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Back in the USSR, the post-war years saw a madcap drive towards establishing Russian ‘priority’ in matters scientific and technological.

Polzunov invented the steam engine, Kotelnikov the parachute, Mozhaisky the aeroplane, Popov the radio, Petrov the electric bulb, Lodygin the electric arc, Tsiolkovsky the rocket, the Cherepanovs the locomotive.

And anyone disseminating information that disputed those indisputable historical facts had to be re-enlightened at the educational facilities under the auspices of The State Administration for Camps (GULAG for short).

Though today’s Russian children are allowed to know who James Watt was, that drive hasn’t necessarily ended, except that this time the rest of the world has been taken in as well.

Only a week was left of 2013 when Mikhail Kalashnikov died at 94, the ‘K’ in the series of weapons based on the original AK-47 rifle. By far the most popular post-war infantry weapons, the Kalashnikovs have killed considerably more people than all WMD combined, and Gen. Kalashnikov’s demise was consequently eulogised in countless obituaries the world over.

However, they all omitted a rather significant detail. Kalashnikov didn’t really develop the Kalashnikovs.

Hugo Schmeisser did, except of course his original customer was Hitler’s rather than Stalin’s army.

Schmeisser, however, broke even in popular perception by being credited with the German MP-40 machine pistol, such a ubiquitous star in war films. However, that ‘Schmeisser’ was developed by others, and Hugo’s only contribution was the magazine. But the magazine had his name on it – hence the confusion.

The ‘Schmeisser’, incidentally, was far from being as popular in combat as in the post-war cinematography. It was used mostly by the Waffen-SS and officers in the Wehrmacht. Grunts usually carried bolt-action rifles that had several times the ‘Schmeisser’s’ 70-meter effective range, but of course fell far short of its rate of fire.

Long before the war the Germans realised that fire fights in modern mobile combat seldom presented targets farther than 300m away. This led to the idea of combining the features of a submachine gun and a bolt-action rifle.

The gun itself came about later, but already in 1924 Hugo Schmeisser developed the firing selector switch, a version of which is now used on all assault rifles. The hybrid rifle itself, Schmeisser’s StG44, went into mass production much later, in 1944, and the Germans only had time to make 450,000 units.

About 50 StG44s, 10,785 sheets of technical designs and, critically, Schmeisser himself along with his whole team, were in 1945 shipped to the town of Izhevsk in the Urals where they were made to work in harness with Soviet designers, including Kalashnikov. Schmeisser and his men were allowed to go back to Germany in 1952, by which time their work had been done.

Only in 2009 did Kalashnikov acknowledge publicly that in designing his rifle he had been ‘helped’ by Schmeisser. Privately, this was an open secret not only to experts but to anyone who saw the photographs of the StG44 and the AK-47 side by side.

The two guns look like dizygotic twins, if not exactly identical ones. Of course in their fine tradition of veracity the Russians have always claimed that this was where the similarity ended. It wasn’t.

All the key features of the AK-47 were copied from the StG44, if occasionally at one remove, with such features as the trigger, double-locking lugs, unlocking raceway and the high-tolerance system had been first reproduced in other rifles and then transplanted into the AK.

The long-stroke gas system and layout of the StG44 were copied faithfully, as was the banana magazine and the stamped-receiver manufacturing process. However, only in the 1959 AKM modification did the Soviets begin to use stamped sheet metal, something Schmeisser had been doing from 1943.

Long-stroke gas pistons, high tolerances and the magazine specially designed for stubby hybrid rounds simplified the maintenance of the gun, making it less likely to jam. This made the Kalashnikov ideal for the poorly trained Soviet army and also for millions of barely trained paramilitaries all over the world.

Approximately 100 million AKs have been produced and in 2006 Russia accounted for only 10 percent of the production. The rest were made in China and elsewhere, usually without the benefit of a licence.

In fact the Russians had been unable to patent the weapon until 1997. And in his adult life Mikhail Kalashnikov was never associated with the designs of any guns other than the AK and its knock-offs. Now you know why.

I apologise for the surfeit of technical detail but, as I’m sure you realise, my purpose is more general. It’s to show that, like energy in the First Law of Thermodynamics, the Soviet Union hasn’t really disappeared. It has merely been transformed.

It’s the same ulterior motive that animated my new book How the Future Worked, just published by RoperPenberthy. This is an anecdotal account of my life in Russia, written in as entertaining a form as I could manage.

The book, however, only masquerades as my memoir – it is actually less about me than about Russia, albeit as seen through my eyes. For the next few days I’ll be running excerpts, along with effusive praise by others – and will continue to do so until you buy the blasted thing.

You can get a copy on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, which is better than getting it on Amazon.co.uk.

Do you like couscous? I do. I like all sorts of ethnic foods: curry, Peking duck, sashimi, frog’s legs, snails. I bet you too enjoy some of those delicacies although, if you’re English, probably not all of them.

It’s not just food either. Some Arab architecture is sublime, though you have to go as far as southern Spain to find it. Belly dancing too has its fans, and I can join their ranks after a few pints of Kingfisher – although in full sobriety I may prefer ballet dancing instead.

Ancient Indian texts uncover some eternal depths of human nature. Muslim, especially Persian, graphic arts can be lovely, and those Japanese watercolours can put me in a sweetly melancholy mood.

In one of those moods I sometimes sigh and think oh, if only this were all there is to multiculturalism. Why, I’d be waving the multi-culti flag as vigorously as any LibDem or Labour front-bench warmer.

Unfortunately, much as we all may admire the outward manifestations of Eastern cultures, we’d do well to remember that their inner essence is at best alien to the West and at worst actively hostile to it.

This isn’t to say that, say, Muslims are always wrong when castigating the West. Godlessness, moral decay, all-pervasive decadence, disintegration of the family, unspeakable lewdness everywhere, materialism – I’ve heard Christian conservatives fume against those very things. Why, I’ve done a fair amount of fuming myself.

Having said all this, the West may be a rotting structure, but it’s the only one we have. Good, bad or indifferent, it’s our life, our family, our culture – it’s, well, us. And Eastern cultures, love them or hate them, are, well, them.

I shan’t quote Kipling on the subject of East and West, but he had a point. It’s debatable which culture is better. It’s undeniable that they are incompatible.

Former RAF officer Mark De Salis tried to bridge the two civilisations in his own person. An executive of an oil-related engineering company, he worked in Libya for six years and enjoyed every minute of it.

Four years into his tenure Mrs De Salis moved back to Cornwall. On general principle, this would suggest that the marriage was rather loosely knit, and indeed Mark acquired a girlfriend, Lynn Howie, a divorced mother of two from New Zealand.

By all accounts this was no casual fling: the couple were looking forward to a life together. In fact, Lynn flew all the way to Libya to spend some time with Mark.

A few days after her arrival the couple went for a romantic picnic in the dunes, where they were found the next day – shot, execution-style, in the back of the neck. The motive for their murder is being investigated, but the authorities plausibly believe that an unmarried couple living in sin had proved more than the delicate Muslim sensibilities could bear.

True enough, the Judaeo-Christian Eighth Commandment also proscribes adultery, and those of us who accept scriptural authority and yet transgress against it repent, hoping that God won’t punish us. Yet we tend to assume that, should God decide to ignore our entreaties, we’ll be punished only at Judgment.

Muslims, by the looks of it, aren’t prepared to defer chastisement or indeed delegate it to Allah. They seem to favour direct and immediate action by humans. The nature of the action varies from the Quran to Hadith.

The former is more lenient: “The woman or man found guilty of sexual intercourse – lash each one of them with a hundred lashes, and do not be taken by pity for them in the religion of Allah, if you should believe in Allah and the Last Day. And let a group of the believers witness their punishment”. Quran 24:2

Now a hundred lashes may kill, but not in each case. That’s why, according to Hadith, which plays the same role in Islam as Talmud in Judaism and patristic texts in Christianity, Mohammed later hardened his position:

“So the Prophet ordered the two adulterers to be stoned to death, and they were stoned to death near the place where biers used to be placed near the Mosque.” Sahih Bukhari 6.79

Stones must have been scarce around the sandy picnic site 50 miles from Tripoli. So the faithful had to resort to 9mm bullets as an acceptable replacement. No doubt they felt good afterwards: Allah had been served.

These days one can’t open the papers without reading about similar acts of faith committed by Muslims, and not just in their own countries. Beatings, lashings, torture, forced marriage, kidnapping, murder, banishment to native villages are the menu from which British Muslim subjects order punishment for infidels and apostates.

It’s essential to realise that, unlike our home-grown criminals who aren’t certifiable psychopaths, the righteous Muslims don’t think they’re doing something wrong. This is what their religion demands and they are faithful to it.

We should remember this when extolling the virtues of multiculturalism. Mix our civilisations all you want, but they’ll never form a homogeneous solution. The fractions will remain strictly separate. 

“Mark was a good guy,” remembers the victim’s friend. “He had no argument with Libyan people, he liked and understood them.”

I’m sure Mark De Salis liked Libyans. But perhaps he didn’t understand them as well as he thought – of which he was served an awful reminder.

Couscous, anyone?

 

 

As a confirmed modernist, I welcome the new, indeed New Age, version of the ‘christening sacrament’ adopted by the Church of England.

Why the quotation commas? Because it’s not just the text of the ceremony but also its name that has become outdated. I think ‘initiation piss-up’ would reflect Zeitgeist much more accurately.

It would also avoid offending Muslims, Jews, Taoists, Shintoists, Buddhists, Hinduists, Zaraostrians, animists, pagans – and above all atheists, who justifiably take exception to the ‘christ’ in christening.

The New Age text does say “Do not be ashamed of Christ”, but you must agree this is so much better than the obsolete “Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.”

It’s really not on to have faith in anything, other than the proposition that it’s not on to have faith in anything. And confess? To whom? This presupposes the existence of someone superior to us, which we know can’t possibly be the case.

As to Christ’s crucifixion, this is open to both historical and ecumenical debate. Who are we to claim Christ was crucified when 1.6 billion Muslims say he wasn’t?

Next thing we know, someone will claim we’re right and they’re wrong, and where will we be then? Of course such an intrepid heretic would be arrested, but the cause of multiculturalism would suffer nonetheless.

However, there’s nothing offensive about not being ashamed of Christ. In fact we shouldn’t be ashamed of anything at all, not even committing crimes. Whenever we go wrong, it’s the fault of society, so let society be ashamed, not us.

Then compare the old “Do you reject the Devil and all rebellion against God” with the new “Do you reject evil?” Even if you’re an old fogey full of moth-eaten prejudices, you’ll have to admit that the new version is much more inclusive, and less reliant on uncool superstition.

The Devil really only exists as a figure of speech, as in “What the devil d’you mean?” And even in such constructions it’s being replaced by a more progressive, contemporary and therefore laudable ‘f***’.

Believing in the Devil who’s the prince of this world is like believing in the tooth fairy, Father Christmas, ghosts and national sovereignty – no self-respecting adult would hold such childish notions. But anyone – man, woman, other – will be happy to reject evil.

In fact, I was talking to my friend Dick (Dr Richard Dawkins to you) the other day and I asked him if he rejected evil. “Course I bloody well do for chrissake,” he said, implicitly undermining all accusations of militant atheism.

“Do you repent of the sins that separate us from God and neighbour” wasn’t just replaced in the new version, it was simply dumped – and quite right too.

The word ‘God’ is by itself judgmental – it presupposes adherence to a certain belief system that has little support among scientists, such as my friend Dick.

And sin doesn’t exist as such; the concept has been superseded by the EU Convention on Human Rights. Of course any transgression against it must be  repented and severely punished, but this goes without saying. So quite rightly the new version doesn’t say it.

“Do you turn to Christ as Saviour? Do you submit to Christ as Lord?” asks the old version and thank God for the new one, which eliminates most of the offensive potential: “Do you turn to Christ? And put your trust in him?”

It’s historically and logically incorrect to refer to Christ as Saviour. If he was indeed crucified, and 1.6 billion Muslims can’t be wrong when assuring us he wasn’t, then he couldn’t even save himself. You call that Lord, which is another word for manager (“Christ was born a manager,” according to that old book, or words to that effect)? You call that leading by example? Any manager of a sales department who himself couldn’t sell would be sacked faster than you can say ‘incompetence’.

Also, focus group research has shown that many parishioners, especially women, take exception to the word ‘submit’. A woman must not submit to anyone, the very idea is grossly offensive. If she submits, this means she is raped, and I don’t care who the rapist is, a stranger, her husband or God Almighty. Way to go, sisters!

“Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life?” This is another empty phrase that has been justifiably eliminated. The way? The truth? Give me a break.

This comes dangerously close to fascism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, absolutism, nationalism, little-Englandism and many other imprisonable offences. There is no one way or one truth. We all decide on our own way and our own truth, that’s what modernity is all about.

As to ‘the life’, it doesn’t exist outside our own bodies. Life is given to a person when his/her/its Dad’s sperm fertilises his/her/its Mum’s ovum, and that’s all there is to it.

Well, not quite all: as my friend Dick says, an even better life may be produced in a test tube or else by cloning, and he’s of course right, but an initiation piss-up is hardly the time to comment on every possibility.

All in all, Archbishop Welby must be applauded. His business background is standing him in good stead: he knows how to maximise sales opportunities. His Grace realises that, for people to walk into Christian churches, Christ must walk out.

If you’re an Anglican, I hope you feel particularly proud today. So please join me in this little prayer: “Our parent, who may or may not be there somewhere…”

 

 

Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families, said Mr Micawber. But of course, Dickens’s idea of familial accidents was formed in Victorian, which is to say pre-Marxist, times.

The Communist Manifesto was only two years old when Wilkins Micawber stepped into literature and, though the pamphlet had helpfully laid out the theory of bestial brutality, Marxists hadn’t yet had enough time to act on it.

Now they have, and they’ve been taking full advantage ever since their historical debut in 1917. This hasn’t been adequately covered in Western historiography, possibly for brevity’s sake or else out of squeamishness.

Thus accounts of Bolshevik ghoulishness tend to mention that so-and-so (or thousands of so-and-sos) was ‘sentenced to death’, ‘executed’ or ‘shot’. However, as often as not this was merely shorthand for rather more Baroque excesses.

Russian historians, especially those who themselves barely avoided finding themselves on the receiving end of such excesses, were more forthright. Perhaps the first, and certainly the most influential, of them was Sergei Melgunov. 

His book The Red Terror, published in the West while Lenin was still alive, documents thousands of such niceties as skinning people alive, rolling them around in nail-studded barrels, driving nails into people’s skulls, quartering, burning alive, crucifying or castrating priests, turning them into pillars of ice by pouring water over their naked bodies in freezing temperatures, stuffing officers alive into locomotive furnaces, pouring molten pitch or liquefied lead down people’s throats – and of course torturing thousands to death.

Western intellectuals shrugged and, for the most part, went on describing the Bolsheviks as fellow liberals out to stage a highly commendable social experiment. It took decades for them to remove some benefit of the doubt from the Russian Marxists and acknowledge grudgingly that, well, perhaps they weren’t as nice as all that.

North Korea’s hereditary dictator Kim Jong-Un was never given such a benefit, at least not to the same extent. Yes, he was often described as a utopian, what with words like ‘evil’ having been more or less excised from journalistic or scholarly vocabulary. But it has been acknowledged that his version of Marxism gives a bad name to the version practised and preached on every Western campus.

That has had a liberating effect on Kim: unlike Russian Marxists yesterday, or those on Western campuses today, he needs no subterfuge. He can openly act on his typically Marxist cannibalism without worrying what the world will think.

It’s against this background that Kim set out to vindicate Mr Micawber, but adding a more modern twist.

You see, he had a bit of a problem with his uncle (by marriage) General Jang Song-Thaek. The good general was widely regarded as second only to Kim in the North Korean pecking order, but in Marxist dictatorships being second is a miss as good as a mile. Only Number One matters, and he was growing increasingly unhappy with Jang, particularly his being in China’s pocket.

China is of course North Korea’s greatest (only?) ally, and it was Jang’s job to keep the friendship going. However, he wasn’t to forget which side his bread was buttered – by all means, get close to the Chinese, uncle, but not so close as to make Kim doubt where your real loyalties lie.

Somewhere, somehow Jang overstepped the line and so had to go. But, to extend literary parallels, Kim is no Lady Macbeth. He’s a Marxist.

Therefore he was never likely to tell his uncle, “Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once.” It was he, Kim, who was to decide both the order and the manner of anybody going anywhere.

Clearly, a man with his own power base couldn’t just be dismissed. He had to go rather permanently, to make sure he’d never come back. Thus Jang was charged with treason, tried by a kangaroo court, or whatever animal lends its name to a travesty of justice in Korea, and sentenced to death.

A quick bullet was called for, but where’s the fun in that? Like in pre-Christian Rome, death can be turned into nice family entertainment.

To that end Jang and his five associates were thrown to be devoured by 120 dogs starved for three days. Kim, his brother and 300 senior officials were enjoying the show, with all but Kim also learning a lesson about the likely consequences of bad behaviour.

It took the animals a full hour to sate themselves and complete this combination of business and pleasure. Kim’s reaction wasn’t recorded, but I’m sure he thoroughly enjoyed himself, proud of adding a whole new dimension to the idea of dog food.

Now I’ve heard of family squabbles, but this is special. I wonder what Mr Micawber would have said had he witnessed the fun.  

The French have taught us gastronomy, Gothic architecture, scholasticism, advanced sexual variants, the use of long words that sound weird, tax avoidance, how to stay thin in spite of gorging ourselves (I haven’t learned that particular lesson) and how to sound sophisticated by slipping into the conversation the odd je ne sais quoi or tout court.

They haven’t yet taught us that the ‘s’ is actually pronounced at the end of fleur de lis and coup de grâce but I’m sure they will, given time. It won’t be long before our socially aspiring countrymen will learn that grâce and gras, as in foie gras, sound different in their native habitat.

But I’m relieved to see it hasn’t all been a one-way street (sens unique). The patriot in me rejoices when reading the news of five young Frenchmen arrested for brawling on a London tube train at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve (you can enjoy the action on YouTube). When in England, do as the English do, and all immigrants should learn this time-honoured rule.

Young Brits of either (or, to be more precise, any) sex know exactly what festive occasions are for: you get pissed and, before passing out in your own vomit, start throwing punches or whatever else comes handy: bar stools, trash bins, bottles, caution into the wind. So it’s only polite that young Frenchmen living or visiting here should follow their hosts’ customs – and politesse is after all a traditional French trait.

Moreover, they also learn from us even in their own country. For example, even 10 years ago there were no tattooing and/or piercing parlours in provincial France, but now they are spreading like chanterelles after a summer rain.

Also, French youngsters now routinely get drunk on weekends – and not just on wine. More and more often they fall into alcohol-induced coma after consuming gallons of vile concoctions the Brits have perfected, if not invented.

Good old lager is also becoming a favourite coma-inducer, and it’s good to see that the EU is succeeding in its stated goal of encouraging cultural exchange. A French friend was commiserating the other day about the growing lager consumption in his native land, and he even chuckled politely at my feeble pun ‘à lager comme à lager’.

He was also polite enough not to suggest that the French are picking up English habits, so it fell upon me to elucidate the point.

It has to be said that when I pass a group of French youngsters in our local village, they still say “Bonjour, Monsieur”, rather than an equivalent of “You wha’, mate?”, so cultural exchange isn’t as brisk as all that. Barroso and Rumpy-Pumpy have work to do, but we can rely on them to do it.

My friend José Manuel Barroso, of course, learned all about internationalism during his youth, profitably spent in the Portuguese militant-communist underground. It’s good to have a man like that working tirelessly towards our common goal: thorough elimination of national, cultural, economic and social differences across Europe.

Before long French youngsters, who drop their aitches naturally, will be shouting “On me ‘ead, son” during their kickabouts, while the English will learn how to enunciate “Sur ma tête, mon vieux” or some such.

Meanwhile the French seem to have learned how to get drunk and then brawl on public transport. One step at a time – or une étape à la fois, as the French may or may not say.

 

 

This paraphrase came to my mind the other day, at lunch with a French friend whom I hadn’t seen for a couple of months.

“Are you still negative about Putin?” he asked with an avuncular, indulgent smile. The expression communicated what words didn’t: to my friend harbouring such feelings was a sign of harmless eccentricity, a little quirk one normally associates with people on the cusp of old age.

“What exactly has happened in the last two months,” I asked, “to make me change my mind?”

“Oh, he’s making Russia great again.”

I shan’t repeat at length what I recently wrote about both Putin and the very idea of national greatness (22 and 26 December). The gist of my comments on the former is that Col. Putin is running a fascist state politically and history’s greatest crime syndicate economically, while on the subject of the latter I argued that ‘great’ is the enemy of ‘good’.

What fascinates me is the attraction of power, especially when wielded with much violence. Like the more primitive girls going weak at the knees over wicked, violent men, intellectuals seem to have that funny feeling down there when observing a tyrant in action.

Putin isn’t the only love object in recent history to benefit from such sensual cravings. To illustrate the point, here are a few things The Times said to explain its decision to name the KGB colonel as the paper’s Man of the Year. In brackets I’m listing other names that could easily replace Putin’s in these panegyrics.

“He is vain, reactionary and not a little paranoid, but he has accumulated unrivalled authority and used it to unmatched effect.” [Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao]

“He succeeded in one of his most enduring ambitions: to bring Moscow back to the international high table.” [Ivan the Terrible, Stalin]

“The Putin stare has become a fixed feature of his ruling technique…” [Stalin, Hitler]

“[Putin] has consolidated power so completely and wielded it so deftly that he is not only unchallenged at home, but indispensable abroad.” [Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Mao]

“But it is abroad that his narrow and nationalistic world view has proved most effective.” [Stalin, Hitler, Mao]

“Mr Putin craves respect on the world stage and for good or ill has earned it.” [Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro et al]

I didn’t choose the parenthetical names arbitrarily: all such things not only could have been said about the gentlemen in brackets, but at the time actually were.

Lenin, Stalin, Hitler were all portrayed as strong leaders badly needed by their own countries and the world at large. Not only giftless hacks, but great poets, writers and thinkers hailed the ‘strong leaders’ just as millions were dying gruesome deaths.

Fellow travellers from all over the world, such as our own Fabians Shaw, Wells, the Webbs et al, flocked to Soviet Russia in the midst of the greatest democide in history; British aristocrats, including some royals, greeted Hitler with the Nazi salute.

Amazingly, even some of their own subjects, including those who themselves were prime candidates for torture and execution, gasped their girlish adoration for the murderous ghouls. For example, the great Russian poets Blok, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva hailed the revolution with exalted ardour, while Pasternak continued to love Stalin quasi-erotically even after millions had already been murdered.

It may be tempting to talk about this in the language of psychobabble liberally borrowed from Freud and Jung, or else to refer to something of more recent provenance, such as the Stockholm syndrome. But I’ll resist such temptations, merely praying that God save us from ‘strong leaders’, at least at peacetime.

What we need instead is a strong society guided by a strong Church and governed by strong, just laws. The nineteenth century wasn’t spared an abomination like homomarriage, to use the first example close at hand, because, say, Gladstone was strong, and nor did it happen last year because Cameron is weak.

It’s just that in Gladstone’s time such a thing was unthinkable, whereas now society can’t come up with a universally acceptable explanation of why perversion shouldn’t be accepted on an even footing with normality. Another word for this is decadence, and decadent societies are the pots in which the scum inevitably rises to the top.

A healthy society doesn’t need a strong leader unless the country is at war. In fact, in such a society the leader is almost irrelevant. His personal characteristics only come into play when his society is feeble and ailing.

For example, every Russian schoolchild knows that Ivan IV (the Terrible) was mad whereas, until Alan Bennett’s play and the subsequent film appeared, only Englishmen with a keen interest in history had known about the madness of George III. The difference is that in some societies mad kings are, and in some they aren’t, allowed to create mad kingdoms.

We shouldn’t ask whether or not the leader is strong; instead we should ask what particular sickness in our society makes us crave a strong leader and admire those we perceive as strong, such as the transparently evil KGB colonel.

In the case of today’s Western intellectuals, such as my French friend, the answer is obvious. We’re all watching our societies collapse around us, and we’re sufficiently horrified to deceive ourselves into believing that a stronger leader than Obama, Cameron or Hollande would arrest the disaster.

He wouldn’t; no one can. A strong leader taking over a decadent, corrupt, amoral society will only succeed in making it more decadent, corrupt and amoral – while enriching and empowering himself and his cronies.

Instead of awaiting the advent of a strong leader, we should pray that our society becomes so strong that it won’t be hurt by a weak one. Supplementing prayer with action would be even better.

In 1938 Time Magazine chose Adolph Hitler as its Man of the Year, with Heinrich Himmler and Lavrenti Beria narrowly missing out.

In 2013 the cognate of that publication, our own The Times awarded the same honour to KGB Col. Putin. This doesn’t quite match the bold step of 75 years ago, but comes close enough to deserve a separate comment, which will come in due course.

Meanwhile I’d like to nominate a few worthy individuals for similar honours to be awarded on this blog later this year. These still being early days, additions to the list are possible, and I’ll welcome your suggestions.

Bringing Society Together in Two Words. The front runner is my friend Dave, aka the Right Honourable David Cameron.

Ever since Mr John Major, as he then was, spoke of the coming delights of classless society, every subsequent PM has pledged allegiance to the same goal.

The usual stratagem is levelling downwards, which in all honesty is the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level. To that end our PMs introduced economic measures designed to pull the upper class down to the middle level, the middle class down into the deserving poor territory, and the deserving poor down to the undeserving bottom.

However, Tony Blair was the first to realise that the real divide isn’t just economic but also cultural. And the most visible (audible?) sign of it is the way people speak.

So Tony set out to bridge that gap within his own highly elastic person. To that end he mastered the art of producing the glottal stop and dropping his aitches. A man of a strictly compartmentalised mind, he’d use the newly acquired diction when talking to a TUC audience and only reverted to his normal speech when delivering Pall Mall addresses.

Now Dave, the self-acclaimed Heir to Blair, has shown it doesn’t take two separate audiences to make everyone feel at home. This morning he made a passionate TV plea to Scotland not to get out of the UK.

What places Dave at the top of the queue for my prestigious accolade is that he produced a highly creditable glottal stop in the middle of ‘Sco’land’, while narrowing the diphthong in ‘out’ to make it sound like his normal superposh ‘ite’. If this isn’t bringing society together, I don’t know what is. Eat your ‘eart ite, Tone, old boy, djamean?

Fair’s Fair award also has a frontrunner: Daily Mail’s Sarah Vine. You’ve heard me mourn the demise of masculine singular pronouns, which makes English the first hermaphroditic language in history. Yet, while banging on about this development I have, to my shame, ignored the iniquity of it all: after all the feminine singular pronouns are thriving.

Well, Sarah not only spotted this outrage but effectively corrected it with one sentence: “As someone who lived on their own from the age of 17 in a not terribly salubrious part of Brighton, I…” Old and embittered sticks-in-the-mud like me would moan that the singular antecedent ‘someone’ would call for a singular, in this instance feminine, possessive pronoun ‘her’. But Sarah is right: ‘their’ is better not only linguistically, but also morally. Aren’t you proud of our wordsmiths?

Truth in Politics At Last has a dead cert already, and the year has barely started. Explaining his unpopular decision to shun the EU in favour of closer ties with Russia, the Ukraine’s president Yanhukovych has cited the true reason: footie in general and John Terry specifically.

In Yanukovych’s view, the ball Terry cleared off the goal line in England’s 2012 Euro Championship match against the Ukraine was in fact over the line. England went on to win 1:0, thereby knocking Yanukovych’s fiefdom out of the Championship.

Even though the UEFA doesn’t fall under the aegis of the EU, the President got so disillusioned with European federalism that he chose Russian federalism instead. And if you as much as hint that the $15-billion bribe Yanukovych received from Russia had anything to do with the decision, he’ll ‘whack you in the shithouse’, to use his friend Putin’s phrase.

It’s to Putin that my Right Man in the Right Place award will probably go at the end of the year. The good colonel has taken an early lead by choosing to hold the Winter Olympics at a Black Sea resort with a subtropical climate.

Sochi is also close enough to the epicentre of terrorist activities in Russia, and those suicide bombers are capable of striking even farther afield, in places like Volgograd, never mind their own backyard.

But then those athletes who suffer grievous injuries in the likely bombings will be able to make an instant switch to the Special Olympics category, and Col. Putin must be commended for anticipating such a development.

The Sale of the Year award won’t go to Harrod’s or Selfridges – these emporia are likely to be edged out by our government’s promotion ‘Buy a Romanian and a Bulgarian, get a Ukrainian, Serb, Moldavian and Macedonian free!’.

The governments of Romania and Bulgaria are peddling their passports to their neighbours who aren’t blessed by membership in the EU. This is what Christian charity is all about: their new citizens can then become new recipients of our largesse – share and share alike. Isn’t that wonderful? 

Nelson Mandela will be hard to beat for my posthumous Proving that God Doesn’t Exist award. The late leader was the only candidate for the slot of Christ on earth. But Christ was supposed to have risen after death, which Mandela hasn’t done. This proves he isn’t Christ, and we already knew that no one else was. This means there’s no God, and if you dispute this unassailable logic I’ll have to tell Richard Dawkins where you live.

Happy New Year!

The Anglican Church is in big trouble, which can be summed up in two words: Lucy Winkett.

I’m not suggesting that this rector of St James’s church in Piccadilly is either the cause of the trouble or its sum total. Only that she’s its neat encapsulation.

To begin with, any woman seeking priesthood is ipso facto subversive as she’s spitting both at scriptural authority and 2,000 years of Christian tradition. And any Church ordaining women forfeits its claim to apostolic succession, in other words to being a Church. The best it can hope to be is a loose confederation of separate congregations, which is indeed what Anglicanism has become.

How do you address a female priest like Winkett? Suppose you go to confession (which is practised in Anglicanism, though not widely) and she’s on the other side of the curtain. What do you say?

“Father, forgive me…” flies in the face of both grammar and physiology. “Mother, forgive me…” might suggest that Miss Winkett is a Mother Superior, something that has been impossible ever since Henry VIII robbed and destroyed the monasteries.

Perhaps “Parent, forgive me…” would be in keeping with our fashionably hermaphroditic language recently cleansed of all masculine pronouns. Fine, Parent Winkett it is.

It has to be said that Parent Winkett spits at Christian tradition in more ways than just being a vicar. For the collective subversiveness of female priesthood practically guarantees that every female priest can be expected to be subversive personally. Parent Winkett doesn’t disappoint this confident expectation.

St James’s is known as the ‘New Age church’, and with good reason. Since I can say nothing about ‘New Age’ anything that hasn’t already been said about haemorrhoids, I’ve always given this church a wide berth.

Alas, a few weeks ago I attended a choral concert there, thinking that Britten’s music performed by good  singers, one of whom is my friend, would be free of offensive potential. I was wrong.

For the small choir was led by an ineptly drawn caricature of a camp artiste whose musicianship went on to prove in short order that it’s not enough to be homosexual – one must also have talent.

But before I was exposed to that side of his personality, the caricature treated the public to a long speech extolling same-sex marriage and promising that 2013 would always be commemorated as the year in which that glorious institution was legalised.

For fear of offending my friend I waited until the interval to make my escape, rather than demonstratively walking out in the middle of the soliloquy. Later my friend assured me that the caricature wasn’t as bad as he looked, and anyway his speech, though admittedly misplaced at a concert, cast no aspersion on Parent Winkett who had no part in it.

The claim sounded dubious, considering the Parent’s history, the nature of her church and the fact that she’s the caricature’s lifelong friend and a singer in his choir. Her theology also failed to prove my friend’s case, for the Parent’s take on Christianity is rather peculiar.

In keeping with her church’s nickname she’s an ardent champion of throwing the cloak of Anglicanism over every occult and neo-pagan idiocy in God’s creation. Her current hobby is Gurdjieff’s theosophy, or rather Ennegram Personality Profiling Systems inspired by it, but she has many others as well.

St James’s has been known to celebrate Buddha’s birthday, and the day can’t be far when Mohammed’s follows suit. But the Parent knows that this sort of ecumenism on LSD has to be approached gradually, in incremental steps.

She made the next such step this Christmas, by decorating the church yard with a partial life-size replica of the wall that separates Israel from Palestinian terrorists. The write-up accompanying this eyesore says that the wall “is a daily disaster for ordinary Palestinian families”.

“We join with people of all faiths in praying for the day when the Wall will come down… The most unhelpful thing you can do is be pro one side; it just adds to the conflict. We have to not only understand those people who are oppressing us, but try to walk in their shoes, and ultimately to really engage with what it means to love our enemies.”

And so forth, all in the same semiliterate vein. The Parent, not being the sharpest tool in the box, doesn’t realise this, but refusing (or in this instance pretending to refuse) to take sides in a conflict between good and evil is in itself taking sides. And in Israel’s conflict with Palestinian terrorists no Christian, indeed no decent person, should have any trouble identifying which is which.

This is how a real Anglican describes the situation:

“Everyday life in Bethlehem and large parts of Judaea-Samaria is a daily siege. Palestinian protection rackets are rife, with $10,000 being extracted by Muslims from the… Christians, on pain of death… The owner of the region’s only Christian bookstore was recently abducted and murdered; Christian shops and schools are regularly firebombed; zealous Muslims picket colleges to intimidate Christian students into reading and studying the Qur’an… There are regular beatings of Christians, and Muslim gangs routinely seize Christian-owned land while the security forces just stand by and watch.”

On the other side of the conflict is Israel, a country that protects the rights of not only Christians but also Muslims, has a similar form of government to ours, shares our values and – for the strategically minded – is the bulwark in Christendom’s defence against Islam.

The wall, Parent, is there to prevent the Palestinians from murdering Israelis every day and encroaching on Israel’s right to exist. Given half the chance they’d do to Israel what they did to Lebanon after overrunning it: they systematically turned it first into a badly maintained public lavatory, then a bloodbath, then ruins.

One can understand that people who routinely murder Christians are closer to the Parent’s leftie heart than those who lovingly guard Christian sites and relics. After all, deep down she herself has to despise traditional Christianity. What’s really dear to her is every anti-Western pagan lunacy she can get hold of.

It’s hard to feel sorry for such people. But I do feel sorry for the Anglican Church being poisoned from within by the likes of Parent Lucy Winkett, in line to be the first female bishop.

These days we tend to use money as the sole measuring stick of just about everything.

This isn’t particularly surprising in a nation that increasingly treats religion as a quaint superstition of no relevance to life. However, even these days there are more important things than money – and one fears we’ll soon be served a cruel reminder of it.

In three days Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants will flood into Britain, a development our EU-bound government is unable to prevent. The newspapers, trying to assess the effect of the influx, are full of numbers preceded by the pound sign and neatly arranged in columns.

In the debit column one finds the cost of looking after the new arrivals before they can support themselves, if such a bright prospect is at all on the cards. The column includes the cost of medical care, schooling, accommodation, welfare payments and so forth.

The credit column is stuffed with figures having more to do with hope than expectation. Here one finds the tax riches the ‘A2’ immigrants are going to generate. This shows how mendacious statistics can become in deft hands.

People only generate new tax revenues when they are self-employed, which is to say when they create their own jobs. If they take jobs already existing, they’ll pay more tax only if they’re paid more than the previous holders. This isn’t going to be the case – in all likelihood the A2s will work for peanuts, ousting the more highly paid Poles and other less recent arrivals.

Another hope widely mooted is that our booming economy will create so many jobs that we’ll desperately need Romanians and Bulgarians to take them. Indeed, if you believe HMG’s statistics, we’re well on course to becoming the most dynamic economy in Europe – and tomorrow, as they say in underachieving Germany, the world.

Taking such projections on face value requires more suspension of incredulity than belief in Father Christmas and the tooth fairy. We have a shrinking manufacturing base, promiscuous state spending, an unmanageable – and growing – national debt, and an increasingly illiterate and work-shy population – this at a time when all modern economies are shifting towards highly qualified labour.

So how are we going to outstrip Germany, with all her Brauns, Bayers and BMWs? The best (or, depending on the way you look at it, the worst) we can hope for is yet another housing bubble creating yet another phoney prosperity, which Dave hopes will last until the next election. Whether or not it does, it’ll burst soon enough – leaving us in a worse mess than in 2008.

Meanwhile the arriving A2s will only be able to make the Exchequer richer by selling houses to one another, until they run out of either houses or money to buy them or, most likely, both.

All in all, if we discount statistical larceny, the net effect of the A2 immigration will be negative, hugely so. The pressure it’ll put on our social services, already creaking at the seams, will be even worse.

But really dire will be the costs that can’t be measured in money. Such as social, ethnic, cultural and linguistic cohesion without which no society can survive as such.

Our consecutive governments have been doing their level best to make sure Britain stops being British – which is a sine qua non for the likes of them to be elected.

One good thing one can say about Labour is that at least they admit that this was both their deliberate policy and desired outcome. The Tories are still coy about it, but then they’re in power and hope to cling to it for a few more years.

Britain and other core European countries aren’t designed to be melting pots, and quoting the American example in this context is disingenuous. From its very inception America has had no choice but to act as the stop of last resort for the world’s jetsam.

It’s the only naturally multi-culti society on earth, which presents no hardship, what with an indigenous culture being either non-existent or too recent to count. Even considering that, one would be hard-pressed to hold America up as an example of racial and cultural harmony.

Sporadic racial riots and constant racial tensions in just about every American state spring to mind, but there are subtler signs as well – just witness the unmatched abundance of racial and ethnic slurs the country has contributed to the English language.

Enforcing this sort of thing in ancient, and sublime, cultures means destroying them first and the nations that begat them a close second. This of course is the EU’s purpose: this horrendously immoral concoction depends for its survival on the destruction of every ancient nationhood in Europe.

It says a lot about Britain’s suicidal decadence that we agreed to join this abomination and now lack the courage to leave it. Instead, Dave, Ed and their jolly friends count the pennies, lying all along that the balance will be positive.

It will be disastrous even at the puny level on which this lot operate. Yet where it really matters the damage being done to our country is incalculable.

But not to worry: at least we can sleep peacefully in the knowledge that Nick will become an EU Commissioner and, with any luck, Tony the EU president. This lot can destroy even well-designed organisations – just imagine what they’ll do to something that has no right to exist. 

 

 

 

   

A few years ago I overheard a highly instructive exchange on the 22 Bus.

A woman, whose South London origin didn’t require a Dr Higgins to pinpoint, gave a light smack to her misbehaving child.

That upset a middle-aged, middleclass German woman who clearly possessed all the self-righteousness of her social background. “In Germany,” she intoned, “ve don’t smack children.”

“In England,” came an instant rapier-sharp conversation-stopper, “we don’t gas Jews.”

As far as repartees go, this worked. However, like most such lines, it doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny, especially its implication that gassing Jews is a constant feature of German life reflecting an immutable trait of the German character.

It’s neither. Propensity to do extreme, institutionalised violence is a universal corollary of extreme, institutionalised power. Absolute power doesn’t just corrupt, it also predictably turns its possessors into amoral, feral beasts.

The degree of amorality and beastliness is directly proportionate to the extent of power: the greater the latter, the greater the former. That’s why English laws over the last 800 years have been aimed at shifting power away from the state and towards the individual.

Most charters of Hellenic antiquity did exactly the opposite: they empowered the state at the expense of the individual, and if you look at the legal history of continental Europe you’ll observe elements of the same tendency.

That’s mostly why England has so far avoided some of the worst excesses of absolute power, including the one mentioned on the 22 Bus. But it would be wrong to assume that history has immunised England against that sort of thing in perpetuity. Constitutional history no doubt inoculates against tyranny, but this kind of vaccine must be constantly topped up.  

Keeping this simple observation in mind, one should always be on guard against an inordinate growth in state power over the individual. We should never sink into it-can’t-happen-here complacency. It can – and, if we aren’t vigilant, it will.

It’s in this light that the latest diktat from the Children’s Commissioner for England Maggie Atkinson ought to be regarded.

Like the German woman in my anecdote Miss Atkinson doesn’t think smacking children is nice. Like any modern government bureaucrat, she believes that anything she doesn’t think nice must be criminalised. This is ominous.

The modern state invariably treats the family as an annoying competitor. It proceeds from the assumption that it can – and has the right to – bring up children better than their parents.

The state also feels justified in regulating the activity that used to have exclusive rights to producing children. The government now insists on squeezing its body of laws into every nuptial bed in some kind of monstrous threesome.

Government bureaucrats will tell the husband what kind of hanky-panky is allowed and what is not. It’ll tell the wife that a sharp word from her husband is a sufficient reason for an appeal to criminal law. It’ll tell both that their lives aren’t entirely their own.

All such measures are shots fired in anger at the very institution of family, the cornerstone of the traditional social order but a direct threat to modern spivocracy. The war against family is being fought on all fronts and with every weapon of mass destruction.

The welfare state, a blockbuster in the armoury of state tyranny, has effectively made the father redundant, especially in lower-class families. His provider role assumed by the state, the father fades away.

Soon he’ll become superfluous not only as a provider for his children but also as the procreator of them: cloning and artificial insemination can do the job nicely. In fact, the very terms ‘father’ and “mother’, along with ‘husband’ and ‘wife’, have been sunk into obsolescence by the perverse law allowing homomarriage.

The same sort of outrage goes on in child rearing. Conservative parents – unless they can afford to educate their progeny privately – have no recourse whatsoever when they object to the multi-culti, PC, leftie poison being pumped into their children at state schools.

They can’t, for example, withdraw their children from obscene, vulgar, soul-destroying sex-education classes whose main purpose seems to be priming the little ones for a life of sexual, and increasingly homosexual, promiscuity accompanied by multi-culti atheism.

Now Miss Atkinson wants to push through a ‘law’ according to which a parent who smacks a child’s bottom may go to prison. (The quotation marks around the word ‘law’ are a tribute to Aquinas, who correctly taught that an unjust law is no law at all.)

“Personally, having been a teacher, and never having had an issue where I’d need to use physical punishment, I believe we should move to ban it,” says Maggie Lite. I don’t know what subject she personally taught, though on this evidence it couldn’t have been English.

Neither was it logic: “Because in law you are forbidden from striking another adult, …but somehow there is a loophole around the fact that you can physically chastise your child. It’s counter-evidential.”

An adult’s relationship with another adult is fundamentally different from his relationship with a child: he has dominion of the latter, but not of the former. A man can’t tell a grown-up what to wear, what to eat or when to go to bed, but he’s within his right to instruct a child in those areas.

We already have a just law prohibiting violent abuse of children resulting in bruising or injury, and quite right too. But a mild smack is a time-proven pedagogical tool, and when it was applied widely if judiciously, children were manifestly better behaved than they are now, when the parents’ dominion over them has effectively been removed.

What ought to be expunged isn’t smacking but the post of Children’s Commissioner, along with other such busybody jobs. The implicit, if not explicit, mandate of all of them is to destroy what little is left of traditional virtue – most emphatically including the institution of family.