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They don’t call them wet Tories for nothing

That was one parade it did rain on. The skies opened just as Rishi ‘Washy’ Sunak was announcing a snap election on 4 July, and the PM’s suit got as wet as his policies.

The decision to call the general election four months earlier than he had to came as a surprise to most people, and surprise instantly caused logorrhoea. All and sundry are wondering why the PM took that step and whether he is crazy enough to believe he can win.

My ignorance of, and indifference to, electoral mechanics ill-qualify me to enlarge on this subject. Suffice it to say that Labour’s lead in the polls stands at 25 per cent, and I don’t recall any candidate overturning such a deficit in my lifetime.

Hence even Rishi’s wife probably thinks he’s going to lose, but perhaps he hopes that by jumping the gun he can still hold on to enough seats for the Tories to be a valid opposition.

Ignorant though I am of such matters, I’m always willing to plug the most gaping holes in my education. To that end I happily read what experts have to say, and they agree on most things.

Rishi went for it because the inflation had just dropped down almost to the target of two per cent, a reduced National Insurance tax will add £900 a year to the average-income earner, the Bank may lower the interest – and hence mortgage! – rates, and the first planes carrying illegal migrants to Rwanda just may take off in time.

Yet wiser heads refer to Harold Macmillan who warned that it takes a long time for voters to equate less tax with more cash. If so, that makes voters quite dim, but then what else is new?

They also say the Bank will be reluctant to lower the interest rate so close to the election because it’ll look like a gimmick. And no one thinks that a few planeloads heading for Rwanda will solve the problem of the flotillas carrying illegal migrants (criminals, in other words) to our shores.

Thus spake public opinion, which in reality means a few dozen pundits and politicians. But being a man of the people (wipe that smirk off your face – I wrote ads for 30 years, and if that doesn’t establish populist credentials, I don’t know what can), I’m more interested in the public-house opinion expressed by Tom, Dick and Harry over a pint.

And those three proverbial gentlemen are unanimous: the Tories are rubbish. One or two even modify the last word with an off-colour intensifier.

I agree: the Tories are pathetic. But any sensible electorate would still give him a landslide victory. Allow me to explain this seeming paradox.

Voting for the opposition should be a game of two halves. The first half is deciding that the ruling party isn’t doing well, and this part Tom, Dick and Harry have got down pat. Sorted, as they’d say.

The second half is harder but even more important: the realistic hope that the other side will do better or, barring that, at least the certainty that it won’t do worse. ‘Things can only get better’ is the ubiquitous mantra of most elections, and yet it’s the worst fallacy of politics.

Things can always get worse, and here I’m going out on an unfamiliar limb and actually making a prediction. No, not on the likely result of the election – my crystal ball is murky. But I can bet everything I hold dear (except perhaps Penelope who claims I have no power to gamble her away because she’s an autonomous individual) that, when they get in power, Labour will make things much, much worse.

It’s also my contention that people who don’t realise this, and in general ignore the second half of my proposed whole, shouldn’t be qualified to vote. They are incapable of casting their vote rationally and therefore responsibly.

These people keep repeating that tired old chestnut, ‘It’s time for a change.’ No it isn’t. It never is. It’s always time to change for the better, not just for the sake of variety.

So why are the Tories rubbish? The short answer is, because they aren’t really Tories but Labour Lite. Just look at how they handled Brexit.

The Tory hierarchy, as opposed to the grassroots, didn’t really want it. They were fused with the EU bureaucracy personally and didn’t mind taking the country with them. Cameron only agreed to the referendum as a sop to the conservative element within the party because he was sure of the Remain vote. That, and his subsequent inept anti-Brexit campaign, was a sign of Tory incompetence, one of many.

Now, the underlying reason for Brexit was strictly conservative: a guarantee of the traditional sovereignty of the nation and its Parliament. The inner logic of that step called very loudly indeed for further conservative steps to build on the momentum.

However, though forced to repudiate EU membership, the government chose to stick to the EU social model. The situation was crying out for shedding the shackles of such continental abominations as the ECHR – we don’t really need Germans to teach us about human rights. I dare say Britain’s historical record in that area stacks up well against that of Germany, France and just about any other major European country.

But continued adherence to that continental setup makes it harder to stem the influx of illegal (i.e. criminal) migration, one of the key issues in the upcoming elections.

Then there’s the post-Brexit economy, with the Tories accentuating the drawback of Brexit and squandering the benefits. The drawback was a restricted access to the huge market at our doorstep. The potential benefits came from an unrestricted ability to cultivate other markets and attract investors to our own.

The easiest way of achieving the latter aim is to make it worth the investors’ while to move their businesses to Britain. In other words, to make it cheaper for them to hire and easier to fire. Yet the government raised the corporate tax, while preserving the social guarantees largely (to be fair, far from exclusively) inspired by the EU.

Under the Tories, the NHS is costing more and achieving less. Their suicidal restrictions on policing make law enforcement risible. They lack the courage to stop the slide of our education into the mire of woke barbarism. In general, you can continue this list of failures, but you won’t be able to offset them with any appreciable successes.

So much for the first half. Now, which of those things do you think Labour will do better?

The party is committed to higher social spending, which means higher taxation. Labour has already announced its intention to return to the unions the powers Margaret Thatcher took away from them. They call it Workers’ Control; I call it destroying the economy.

They are committed to go on throwing billions into the black hole of the NHS, their beloved brainchild. That too means higher public spending and more taxation.

These combined measures are guaranteed to make the cost of doing business higher and the prospects of new investment lower. As to renewed rapprochement with the EU, Labour leaders have hinted broadly at another referendum and subsequent return into the fold.

Labour leaders refuse to commit themselves to assigning specific primary sex characteristics to either sex. They see the entire history of Britain as a story of racism and colonialism, and insist children should be educated in that spirit. In his earlier tenure as Director of Public Prosecutions, their likely PM, Starmer, never saw a criminal he couldn’t let go – they were all victims of social injustice.

And so on ad infinitum: anywhere you look, Labour is guaranteed to do much worse than even the pathetic Tories. The latter may be Labour Lite, but the new government will be Labour Full Strength. And I haven’t even touched on foreign policy and Labour’s unwavering commitment to the ‘Palestinian’ cause and its understated commitment to defence.

By this circuitous route we’ve arrived at my recurrent theme: the gross inadequacy of unqualified, unlimited and unbalanced democracy. Things I’ve outlined aren’t the stuff of which doctorates in political science are made. They should be instantly obvious to any even remotely qualified voter.

Yet they aren’t. That means our voters aren’t qual… Oh well, there I go again.  

Ship all Canadians to Africa

Soviet cartoon, 1969

What a strange idea, you might think. In fact, you may question the sanity of anyone proposing such mass deportation.

Moral considerations apart, what on earth is the point? It’s not as if Canada were so overpopulated that it’s running out of room to accommodate its 39 million inhabitants. And surely, if for some unfathomable reason Canadians agreed to be shipped anywhere, it would be to a more familiar climate.

Yet all your bemusement shows is that you don’t understand the language. No, not English. The headline was written in a different tongue: Aesopian American.

First a disclaimer: my comments on American usage may show a patina of age. I left the US in 1988, and all languages have developed since then (usually for the worse, but this is a separate subject). In my day, ‘Canadian’ was the racist Aesopian for ‘black’.

You see, already in those days overt racism had become socially awkward, if not quite unacceptable. One could have more latitude for such self-expression down South, but even there I heard statements like “I hate niggers” much less often in the ‘80s than I did in the ‘70s.

When I moved to New York in 1984 after 10 years in Texas, I found such locutions expunged from publicly audible speech. The dread N-word was strictly off-limits. Yet when people talked to like-minded individuals in strict privacy, one could still occasionally hear words like ‘schvartze’ from Jews or ‘Hymie’ from blacks.

But only crazed fanatics like Jesse Jackson dared refer to New York as ‘Hymietown’ in public. As a matter of historical reference, Dr Goebbels preferred ‘Jew York’, but then English wasn’t his mother tongue.

And one could never hear any pejorative anti-black terms in bars or on public transport. The vast thesaurus of such words in American English remained untapped.

However, the sentiment didn’t disappear. It was merely bottled up, trying to pop the cork and gush out, but without drawing opprobrium. Hence the term ‘Canadian’ some New Yorkers (and other Yankees) used in lieu of ‘blacks’ to vent their innermost feelings to the initiated.

The uninitiated drinking in the same bar would be left wondering why anyone would think that Canadians had puffed-up lips and a propensity for mugging, or why they should all be shipped to Africa. Those in the know just smirked in a gnostic sort of way.

This bit of linguistic nostalgia goes a long way towards explaining the agued public denunciations of Israel and its ‘genocide’ of ‘Palestinians’. Most of the people displaying such touching concern for Muslim terrorists and their civilian fans don’t really care about the face value of the issue. And practically none are familiar with its historical background.

In fact, whenever several refugee families move into their own neighbourhood, such bleeding hearts can scream ‘NIMBY’ with the best of jingoists. The ongoing conflict simply allows them to vent their heartfelt anti-Semitism while sidestepping accusations of bigotry and even garnering social kudos for their woke sensitivity.

When they utter the word ‘Israelis’, other words keep flashing through their mind – just like ‘Canadians’ didn’t necessarily mean denizens of Toronto or Vancouver to American racists.

Every time Israel responds with violence to murderous forays into its territory, the anti-Semites of the world heave a sigh of relief: “Now we can.” Nor is it just isolated individuals – institutions jump at the chance too.

Since Israel was founded in 1948, the UN, to name one august organisation, has passed more castigating resolutions against Israel than against all other countries combined. If one didn’t know better, one could easily get the impression that Israel is the densest distillation of evil in the world, the greatest threat to everything we hold dear.

That tiny spec on the map sitting in the midst of vast tracts inhabited by rabid anti-Semites craving its annihilation draws more hatred than Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China or Kim’s North Korea.

Yet unlike those three, Israel is a truly democratic state where all citizens, including Arabs, enjoy greater freedoms than anywhere else in the Middle East. A state that’s our only ally in the region, an oasis of Western civility in the desert of savage barbarism. Not a perfect state by any means – we aren’t blessed with such things in this life. But definitely the best place in the Middle East and one of the best in the world.

Yet making such points is useless. Everyone knows all this anyway, and the line isn’t drawn between the ignorant and the educated. It’s drawn between decent people and anti-Semites.

The latter category evidently includes Karim Khan, ICC prosecutor who has issued an ICC arrest warrant against Israel’s PM and Defence minister whom he accuses of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mr Khan (no relation of the London mayor) is British, born in Scotland and weaned on the finest traditions of British legality.

That Scotsman born and bred detects moral – and, more to the point, legal – equivalence between Israel trying to stamp out the terrorists who perpetrated the worst attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust and the terrorists themselves.

No sane person, especially one endowed with any moral sense, would feel that way unless the real reason for his actions was different from the ostensible one. That warrant is as clear an anti-Semitic statement as Jesse Jackson’s ‘Hymietown’. It’s just worded differently, relying on Aesopian shorthand.

This sort of thing lacks novelty appeal for me. I grew up in Moscow, where the streets were alive with the sounds of anti-Semitic invective. Yet the press was slightly more circumspect, relying on Aesopian more than Russian. I was too little to remember the openly Judeophobic campaign during the ‘Doctors’ Plot’, but in my day ‘Israelis’ and ‘Zionists’ were the Aesopian for ‘Jews’.

Soviet papers regaled their readers with anti-Semitic cartoons that would have made Julius Streicher wince at such a lack of subtlety. Muscovites quipped that the traditional anti-Semitic term ‘kike snout’ was being replaced with ‘the face of aggression’. No one was in any doubt as to the real meaning of those cartoons and their impassioned captions.

I wouldn’t waste my breath trying to argue with that good Scotsman, Mr Khan. One can take rational exception only to rational thoughts, not to inflamed passions. He just wouldn’t see the self-evident truth that Hamas is as responsible for the deaths of the civilians it uses as a human shield as it is for the sadistic murder of 1,500 Israelis.

Meanwhile, Norway has declared its intention to recognise ‘Palestine’ as an independent state from 28 May. It will be followed in short order by other EU members, starting with Spain and Ireland. Do those governments actually think this futile gesture will bring peace to the Middle East? Nobody is that stupid. But some people are that impassioned.

But Canadians shouldn’t worry. They can stay in North America and continue to speak English or French – as long as they eschew Aesopian.

P.S. Speaking of language, I love the way the word ‘philosophical’ is used nowadays. Following the resignation of Pochettino, the coach of Chelsea FC, the papers are writing about a ‘philosophical divide’ between him and the club owners. Does this mean he is a logical positivist and they are deconstructionists? Or is it just that they mispronounce ‘Kant’ and ‘Foucault’?

Down with slogans!

As a former purveyor of catchy advertising lines, I’ve learned two things about slogans: confidence in their efficacy and cynicism about those who make them effective.

Advertising is usually aimed at eliciting a low-level buying decision: which brand to choose at a supermarket or a department store. Since most brands are much of a muchness, no choice will affect the buyer’s life too much one way or another. And society at large won’t be affected at all.

Not so with political slogans. These are encapsulations of political philosophies, and if the philosophies are wrong, the slogans – specifically because they are effective – can cause much harm.

And even if the underlying philosophies are good… I was about to write “…slogans can still do damage”, but checked myself in the nick of time. My contention is that no good political philosophy lends itself to sloganeering.

That’s one reason, for example, that political conservatism can’t compete with the mass appeal of its leftist opponents. Ideologies are easily reducible to memorable slogans, whereas serious political thought suffers from what the biochemist Michael Behe called ‘irreducible complexity’.

Just take the founding slogan of modernity, liberté, egalité, fraternité. One can see why it worked so well.

In the early stages of the revolution, this triple lie of a motto didn’t run unopposed: other desiderata, such as unity and justice, were occasionally proposed as replacements for the brotherhood element. The ultimate winner was probably determined by its Christian overtones purloined from the original owner for PR purposes.

To start with, let’s consider its tripartite form. You’ll notice that many revolutionary slogans of post-Christian modernity are constructed of three elements, either words or phrases.

Apart from the French one, we could cite the American ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’, the Russian ‘vsia vlast sovetam’ (all power to the Soviets) or the German ‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (one people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant revolution had to chip in with a vapid ‘Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!’

What we are witnessing here is the first stage of shoplifting larceny: the revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. Since people’s ears were attuned to it, they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning. In this instance, however, it wasn’t just the music.

Also hidden in the French slogan was another mock-Christian allusion. For, according to the Enlighteners, ‘fraternity’ flowed out of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. Philosophers of the time argued that no brotherhood was possible without liberty and equality, which is to say that the third part of the triad proceeded from the first two.

One doesn’t have to be a theologian to see how the deep and subtle Christian doctrine of the Trinity was vulgarised for a very un-Christian purpose by adding the faked echoes of the Creeds.

Each element of the French triad was stolen property. To the original owner, freedom came from – and led to – the truth, which is to say God; equality was a natural consequence of jointly loving, and being loved by, a supreme being, which is to say God; brotherhood implied a spiritual kinship bestowed by a common father, which is to say God.

The intellectual cardsharps of the Enlightenment deftly pulled the ace of God out of the pack, leaving people with a hand of cards that were not only low but also marked. For even on a purely secular level, the middle element of the triad, equality, negates the other two.

But no conservative thinker, even one with my 30 years’ experience in advertising, will be able to counter with a slogan of his own. It would take at least a lengthy article, better still a book, to explain that, say, the state can only ever level down, not up, and this can only ever be achieved by coercive means.

Since, contrary to another revolutionary falsehood, people really aren’t created – and certainly don’t end up – equal, they can only be equalised by government fiat aimed at truncating the social and economic pyramid at the top. In other words, equality presupposes ever-greater and bossier centralism, which will in turn lead to tyranny.

There you have it: I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the issue, but I’ve already lost the masses by appealing to their understated, not to say non-existent, thinking capacity. Instead of causing a kneejerk response, I’ve caused consternation.

Or look at the communist slogan, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’. This sounds wonderful to the unthinking masses, and they won’t listen to an egghead arguing that, for the slogan to mean anything at all, there has to exist an omnipotent authority empowered to decide what an individual is capable of and what his needs are.

Such an authority would have to be not only tyrannical but murderously oppressive, which has to be instantly clear to any thinking person. However, I wish I had a tenner for each time I’ve heard someone insist that the communist idea is lovely but regrettably unachievable, or else perverted by the Bolsheviks. In fact, it’s unachievable precisely because it’s monstrous, which the Bolsheviks demonstrated so persuasively.

The problem with slogans is that they are simplistic and hence vulgar. That makes them as appealing to the simplistic and vulgar multitudes as they are repugnant to the few people who try to think about serious matters seriously.

No slogan can ever stand up to intelligent enquiry, never mind scrutiny. This goes for slogans associated not only with the subversive Left but also with the benign Right, such as ‘make America great again’ – even though the people who swear by it are nicer than those who talk about liberty and equality.

I could almost live with that entreaty if ‘great’ were replaced with ‘good’. That wouldn’t make the slogan any less vulgar, but at least ‘good’ is easier to define than ‘great’. The standards of goodness were laid down in Exodus and Matthew, and they can perhaps be somehow extrapolated to a country. But what makes a country great?

Different things to different men, I’d suggest. Some will talk about prosperity, some about military strength, some about international influence and prestige, some about anything else they can think of.

I once asked a promulgator of that slogan what it actually meant. The word ‘again’ suggests that America used to be great in the past, but isn’t any longer. This seems to call for a return to a specific period in the country’s history. Which one?

His first response was “before the war”. What, the thirties? The Great Depression, dustbowl countryside, FDR’s socialism America is still reeling from, an alphabet soup of new government agencies, giant publicly funded projects like the Hoover Dam with workers paid a dollar a day?

In the end we agreed that perhaps the fifties was a better candidate for greatness, up until the Vietnam War, the student riots and the precursors of today’s BLM and Me-Too. But did we mean isolationist or proselytising greatness? America providing a shining example for the world or trying to lead it?

So decorticated, the slogan lost its substantive meaning. Only populist demagoguery at its most soaring remained and, provided the people are vulnerable to it, that weapon can be wielded by rather questionable politicians.

I suppose populist politics is like advertising in that neither can survive without rabble-rousing sloganeering. That’s my problem with populist politics, sloganeering and – come to think of it – advertising. Yes, I know this is biting the hand that continues to feed me 20-odd years after I left the trade. But a hand close to one’s mouth is much easier to bite.

Our gender-bender politics

We miss you, Niccolo

On the face of it, the news doesn’t even seem to be newsworthy.

According to Labour, those dastardly Tories make it too hard for children to change sex. Their reasons for such tyrannical practices have to be nefarious, though Labour isn’t quite sure what they may be.

One way or another, those toffee-nosed demons ruin children’s lives by insisting on a medical certificate of gender dysphoria before a boy can legally become a girl or vice versa. That process must be “simplified”, says Labour.

Now, as a matter of general principle, Labour is in favour of medicalising everything: alcoholism, drug addiction, bad moods, criminality, marital problems, you name it. Just as long as you don’t name gender-bending.

The small matter of a child undergoing castration to be legally recognised as something he wasn’t born to be should be off-limits for medicine. Doctors and ideally parents must be taken out of the loop. If little Johnny wants to have his wee-wee cut off so that he can become little Jenny instead, it’s nobody’s business but his own.

Such was the Labour position under Corbyn. However, realising that extremism could scare off the electorate, the party drummed Jeremy out and Sir Keir Starmer in. Seeking electoral acceptability, he has suppressed his innermost cravings (which are similar to Corbyn’s) and mitigated Labour policies by way of subterfuge.

One such policy Starmer has mitigated is on the issue under discussion here. Rather than cutting doctors out of the process altogether, Sir Keir only wants to abolish the medical panel currently required to issue the necessary certificate. A quick diagnosis by a single doctor, he says, should suffice. That doctor may be a specialist, but even a GP would do at a pinch.

According to the NHS Choices website, “GPs spend an average of 8-10 minutes with each patient”. In reality it’s even less, but even the claimed generosity seems inadequate in this case. After all, a GP is about to send a child on a lifelong road from which there is no return.

All this is tediously predictable and, by itself, not worth talking about. We already know that night follows day, trees are green in summer, and our leftmost major party will seek to enter the corridors of power through the left door.

However, the reaction of the Tory Party hints at the real issue underneath it all. Kemi Badenoch, the Women and Equality Minister (don’t you just love such job descriptions) said: “There is no reason whatsoever to relax the safeguards that are in place. Labour should stop trying to weaponise this issue and allow professionals to do their job properly.”

Weaponise to what purpose? Obviously, to gain the upper hand in the forthcoming elections. In other words, both parties are certain that the elections may to a large extent hinge on this issue. That, I’d suggest, is grounds for a fundamental reassessment of basic political theory.

Any expert technician of democratic policies knows that political success comes from the ability to put large voting blocs together. That makes democratic politics a game of numbers.

Giant computers whir into action all over the land, crunching multi-digit numbers and identifying areas where such numbers could be large enough to add up to a voting bloc. Thousands of focus groups are convened and put under intense interrogation. Trained moderators bombard various demographic sectors with a barrage of questions, trying to determine which way the wind of great numbers is blowing.

Pollsters good at their job are worth their weight in diamonds, not just gold. Such mavens see the forest of voting intention behind the trees of seemingly random answers to intricate questionnaires. And they convert what they see into what they recommend to the candidate.

What the latter thinks on the subject has always been secondary and now is not so much tertiary as irrelevant. It’s not convictions but numbers that decide elections.

Are you with me so far? If so, you are way behind the times.

That’s how it used to be when democratic politics was mostly Machiavellian. In those days, electoral promises were determined by coldblooded calculations of sums. Nowadays, however, they are increasingly skewed by obsequious bows to ideologies.

Gender-bending is a case in point. No one knows for sure how many transsexuals grace these Isles with their presence. Assessments vary, but the greatest number I’ve seen was about 250,000. That’s those who doubt they were born with the right sex, and only a small percentage of them will ever do something to correct the injustice perpetrated on them by nature.

This is a drop in the ocean of a 50-million electorate, certainly not enough to add up to any bloc worthy of the name. And yet a Tory minister protests against Labour weaponising the issue, which suggests she knows how destructive to her party’s chances that weapon may be.

This means democratic politics is no longer a game of numbers, certainly not in any straightforward sense. Ultimately elections will always be decided by sums, but we must fundamentally revise our view on how such sums are put together.

It’s no longer just about appealing to the concrete interests of a group perceived to be large enough to swing an election. It’s about kowtowing to an ideology accepted by a vast number of voters regardless of their specific concerns. The public has been brainwashed to applaud virtue-signalling, however perversely virtue is defined.

Ideologies give our increasingly atheist masses a way of reaching the superpersonal without approaching the supernatural. This answers a ubiquitous human need to believe in something greater than oneself. Most people are probably unaware of this craving, but it does exist.

And swindlers of any kind know how to reel in their prey by identifying unconscious needs and catering to them. As a result, people feel good about themselves because they’ve responded to the diktats of a pernicious ideology – and any ideology is pernicious by definition.

People may not account for this in so many words. Nobody will say even to himself that he’ll vote Labour because it’ll make sex change easier. But he may allow himself to be sedated by the aroma of virtue emanating from the whiffs of ideology released into the atmosphere.

Therefore it doesn’t matter how many transsexuals live in Britain. It may be 250,000, 2,500 or 250 – never mind the numbers, feel the ‘virtuous’ ideology.

Generally speaking, it’s wrong to insist that because something happened it was bound to happen. Secular determinism of any kind is usually unsound. Yet the post-Enlightenment fusion of boundless atheism and limitless democracy may well provide an exception. Otherwise it’s hard to explain how transsexuality has become such an urgent concern for so many otherwise normal people.

Niccolo Machiavelli, please come back, we need you. All is forgiven – if it takes a dose of your cynicism to inoculate us against ideologies, we’ll never again say a nasty word about you.

Happy Multi-Culti Day!

Today is Pentecost Sunday, traditionally known in England (and the Anglican Church) as Whitsun. On this day, the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles and the Virgin Mary, who all began to ‘speak in tongues’.

Theologians argue whether what occurred on that day was glossolalia or xenolalia. The former means acquiring a miraculous ability to speak a divine language that only the initiated know. The latter refers to an equally miraculous ability to speak an existing language previously unknown to the speaker.

The divinely linguistic aspect of Pentecost is one possible aspect to discuss, and there exist many others, such as the holiday’s origin in the Jewish tradition, Pentecost’s interplay with the Old Testament Babel, the working of the Holy Spirit, its representation in Eastern and Western iconography and so forth.

However, I’ll display uncharacteristic reticence by refraining from discussing any of them. Actually, this isn’t so much an exercise in modesty as merely an attempt to follow pastoral guidance.

For the priest celebrating today’s mass at our church didn’t go into those arcana either. This, though one would think his remit would preclude such bashfulness.

Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that the good monsignor (such is his clerical title) ignored Pentecost altogether. He didn’t. But he focused on what he saw as its true significance to him and, by implication, his congregation.

Walking through the streets of London, he said, especially the city’s less salubrious areas, one can hear a multitude of tongues spoken, each originating from a downtrodden part of the world. Somali, Swahili, Zulu, Urdu, Pashtu, Arabic – you can hear them all, and some people, presumably including the good monsignor, can even identify them.

Whenever he espies what I once alliteratively called a ‘global glossalalian gloom’, the monsignor’s heart rejoices – since all those are existing languages, he must support the xenolalian school. But that’s not all he supports, which immediately became clear.

Isn’t it wonderful, continued the monsignor, that so many different nationalities are represented in London, and in such admirably high numbers. Just think how they enrich the panoply of life in the capital, what a valuable cultural and economic contribution they make.

Isn’t multiculturalism wonderful? And not just as such. For it also reminds us of the evils of colonial and capitalist exploitation, practised in the past by so many Western countries, including – to our collective shame – Britain.

Well, what did you expect? I did tell you one can talk about all sorts of things on Pentecost Sunday.

However, some may object that perhaps a homily delivered from the pulpit next to the altar may not be an ideal vehicle for carrying such messages to the multitudes. The homily should really have been about the Holy Spirit descending on the apostles in Jerusalem, not the formerly downtrodden masses descending on London in apocalyptic numbers.

Moreover, some dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries among you may even question the validity and factual accuracy of such statements even if voiced at a more secular venue. Such objectionable individuals may argue that the net effect of, say, Somalian immigration is hugely negative.

That group adds much to London’s crime rate and the pressure on its already creaking infrastructure and social services, while adding nothing at all to the city’s culture. And the massive presence of Arabic speakers may in some minds be primarily associated with riots and exploding public transport.

But not being one such dyed-in-the-wool reactionary myself (I thought I had to make this disclaimer to reduce the risk of having my collar felt), I shan’t join those ranks. I’ll merely express a heartfelt hope that we’ll see the day when such priests are summarily unfrocked. God knows Christianity has enough enemies without not to be able also to afford enemies within.

P.S. Speaking of multiculturalism, the town of Carentan in Normandy celebrated the approaching anniversary of D-Day by hanging bunting all over the place.

They hung all sorts of flags, including the EU one, even though that organisation was then merely a twinkle in the collective eye of Franco-German bureaucrats. Even the flags of such countries as Sweden (neutral, but leaning to the German side), Switzerland (ditto) and Ireland (ditto) proudly flapped in the wind. The flag prominent by its absence was the Union Jack.

One may assume that the city council is unaware of Britain’s role in history’s greatest amphibious landing, and of the thousands of Britons killed on and around those Normandy beaches. But that assumption would be wrong: “This is about Brexit,” explained a chap at the town’s tourist board.

I get it. Britain doesn’t deserve to have her vital role acknowledged because on 6 June, 1944, she proved her euroscepticism. Britain did so by violence on that day and again by plebiscite 72 years later.

Say no more. No one thwarts two attempts by the Franco-Germans to unite Europe and gets away with it.

It didn’t start with Biden

Western governments are accountable to the people, which makes us better able to resist threats of domestic tyranny. Yet the same accountability makes us less able to resist threats posed by foreign despots.

Every few years we can punish our politicians by taking their power away. To a great extent, that turns our leaders into followers. They have to keep their ear to the grapevine of public opinion and respond to the people’s innermost cravings.

And outside some 10 per cent at either end of the political spectrum, most denizens of Western democracies are more interested in domestic comforts than foreign policy. That’s why the clichéd phrase, “All politics is local”, has become a truism in America and elsewhere.

Voters are likely to treat every penny spent on defence or foreign aid as a penny added to their already extortionate taxes. And they are wary of taking a strong stand against foreign tyrants because they fear such brinkmanship may drag them into a major war.

In other words, Western societies are predominantly philistine, which makes it well-nigh impossible for their leaders to face up to foreign enemies until it’s too late. Yet vacillation in the face of foreign threats makes war not less likely but more sanguinary – and modern times offer no exceptions to this general rule.

In a typically thoughtful article, Andrew Neil today runs through a roll call of Western leaders and correctly finds them all too weak to resist the threat of evil regimes in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

“The dictators are emboldened by the dearth of democratic leadership. Europe is especially bereft of it,” he writes. However, America isn’t much better off: “The fact Joe Biden and Donald Trump are the best the U.S. can come up with when autocrats are on the march is a cause for despair among all democrats – and much chortling in the redoubts of the dictators.”

All very true. But it didn’t start with Messrs Biden, Macron, Sunak and Scholz. The problem is systemic, which even a brief glance at the history of the past 100 years or so will prove.

Most of the cataclysmic horrors suffered by mankind were perpetrated by the two most evil regimes in history: the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (with China adding her yuan’s worth later). Yet both could have been nipped in the bud had Western democracies possessed the will to act.

They certainly had both the means and the legal grounds for doing so. In the case of Russia, Lenin’s Bolsheviks violated agreements with the Allies by signing a separate peace with Germany in 1918 and effectively becoming her allies in the war against the Entente.

The Bolsheviks were so weak at the time that Anglo-American troops could have easily unseated those usurpers, saving the world from untold miseries. Not that the Allies hadn’t been warned.

Sidney Reilly, ‘the Ace of Spies’, pleaded from Moscow that his superiors in London shift the emphasis of their policy from the war to the Bolshevik revolution:

“This hideous cancer [is] striking at the very root of civilisation. Gracious heavens, will the people in England never understand? The Germans are human beings; we can afford to be even beaten by them. Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch enemy of the human race… At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed out of existence… Mankind must unite in a holy alliance against this midnight terror.”

Yet that “arch enemy of the human race” was allowed not only to grow to maturity but to spawn and wean another such monster in Germany. And again Britain and France had both the means and, after the first acts of Nazi aggression, the legal justification for crushing Hitler’s regime before it got in full swing.

The remilitarisation of the Rhineland in 1936 was Hitler’s first bluff that could have been easily called, but wasn’t, and neither were all subsequent bluffs. Even after 1 September, 1939, Germany lay open to a thrust from the west. All her resources were committed in Poland, and there wasn’t a single tank on her western border. Yet Britain and France chose to fight a Phony War rather than a real one, and you know what happened next.

Around mid-1943 it was clear Germany would lose the war. Hence the post-war shape of Europe began to loom large, with Stalin not even bothering to conceal his pan-European ambitions.

Churchill was deeply concerned with the possibility of a communist-dominated continent, but Roosevelt was quite insouciant about it. He was more concerned with winning yet another presidential term in November 1944. When Churchill pleaded with him to join efforts in resisting Stalin’s designs, FDR sent him a private message on 29 September, 1944:   

“We are all in agreement as to the necessity of having the USSR as a fully accepted and equal member of an association of great powers formed for the purpose of preventing international war. It should be possible to accomplish this by adjusting our differences through compromise by all the parties concerned and this ought to tide things over for a few years until the child learns to toddle.”

As a direct result of that drivel, Eastern Europe got to experience the delights of communism for several decades, communist regimes in China and elsewhere appeared, and the world has been facing the threat of annihilation ever since.

Disregarding various small fry, in the past 100 years the greatest threats to the West have come from the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, communist China and Putin’s Russia. All four could have been pre-empted by a timely military response but, even barring that, simple economic far-sightedness could have sufficed.

Had the West denied those regimes sustained assistance in the shape of technologies and investment, none of them would have survived as a power capable of challenging the West. Yet our leaders, responding to the philistine cravings of their electorate, couldn’t pass up the profits from trade with evil regimes.

“Forget a Winston Churchill. We barely have a Neville Chamberlain at the moment,” writes Mr Neil, and I share his frustration. What I don’t share is the implication that, should the West be blessed with stronger leaders, we’d have nothing to fear from Putin and Xi.

Clone old Winston, put his doppelgängers in charge of every Western country, and they’d still remain supine and helpless to act until the evil despots left them no choice. Such is the inner logic of modern democracies, their systemic defect.

As a result, Western countries have grown unable to prevent wars or at least to win them quickly once they’ve become unavoidable. Such is the rule, and all we can do is pray for exceptions.     

Chinese whispers

Shoigu and his boss

The ongoing war in the Ukraine is generally perceived as a clash between Russia and the West. The latter is using the Ukraine as its proxy, while the former is supposed to be a free agent answering to no one and moved by nothing other than national interests.

Both parts are open to debate because the situation is far from being so straightforward.

First, the West got drawn into the conflict by default and not as part of some long-term strategy. When the Russians started their ‘hybrid’ war on the Ukraine by annexing her Crimea and some other provinces in 2014, even myopic analysts saw that Putin was out to restore Russia in all her imperial (or Soviet) grandeur.

Western leaders weren’t united in their opposition to that plan, with, for example, Angela Merkel being broadly sympathetic to it. But eventually NATO, the EU and the US reached a vague consensus: Putin must be defeated. Well, perhaps not quite defeated, but stopped. Or barring that, slowed down. All without provoking him into an apocalyptic response, naturally, that went without saying.

Such vagueness of purpose has produced ambivalence of action. On the one hand, the West has kept training and arming the Ukrainian forces, but on the other hand every effort has been taken not to do too good a job of it. Hence the arms supplies to the Ukraine were intermittent and insufficient, certain types of weaponry were off the list, no attempt to use NATO’s air force to protect Ukrainian cities from destruction was made or even mooted.

Neither does one detect any clear idea anywhere in the West of how the war should desirably end. Bien pensant generalities about peace and negotiations remain nebulous, and understandably so. Negotiations only mean something concrete when the desired end is crystal clear. This is far from being the case.

Zelensky talks about Russia retreating to the 1991 borders, which Putin would regard as a shattering defeat ending his political career and, in all likelihood, life. (He knows his boys on the muscle end of things play for keeps. Cross them, and suddenly a hand grenade goes off on your flight, all purely accidental of course.)

Putin is making vague noises about calling it quits on the existing frontline, with the eastern part of the Ukraine ending up as a sort of buffer zone. Now such an outcome would spell defeat for the Ukraine and also for Zelensky’s political (though probably not physical) life.

Ukrainians would be able to console themselves with Finland’s experience. Having heroically taken on the whole might of the Red Army in 1939-1940, that tiny country defended her sovereignty but ceded nine per cent of her territory – more than Stalin had originally demanded.

The Finnish model could be regarded as the most realistic and honourable way for the Ukraine to find peace, but for a few details. First, Finland kept her sovereignty but not really her independence. She became a Soviet satrap, with the Soviets keeping veto power over cabinet appointments and foreign policy decisions. Some of the top Finnish officials were openly KGB agents – and proud of it. That situation produced a new geopolitical term: finlandisation.

In the scenario I’ve outlined, the Ukraine would definitely be finlandised, meekly awaiting a new Russian invasion when the moment would be judged right. Yet indications are growing that most Western leaders find such an outcome acceptable. If they didn’t, Ukrainian F-16s would already be keeping their skies safe and Russian skies less so.

All in all, yes, to some extent, the Ukraine may be considered a proxy of the West. But only to a rather small extent, and with numerous reservations and qualifications.

But what about the other half of the story, Russia acting exclusively in her national interests and taking her cues from nobody? Here we must widen our field of vision to include the vast tracts of terrain east of the Urals.

China is rapidly colonising the Russian Far East, getting mining concessions, inspiring demographic displacement, building new settlements that increasingly take the shape of cities, buying up Russian oil at dumping prices and in general moving in deeper and deeper. China and Russia may be partners, but there’s little doubt as to who is the senior one.

The relationship between the two countries looks increasingly like that between the Golden Horde and Russian principalities in the 13th century. It’s not for nothing that Putin likes to compare himself to Alexander Nevsky, a prince whose heroic battles against Western invaders have turned out to be mere skirmishes, but whose subservience to the Horde was nothing short of Quisling treachery.

It’s against this background that the on-going reshuffle of the Russian leadership begins to make sense. For years, the most aggressive hawk in Putin’s war party, other than Putin himself, has been Nikolai Patrushev, KGB general and former head of the FSB.

He is commonly regarded as the chief architect and major inspiration of the full-scale aggression against the Ukraine. Patrushev is also credited with reliance on nuclear blackmail as a way of keeping the West in check.

Since 2008 he has held the post of Secretary of the Security Council, effectively the second highest position in Russia. A position that he dramatically lost on 12 May, being demoted to an honorary post as Putin’s aide. Overnight the tone of Russian anti-West propaganda changed.

If until 12 May the common theme had been reducing the US to radioactive ash and sinking Britain under a typhoon wave, since that date the threats have become practically vegetarian. If NATO dares to send its soldiers to the Ukraine, say Kremlin propagandists, they’ll be killed. Is that all? What about turning New York, Paris and London to smouldering stones?

At the same time, another close associate of Putin, Sergei Shoigu, was removed from his post of Defence Minister. But unlike Patrushev, he wasn’t demoted – quite the opposite. Shoigu was moved to Patrushev’s job at the Security Council, thus getting infinitely more power.

This looks surprising to anyone who has been watching the purge of Shoigu’s bailiwick, the Defence Ministry, over the past few days. His deputy Ivanov, known for his addiction to living high on the hog, is now in prison awaiting trial for corruption. Joining him in the same dock will be the Ministry’s head of personnel, Lt Gen Kuznetsov.

One doesn’t have to be an expert investigator to know that both generals are guilty as charged. After all, their incomes are in the public domain, and their salaries don’t stretch to Bentleys, private planes and villas in the nicer parts of the Mediterranean, to which the two warriors have become accustomed.

Hence their arrest is motivated by political considerations, not a quest for justice. They could have been arrested with equal justification years ago, along with their immediate superior, Shoigu. Yet, rather than having to explain his own billions, Shoigu has received the second highest post in Russia.

Before, his immediate superior was Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who has emerged from the reshuffle unscathed, holding on to his position, the third highest in government. Now what do the two men occupying the two rungs immediately under Putin’s have in common?

They are both so close to China that some commentators refuse to mince words and refer to them as Xi’s agents. And Xi has been controlling the temperature of Putin’s war from the start. For example, when Putin and Patrushev were ready to resort to tactical nukes, Xi put a quiet word in their shell-like that this wasn’t a good idea.

Both Shoigu and Mishustin are frequent visitors to Peking, where they emulate Nevsky and other Russian princes by seeking instructions. The princes also sought licences to rule, and there are indications that the glorious duo pursue those as well.

Apparently, Patrushev, with his KGB nose for intrigue, cottoned on to what was going on and demanded that Putin sack Mishutin. Yet Vlad saw the frown on Xi’s face and sacked Patrushev instead.

If this analysis is correct – and there are no guarantees in the murky haze of Kremlin politics – then Putin’s days are numbered too. Xi seems to realise that he has got as much political capital out of the war as he could, and there’s no more point suffering economic losses: deterioration of China’s economic relations with the West, growing prices of raw materials, restrictions on exports and so on.

The shadow cast by China’s bulk on Russia is widening by the minute. Like an erstwhile khan of the Golden Horde, Xi may only allow his Russian vassals to be independent up to a point. He may well decide it suits him to call an end to the war, which means getting rid of two of its most fanatical proponents.

One of them, Patrushev, is already gone. The other, Putin… Well, according to some Russian commentators, he is next on the way out, with either Shoigu or Mishutin getting Xi’s licence to rule. Let’s wait and see, shall we?

P.S. On a seemingly unrelated note, Concergebouw, Amsterdam’s top concert hall, has just cancelled two performances by the Israel-based Jerusalem String Quartet. The next step will probably be cancelling Jewish musicians regardless of where they come from. What’s Judenfrei in Dutch?

Cars can drive you around the bend in France

Common sign on French roads

Ten years ago – and time does fly even when you’re not having fun – I wrote this piece, mocking French driving: http://www.alexanderboot.com/french-manual-of-defensive-driving/

It was a satirical spoof and, like all works in that genre, had to have some link with reality. And the reality is gruesome.

The French suffer twice the number of road deaths we have in Britain, and the two statistics are diverging: ours is going down, theirs is going up. This though the two populations are roughly equal, French roads are infinitely better and as a rule straighter than ours, and they have 10 times our number of road-miles per car.

Obviously, when millions of people propel tonnes of metal at high speeds, a certain number of accidents, including fatal ones, will happen. But when such numbers climb above realistic expectations, governments feel they must do something about it.

Now, most European governments – hell, down with understatement – all European governments are socialist, which means anti-car. This bias must go back to the time, a century or so ago, when only wealthy people could afford to drive. That put class war on the road, and hostilities have been raging ever since, even though the car has since become basic, often indispensable, transportation.

However, just as iconoclasm persists long after the icons have been smashed, socialists act in character by ignoring reality. As far as they are concerned, no truce is on the cards.

That’s why European governments have been busily trying to drive cars off the road, as it were. They impose extortionist taxes on motorists, introduce frankly unrealistic speed limits, suffocate traffic with bus and cycle lanes or unnecessary islands, charge the earth for parking or entering city centres.

Such punitive measures have always been sold to the public as touching concern for lives, but these days officials can pull another larcenous card out of their sleeve: air quality and climate, both being irredeemably damaged by selfish people who’d rather not get to work by three buses and two underground lines.

Nevertheless people still grit their teeth and get behind the wheel – even in London, where driving to work every day may cost more than the average family income in Britain. And with so many cars on the road, the number of road deaths will never drop down to zero, much as governments may insist this is their ultimate goal.

Since empirical evidence proves that the state can only ever change undesirable situations for the worse, no government can ever make driving safer. But individual drivers can, even in France, with its carnage on public roads.

Yet the French government has to indulge its traditional dirigisme by attacking the problem from its height downwards, which stratagem only works in infantry warfare. As the starting point of the campaign, the government took the universal male derision of woman drivers.

In France, this sentiment is expressed with a little rhyme: “Femme au volant, danger au tournant” (woman at the wheel – danger around the corner). Nonsense, says the French government, and misogynist nonsense at that. In fact, if men drove like women, drivers wouldn’t be dying in their droves.  

Easier done than said. Hey presto, and France has been inundated with the slogan “conduisez comme une femme”, drive like a woman (and never have an accident, is the implication). To support this recommendation, the French manipulate statistics with the legerdemain of a cardsharp.

Women, they say, account for 46 per cent of drivers and yet are eight times less likely to be involved in a fatal accident. Here one recalls the old adage about lies, barefaced lies and statistics.

What matters isn’t how many women have a driving licence, but how many miles they actually drive compared to men. In my own two-member family, 50 per cent of the drivers are (is?) female, and yet the male half (well, me) do over 90 per cent of all driving. The same goes for just about every family I know, other than those where the husband is incapacitated, banned, alcoholic or wimpish.

Looking at the French couples I know, it’s true that the men (with one shameful exception) do drive faster than the women but, since none of them has ever been killed, this limited sample can’t be held in evidence. So let’s leave statistics to the sociologists and concentrate on some home truths, uncomfortable as they may be to the modern conscience.

The first such is now controversial but used to be self-evident: men and women are different – biologically, physiologically, psychologically, physically, intellectually and in every other way. Hence a man can no more drive like a woman than he can walk like one, although some do try and look pathetic for it.

Testosteronal aggression makes men more susceptible to the competitive aspect of driving and the lure of an open (or not so open) road. That’s why, for example, only two women have ever raced F1 cars, compared to 776 men, a difference that can’t be wholly ascribed to discrimination.

Moving from the race track to public roads, men do tend to use cars as penile extensions, which in theory will get them into dicey situations more often. However – and it’s not me but physiology speaking – men tend to be more decisive and their reflexes are quicker, which means they can get out of danger more often.

These, however, are generalities. If we now stick to specifics, the problem with French drivers isn’t that they indulge their masculinity, but that they are shockingly bad compared to the English. Hence the disparity in road deaths.

One observation is baffling to me. The French are much more polite than the British when on foot and much less so when behind the wheel. Having driven the best part of a million miles, two thirds of them in the two countries I’m comparing, I feel I’m entitled to such a generalisation.

Where an English driver magnanimously lets you into the lane, a French one is prepared to die defending his right of way. Many do, with drivers overtaking on a single carriageway unable to force their way back in and colliding with an onrushing car head on.

Driving on French motorways, one can’t relax for a second. Lane discipline is abysmal, with cars routinely and blithely venturing into your lane at 100 mph. Tailgating is also widespread, and my heart has sunk many a time when, driving at that kind of speed, I’d see in my rear-view mirror a jalopy steered by a white-knuckled driver an inch behind my bumper.

French drivers are more likely than their British counterparts to come out, change lanes or reverse without looking. Thus any competent driver can safely negotiate, say, Hyde Park Corner, considered the hardest place to drive in London. But driving around l’Etoile in Paris is all your life is worth even if you happen to be Stirling Moss in disguise.

I mentioned jalopies earlier, and this is another factor of road safety. Cars in France tend to be in a terrible state compared to Britain. For one thing, a car in Britain must undergo an MOT test after its first three years and each year thereafter. In France, it’s after the first four years and then every two.

As a result, one sees many cars in the French countryside sputtering, belching black smoke and, most dangerous, breaking down at speed. Many of those cars are grossly underpowered to begin with, which isn’t that much of a problem on a motorway but can be deadly when trying to overtake on a single-lane road. And France being a more agricultural country, overtaking on such roads is essential if you don’t want to be stuck behind a tractor for miles.

On the basis of extensive personal experience, I don’t subscribe to the theory that the French are miserly. But, unlike the British, they’d definitely rather spend their money on things other than cars. In general, this reluctance to show off is commendable, but at a certain point an old car that wasn’t that good to begin with can become a death trap.

Advice to the French: don’t drive like women, nor like men. Instead make sure you have a road-worthy vehicle and drive it well.

That doesn’t necessarily mean driving slowly. There’s no such thing as too much speed – only too much speed for the conditions, including your driving ability and reaction time. Driving fast can be fun, and there’s no need to deprive yourself of it, as long as you know when, where and how to indulge that passion.

And yes, I suppose men are more likely to enjoy driving, rather than just treating it as a way of getting from A to B. But road fatalities aren’t caused by sex differences. They are caused by a nation in need of a remedial driving course – for men, women, other.

Polls come before Israelis and Ukrainians

The US definitely and the UK probably will hold general elections this year, and both will be ‘either… or’ binary.

One party will win, the other will lose, with some Americans and Britons regarding the outcome as triumph and others as disaster. The split between the pros and cons will be about even, with a couple of percentage points on either side.

There’s no such ambivalence for the Ukrainians and Israelis. Those two nations fighting for survival may be indifferent to the results of these elections, but the very fact they are being held this year is cause for concern.

Both nations are heavily dependent on Western aid, especially with arms. The Ukraine’s survival hinges on it totally, Israel’s to a large extent. That’s why both nations follow the vicissitudes of British and American internal politics with equal apprehension.

They know that vital aid for their war efforts is held hostage by such outfits as Gallup, YouGov, ICM, Mori and so forth. These keep a watchful eye on the cursor of public opinion, informing the candidates of the slightest fluctuations.  

The candidates watch such oscillations with equal intensity. As things stand now, the polls suggest a close race in the US and a Labour landslide in Britain. But politicians have their own pollsters and, above all, their own instincts. They know that any election can be decided by a few swing votes.

Now, our politicians tend to be highly specialised creatures with single-track minds focused on electoral success. Hence they base their pronouncements and, if currently in power, also their policies on what they perceive as the good of their political careers.

Thus, to paraphrase an Anglo-American football coach, polls are everything for them; but in the immediate runup to the elections, polls become the only thing.

By and large, the two electorates seldom gear their vote to the competing foreign policies. In Britain such interests are lukewarm; in the US, ice-cold. That, however, is talking about the populations at large. Yet within each electorate there exist groups that treat some foreign policies as a matter of vital interest.

Moreover, they may well vote as a bloc for a candidate whose foreign policies appeal to them. For example, New York’s large Jewish population may vote against anyone perceived as anti-Israeli regardless of any other considerations. Britain’s and America’s large Muslim population, on the other hand, may well punish a candidate advocating continued assistance to Israel.

This explains why Joe Biden’s administration has issued a ban on the supply of certain weapons to Israel. Biden’s advisors have probably done the numbers and found out that, though such stinginess may upset some New Yorkers, the city and especially the state as a whole aren’t going to vote for Trump anyway.

However, Michigan and Pennsylvania both have large Muslim populations who are practically guaranteed to vote as a bloc for the less pro-Israel candidate. Thus denying Israel some vital armaments may put Biden on the good side of voters in two swing states.

Now, in Britain the almost four million Muslims make up 6.5 per cent of the population. And Muslim organisations have already kindly informed the two leading parties that their political survival may well depend on their Middle East policies.

Neither party has so far openly stated its intention of cutting off arms supplies to Israel. But the anti-Semitism scandals within the Labour Party probably stand it in good stead with British Muslims. They may sense Labour is their safer bet and, if they do, the projected Labour landslide may well become a reality.

Hence it amuses me no end watching Labour and Tory politicians zigzag around this issue with the elegance of professional figure skaters. There’s no doubt that, if the polls suggest a close election, both parties will move towards the Hamas side, but Labour can do so with greater ease.

In the US, Trump has been consistently pro-Israel, whereas Biden, just as consistently, has been more, shall we say, open-minded. If the polls show that the election hinges on Michigan and Pennsylvania, which in turn swing on the Muslim vote, Biden’s mind will probably open so wide that the last vestiges of pro-Israeli policies will fall out. And even Trump may decide that perhaps superimposing the odd swastika on the Israeli flag may not be such a bad idea after all.

The situation with the Ukraine is more complex. America has close to three million Russian immigrants, but they are unlikely to vote as a bloc. The Russian population of Britain is relatively small, but it’s heavily concentrated in London. From what I hear, most of the 150,000 Russian immigrants living here are pro-Putin, and I’m sure such hearsay has reached the ears of potential candidates.

Yet Putin’s war on the Ukraine affects internal politics in ways other than just ethnic voting. The ghost of Neville Chamberlain is wafting over Britain, hissing the old story about war in a faraway land about which we know nothing and care even less. Appeasing Putin seems like an election winner if it can be positioned as the only way of avoiding a major war – or even a minor one that may involve British forces.

This argument may hold sway in the US as well, where isolationist attitudes have always been strong, especially within the Republican Party. Yet there, aid for the Ukraine may also be seen as sacrilege to the hallowed American Taxpayer. The arithmetic of such a claim may not add up, but its demagogic potential is high.

I don’t know whether I’ve identified the subterranean political tremors caught by the polls accurately. Yet one thing I’m sure of: neither side in either election cares about the survival of Israel and the Ukraine as sovereign states. Not really.

Those two heroic nations are merely pawns on the electoral chessboard, to be promoted or swiped off depending on internal poll results. These days, politics, foreign and even domestic, isn’t just immoral but amoral. Neither, speaking specifically of the treatment of Israel and the Ukraine, is it particularly clever.

Those two nations are spilling their blood not only for themselves but also for us. But, reviving the chess metaphor, our politicians must be able to calculate more than one move in advance to see that.

Such an ability is beyond them. The blinkers of forthcoming elections are in place, and the candidates can see only one square, the shape of the ballot box.

Pride that came after the fall

Putin and his proud guests

Every year, come the second week of May, I marvel at the difference between the 8th of that month in the West and the 9th in Russia.

A visitor from another planet to London would have missed the significance of the former date altogether. That was the day when the Allies accepted the capitulation of Nazi Germany in 1945, and yet the anniversary passed unnoticed this year, as it always does unless there’s a zero on the end.

Victory Day in Russia is celebrated a day later because the Nazis surrendered to the Red troops on the 9th. And there, though my hypothetical alien might wonder about the reason for the festivities, there’s no way he’d miss them.

For the 9th of May has always been treated there as an occasion to celebrate, rather than a tragedy to mourn. Moreover, it’s an occasion for reaffirming Russia’s towering superiority over the decadent West. Last Thursday that ascendancy was encapsulated in the deafening roar of “We can do it again!”

Exactly what? Few Russians ask that question because the big war is the lynchpin of the most massive and successful propaganda effort in history. Thus even those Russians who oppose Putin and detest his wars have to repeat by parrot-like rote that they are proud of their fathers/grandfathers/great-grandfathers who did Stalin’s bidding in the Second World War.

They are especially proud of the Soviets, the best part of 30 million of them, who gave their lives so that red fascism triumphed over the brown variety. Moreover, such horrendous losses are used to deliver a contortionist slap on their own back.

Look, Soviet and Russian propagandists have been shouting since 1945. The British and the Americans barely lost a million between them. This proves they practically didn’t fight and, if they did, they did so in a cowardly fashion. The Soviet Union won that war on its own and, if need be, “We can do it again!”.

Translating from propaganda into English, they can again die in their millions to impose their brand of fascism on Europe. Except this time around they’ll be imposing it not on other fascists but on free people desperate to stay that way.

Let’s cast a quick retrospective glance at what it is the Russians are proud of, stripping the chaff of lies from the wheat of the truth.

The Soviet Union was formed in 1922 as a Bolshevik reincarnation of the Russian Empire, one dedicated to world conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet escutcheon showed hammer and sickle superimposed on the globe.

Early setbacks in Poland, Hungary, Finland and Germany persuaded the new leader, Stalin, that such a worthy goal could only be achieved by military means. If undefeated in a world war, foreigners couldn’t be expected to see the light.

At that moment the country was put on a war footing, just as demob-happy Europe was rejoicing in peace. Step by step, the Soviet Union was turned into a sinister combination of war factory and boot camp.

Peasants were enslaved first de facto, then de jure, which went by the name of ‘Collectivisation’. In effect, the state confiscated all the food produced in the villages to keep factory workers half-fed. In the countryside, nothing was done by halves: the peasants starved and died in their millions. Cannibalism was rife in the midst of the world’s most bountiful agricultural regions.

Factories worked in three eight-hour shifts, cranking out killing machines of ever description. (By contrast, factories in Nazi Germany continued to work single-shift days even a year after the war started.)

Politically, the Soviets identified Hitler as what Lenin called ‘the icebreaker of the revolution’, someone who could smash the old European order, laying it open for a Soviet thrust. To that end, Stalin prohibited his puppet German Communist Party from forming a block with the Socialists, which effectively brought Hitler to power in 1933.

The two rogue states formed a friendly alliance, building up each other’s military muscle. The Soviets were supplying the Nazis with raw materials, including grain (at the time Soviet peasants were starving to death), while the Germans paid back in technologies and equipment the Soviets couldn’t produce on their own.

The 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact was the culmination of that process, rather than its beginning. The Second World War started a week after that aggressive pact was signed, with the Nazis and the Soviets going into the war as allies dividing Europe into zones of subjugation.

Thus the Soviets attacked Poland 17 days after the Nazis did, with the two predators holding joint victory parades. The Soviets then claimed the Baltics, eastern Poland, parts of Romania and went after Finland that was supposed to be theirs under the Pact’s terms. But the Finns fought heroically against Stalin’s hordes, managing to hold on to their sovereignty and most of their territory.

The Soviets started as they meant to go on. That was the first half a million Red soldiers dying in human-wave attacks on fortified positions – and the first source of pride for their descendants. Imperial madness leaves few Russians unscathed. Even Victor Suvorov, who first exposed Russia’s role as one of the two warmongers, writes he is proud of the Red soldiers happily freezing to death in Arctic conditions or perishing in the hail of Finnish bullets.

While all that was going on, Stalin was continuing his preparations for conquest. Hitler was smashing one European country after another, while Stalin was amassing millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks on the new German border. He was waiting for the propitious moment to strike, and eventually that intent became impossible to hide.

Having failed to take Britain out of the war, Hitler now had to launch a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union, thus getting what every German schoolboy knew would be catastrophic: a war on two fronts. But Hitler knew he no longer had a choice. His only hope was to stop Stalin’s juggernaut before it started to roll.

What ensued was four years of blood gushing at a rate never seen before. The Soviets fought with total disregard for human lives, a traditional aspect of Russian military doctrine blown out of proportion by communist cannibals.

Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs how stunned he was when Marshal Zhukov casually mentioned that his favourite way of clearing a mine field was to march some infantry over it, thereby protecting valuable armour with valueless lives.

Soviet commanders only began to acquire some basic professional skills after many months of action, which partly explains why the Nazis captured over four million POWs (my father among them) by the time they reached Moscow in December, after less than six months of action.

As Stalin later admitted, the Soviets would never have won that war without Allied help. Without American and British supplies, they would have had nothing to win that war with. But win it they did – in the east, while the Allies won their victory in the west, Far East and North Africa.

As a result, red fascism enslaved Eastern Europe directly it was liberated from the brown variety, and with the same totalitarian brutality. Ask Eastern Europeans how happy they were from 1945 to 1991, when they were oppressed by the victorious Soviets. They’ll tell you.

And now descendants of the horde that rolled over Europe, murdering, looting and raping every step of the way (not just in Germany but also in ‘liberated’ Eastern Europe), go hoarse screaming “We can do it again!”

They are as good as their word. They haven’t lost their knack at murdering, looting and raping – usually at tremendous cost to their own lives. They’ve proved that in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, ‘hybrid’ war in the Ukraine, Syria – and now a full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

They are proud of the victory their red fascism won over Nazism, the victory of Magadan over Majdanek, of Kolyma over Chelmno, of the Gulag over the Gestapo.

The day that should be reserved for tears and silent prayers for the millions who died in the war in which Russia was equally complicit is used instead as an occasion for pathetic triumphalism and thunderous threats to “do it again”.

The obligatory parade in Red Square was only attended by guests from Russia’s satellites: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau and Laos. The rest of the world showed by its absence what it really thinks of Putin and his attempts to impose fascism on Europe again.

There’s much to weep about and pray for on 9th of May – and nothing to be proud of. Especially when such pride inspires Russians to “do it again”.