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I’m still recovering from the shock. There I was, thinking that Syrian rebels are driven by an urgent craving for parliamentary democracy hitherto denied them by the nasty Assad.

Then came an eye-opener in yesterday’s papers: of the variously counted 75,000-110,000 democracy seekers, 26,000 are rated as jihadists. Now the history of all past rebellions suggests that the most aggressive group within any movement invariably reduces everyone else to obedient acolytes (or kills them).

In other words, what we have there is a force the size of several divisions made up of crazed, blood-thirsty, heavily armed fanatics eschewing purely parochial aims in favour of something infinitely larger in scope.

Allow me, or rather my late friend Ayatollah Khomeini, to refresh your memory of what being a jihadist entails. This is what he said, and one must always listen to experts: “Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of other countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world.”

What a bitter disappointment. Being an attentive reader of op-ed pages, I fully expected that DEMOCRACY IN SYRIA: ONE MAN (OR WOMAN), ONE VOTE would be writ large on the rebels’ banners. Turns out their designs are drawn on a wider canvas, implicitly with both you and me in the picture.

Just think: a mere couple of months ago my other two friends, Barack Hussein and Dave, were agitating for entering the Syrian civil war on the side of those who wish to conquer, and preferably kill, us all.

Only Republican opposition in Congress and Tory rebellion in Parliament (you don’t think Dave is a Tory, do you?) prevented our sage leaders from advancing the cause of Islamic aggression even further than they had already advanced it.

I shall refrain from comment on Barack Hussein’s and Dave’s personalities for fear of losing them as friends. They are what they are, the kind of leaders one-man-one-vote democracy run riot is guaranteed to throw up. Nor shall I comment on the moral fibre of the jihadist rebel force – not being a zoologist, I’m ill-qualified to judge feral beasts.

What I am, however, qualified to judge is the political philosophy underpinning the last 12 years of Western action in the Middle East.

Courtesy of American, and increasingly British, neoconservatives, the unsuspecting public has been sold an essentially binary view of the world’s political makeup, real and desired. In an acrimonious mood I’d describe this view as moronic; in my today’s kinder one I’ll settle for simplistic.

According to my neocon friends, the 206 sovereign states comprising the political map of the world are divided into two categories: democratic (good) and other (bad). No gradations are presumed to exist: the watershed between the two doesn’t just separate different systems of government. It separates good from evil.

If all democrats are our friends and all others are our enemies, then our enemies’ enemies are our friends, and therefore democrats. Applying this proven line of thought to concrete political situations, any group trying to unseat a non-democratic leader (our enemy) has to be by definition presumed to be made up of democracy seekers (our friends).

These are the terms in which neocon ventriloquists to whom Bush was the dummy justified the criminal aggression against Iraq (once it became clear that the WMD argument no longer washed). As far as they were concerned, all the boxes were ticked.

Saddam is nasty – tick. He’s a dictator – tick. He isn’t a great champion of either representative or direct democracy – tick. There are enough forces in the country who’d joyously eviscerate Saddam – tick. These forces have to be driven by a quest for American-style democracy or, at a pinch, the British variety – tick.

The yes-no binary system so familiar to computer programmers was thus applied to an infinitely more complex problem, that of human cravings. Saddam wasn’t a democrat – he had to be hanged. His opponents were – they had to be supported.

What resulted from this idiotic (sorry, simplistic) exercise in systems analysis was a catastrophe, first for Iraq, then for Afghanistan, then for the rest of the Islamic Middle East, emphatically including Syria. Moreover, it was a catastrophe so utterly predictable that it’s hard not to feel it was intended.

Now we’re all in peril, not just strategically but also tactically. For the army of jihadist-democratic cannibals includes thousands of Western-born Muslims, at least 400 of them British. By all accounts these chaps outdo the natives in cruelty and fanaticism, as neophytes so often do.

The papers are full of stories of those idealists torturing and murdering prisoners, with photos of blood dripping off their hands onto newsprint. Now what are they all going to do when the fighting in Syria stops? Are they going to go back to England, France and Germany and resume their careers in offices, factories and corner shops?

Anyone who thinks that needs a crash course in human nature. These chaps have tasted blood and power, which is a heady and addictive mix. They’ve learned that an ideology justifies murder and expiates sin, which is a monstrous but inevitable conclusion.

They also hate the West, whence they come, even more than they had before signing up for Syrian cannibalism. (They don’t hate Israel more than they ever did because that’s impossible).

The only field of endeavour in which they can possibly apply their talents, skills, beliefs and passions is murdering people like us. You and me.

They must and can be stopped, and we already have enough security personnel and special forces in the region to do so. I wouldn’t presume to offer technical advice, but one has to believe we have enough expertise in place.

The most effective method would be to put those repatriating jihadists down quietly before they ever catch a return flight to Britain or wherever else they come from. But this would go against the grain of multiculturalism to such an extent that criminal prosecution for racially inspired hate crimes would be unavoidable.

Having exposed my technical inadequacy, I now have to stick to the general principle. These monsters, regardless of where they were born, have forfeited every claim to British (or French or German) nationality. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to bring their hatred-charged passions back into the civilised world.

One way or the other, we certainly have the means of protecting ourselves and our friends. Yet, with the likes of Barack Hussein, Dave and François at the helm, one doubts we’ll have the will.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not smoking in cars full of children is a good idea. However, many good ideas result in awful laws, and the ban Parliament is about to pass is one such.

Smoking in general is a rotten habit, as I can testify from 30 years of personal experience.

It gives you bad breath, morning coughs, emphysema, lung cancer and, when done while driving, holes in your trousers. Hence suggesting that people desist is good advice – but punishing them for not taking it is worse than even cancer. It’s despotism.

That sound medical ideas can be used as an instrument of tyranny has been demonstrated by every political state in modern history, not least by Nazi Germany.

Firm believers in their own version of the NHS, the Nazis showed how it could be used for crowd control. And just like today’s bureaucrats, they emphasised preventive medicine, with nutrition featuring prominently in their health propaganda.

In the same spirit the Nazis also waged an anti-smoking campaign that would be the envy of today’s EU. It was their scientists who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer, and as a result lung-cancer statistics in Germany continued to be better than in other Western countries for a couple of decades after the war.

Like most research, this proceeded from the starting point of an axiomatic assumption, in this case that smoking had to be bad because the Führer was good, and he didn’t approve of lighting up.

It wasn’t just smoking either. Chemical additives and preservatives were roundly castigated by the Nazis, wholemeal bread was depicted as morally superior to breads made from blanched white flour. And, like our today’s bureaucrats, the Nazis disapproved of medical experiments on animals (unlike us, they had no shortage of enthusiastic human volunteers).

Modern ‘democracies’ seem to be envious of the Nazis. They too would love to have the same power over us, though if possible without the stomach-churning business of gassing millions of people.

When they use medicine to that end, their rationale is strikingly similar to the Nazis’: the good of the state.

Years ago I mentioned to a friend that any state punishing people for not wearing a seatbelt is by definition tyrannical. This sort of thing is none of the state’s business.

But it is, objected my friend. If you get injured as a result of not buckling up, it’s the state that’ll have to pay for treatment, through the NHS. The state pays its money, so it makes its music.

That, I replied, is the best argument against having an NHS I’ve ever heard, and yet another proof that, when the state does a lot for you, it’ll inevitably do a lot to you. My friend looked at me with touching concern for my mental health (now he too has severe misgivings about the NHS, and it has only taken him 25 years).

What I’m advocating isn’t a staunchly libertarian position but vigilance. In fact some wielding of state power is advisable, as for example in banning the use of hands-on mobile phones while driving.

It’s not counterintuitive to suggest that holding a phone to one’s ear compromises the driver’s control of his car. This may endanger all sorts of innocent parties on the road, meaning that the danger isn’t confined to the extension of the driver’s home, his car.

By the same token, a man who likes to shoot an air rifle at paper targets in his flat thereby commits an eccentric act, but not one that’s anyone’s business other than his wife’s. The same man firing the same rifle at pedestrians passing by in the street below ought to be punished.

Whatever next? What else will they ban for our own good, what other sound ideas will they try to enshrine in laws?

For example, exercise is good for you, you can’t deny that. So how about a law punishing anyone who doesn’t do half an hour of callisthenics every morning? Compliance can be monitored with strategically placed CCTV cameras – who says surveillance should be confined to outdoors?

And how about equipping every supermarket till with a saturated-fat counter linked to the cash register? I can just hear that metallic pre-recorded voice, saying, “This is Cholesterol Watch. You’ve exceeded your allowance of animal fat, so put those bangers back or risk persecution, you irresponsible bastard.”

Really, if our legislators have nothing better to do, I could suggest any number of alternative pastimes. For example, in their spare time they could learn valuable skills, such as plumbing.

Considering their general level of competence, our houses will probably be flooded as a result. But at least we’ll be freer.

 

 

My friend Vladimir Putin is getting a bum rap for the cost of his Winter Olympics, £30 billon and counting.

This isn’t to say that Volodia (I call him by the Russian diminutive of his name, as friends do) doesn’t deserve to have his bum rapped, kicked or – if you’d rather – blown away. (Scratch that last one – I’d rather not expand my diet to include polonium, if it’s all the same to you.)

He does. Yet at the same time Volodia has to be complimented. It has taken a titanic effort to convert Russia from one contiguous prison camp into a giant crime syndicate – while keeping the downscaled elements of the prison camp firmly in place.

Volodia rightly feels he doesn’t need too many prison camps. Such facilities, with their guards, transportation, Alsatians and barbed wire, impose a heavy burden on the state budget. So do even sham legal proceedings serving as the intermediate stage between Volodia’s ire and the culprit’s incarceration.

At the same time a small-calibre bullet strategically placed into a vital organ in a dark alley costs only 20p. Just a few of those judiciously utilised keep malcontents on their toes, especially since the implicit promise of using a few more looks eminently credible.

Volodia thus has to be commended for being careful with public funds, an accolade that makes him even more deserving of Peter Hitchens’s admiration. Not only is Volodia the strong leader Peter wishes we had in Britain, but he’s also more parsimonious than any of our profligate lot.

So much more unfair it is to rebuke Volodia for frittering away £30 billion of public funds on the emetic extravaganza going by the name of the Sochi Olympics.

Volodia’s accusers ought to check their facts before slinging mud. It’s absolutely not true that the Olympics has cost more than any other Games in history, and more than all winter Olympics combined.

That is, it would be true if we indeed believed that all those sports facilities, lavatories with two bowls in one cubicle, pillowless hotels rooms and vast amounts of snow artificially created (natural snow is scarce in the subtropics) did cost £30 billion. They didn’t.

Neither did the 50,000-strong security detail making sure that none of the 2,900 competitors is blown up into that great ski jump in the sky. Nor did the cull of dissidents and the silencing of stray dogs add appreciable amounts to the balance… oops, sorry, getting dyslexic in my old age. It’s stray dogs that were culled and dissidents who were silenced, but this doesn’t invalidate the point.

In fact, according to my reliable Moscow sources the rebranding and reconstruction of Sochi actually cost no more than £8 billion, which is in line with the budgets of other similar events. So where did the £22-billion balance come from?

The answer is, it came from the sleight of hand practised by Volodia’s detractors. They larcenously include into the overall amount those sums that really belong in a totally different rubric.

“The stealing has been audacious, enormous — theft from every single direction. Presidential friends received contracts on a plate. Billions were awarded to loyalists. Ministers winked as tranches of cash left the country. More vanished into kickbacks. Bureaucrats carried off entire tarmac budgets. Bandits took their cut…,” writes Ben Judah in today’s Times.

In his (otherwise excellent) article Mr Judah is right factually, but he’s wrong conceptually and, if you will, mathematically. The stolen £22 billion, much of it swelling the £40-billion stream flowing out of Russia into offshore banks last year, has only a tangential link with Olympic costs.

In reality it’s the cost of power, or rather of Volodia staying in power. ‘Tsar Vladimir’, as his friends call him, can rule by himself but he can’t protect himself by himself. Like any ruler he needs a large but close-knit coterie of loyalists forming a buffer between him and the masses or else other power-hungry politicians.

The masses generally share Peter Hitchens’s almost erotic admiration of a ‘strong leader’, but at the same time they make an average of £400 a month (prices in Russia are close to ours). This makes them rather upset at the sight of monumental palaces popping up all over the place, with at least 20 of them belonging to Volodia personally and the rest to his cronies.

The Russians enjoy a deserved reputation for docility and forbearance, but this is occasionally punctuated by what Pushkin called “the Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.” The only thing ever separating a real or metaphorical tsar from being torn apart limb from limb is his own strength and that of his entourage.

No other considerations come into play, including, say, the tsar’s kindness and fairness. On the contrary, such traits are taken as a sign as weakness and the people (or disgruntled courtiers) inevitably pounce.

For example, such tsars as the ‘False’ Dmitry, Peter III, Paul I, Alexander II and Nicholas II, were somewhat influenced by Western liberalism and Christian morality. This sent wrong signals out, and each of the protoliberals was – respectively – ripped to pieces, strangled, torn in half by a bomb and riddled with bullets together with his whole family.

My friend Volodia has all the necessary qualities to stay on top: unlimited cruelty, limited intellect, the morality of a wayward skunk, tyrannical temperament, duplicity, greed. But these would count for nothing if the same people who put him into the Kremlin weren’t willing to keep him there.

Such people don’t come cheap. They too want their 500-foot yachts and billion-dollar estates, and they must be kept sweet in however toe-curling, vomit-making a way if Volodia is to avoid a bitter end.

Hence the £22 billion stolen in the run-up to the Sochi Olympics has little to do with the cost of the Games. It’s the cost of doing politics in Putin’s Russia.

A man who hates seeing his photograph in public media is either morbidly modest or a sociopath. Unless, of course, the photo is accompanied by an ‘armed and dangerous’ warning and a promise of a large reward.

Yet show me a man who craves to have his likeness in the public domain, and I’ll show you a narcissist and a simpleton. Unless of course he’s a film actor for whom self-exposure is his job.

I’m neither a narcissist nor a sociopath nor a criminal. So if you asked me whether I like to see my picture in a magazine or on the net, my answer would be a cautious ‘that depends’.

When a French conservative magazine put my grinning likeness on the front cover, I quite liked it. Why, I even keep a couple of copies of the magazine where my guests can see them, and don’t tell me this is infantile. I already know this.

When an amateur photographer put on Google an unflattering (some will say realistic) picture of me pontificating to an academic audience, I was neither happy nor unhappy. Personally, I would have chosen a kinder angle, but I knew the event was being photographed, so there are no grounds for complaint.

Then two years ago a wily oriental gentleman chose to drive his car into mine in an empty street, and he didn’t even know me. That manoeuvre was caught on two separate CCTV cameras, which exculpated me and got him charged with dangerous driving.

Then this morning my wife spent a giggly 15 minutes playing with her new toy, an I-Phone. This wasn’t the first quarter-hour she spent with the gadget and it won’t be the last: the device has so many features that only a dysfunctional 10-year-old can learn them all quickly.

One feature she did discover is a sort of SatNav that can guide you photographically to any place in His creation. All the diabolical gadget asks is the destination and the starting point of the journey, which you must agree is a modest request.

Just for the hell of it my wife offered our nearest bus stop as Point A, and sure enough a photograph of it instantly came up. Standing at the bus stop was a portly chap, wearing my track suit and toting my tennis bag.

Upon closer examination she realised that the copycat wasn’t some star-struck admirer who sees me as his role model, not that such a possibility was ever on the cards. He was, well, me.

Judging by the clothes I was wearing, the shot was taken some time in October. Four months ago, and I haven’t had a clue that my squarish frame was there to be despised by anyone interested in the 22 Bus.

I didn’t know my picture had been taken, and neither was there any dramatic situation, such as a car accident or a mugging, in which one’s principles could be compromised.

And there are principles involved. Protecting individual privacy is the cornerstone of Western decency. ‘Western’ is the operative word here for, say, the Russians don’t even have a word for privacy.

Entitlement to privacy is closely linked to the Western belief in the autonomous value of every individual, something that these days goes by the awful term ‘human rights’. Personal dignity is an essential constituent of this value, and part of it is freedom of unmonitored movement when going about one’s lawful business.

Yet Britain boasts more CCTV cameras than the rest of the West combined. We have one such camera for every 14 of Her Majesty’s subjects, making surveillance one of the few areas in which we comfortably lead the world. Communist China, for example, has fewer cameras even in absolute terms, never mind per capita.

As a result every Briton is secretly photographed an average of 240 times a day, and we can’t even smile for the camera because this would entail scowling non-stop.

This clearly goes against the grain of any traditional morality: only downright despotic regimes proceed from the assumption that everyone is a naughty child who needs watching round the clock.

One could argue that any state that feels the need to monitor its subjects every step of the way is despotic on the strength of that fact alone. One could even go so far as to say such a state is immoral.

In fact, when government officials defend such wholesale surveillance, they argue not from morality but from utility. Being able to watch every square foot in real time may be upsetting but at least it prevents crime.

If so, we clearly need even more cameras. For Britain proudly leads  every Western country in crime rate. For example, the latest data show that 63 million Brits commit 6.5 million crimes a year, while 315 million Americans barely manage 12 million. France’s crime rate is half of ours, and Germany’s two thirds.

Of course a utilitarian will point out that we don’t know what the crime rate would be like if we didn’t have those cameras, and on his own terms he’ll be right.

But his terms are wrong. It’s clear that a nation’s crime rate reflects a whole panoply of social, demographic, religious, moral and economic factors. A profusion of cameras is as far from explaining a lower crime rate as a dearth of them is from explaining a higher one.

Thus someone who, like me, despises moral utilitarianism may justifiably object that neither do we know that fewer cameras would lead to more crime. In the 1890s, for example, Britain’s crime rate was a fraction of today’s, yet not many CCTV cameras were in evidence.

A moral argument, when properly constructed, ought to beat a utilitarian one every time. In this instance preserving the fundamental moral values of our civilisation is infinitely more vital than lowering the crime rate – even assuming that cameras do that. A criminal may kill a man; undermining moral foundations can kill society.

Then again, all modern tyrannies, which category to varying degrees includes all modern states, put forth utilitarian arguments to justify the burgeoning of state power.

Both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany trained their people to inform on one another because they were allegedly threatened by swarms of foreign spies (typically if not exclusively Anglo-American) and home-grown subversives.

Of course even paranoiacs have enemies, and all regimes at times suffer from foreign espionage and internal sedition. Yet if a regime can’t survive without losing any moral justification to do so, perhaps it doesn’t deserve to.

Yet another deluge accompanied by 80mph winds is coming, and Britain is bracing herself for more floods this weekend.

As is obvious to any reader of daily newspapers, such things don’t just happen. There has got to be an ultimately identifiable cause, and we’re the ones to identify it.

Most readers of daily newspapers are materialists who have to believe in physical contingency and anthropogenic causality. Since all adverse events are these days known to be caused by capitalism with its profligate abuse of ‘our planet’, culprits are never hard to pinpoint. 

By following this line of thought, we’re approaching the sophistication of medieval European (or some contemporary African) witch hunters who ascribed every hurricane, epidemic or flood to human agency. 

In one African tribe they go so far as to believe that every death is in fact murder by witchcraft. The bereaved family then seeks vengeance on the evil-doer, whom they track down using the kind of evidential rigour our prosecutors apply retrospectively to rape that may or may not have happened two generations ago.

While still in mourning the family avenges the death, then the culprit’s family retaliates in kind. This keeps everyone entertained in perpetuity, especially since human nature is such that deaths will occur with monotonous constancy. 

Thinking along similar lines, Dave Cameron, who lists expertise in meteorology among his endless accomplishments, knows exactly why our bad weather is happening and who’s to blame.

It’s you, John, for driving to work when you could instead enjoy a pleasant 10-mile walk each way. It’s you, Jane, for turning your thermostat up when you could just as easily put a jumper and a cardigan over your thermal underwear. It’s all of us who have ever used an aerosol spray.

Far be it from me to question such an expert analysis or especially the intellectual quality of the conclusions drawn. However, if one could be allowed a timid historical reference, our floods aren’t exactly unprecedented.

One doesn’t even have to go as far as Noah, the last antediluvian patriarch who was famously spared by God in the Biblical flood – even though most readers of daily newspapers agree that the Biblical flood never happened, Noah never existed, and there is no God.

However, we know for sure that the great flood of St Petersburg did happen, and we even know exactly when: 19 November, 1824. The Neva broke banks and water rose 13.5 feet above its normal level, sweeping 462 houses into the sea and claiming 208 lives.

The calamity inspired Pushkin’s sublime poem The Bronze Horseman. Actually, Pushkin titled his sublime poem The Copper Horseman, a metallurgical oversight mercifully corrected by his pedantic English translators.

The English mentality doesn’t allow such impressionistic treatment of facts. Falconet’s equestrian statue is made of bronze, and Pushkin ought to have known better. Actually one suspects he did know better and only picked a wrong metal for poetic reasons.

Just like the English word for it, the Russian word for copper (mednyi) has two syllables, with the stress on the first one. Consequently, since ‘bronze’ is an unwieldy bronzovyi in Russian, Pushkin chose to sin against science rather than art. By choosing the single-syllable ‘bronze’ the translators went the other way, thereby vindicating my stereotypes of the two national characters.

What is closer to my today’s theme, however, isn’t Pushkin’s sublime poem but Pushkin’s close friend. Pyotr Chaadayev was Russia’s first (some say best) philosopher, the author of the postdiluvian essay Lettres Philosophiques, which, as one did in those days, he wrote in French.

Since the work was critical of Russia, and since Chaadayev inclined towards Catholicism, he was officially declared insane, thus inaugurating a fine tradition later so profitably developed by the Soviets. But what interests me today is the philosopher’s comment on the flood: “Our first rule ought to be not to avoid disaster but not to deserve it.”

At first glance one may get the impression that this remark is consonant with that made by Dave Cameron, who too boasts a deep philosophical mind among his endearing features.

But when one recalls that in those days people didn’t use IC engines to drive to work, didn’t have thermostats, never saw aerosol sprays and hadn’t yet identified global warming as the root of all evil, one begins to fear that Chaadayev meant something entirely different.

Since he obviously lacked the sophistication exemplified by Dave and most readers of daily newspapers, Chaadayev must have seen the flood as God’s punishment for wickedness.

He drew on the scriptural sources that showed that God had form in meting out such punitive measures. Witness the Biblical flood, which we all know never happened, Noah, who we all know never existed, and irate God who we all know is a myth.

Since Chaadayev wasn’t privy to the tremendous advances in philosophical and scientific thought, so ably exemplified by Dave, he operated within a different intellectual system.

As a sincere believer (rather than “a practising member of the Church of England”, in Dave’s self-description), he proceeded from the presupposition of God’s existence. That meant accepting that God established the standards of good and evil, rewarding the former and punishing the latter.

For today’s lot such categories sound, well, antediluvian. There’s no God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to punish us for breaking divine law, but there is the God of Political Correctness and Global Warming to punish us for using deodorants.

Different people worship different gods and, in the words of Pope Francis, who am I to tell them who’s right and who’s wrong? Nobody at all: I don’t have a chance in hell of ever holding a cabinet position in any government. And only such an elevation can hone a person’s spirit to a sharpness required to penetrate the mysteries of the universe.

And to decide exactly who’s to blame for the current floods.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to the popular, if in this instance slanderous, wartime song, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s principal ideologue, had no… well, he was testicularly challenged.

That, however, didn’t prevent him from making the great-men list compiled by the Russian TV channel VESTI-RU, the Kremlin’s mouthpiece. The list, published on the channel’s Facebook page, featured Goebbels along with Lenin, Stalin, Ghandi and Einstein.

The Nazi was quoted with obvious editorial approval as expressing his admiration for Lenin: “Whoever one day leads the Russian people out of their suffering will become their Saviour, their Apostle, their God. Lenin was the greatest of such people. He wanted to show the people the way. For his people he became everything.”

…while the people themselves became nothing, one is tempted to add, but this is beside the point.

Goebbels’s admiration for Lenin was understandable: young Joseph came from the leftmost wing of a socialist party, the NSDAP. Hitler himself admitted he “owed everything to Marx”, and both he and Mussolini venerated Marx’s most diligent and consistent pupil.

Protests against glorifying Lenin and Stalin are fraught with danger in Putin’s Russia, but Nazis are still not off limits. What followed was an outburst of public indignation spearheaded by liberal (meaning on-line only) magazines and the few surviving war veterans.

Such survivors would have had to be born no later than 1927. Considering Russia’s third-world life expectancy, the number of veterans must therefore be roughly equal to the number of magazines, but nevertheless their protests were heard.

Goebbels was removed from the page, even though Lenin and Stalin stayed. The next day the page itself was taken off Facebook, which was followed by the summary sacking of the entire staff of the channel’s social media department.

Yet according to the story making the rounds in Moscow, the unfortunate youngsters were sacked not only, nor even particularly, because of their affection for Goebbels. It’s just that, when queried, none of them could quite place Goebbels’s name.

They had picked up the Nazi’s quote about Lenin from a website featuring such trivia and thought the accolade ipso facto merited its author’s inclusion. They didn’t have a clue who the author was.

I occasionally rebuke British education, using such immoderate modifiers as ‘moron-spewing’, ‘pathetic’ and ‘shameful’. So much happier, in the Schadenfreude sense of the word, I am to see that we’re not in that boat alone. In fact, the boat is overloaded and due to capsize.

Why, the Russians are just like us. In fact, they’re even worse: according to a recent poll 30 percent of them think the sun revolves around the earth. So far only a negligible proportion describe the earth as flat, but give them another generation or two.

This is indeed a generation game. When I was going to a Soviet school back in the ‘60s everyone knew who Goebbels was. We might have been unaware of the emotional and ideological links between Nazi and Soviet chieftains, but we could place all the key names.

Russians of the current generation are allowed to learn anything they want, this side of the KGB archives. What they want to learn most of all is how to be Western.

However, they’re finding out the hard way that, though borrowing Western technology is easy, borrowing the Western ethos is not.

When we want to become like someone else we tend to suspend any critical judgment of our role model. That’s why whenever the Russians try to borrow Western ways, be it during Peter I’s, Alexander I’s or Putin I’s reign, they fail to realise that now is the wrong time.

Peter was only interested in Western trinkets, while ignoring the civilisation that had made them possible. Neither did he realise that those Western institutions whose outer shell he wished to import were already tottering in the West itself. It was early eighteenth century, and the unenlightening Enlightenment was beginning to sabotage the West.

By the time of Russia’s 1812 victory in the Napoleonic war, the Enlightenment had already turned the West into a lender from which one would have been well-advised to borrow with caution. After Waterloo all those dashing officers in the occupation force spent a year in Paris and came back screaming Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité at every corner. We all know what happened a century later.

Under Tsar Putin, the Russians yet again strive to learn from the West. Yet again they’re finding that it’s only the bad things that are easy to pick up. And even the good things lose some of their lustre when transplanted onto Russian soil.

Western materialism puts on manic fervour when in Russian hands. Commercial activity in the West may no longer be restrained by God’s laws, but at least it’s still largely controlled by the man-made variety.

The Russians, however, are showing that, when unchecked by laws, material pursuits turn into gangsterism. To make that point Putin and his cronies have successfully turned the country’s economy into an international crime syndicate.

Pornography, gambling, money laundering, protection rackets, tasteless palaces and megalomaniac yachts all carry Western labels in Russia, as does the dromomaniac urge to travel non-stop.

Meanwhile the Russians’ traditional dedication to learning is falling by the wayside. They’ve picked up Western pragmatism, and to them as to us education has become a purely utilitarian necessity (or not even, as the case may be).

Some types of knowledge can make you rich, some can’t. The knowledge of modern history clearly falls into the second category, so never mind Goebbels – feel the marketing courses.

As a result, one observes the Western kind of anomie brewing in Russia. Reducing education solely to the acquisition of marketable skills creates a chasm between the people and their civilisation. Those falling in are traditionally called barbarians, and that’s what we’re all becoming.

A note to the Russians: Don’t borrow things from the West, chaps. You’re a 1,000 years too late. Try to find your own way, one that would exclude Putin but include familiarity with the key figures of modern history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At first glance there isn’t much common ground.

Hoffman, who died of a heroin overdose on 2 February at age 46, was an immensely talented thespian, arguably the best character actor of his generation.

At 44, Sally is almost Hoffman’s age, but her sole conspicuous accomplishment so far is being married to John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons and therefore one of Britain’s most important politicians.

Hoffman possessed a genuine gift – all he had to do to stay in the limelight was keep working with his customary dedication. He was an old-fashioned celebrity, one who owed his fame to actual attainment.

Sally is a newfangled celebrity wholly manufactured by the media. As such, she doesn’t rely on her nonexistent attainments to remain in the public eye: all she needs is the odd bit of scandal, the slimier the better.

Any decent person would be too proud to seek cheap, utterly undeserved publicity. But our Sally is a modern person, not a decent one. She has to appear in glossies and tabloids at whatever cost – this is a compulsion shared by most modern people devoid of inner content, which is to say most modern people.

Sally would consent to be photographed having an abortion, if that were the only way. Mercifully she doesn’t have to go so far. Considering her hubby-wubby, she can get on front pages with a minimum of effort.

To that end she has posed wearing only a bed sheet against the background of her husband’s House, flashed her underwear in public, appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, rolled blind drunk out of night clubs in full view of (probably) pre-alerted paparazzi, laughed as she was pawed from behind by unidentified men.

The other day she was photographed on one such occasion, wearing a silly wig and French-kissing a muscular, heavily tattooed black man about half her age. The picture made the front page of The Sun, whence it has spread over to both broadsheets and other tabloids.

Sex sells, goes the old truism, and Sally hasn’t been bashful about disclosing the intimate details of her life. In her youth she was “addicted to alcohol”, routinely drinking several bottles of wine every day. She’d then pick up strangers at clubs or pubs and “go home with them”, waking up in places, and with men, she didn’t know.

Now she’s trying to fight such urges, but sometimes they get the better of her. Sometimes they prove beyond her control.

If Sally were married to an accountant or, which is closer to her intellectual and moral level, a dope pusher, she wouldn’t make the papers. And even if she did something truly outrageous, she’d barely merit an inch on Page 74, with most readers dismissing her as a vulgar, drink-sodden slut.

But she’s married neither to an accountant nor a dope pusher. That’s why hacks seriously and sympathetically discuss her “condition”, talking about her “addictive personality”, “desire to be liked”, “inability to toe the line”, intolerable “pressure to conform” and other factors supposedly beyond her control.

The impression one gets is that Sally is an innocent victim of external circumstances, some of them purely medical. She has an addictive personality, doesn’t she? So she can’t help acting in a grossly obscene manner. It’s beyond her control.

Similar arguments are being put forth on behalf of Hoffman, a great actor but a flawed man. You see, he suffered from a disease, now unfortunately pandemic,  known as drug addiction. At age 22 he courageously went into a remission, then suffered a relapse.

When in the throes of his disease, Hoffman stuffed his flat with heroin-based substances not exactly approved by the FDA, MHRA or any other regulatory body. One of the substances proved too potent, and the actor was found dead with a syringe stuck into his vein.

Conclusion? Legalise drugs, which will prevent similar tragedies. The FDA would have done for Hoffman what he couldn’t possibly have done for himself. Protecting his own life was beyond his control.

The inference one derives is that alcoholism and drug addiction are basically medical conditions, like laryngitis or cancer. We catch dependence on booze or heroin the way we catch flu – it’s beyond our control.

However, there’s a noticeable difference between cancer and drug addiction: only the former is truly beyond our control. We can’t choose not to have cancer. We can choose not to mainline heroin.

This was established in a statistically reliable trial on millions of subjects by that great clinician Mao Zedong. One fine day Mao declared that anyone caught taking drugs would be summarily shot. As the threat was both dire and credible, it had a remarkable curative effect: within days the number of drug addicts in China dwindled away to zero. Somehow one doubts that a similar promise would have reduced the incidence of cancer as successfully.

Though they may have medical consequences, drug addiction and alcoholism are existential, not medical, problems. They are a result of a person exercising, or rather abusing, his God-given free will. Like any other freedom this one presents a choice between right and wrong, presupposing the possibility of a person opting for the latter.

People who choose to go wrong effectively throw God’s gift back into his face, just like our progenitors did in the garden of Eden. Nonetheless God forgives them and so must we. But spare us the medicalised psychobabble: such idiotic bien pensant nonsense is truly unforgivable.

Those who throw away their life, à la Hoffman, or every vestige of human dignity, à la Sally, deserve pity or, in Hoffman’s case, sorrow. But they don’t deserve sympathy: what happens to them isn’t beyond their control.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some people do exercises to get their day started, which is fine. We’re all entitled to eccentricities, and this isn’t the worst one.

It is, however, one of the most annoying. This obsession with one’s physique betokens sybaritic self-indulgence, a tilt towards the body and away from the mind.

One also detects a certain holier-than-thou attitude there, some claim to moral ascendancy. Yes, the well-toned chap seems to be saying, I pay attention to my body – unlike you.

I, the well-toned testament to the everlasting nature of amour propre, uphold the ideals of Greco-Roman antiquity. Mens sana in corpore sano, my old son.

Yeah, yeah, I reply with my usual contrariness. And what ideals would they be? Slavery? Paganism? Leaving newborn girls by the roadside to be devoured by wild beasts?

Your logic, he objects, doing his fiftieth press-up, is as soft as your muscles. What do you do first thing in the morning? After you’ve finished throwing up, that is?

First, I answer indignantly, I haven’t done that in the best part of 30 years. And second… well, here I have to admit to an eccentricity of my own.

Having abandoned all hope of ever cranking up my body into life in the morning, I try to get my mind started instead. To that, typically hopeless, end I do a couple of easy crosswords, eschewing the cryptic ones.

When asked for an explanation, I usually say that cryptic crosswords take too long to complete. Actually, and this is between you and me, I’m not smart enough, or rather British enough, to complete them.

I can just about complete the easy ones, though occasionally I’m let down by my conviction that words must always be used in their real meaning.

We get words second-hand, after they’ve been used by a chastening number of generations. To make verbal discourse possible, they had to agree on the meaning of words and stick to that agreement.

They, the generations that produced John Donne and Anthony Trollope, didn’t feel that words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. We, the generation that produced Don Brown and Joanna Trollope, think they must.

In fact, lexical laxity is a distinguishing feature of modernity, what with its understated education and overstated solipsism. Well, you know what I mean, says a modern man using ‘masterful’ to mean ‘masterly’. No, I don’t, my friend. Are you sure you do?

Look at today’s crossword, for example. One clue is “Make (someone) appear guilty (11)”. The compiler seems to think that this is what ‘incriminate’ means.

It doesn’t. ‘Incriminate’ means to charge with a crime or a fault, with a few variations. None of them signifies ‘make someone appear guilty’. In fact, many incriminated people appear as innocent as those newborn girls dumped by the Romans.

Another clue in the same pathetic puzzle: “Essential aspects (5-6)”, with me  expected to write in ‘nitty-gritty’. But that’s not what nitty-gritty means.

It means fine, basic details. Such details may be essential, but then again they may not. Anyone who has ever read a legal document will agree, as will anyone who has ever foolishly said ‘nice car’ to a boffin and received a lecture on McPherson struts and slip differentials in return.

Here’s another clue in the same crossword: ‘Deep admiration (7)’. Would you guess that the answer is supposed to be ‘respect’?

Admiration and respect are two different things. I respect our cleaning lady for being honest and conscientious, but I don’t admire her. I respect Andy Murray for having become the first Briton to win Wimbledon since God was young, but I certainly don’t admire the surly git.

It’s not just crosswords either. The other day a receptionist told me that the doctor would see me ‘momentarily’. That gave me a start: I feared the doctor would take one look at me and kick me out.

Then I realised that she had used the word not in its true meaning, which is ‘for a moment’, but in her voluntaristic meaning of ‘in a moment’. When such solecisms are pointed out to today’s lot, they usually say that language is but a means of communication.

That may be, though any reader of Shakespeare’s sonnets will argue that language isn’t just that. Still, no communication is possible if the speaker and listener can’t agree on the meaning of words.

All this sounds trivial, and so it would be if it weren’t a symptom of a general malaise. For voluntarism in language betokens voluntarism in thought. Anyone who uses words loosely thinks loosely, which makes him easy prey to those who use language to deceive.

Thus when a politician talks about helping the less fortunate, few realise he means dispossessing the more fortunate. When he mentions cooperation with our European partners, few understand this means overturning 2,000 years of British political history. And when he preaches respect for different cultures, we may overlook that he actually means destroying our own.

Much as we may despise conspiracy theories, one finds it hard to believe that our educational catastrophe is a result of honest errors. Some deliberate design is discernible behind the concerted drive to disengage people from their culture, including their language.

Our ‘leaders’ believe that stuffing the people with bread and keeping them half-catatonic with circuses will keep them sweet. The blighters only ever sound alarm bells when they realise that our moron-spewing ‘education’ produces millions of unemployable savages.

All those Poles and Estonians, some of them not speaking a word of English, come here and within a few months they take jobs the Britons aren’t qualified to do.

Since people don’t starve to death in civilised countries, the state has to feed those underachieving Britons, as a side benefit making them likely to vote for those who promise to feed them better.

Our ‘leaders’ generally think this is a fair deal but, with the economy being what it is, feeding a burgeoning army of illiterate idlers lowers the standard of living for everyone else.

Since those who thereby suffer still outnumber the loafers, an electoral calamity looms large. It’s only at this point that politicians try to paper over the spidery cracks in our ‘education system’.

Otherwise, reducing a great nation to anomic barbarism is perfectly fine with them. That’s actually a clue in another crossword: “savage (8)”. ‘Barbarian’ is supposed to be the answer, a typically imprecise one. 

 

 

 

 

 

The world is blessed with 206 independent states. Only one of them has its legitimacy, and indeed right to survive, questioned.

Some of the others routinely murder and torture their own citizens, control the press, reduce their population to cannibalism, present a direct threat to the world, change governments by violent means every few years, support international terrorism, reduce women to chattels, maim or murder homosexuals and adulterers.

The sole pariah state does none of such things. It’s a Western parliamentary democracy whose legitimacy is grounded in international law.

So what has Israel done to deserve its unique status and to merit the threat of a global boycott issued by John Kerry, the US Secretary of State?

Israel refuses to accept a ‘peace settlement’ on the terms imposed by terrorists who openly aim to wipe the country with everyone in it off the face of the earth. Would we accept such a settlement? Would any country? Would John Kerry?

Yet yesterday he saw fit to utter what the Israeli government correctly took as a veiled threat.

“You see for Israel there’s an increasing de-legitimisation campaign that has been building up,” pronounced the Secretary with a rhetorical lustre polished at Yale. “People are very sensitive to it. There are talk of boycotts and other kinds of things. Today’s status quo absolutely, to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained.”

The tautological ‘today’s status quo’ refers to Israel occupying territories beyond her 1967 borders, into which progressive mankind and regressive terrorists want her to retreat.

Israel, you’ll recall, expanded beyond those borders after repelling an attempt to ‘drive her into the sea’, in the words of Nasser, the leader of said attempt.

In a short, sharp war a greatly outnumbered Israel routed the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan – against the background of global bleating about Israel being the aggressor.

Since then Israel has relinquished most of the captured territories, to which she had a right at least as legitimate as America’s to Texas or New Mexico.

She has hung on to some acreage for two reasons: economic and demographic (a dire shortage of space) and strategic (an equally dire need for a buffer against those whose murderous urges have never abated).

There’s not a single rational, moral or legal reason for Israel to succumb to pressure. Nor are there any such reasons for the pressure to be applied.

So why has the man in charge of US foreign policy gone along with the manifestly wicked, irrational drive to twist Israel’s arm into submission? Two isms spring to mind: anti-Semitism and progressivism.

The Israelis focused their response on the former, and one can hardly blame Jews for being sensitive to anti-Semitism. After all, that quaint prejudice reduced their number by half in my father’s generation.

In some circles Jews are slated for treating any criticism of Israel as a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Obviously not all such criticism is caused by Judophobia. But just as obviously some of it is.

Anti-Semitism, especially when it’s fashionably presented as anti-Zionism or else burning affection for the oppressed, clearly touches some sensitive chords in the hearts of many gentiles.

Their number may be large enough to tilt elections in favour of politicians expressing such sentiments – or at least not to hurt their electoral chances.

Predictably the call for boycotting Israel is sounded the loudest by the EU, which is to say the alliance driven by Germany and France, two countries not known for excessive Judophilia. Within that organisation one also finds many Eastern European countries, such as Poland, Romania and Lithuania, whose own record in treating the Jews is, well, ambivalent.

A growing number of European businesses and pension funds cut ties with Israeli firms linked to settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem – with most publicised opposition to this outrage coming in the delectable shape of Scarlett Johansson. Over the weekend, Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, blacklisted Israel’s Bank Hapoalim because of its links to settlement activity.

Barack Hussein Obama has never been accused of a pro-Jewish bias either, and his policy towards Israel has been consistently more ‘even-handed’, which is to say pro-Muslim, than any other US president’s.

At the same time, he treats Iran with avuncular benevolence, a spirit in which Kerry is currently negotiating with his Iranian counterpart. While this love-in of mutual cordiality goes on, Iran’s nuclear programme is proceeding apace, and we all know who its first victim is likely to be.

Britain’s foreign policy in the Middle East has always been dominated by Arabists and driven by an emotional and, perhaps more important, pecuniary tendency to appease those who have oil at the expense of those who don’t.

The country’s academic community these days routinely boycotts Israeli scientists (of whom, incidentally, there are considerably more than in the entire Muslim world combined), barring them not only from research grants but even from attendance at international conferences.

In all these instances latent anti-Semitism overlaps with explicit progressivism, which is the major reason behind anti-Israel invective. Lefties, such as Obama, Kerry, every EU functionary and most British academics, are ideologically predisposed to champion the cause of ‘the oppressed’.

This group may be defined in any number of ways, but one ironclad qualification for membership is hatred, both private and institutional, of every aspect of the West.

Material prosperity is one such aspect, especially when achieved by widespread talent, enterprise and industry, rather than pumping oil sloshing underfoot. Because Israelis have a deservedly higher standard of living than the Palestinians, they don’t merit our sympathy.

Palestinians do, mainly because they can be seen as an international extension of our own welfare state. Our supplicants are adjudged to merit assistance even when their destitution is manifestly caused by sloth. Likewise, Palestinians, who spend most of their time not working but dreaming of eviscerating Jews, are perfectly cast in the role of victims.

All these factors combine for the likes of Kerry to feel that he must throw support behind the Palestinian cause by holding a gun to Israel’s head. He’s being applauded by the growing Muslim communities in the West, its home-grown anti-Semites and assorted lefties the world over.

This is the company in which we find ourselves thanks to our sage leaders. Let’s rejoice.

 

Last week a 53-year-old denizen of a small town in the Urals went to see his older friend and mentor, aged 67.

In the good Russian tradition the two friends cracked a bottle of what in common Russian parlance is called ‘white wine’ (vodka to you). The report of the incident doesn’t mention if a second bottle saw the light of day, but on general principle and lifelong empirical evidence I’d think it likely.

In another good Russian tradition, once the two chaps got properly lubricated, they kicked off a heated literary dispute. In this instance the bone of contention was the comparative significance of poetry and prose as genres of literature.

The guest, whose CV includes university education and a career as school master, maintained that only poetry qualifies as real literature. The host, whose professional credentials weren’t divulged in the report, begged to differ.

I don’t know the details of his argument, but no doubt the names of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky came up, as did the fact that some of Russia’s greatest poets (Pushkin, Lermontov, Pasternak, Bely et al) eventually turned to prose, with hardly any movement in the opposite direction.

I do hope you’re suitably impressed and ever so slightly envious. How often do you hear two pissed Englishmen falling out over such topics? I’d suggest they’d be more likely to disagree about the relative merits of two football clubs or perhaps of various Black & Decker home-improvement tools.

On balance, having experienced both, I prefer the English way: it seldom reaches out to the sublime but at least it’s less likely to sound ridiculous, as the argument in question clearly is.

Staying within the confines of Russian literature, the dispute reminds me of a 5-year-old character in a popular children’s book. The boy asks his slightly older brother, “If a whale wrestles with an elephant, who will win?” Ask a stupid question and you’ll get a stupid answer, as the saying goes.

Well, in this instance the answer was rather worse than merely stupid. For the champion of poetry grabbed a knife off the table and killed the defender of prose with one mighty thrust.

Drunk as he was, the ex-teacher was sufficiently compos mentis to do a runner and go aground in another friend’s house. This friend either wasn’t informed of his guest’s chosen method of settling literary disagreements or else didn’t particularly care about literature one way or the other.

Considering that Russia’s murder rate is higher than ours by an order of magnitude, and in that region by two, the police resources there are stretched thin. Yet in this case the law enforcers did themselves proud: they quickly tracked the poetry lover down and charged him with violating the Russian Criminal Code, Article 105, Part 1 (murder). One hopes poetry is amply represented in his prison library.

What’s one to make of this? Jokes aside, literature has to be held in high esteem to be considered a matter of life or death even in a state of inebriation. Not many Westerners, apart from the French, would allow such abstract arguments to inflame their passions to such an extent.

I’d suggest that this is an argument against universal education. Education only means anything important when it brings about a certain ennoblement of character and refinement of soul, not just wider erudition. Yet observation suggests that most people find it easier to absorb information than to improve their character in any noticeable way.

Someone who has read Shakespeare’s sonnets may still beat his wife, even when she doesn’t deserve it. But someone whose soul was penetrated and shaped by Shakespeare’s sonnets, or come to that Pushkin’s poems, would be unlikely to resort to domestic corporal punishment or, in our case, murder.

It’s much healthier for most people to cultivate an interest in things like football and home decoration than, say, iambic pentameter vs. dactylic hexameter. This diminishes the chances of serious culture falling into wrong hands, with concomitant damage done to both the neophyte and serious culture.

On a personal note, incidents like this make me even happier about leaving Russia over 40 years ago. Human life is worth considerably less there, nor lasts nearly as long.

According to one news item today, a quarter of Russian men die before their fifty-fifth birthday. The BBC ascribed this rather appalling statistic to vodka, but clearly at least some of it has to be due to literary arguments fuelled by vodka. 

“They change their sky, not their soul, who run across the sea,” wrote Horace. That may be. But thankfully they do change their life expectancy.

 

My new book, How the Future Worked, ponders many such stories. It’s available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk.