuela and Nauru, which exclusive club has yet to expand its membership.

Again the Russians cheered. Even those who were uncertain exactly what and where Nauru was were happy to find themselves in such select company. The muzhik may not be able to feed Russians, but at least he can bully foreigners.

Yet Putin realises that the political capital he has built in Russia needs topping up lest it be depleted. Throughout their history the Russians have pounced on any leader perceived as less than a muzhik, and they can do so again.

The Russian concept of a muzhik includes as a necessary constituent a healthy dose of xenophobia, especially hatred of the West.

Thus a ‘strong leader’ has to keep reminding them that, though Western money and technology are welcome, Western influence, especially of a civilising sort, is not.

There’s every sign that Putin senses that his popularity is now at its peak. From there the only way to go is down, and this is a direction no tyrant will accept.

Hence the brinkmanship in which he’s indulging. He’s the schoolyard bully pushing a classmate in the chest and saying “Oh yeah? So what’re you going to do about it?”

Even the mindless, spineless spivs in our governments are beginning to realise they have to push back, albeit not too hard.

Putin responds by pushing harder. So much so, in fact, that one gets the impression he actually wants (or rather feels he needs) a full-blooded fight.

In a horrifying reminder of the Berlin wall, he’s surrounding South Ossetia with a barbed-wire fence, effectively turning it into a concentration camp.

The combination of Russia and barbed wire conjures horrific images even for those who merely read The Gulag Archipelago. For those who used to be inside the barbed wire, the images are unbearable.

At the same time, the Russians are violating the terms of the 1987 treaty by testing ground-based cruise missiles. Just like the barbed wire around South Ossetia, this too evokes nightmarish memories, and even Obama felt he had to say (not yet do) something about it.

Remember all those SALTs? The Soviets violated them with boldfaced duplicity, achieving at least strategic parity with the USA as a result. That history is now repeating itself with STARTs, as Putin is proving that the knack for cheating didn’t collapse along with the Soviet Union.

Interestingly, the Russians have been testing the banned missiles since 2008, but Obama’s administration has been turning a blind eye until now, when Putin’s cheating has overlapped with other outrages.

Last year Putin deployed tactical Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, née Königsberg, right at Nato’s doorstep. The missiles have in their sights Nato’s radar systems designed to protect millions of Europeans against Russia’s first-strike holocaust.

And this year he’s testing the West’s resolve by trying to rape the Ukraine and loot chunks of her territory, ideally all of it.

In response, Nato is planning large-scale military exercises in Eastern Europe, with Dave contributing a mighty contingent of 1,500, the numerical strength our spivs evidently see as ideal for our army in toto.

Seeing how European leaders cringe at the thought of having to pay more for gas, one can be confident they don’t want a confrontation with Russia.

Neither does Dave: the City and BP are screaming hysterically that keeping a few Russian gangsters out of Knightsbridge will be costly. Nor does Dave want to bite the Russian hand feeding his party’s coffers.

Yet make no mistake: the situation is fraught with danger. The analogy with a powder keg is much overused, but only because it works.

It takes but a tiny spark to turn a keg into a bomb, and sparks always fly whenever two armies are poised in confrontation.

We can’t trust Putin to know when to stop pushing: bullies never do, unless they’re punched on the nose. What if he pushes into the Baltics, Nato members?

Baltic governments certainly think this is likely, and their shrieks of SOS are resounding through Nato headquarters.

What if Putin launches an all-out offensive on the Ukraine, this time with his forces honestly wearing Russian insignia?

Here’s one plausible scenario. Putin’s Spetznaz thugs hold out until 28 September, when the next national election will be called. The election will be free, in that East Ukrainians will be given a free choice between a ballot and a bullet.

The East will then declare its independence, this time claiming an electoral mandate. Since the Ukrainian government has shown little willingness to accept their country’s dismemberment, there’s no reason to believe they won’t respond by force.

The Russian juggernaut will then roll, possibly with the right wing crashing into the Baltics. Nato will have to respond, and Putin will get his war, which he hopes will be limited.

This isn’t scaremongering. Nothing like this may happen, but only an irresponsible fool will insist it can’t happen.

Si vis pacem, para bellum, as the Romans used to say. We want peace, even if Putin doesn’t. That’s why it’ll be criminal folly not to prepare for war.

 

 

 

  

As a lifelong champion of multi-culti rectitude, I’m proud of the progress Britain has made since the 19^th century.

In those days of the Raj the British colonialist-imperialist monsters displayed gross insensitivity to the local customs.

It’s not as if the concept of multiculturalism was then unknown, even if the word was. As far back as the 5^th century BC (sorry, it should be BCE now, but I haven’t yet expunged all my rotten habits), Herodotus taught that “we must respect other people’s customs.”

Having issued that injunction, about 50 pages later in the same book he cited an illustration: “Burying people alive is a Persian custom.”

Herodotus didn’t link the two statements directly, an oversight that I’d like to correct. For it’s my heartfelt conviction that we mustn’t be selective in proffering our respect. We can’t pick and choose which alien customs we esteem – they’re all equally valuable and, implicitly, more so than our own.

Such is the true meaning of progress, as we define it today. But in the stone-age 19^th century the Brits still tried to cling on to antediluvian values. They still hadn’t grasped the nature of progress.

Thus in 1829 the Raj administration in India callously banned suttee, the ritual immolation of the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.

This ancient custom was then still practised widely, with about 600 women turned to ash every year, supposedly with no coercion involved. Submitting to suttee was a sign of virtue: the word derives from the Sanskrit for ‘good woman’.

That ethnic, meaning progressive, rite wasn’t limited to the Indians. In fact, Herodotus mentions its existence among some Thracian tribes, and Procopius, as cited by Gibbon, says that some Germanic tribes also had a version of this fine custom.

The Russians, or rather proto-Russians, weren’t far behind, as testified by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan. He travelled from Baghdad to the Volga area in the 10^th century and wrote an entertaining book about it.

A version of suttee was among other charming rites Ibn Fadlan described. In broad strokes, when a chieftain died, his numerous wives and concubines were asked to nominate a volunteer to be cremated with him.

One would inevitably step forward, after which the lady, before she was incinerated, would be given wine and drugs. She would then, in her semi-conscious state, dance and have sex with all the male relations of the deceased.

This ritual, while testifying to the unbridled virility of the early Russians, probably has as its close modern equivalent the sex-drugs-and-rock’n-roll culture (usually without the immolation) so beloved of today’s Western youths.

By the mid-1880s the Indians had had enough of the colonial oppression imposed by the British and personified by General Sir Charles James Napier, the Commander-in-Chief in India (1859-1861).

Some Hindu priests came to him with a perfectly valid complaint about the continuing ban on suttee. This, they said, is our ancient custom and you must respect it.

Belying his reputation for intransigence, Napier readily agreed:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation also has a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”

This statement fills me with righteous wrath. For Napier didn’t just threaten to punish multiculturalism with the death penalty. He mocked it by his last sentence, implying that we too have our customs and, given the chance, will make others abide by them.

Yet the multi-culti champion in me also rejoices. For these days no British administrator would allow himself such sarcasm towards any ethnic custom. If he did, he’d be forced to take a diversity course or, more likely, sacked.

For we’ve learned to respect other people’s cultures so much that we despise our own. That’s why we allow the existence of thousands of mosques, each preaching hatred for everything we used to hold dear, but don’t any longer.

Oh yes, we still draw the line on some of the more quaint customs, such as the stoning of adulterers. I suspect that our multi-culti sensitivity hasn’t yet been honed enough to let such things slide, but do give us a few years.

As to suttee, I don’t know how widely it’s practised these days in its native habitat. Yet India’s government felt obliged to pass the Commission of Suttee Act in 1987, which suggests the ritual isn’t completely out of fashion in modern times.

However, I’m not aware of suttee still surviving among the British Indians. British Muslims, on the other hand, still enforce some customs to which we respond with the retrograde knee-jerk reaction of disgust.

Many of them relate to the treatment of women, who in the Islamic ethos occupy an intermediate position between humans and livestock.

Honour beatings, incarceration and even murder are widely reported, as are such more innocuous things as forced marriage, often coupled with making a Western-born and educated girl go back to her parents’ native village to wed an illiterate goatherd.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is another aspect of multiculturalism that’s still very much alive in 27 African countries, as well as in Yemen and Iraqi Kurdistan. About 125 million girls in those countries have been affected, and the number is going up, what with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria imposing it by law.

Back in 1985 the British government, still in the grip of vestigious prejudice, outlawed FGM. Since then the law has been on the books but, as I’m pleased to report, not a single case has been prosecuted.

Yet up to 66,000 women have been thus crippled in Britain since then. I’m sure they don’t mind: this is an ancient custom after all, and it must be obeyed on pain of death.

One has to welcome this progress of multiculturalism, even as one feels slight unease of a gastrointestinal nature. How long before we legalise suttee, I wonder?

The term ‘moral equivalence’ was popular during the Cold War, when it was widely used by Westerners of the leftist persuasion.

Those people saw no difference between the KGB spying on the West and the CIA spying on the Soviet Union or, say, between American missiles installed in Turkey and Soviet missiles installed in Cuba.

‘Moral equivalence’ was the term they used, but they didn’t really mean equivalence. The word was just shorthand for the emotional and ideological kinship they felt for the Soviet Union.

Coming out and saying outright that they were on the Soviet side wasn’t quite socially (and at times legally) acceptable.

On the other hand, ‘moral equivalence’ suggested an unbiased, even-handed judgement. Aren’t those Egyptians killed by British bombs as human as the Hungarian students tortured to death by the Soviets? Of course they are. So who’s to say we’re any better than them?

This touching devotion to the sanctity of human life was almost saintly, and it would have been completely so had its enunciators not in fact been supporting the most evil regime in history. Having murdered 62 million of their own citizens, the Soviets sought to extend their sway over the whole world, and the Westerners worshipping at the altar of moral equivalence were doing their bit to make it happen.

One would think that, what with the Cold War supposedly finished, the term, and the spurious notion behind it, would sink into oblivion. However, this hope would be forlorn.

The two most eye-catching conflicts currently under way are pitting Putin’s bandits against the legitimate, pro-Nato Ukrainian government and Hamas terrorists against the legitimate, pro-Nato Israeli government.

Both conflicts have such clearly drawn lines that no moral ambivalence seems to be possible. In both instances any decent person should be on the side of good against evil. And any intelligent person should be able to tell which is which.

The first of these conflicts arose because the KGB colonel Putin is trying to rebuild history’s most evil regime, whose collapse he regards as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century’.

Never mind the two world wars. The greatest catastrophe of the most murderous century ever was the demise of the regime that made the century considerably more murderous than it otherwise would have been.

That same regime has come back in its kleptofascist incarnation, and it’s so far in its infancy. Putin wishes to nurture it to its cannibalistic maturity, an end that can only be achieved by cannibalistic means.

This noble effort has already produced hundreds of thousands dead in places about which we know nothing and care even less, such as Chechnya and Georgia.

Since the two places were comfortably far from Europe’s doorstep, it was possible to pretend that Putin’s savagery was none of our business. His next adventure, however, has made such detachment difficult.

The Ukraine shares her borders with several Nato members and Putin’s boldfaced aggression against the country demanded some response, however timid. Yet, after Putin’s lads murdered 298 Westerners with a sophisticated SAM missile, timidity is no longer on the cards.

The second on-going conflict involves Israel fighting for her survival, as she has had to do since 1948. The fight has always been against desperate odds, what with the country being surrounded by enemies who are never bashful about their intention to eliminate the State of Israel and to exterminate everyone in it.

Hence Israel can’t afford losing. When, say, Japan lost the war in 1945, she was given every opportunity and help to rebuild. If Israel lost a war, her every man, woman and child would be butchered in the imaginative ways for which Muslims are justly famous.

This situation tends to focus the mind, making the Israelis trigger-happy whenever their enemies overstep certain boundaries. Israel strikes out then, trying to disable the enemies and buy herself a few years of uneasy and precarious peace.

Both situations seem crystal-clear – morally, geopolitically or in any other way. If one prefers Western civilisation to the satanic reign of KGB or Hamas brutality, one supports the Ukraine and Israel. If one’s preference is different, one supports the other side.

The situation may seem crystal-clear to you and me, but not to the mongers of moral equivalence in our midst. Such as a Moscow reader of mine (let’s call him Igor) and a certain Mail columnist (let’s call him Peter Hitchens).

Here’s Igor responding to the articles I’ve written recently:     

“Whenever Israel… starts bombing the quarters densely populated with children, women and old men, I do not see how this is different from what Putin is doing in Ukraine. It is the international community that must disarm Hamas and punish Palestine for any aggressive behaviour towards Israel in the future, but when Israel retaliates it looks as though 20 Palestinians are killed for each Israeli victim…”

The term ‘moral equivalence’ isn’t used, but it’s implied. Also, it’s clear that Igor’s heart is with Russia, whoever happens to govern her at the moment.

This loyalty clearly overrides his intelligence, of which he possesses plenty, as do all my regular readers. Otherwise he wouldn’t need me to tell him what the difference is. There are several, as a matter of fact.

Difference 1: The Ukrainian government isn’t out to conquer Russia and massacre every Russian. Hamas pursues exactly such ends towards Israel.

Difference 2: Israel is a legitimate country. Hamas is a terrorist organisation acting not only against Israel but against the West at large.

Difference 3: Israel indeed kills 20 Palestinians for every one of her own casualties, which is exactly the same ratio as in 1939-1940, when Stalin attacked Finland. The reasons for the disparity are identical.

Benefiting from superior training and higher morale than Stalin’s hordes, the gallant Finns were better at fighting the war they didn’t start. They also didn’t use Stalin’s human-wave tactics springing from the Soviets’ nonexistent regard for human lives.

The parallel works because Israelis are also better at war than Hamas, just as they are better at having peaceful lives. For the Israelis every IDF soldier killed is a national tragedy to avoid. For Hamas, every Palestinian killed, especially one from a vulnerable group, is a PR triumph to seek.

That’s why they site their rocket launchers and command centres in ‘densely populated areas’, next to a school or a hospital being their particular preference. The Israelis are then faced with the Hobson’s choice of either accepting the thousands of rockets fired at them every year or bombing the sites, at the risk of incurring the wrath of good but naïve people like Igor.

As to his faith in the power, and indeed the desire, of ‘the international community’ to stop Islamic terrorism in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, it can only be attributed to his living in a country that strangulates any free flow of information.

Peter Hitchens doesn’t have this excuse, which is why I wouldn’t describe him as either good or naïve. In fact, this being Sunday, I’ll refrain from describing him in any befitting terms.

To Hitchens ‘Israel’s attack on Gaza’ is ‘idiotic’, ‘wrong’, ‘probably fatal to the future of the state its leaders claim to be defending’, ‘moronic’ and ‘babyish’, all within a couple of paragraphs. Pretty good going for any day of the week, especially for Sunday.

“Israel may bray that it did not intend to do this [dead and wounded women and children, weeping, gore and rubble]. I’m sure it didn’t. But if you shell and bomb a confined space such as Gaza, it will happen, and shame on you if you pretend that it’s not your fault when it does.”

Israelis don’t pretend any such thing. Similarly, Sir Arthur Harris didn’t pretend his Lancasters weren’t killing civilians when bombing munitions factories and railway junctions located in ‘densely populated areas’. But Britain was fighting for her survival, just as Israel is doing now.

The nature of modern war has long since invalidated the difference between combatants and civilians. Using missiles and bombs, guided or otherwise, will produce collateral damage whether desired (as in the case of Hamas launching their rockets indiscriminately) or seen as unfortunate (as in the case of Israel).

“It would have been far, far better to let the Hamas rockets fall, to shelter from them and to let the world see how much better Israel is than its aggressive despotic neighbours,” continues Hitchens.

In other words, he wants Israel to do what Hamas does: use the deaths of her people as a PR stunt. As to Hitchens’s faith in the world being able to see anything along those lines, it’s as misplaced as in Igor’s case, but without the same excuse of having little access to unbiased information.

Hitchens then switches his attention to Russia: “I’m pleased to see that the wild, simple-minded anti-Russian hysteria of last weekend has cooled a bit, as the complicated truth has emerged.”

The complicated truth is that, while “Russia has been helping the rebels in Ukraine… it’s also fairly obvious that Ukraine’s revolutionary government, which came to power in an EU and American-backed mob putsch in February, is getting help too.”

First, Russia hasn’t been “helping the rebels”. They are Putin’s proxy troops, his Spetznaz thugs. And describing in such terms the Ukraine’s successful attempt to throw out her puppet government loyal to Putin and trying to drag the country into his Soviet Union Mark 2 leaves one in no doubt where Hitchens’s sympathies lie.

In fact, for him to grant moral equivalence to the two sides would be a step in the right direction. As it is, he can’t contain his preference for the kleptofascist regime run by the KGB colonel.

A councilwoman in Brimscombe, Gloucestershire, committed a crime.

I’m not sure whether it’s forensically classified as a felony but, if it isn’t yet, it will be soon.

For the time being, this salt of the English earth, who runs a B&B and organises the village fete, hasn’t been sent to prison, as she doubtless will be if she re-offends when she’s 75.

Meanwhile she was sent on a diversity and equality course, which will set her back £150 plus the train fair to London.

Her crime? She described herself as ‘the nigger in the woodpile’, which offended two of her fellow councillors.

Neither of her opponents belongs to the racial group justified to resent being described by the word in the idiom. This group being barely represented in their county, neither could they have felt the vicarious pain of their constituents.

As native speakers of English, they certainly know that the expression is desemanticised, as most clichés get to be after a century or two.

Nonetheless they felt called upon to feel offended, as they’ve been trained to be by the ethos of modernity. The same training makes them sanctimonious snitches, which they proved by shopping the poor woman.

As a result, she’s being subjecting to a stupid, unjust and humiliating punishment, and not for the first time either: “I’ve already done equality training with the council,” she says, “but it was mainly on gays and travellers.”

Mrs Peters spoke without rancour but with bemusement: “I’m a Christian and believe you should love everyone whoever they are, regardless of their colour or creed, so I think for me to go on this course is a bit silly.”

It is rather. I’d actually call it something worse than that, but then Mrs Peters is obviously a gentler person than me.

She then went on to prove that she’s still an inveterate criminal at heart: “‘English is such a lovely language. I feel sad the way it is being changed. I asked my grandchildren yesterday how they say ‘eeny, meeny, miney, mo’ now. One said ‘catch a spider by its toe’, another said ‘catch a tiger by its toe’. Spiders don’t even have toes.”

Neither do tigers, but this isn’t about zoology. It’s about modernity asserting its power over taste, tradition, common sense, language, religion and whatever else stands in its way.

Trying to match Mrs Peters’s benign civility and resignation, I’m prepared to accept that we today have much more delicate sensibilities than our forebears. We’re all hypersensitive and our skin is gossamer-thin.

We are also imbued with the ideological, if somewhat counterintuitive, belief that we’re all equal. It’s in this spirit that I’d like to share this complaint with you.

What about my friends and me? We too are grossly offended, and not just once in a while. Everywhere we turn, our senses, intellects, tastes and beliefs aren’t just insulted but stamped into the dirt.

Aren’t we tautologically as equal as Mrs Peters’s fellow councillors? Or are they oxymoronically more so? Surely not, if you believe in equality as firmly as I do.

So how come no one cares about us? How come we have no recourse? How come we can’t send our offenders to a taste, propriety, politeness or sanity course? How come no one stands up for our human rights?

I can’t speak for my friends, although they’d be happy for me to do so. However, here, in no particular order, is an abbreviated list of things that offend me, and I know I’m leaving a lot out:

 

• Tattooed, facially metalled louts and slags overrunning our country
• People mangling the English language out of ignorance or, worse, perverse ideology
• Political correctness of any kind
• Preponderance, indeed the very existence, of anti-musical, satanic, shamanistic noise called music, which assails one’s ears everywhere one goes (including the Proms)
• Self-serving spivs who run our governments
• Sexual perversion elevated to social virtue
• Thousands of mosques preaching hatred for Christians, Jews, the West in general and everything about our civilisation
• Tony Blair, Dave Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband
• Grossly rude attacks on Christianity that, unlike even a mild opprobrium of other faiths, aren’t just unpunished but tacitly encouraged
• What passes for literature these days
• What passes for classical music these days
• What passes for art these days, i.e. unmade beds, pickled animals and close-up pictures of genitalia
• TV and radio announcers who speak with demotic accents and grammar
• People penalised for their words and thoughts but not for crimes like burglary
• Education that doesn’t educate
• Medical care that doesn’t care
• 200,000 abortions every year
• Creeping euthanasia
• EU Maoists and Trotskyists running our lives
• EU in general
• Footballers making more in a week than teachers do in five years
• Most footballers not being worth the fortune they get
• Most teachers not being worth even the pittance they get
• Foreign policy designed to punish our friends and reward our enemies
• Rampant egalitarianism
• Press with nonexistent moral and intellectual standards
• Russian gangsters buying into social acceptability in London
• Ditto Arab sheiks
• Ditto Chinese communists
• Homomarriage
• Anglicanism becoming a social club barring Christians from membership
• Britain having lost the right to keep the riff-raff out
• Pall Mall clubs admitting women
• Reverse discrimination
• British boroughs and whole towns imposing Sharia
• Lambeth calling itself a nuclear-free zone
• All those facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation and diversity consultants in the NHS or anywhere else

Last but not least, let’s not forget diversity and equality courses, acting as the modern equivalents of tarring and feathering. You know, like the one shoved down poor Mrs Peters’s throat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fancy a nice, cuddly Tory MP? Or a bloodhound ready to chase your detractors to the ends of the earth? A whole pack perhaps?

Come to the Tory Kennel in Westminster – we won’t let you down.

We have plenty to choose from: front bench, back bench, dogs, bitches, black, brown, white, all ages from puppy to pre-taxidermy, all looks from well fit (bitches) to shaggy (dogs) – you name it.

Lately we’ve had a large intake of particularly good-looking bitches, all perfectly groomed, able to walk on hind legs and… Well, what more do you need?

Every one of our MPs, dog or bitch, is paper-trained and also taught to obey simple commands: sit, stand, vote, bark, play dead and so forth.

Each has many previous owners and a pedigree of unwavering, if short-term, loyalty to every one.

Looking for a plump, juicy defence contract with bells on? Just shout ‘fetch’, and your new MP will deliver it to your doorstep in his mouth.

Want to hide billions in dubious cash somewhere in the City? Just toss the bone to your best friend and he’ll bury it for you, having first gnawed on it a little.

Need a guide dog to lead you to your local laundromat? We have the right bitch.

Or you may just fancy paying £160,000 for the privilege of playing a game of fuzzy yellow balls with our top dog – whatever your heart desires.

Prices are negotiable, varying from a large one-time donation to a lease-to-purchase plan involving smaller monthly contributions.

We also accept payment in kind, such as a Mediterranean cruise on a 300-foot yacht, the use of a castle in France, Italy or Spain, free flights on private jets. 

Our kennel has satisfied customers all over the world, from China to Saudi Arabia, from Columbia to Russia (references available upon request).

It’s our Russian customers, all hailing from the picturesque town of Putingrad, who have been particularly satisfied with our goods and services. That’s why they come back for repeat business time and again.

And, are you ready for this?

We’ve helped our loyal Putingrad clients to save themselves a lot of roubles by offering not single MPs retail but large portions of the whole kennel wholesale.

In addition to having first pick of the MPs they require, our wholesale customers join the ranks of Friends of the Tory Kennel. This entitles them to a prominent seat at our annual sales conference, where they can meet all our MPs and choose those who can best serve their needs.

Depending on the services you require, and the trouble with the law from which you wish to be protected, the down payment may vary from £90,000 to £400,000.

But you wouldn’t be paying this money – you’d be investing it in the kind of protection only our MPs can provide.

The initial outlay may look rather large, but not when you divide it by 305, the number of MP dogs and bitches we have on offer.

There are also tax advantages, for we can classify your investment as a charitable donation, or else as an operating expense. One way or the other, you save.

Suddenly, rather than having just one or two MPs to serve you, you have the whole kennel at your disposal, starting with our top dogs (and bitches) on the front benches.

But don’t take our word for it: hear what our happy customers from Putingrad have to say about our MPs and the services they provide.

Dmitri ‘the Hammer’, Putingrad banker:

“When I decided to move from Putingrad to Londongrad, I needed someone to guard my money from the pol…, well, I mean from those who wanted to get their teeth into it.

“And you know what? For a mere £450,000 in pocket change I became a Friend of the Tory Kennel. Now my money is secure, whatever is left of it after my boss in Putingrad gets his cut.”

Alexei ‘the Garrotte’, aluminium producer, also from Putingrad:

“My enemies from back home were after me, and I needed round-the-clock protection. Then my associate Dmitri ‘the Hammer’ told me of the great experience he had had with the Tory Kennel, so I decided to give it a go.

“At first I bought just a few MPs, at £10,000 each, and they did a good job. But then Dmitri told me not to be a putz. ‘Only a schmuck pays retail,’ he said, and it made sense to me.

“So for ‘a few bob more’, as my English mates put it, I got a great deal. I became a Friend of the Tory Kennel for just £100,000, the price of 10 MPs. For that I got the services of all 305 of them, and they’ll chase away any beast coming after me.”

Ivan ‘the Beast’, laudromat owner, formerly of Gorbachevka, then of Putingrad:

“I came to settle in Londongrad because my boss ‘Polonium’ wanted to ‘whack me in the shithouse’, as he put it. For just £65,000 I got a whole pack of guard MPs, and sure enough, they’re real sons of bitches, just as advertised. I feel safe now.”

Write to us for more testimonials – we have hundreds of them, even more than that other kennel from across the aisle.

So whether you need protection or just a playmate, become a Friend of the Tory Kennel. We’ll find just the right MPs to serve your needs.

The Tory Kennel. No job too low, no donation too high, no paying customer turned away. We’re always at your beck and call, Mr Comrade.

 

Although Churchill in his later life couldn’t conceal his admiration for Stalin, he accurately described Lenin as a ‘plague bacillus’ transported by the Germans from Switzerland to Russia.

The bacillus caused an outbreak of a deadly disease that claimed more lives than any other pandemic in history.

Calculating the exact number of those devoured by the Bolsheviks over decades of tireless labour is difficult: the Russians have never been the most meticulous of record keepers, and those records the Bolsheviks did keep are still largely classified.

However, difficult doesn’t mean impossible, and in his books Lethal Politics and Death by Government Prof. Rummel used demographic analysis to come up with a plausible number of  62 million – way in excess of the 20 million Khrushchev acknowledged.

One way or another the physical damage caused by Bolshevik infestation is possible to calculate with various degrees of precision. What’s utterly incalculable is the metaphysical, moral damage.

Yet I submit, while praying for the millions of innocent people slaughtered by the ghastliest regime in history, that the moral damage it caused is even greater and longer-lasting.

Years of brutal, murderous slavery corrupts slaves and masters alike. The two groups intermingle, and after a few decades their members become largely indistinguishable. The slaves often think, occasionally act, like their masters, and the masters are themselves slaves in their mentality, morality and tastes.

The mark of Cain isn’t indelible, and the same book that tells us the story also shows ways in which the ugly imprint can be expunged. Yet, though a person can do so quickly, a society can’t.

The disease that infected it in the first place may go into remission for a while, but then it’ll always flare up – and it’ll remain for ever contagious.

In its acute phase, the bacillus of Leninism reinfected the West whence it had come. And it wasn’t just thousands of ‘useful idiots’ who were the carriers of the contagion. Russia in her Bolshevik phase vastly expanded the boundaries of the possible and trampled over the old taboos, which affected not just witting individuals but also unwitting societies.

By elevating institutional amorality to a level of secular religion, Bolshevism claimed millions of post-Christian Western victims, now bereft of the only source of collective morality possible in the West.

Those at the epicentre of the pandemic, the Russians, suffered immeasurably more than anyone else. But Westerners reinfected with the bacillus suffered too – and they continue to do so.

Russia is undergoing a new massive outbreak of the plague, with the bacillus of Leninism having returned in a modified version called Putinism. But those at the periphery of the pandemic, Westerners, aren’t free of the disease either.

The West is smiling smugly at the ego-stroking thought of being safe from a direct physical attack by Putin’s kleptofascist state. This sense of security may or may not be false, and I’ll leave it to the experts to weigh our military capabilities against Russia’s.

But the West has neither any natural immunity nor any effective vaccine against the bacilli of moral corruption emanating from Putin’s Russia.

These are carried and spread by Russian ‘oligarchs’ who don’t just gobble up properties in London’s better boroughs. These messengers of Putin  are buying up, both retail and wholesale, Western politicians and their parties, journalists (along with their papers), businessmen, present and former heads of states and even members of our royal family.

Every purloined banknote passed on by the gangster ‘oligarchs’ (and all their banknotes are purloined) is crawling with the germs of moral plague. These infect the recipients as surely as the real physical bacilli would.

An article in today’s Mail doesn’t tell me anything I don’t know or haven’t written about. But it catalogues nicely the British VIPs who have fallen victim to the germs that have rubbed off on them from dirty Russian money.

The contagion doesn’t discriminate along party or class lines. It affects with equally lethal power prominent Tories like Douglas Hurd and Lord Powell, Labour grandees like Lord Mandelson and Lord Myners, independent leftie Lord Owen, Lord Ponsbie, George ‘I’ve-never-seen-a-disgusting-cause-I-couldn’t-love’ Galloway, Lord Truscott – and it even reaches our royal palaces, infecting their past and present inhabitants, like Sir Michael Peat, until recently Prince Charles’s Private Secretary, and Prince Michael of Kent, who has been taking Russia’s rouble since the time Putin was a student at the KGB academy.

It’s not just about the individuals though. The disease pervades the whole society, for we all sully our hands with filthy Russian lucre, even if it’s not passed into our proffered palms directly.

The City of London, which produces almost a quarter of our GDP, receives and launders billions in infected cash, as does the booming property sector of London and the Home Counties. Our pension funds are awash with dirty money, and there’s enough sewage left over to float our football clubs, newspapers and chains of bookstores.

With money comes political influence. Since Putin’s kleptofascism veils itself in the mantle of democracy, however threadbare, even the Tory party doesn’t flinch when accepting millions in plague-infested cash.

By taking money from Russian disease carriers, our tennis-loving politicians Dave and Boris are spreading the disease as surely as does Germany’s ex-chancellor Schröder who’s paid millions by the Russians, France’s president Hollande who’s selling Mistral helicopter carriers to the Russian fleet based in the annexed Crimea – as surely as all those European governments who won’t do anything to stop Putin’s aggression because they want Putin’s gas.

They are all doing an Esau and a Faust simultaneously, by selling both the West’s birthright and its soul to the highest bidder, in this instance Russia.

Money doesn’t just talk, ladies and gentlemen. When crawling with plague bacilli, it also infects.