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Tony Blair devoted his life to fighting ‘the forces of conservatism’. Not literally of course: everyone knows that Tony devoted his life only to Tony. However, there’s no denying that hatred of conservatives came closer than anything else to what may be loosely described as Tony’s heart.

It is in this sense that Dave is truly, and not just self-admittedly, ‘heir to Blair’. A slight problem is caused by the minor inconvenience of Dave leading the Tory party and not, like Tony, Labour. As a true heir to Blair, therefore, Dave detests every belief residing in the viscera of his party.

This was bound to create some tension with the party faithful, and so it has proved. Predictably Dave’s feelings for conservatives are most heartily reciprocated.

Writing in The Times, Matthew Parris put his finger right on it. Real conservatives “loathe the leader of their party: loathe him for personal as well as ideological reasons. It’s no exaggeration to say that these people would rather see their party lose an election than win under Mr Cameron’s leadership.”

One suspects it is a bit of an exaggeration. But the first part of the sentence does represent insightful analysis, for which Mr Parris isn’t widely known. However, if he’s right in the second part as well, then such lack of party loyalty is most regrettable.

By inference, Dave himself unfailingly puts party interests before his own. If the only way for the Tories to win an election would be a coalition with UKIP, and if Farage persists in saying that this isn’t on for as long as Dave is the leader, Dave would selflessly step aside. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would. And pigs will fly, tactfully giving a wide berth to Muslim neighbourhoods.

The conundrum is unsolvable: Dave is at odds with most of those who have traditionally voted for his party. It’s as if two tectonic plates have slammed together and a crack is widening at the fault line.  

There’s little doubt which side Mr Parris supports. To make this perfectly clear he writes that traditional Tories represent the ‘forces of darkness’, while “David Cameron’s Tory modernisers [are] the ‘forces of light’.” Mr Mani, ring your office. Your sect has just claimed another member.

From then on Parris abandons Manichaean terminology and deploys the language of either a detective investigating a dastardly conspiracy, or else that of a military man plotting the rout of enemy forces.

As a paid-up, card-carrying member of the nutters, swivel-eyed loons and fruitcakes lurking in the shadows, I may sum up what makes us such forces of darkness – specifically the areas in which we’re at odds with the light shining out of Dave’s various orifices.

We believe that Britain should be a sovereign country, just as it has been since time immemorial.

We also think it should pay its way, encourage all Brits to do the same – and, more important, discourage them from not doing so.

We support the idea that everyone should obey the law, and that those who don’t must be severely punished. The laws we obey should come from God and our own government, not from any other political entity and not from any religion foreign to these Isles.

We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman, not between any two arbitrarily selected mammals.

We think that medicine and education should tend, respectively, to people’s bodies and minds, rather than acting as a laboratory for social engineering.

We believe the flood of immigration should be reduced and that of cultural aliens stopped altogether – and preferably reversed.

In short, the forces of darkness are made up of those who believe everything the likes of Matt and Dave abhor. The duo sense with the unerring instinct of Pavlovian dogs that in a Britain run by such forces the ‘forces of light’ would form a tiny halo on the margins. It’s a matter of life or death – the life of the country, the death of vacuous, trendy, lefty posturing devoid of any intellectual or moral substance.

How does one protect Matt-and-Dave’s bailiwick? “The Admiral Byng strategy, I fear,” suggests Mr Parris. “A handful must be shot pour encourager les autres.” Now Byng was shot literally, for failing ‘to do his utmost’ in the battle of Minorca. Parris is longing for conservatives to be shot, one hopes only figuratively at this stage, for, well, being conservative. Quoting Voltaire in this context is apposite, although Lenin would be even better.

What should be the battle plan in the war against the forces of darkness? “Pretext must be found to single one or two rebels for extraordinary punishment: the sacking of a minister… the removal of the whip from a backbencher who starts crowing about deals with UKIP…”

And consequently, though Parris doesn’t say this, the effective disfranchising of every conservative in the country. Now that we bandy French phrases about, à la guerre comme à la guerre.

“Not another yard, Prime Minister, not another inch,” Parris blows his beagle – sorry, I meant bugle, or whatever else these people blow. “Attack!”

Do attack, Dave. The forces of light, whose line of battle traverses Holland Park and Islington, will salute you – and, one hopes, will perish together with you. Just like those Roman gladiators shouting morituri te salutant. And if you don’t know what this means, your military advisor Matthew ‘Mani’ Parris will be happy to translate.

As our sensibilities become more acute and our sense of propriety more heightened, we refine and broaden our notion of racial slurs.

What in the recent past would have been considered an innocent joke is well on its way to becoming an imprisonable offence. In a parallel development, what used to be treated as an imprisonable offence, incitement to terrorism, has become a valid expression of diversity.

Yet as our keen sensibilities gently waft up to cloud cuckoo land, there’s Russia to remind us of the times olden and golden. The times when a racially offensive remark was longing for genocide, rather than a simple acknowledgement that certain indigenous racial characteristics do exist.

As an example of the earth-bound gravitational pull exerted by Russia, witness the current scandal involving decorative items made out of human skin. As an example of the gravity-defying, airy-fairy motion in the opposite direction, observe the Western race scandal revolving around the stereotypical dietary habits of American blacks.

The latter is closer to home, so let’s start with that. Two golfers, Sergio García (white) from Spain and Tiger Woods (half-black) from the USA have a history of bad blood. I don’t know what caused the original rift, but everyone who follows golf knows the two men can’t stand each other.

Building on this common knowledge, a humorous interviewer asked Mr García if he was planning to invite Mr Woods to dinner. Yes, replied the golfer, and I’ll serve fried chicken.

That delicacy is a staple in the southern states, and has been since time immemorial. Since black slaves were originally brought to that part of America, they too developed a taste for chicken pieces deep-fried in batter. This affection is by no means exclusive to them – the KFC chain was started by an impeccably white Kentucky Colonel Sanders, and it’s widely, if incomprehensibly, popular all over the world.

Still, Mr García was unmistakeably referring to Mr Wood’s complexion. Even so, the supposed insult doesn’t register very high on the seismic scale of racial invective. Suppose for argument’s sake that the roles were reversed and Mr Woods would say that he’d serve paella to Mr García. Would the ensuing outcry reach the same decibel level?

Certain racial stereotypes exist – and persist – because there’s an element of truth to them. The Jews are associated with chicken soup, the Italians with pasta, the North Africans with couscous, the French with frogs’ legs, the Russians with vodka. A reference to their culinary preferences would normally fall somewhere between ethnic awareness and an innocent jibe.

In the past that sort of thing wouldn’t even have registered, never mind caused a worldwide scandal. Yet our times are far from normal, and the way Mr García is being treated in the press makes it hard to distinguish between him and a cross-burning Ku-Klux-Klan member clad in a white bed sheet.

George O’Grady, the chief executive of the European tour, fanned a flickering flame into a brush fire. Trying to stick up for Mr García, he vouchsafed that the golfer has many ‘coloured athletes’ among his friends. What ignited passions wasn’t the echo of the old line ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ but the word ‘coloured’.

Mr O’Grady meant well, but he got his modifiers terribly confused. In no way wishing to exculpate this egregious affront to human decency, family values and moral fibre, one still has to suggest that it’s not always easy to keep all those adjectives straight.

Our language is fluid, and what one day is considered a stylistically neutral description may the next day become a criminal insult. For example, when I was a child the word ‘Negro’ had no stylistic colouring whatever, as it were. Conversely, the word ‘black’ was regarded as a racist insult. The word ‘coloured’ was a colloquial and anodyne counterpart to ‘Negro’. These days Americans are supposed to say ‘Afro-American’, with the British favouring ‘Afro-Caribbean’.

Add to this a full repertoire of undeniably pejorative terms, and our vocabulary becomes a veritable minefield strewn with charges ready to go off. Messrs García and O’Grady stepped on a mine, and pieces of their hides are being blown all over our press, that vigilant guardian of probity.

Now compare this scandal to the one making news in Russia. Commenting on a film about Smersh, Soviet wartime counterintelligence, the liberal commentator Leonid Gozman took exception to the portrayal of those butchers as selfless heroes. On any moral level, he suggested, they were no different from the SS.

Now, thanks largely to Smersh’s good offices, 157,000 Soviet soldiers were executed by military tribunals during the war – often for such awful offences as telling a joke about Stalin or suggesting that German planes weren’t bad. Add to this at least twice as many shot out of hand without the benefit of even a kangaroo trial, and the casualties inflicted by Smersh on its own army outstrip those suffered by the US military in four years of desperate fighting against the Germans and the Japanese.

A comparison to the SS thus doesn’t sound particularly far-fetched, does it? Not so, according to the columnist Uliana Skoybeda. Writing for Russia’s highest-circulation daily, she expressed a heart-felt regret that the Germans hadn’t ‘made lampshades out of all the ancestors of today’s liberals’ – such as Mr Gozman, whose name is Jewish.

It has to be said that the Germans made a pretty good fist of that, though not, according to Skoybeda, good enough. They only managed to murder half the European Jews, with the other half left to procreate and eventually produce venomous snakes like Gozman with his libellous comparisons.

Now that’s what I call a racial slur (a Jew in Russia is a racial, not religious, entity). That’s how it was taken by the tiny Russian liberal press, while the dominant voice screamed all over the country that Gozman had only himself to blame – just as the Jews were largely responsible for their own holocaust.

We ought to be thankful to the Russians for reminding us what racism really is. So let’s just compare the two scandals and ask ourselves a rhetorical question, ‘Have we all gone mad?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A friend of mine, a card-carrying fruitcake and swivel-eyed loon, may be British, but he simply doesn’t understand how this country works.

In his blog today he bemoans the tardiness of Woolwich police who took twenty minutes to arrive at the scene of yesterday’s massacre. Instead of being angry, he should instead give thanks that they arrived at all.

By doing so, our brave PCs put themselves in jeopardy. Even as we speak, they risk censure for at least three aspects of their action.

First, we must keep in mind that the lovely chaps who hacked the soldier to pieces are black, which ipso facto makes them existential victims. Moreover, not only have they been victimised themselves, but they also carry in their hearts the genetic memory of centuries of oppression and suffering.

Admittedly their suffering may have been less acute than what they inflicted with their meat cleavers, but it still can’t be dismissed lightly. Taking vigorous action against them could very easily be construed in some quarters as racial discrimination.

Now that crime, as I hope we all realise, is much worse than cutting a man’s head off. The poor chaps may have attacked a man, but abusing them in any way could be tantamount to assaulting their whole race. Hence it’s no surprise that Woolwich PCs, whose job description can also stand for Political Correctness, had to stop and think before acting.

Second, the victim-criminals are also pious Muslims, which they proved by shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ while chopping through those neck tendons. As such, they are answerable to the Sharia law which does provide for killing infidels.

I hope you’re not going to suggest that there’s anything wrong with Islam, or that it’s in any way inferior to any other religion, including the superstition that fed our society for the better part of a millennium and a half. It isn’t. In fact all faiths are equal, which is why our next monarch is going to defend them all equally. Quite right too.

My friend is himself a priest, so he must be comfortable with the notion of God’s laws taking precedence over secular ones. By murdering that soldier, the two chaps acted in accordance with the higher law. Fair enough, theirs may be different from my friend’s, but who’s to say it’s inferior? Certainly no one who wishes to avoid the charge of inciting religious hatred.

Such considerations no doubt detained the policemen even further. And that’s not all. The PCs knew that the criminals – nay, suspects! – were armed with aforementioned meat cleavers and also with guns. Since no one has yet repealed the law of self-preservation, the policemen, properly forewarned, had to forearm themselves with firearms.

Since they don’t habitually carry them, such inherently immoral weapons are kept under lock and key. There has to be a certain procedure for signing them out, and that sort of thing can’t be rushed.

I’m guessing here, but elementary PC morality must demand that appropriate forms be filled in triplicate and properly filed. Doesn’t my friend believe in Original Sin? He claims he does. Well then, policemen, being fallible and indeed fallen, must be kept a safe distance away from weapons they could use as tools of racial and religious discrimination. It’s for their own good, not just for the safety of our oppressed minorities.

Having checked the guns out, the policemen then had to spend some time pondering what they were going to do with them. The spectre of prosecution for using excessive force and therefore committing an unlawful killing must have loomed large, causing yet another delay.

Also, since for reasons stated above their weapons training must be limited, they had to spend a minute or two figuring out how put the magazine in, pull the slide back and slip the safety off – all without injuring themselves or innocent bystanders.

All things considered, it’s amazing they arrived after barely twenty minutes – and then actually assailed the blood-soaked suspects with guns. Mercifully, they didn’t kill them, for this would have constituted a wanton taking of two human lives. True, the suspects are themselves suspected of having taken a human life, but two wrongs don’t make a right, do they now?

What’s encouraging is our PM Dave’s resolute response. Pulling no punches, he referred to the Woolwich attack as ‘deeply shocking’. That’s the right thing to say, no doubt about that. ‘They [the wounded suspects] should know something like this will only bring us together and make us stronger,’ promised Dave.

Of course it will. Dave’s record of keeping promises being of sterling quality, we’ll rally together, close ranks and join Dave in campaigning for unlimited Muslim – and any other! – immigration. The odd hiccup notwithstanding, multi-culti diversity is what will ultimately make us strong.

Given such future empowerment, what’s a minute here or there among friends? A mere triviality, an insignificant fragment of the big picture. I do wish my friend could realise this.

 

 

P.S. In my yesterday’s piece, I erroneously identified Dominique Venner as a Catholic, which he wasn’t – mea culpa. This explains his chosen form of protest, to which I took exception, and also vindicates my suggestion that one doesn’t have to be a pious Christian to oppose same-sex marriage. Even the cloud of sloppy research is sometimes not without a silver lining. 

 

 

The death in question is that of Dominique Venner, eminent French writer and historian. After he made the news, bottom of Page 49 or thereabouts, the modifier ‘extreme right-wing’ has been inevitably attached to his name.

What an awful thing to be. I don’t know the French for ‘swivel-eyed loon’ or ‘fruitcake’, but if the words exist they’re doubtless being used to describe Dr Venner. The word conservateur definitely does exist, and in French it’s strictly, as opposed to ‘mostly’ in English, pejorative. Dominique Venner certainly was that.

Now what kind of views did the historian espouse to deserve such derogatory soubriquets?

In 1956, at age 21, he participated in the sacking of the offices of the French Communist Party to protest against the massacre of the Hungarian uprising. Naughty, naughty. It used to take a veritable fruitcake to find anything wrong with communism until the Russians said it was okay. Trust a loon to speak out of turn.

In 1961 Venner was sentenced to 18 months in prison for being a member of the OAS, an army organisation that took at face value de Gaulle’s promise that Algeria was and would remain French. A stint in pokey was just punishment for failing to grasp the nature of modern politics. Just because de Gaulle said that, it didn’t mean he was going to keep his promise, and it was silly of Venner not to have realised this.

Since then Dr Venner had had a distinguished academic, journalistic and publishing career. He wrote many books, all receiving wide critical acclaim, most translated into various languages and several awarded prestigious literary prizes. He also published and edited a few influential magazines.

Dr Venner’s literary output is variations on a central theme: a desperate desire to preserve what’s left of Western civilisation. You know, the anachronism that used to be called Christendom.

For example, he saw mass immigration of cultural aliens as – are you ready for this? – something that imperilled the Western civilisation he loved and the Catholic faith he practised. His love wasn’t tinged with hatred, as even his detractors had to admit. In an editorial Dr Venner wrote for his magazine La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, he made this perfectly clear:

‘The Japanese, the Jews, the Hindus and other peoples possess that treasure that has permitted them to confront the perils of history without disappearing. It is our misfortune that the majority of Europeans, and especially the French, are so impregnated with universalism that this treasure is lacking.’

Replace ‘French’ with ‘British’ and I, along with my fellow swivel-eyes loons, can only say ‘hear, hear’. But then what do you expect – we’re all fruitcakes. If we aren’t careful in our attacks on universalism we may find ourselves wearing not our customary tweeds but straitjackets. Dave will see to it.

Lately, when homomarriage was pushed down the throats of the French, as it has been shoved down our throats, Dr Venner spoke out in opposition. His proceeded mostly from his Catholic faith, but one doesn’t have to be a pious Christian to see the disastrous nature of this abomination.

Lord Tebbit the other day pointed out the dynastic ramifications of same-sex wedlock. If we had a lesbian queen, he asked, and she married her lover, with the two of them later adopting a child, would the baby be heir to the throne?

Only goes to show how far behind the times this proto-loon is. Doesn’t he know that destruction of the monarchy is the next job on our agenda, after marriage has been dead and buried? The answer to Tebbit’s question, and I know I speak for my friend Dave as well, is of course the baby would be heir to the throne. And if that means Britain becomes a republic, so much the better. Did I get this right, Dave?

Dr Venner already lived in a republic, yet he fought against the debauchment of our fundamental institution with as much vigour – and unfortunately more. The other day he wrote on his blog, ‘It will require new, spectacular and symbolic actions to rouse people from their complacency… We enter into a time when words must be backed up by actions.’

The action with which Dr Venner chose to back up his words was tragic. He went to the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and blew his brains out in front of the altar, sending 1,500 tourists scampering for the exit. A few days earlier, another Catholic had also killed himself with a sawn-off shotgun outside the Eiffel Tower.

One can only regret that Dr Venner chose to express his righteous indignation in such an unrighteous way. For in protesting against what he correctly saw as a mortal sin, he committed a sin that’s much worse. He either didn’t know or didn’t heed what G.K. Chesterton said on this subject so poignantly:

‘Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.’

Perhaps that was Dr Venner’s intention, to wipe out the world that had become intolerable to him. That, however, wasn’t his prerogative but God’s. One can only pray that He will treat Dr Venner with His usual mercy.

Here on earth we should bracket Dr Venner with those Hungarian patriots he defended in his youth – they are all victims of our anomic, cannibalistic modernity. Or else martyrs to the worthiest cause of all: defence of virtue.

Dr Dominique Venner, RIP.

 

If Classical and Romantic music revolves around the tonic-dominant polarity, one gets the distinct impression that whoever writes on such subjects in The Times favours the gin-dominant polarity instead.

In general, the effrontery of our journalists in passing bold judgment on subjects with which they’re barely familiar is most refreshing. But whenever they display this tendency to enlarge on topics dear to one’s heart, alarm bells begin to chime loudly and discordantly.

The other day, a wisely anonymous pundit delivered himself on the subject of Wagner (Art and Anti-Semitism) and, this being the 200^th anniversary of the composer’s birth, we must brace ourselves for a veritable outpouring of similarly inane gibberish.

In particular, linking Wagner’s music with the article’s eponymous vice has a lot of mileage in it, and you can bet that every inch will be travelled back and forth. This, according to our anonym, ‘should not be shirked’ because it ‘exemplifies an uncomfortable truth. One of the supreme achievements of Western civilisation, ranking with Shakespeare and Michelangelo, was the work of an appalling man.’

The underlying assumption is that other supreme achievements of our civilisation have been the work of wing-flapping angels, which would be proved false by even a cursory examination of Western cultural history. We don’t know much about Shakespeare, but neither Michelangelo nor say Tolstoy, arguably the best novelist ever, was an exemplar of probity and moral goodness. As to Caravaggio, the pictorial answer to Wagner, he was simply a murderer.

That Wagner wasn’t a nice chappy is beyond doubt. However, ranking him with either Shakespeare or Michelangelo is a gross overstatement. It’s Wagner we’re talking about, not Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. Though no doubt a great musician, he didn’t sit in the first row of Western composers, and probably not even in the second.

As proof of his genius, the anonym states that Wagner ‘advanced the expressive power of music by developing, deliberately and triumphantly, a chromatic technique with scant precedence… thereby expressing intense emotion.’

This accolade displays a deficit of both education and taste. Wagner didn’t invent chromaticism ‘with scant precedence’. It’s Bach’s exploration of well-tempered tuning resulting in such sublime works as his Well-Tempered Clavier and Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue that could perhaps be credited with this innovation.

After Bach, chromaticism became an essential part of the musical language, as any listener of Mozart’s Fantasy in C Minor or Chopin’s last Mazurka will testify. Moreover, this Mazurka also contains a reasonable approximation of the Tristan chord, widely and too generously credited with redefining tonality.

That Wagner was a musical innovator is beyond doubt, but it’s sheer ignorance to suggest that his radicalism was best revealed in chromaticism or in expanding the limits of tonality, pursuits he doubtless advanced but far from ‘with scant precedent’. To be technical about it, his most innovative contribution to music perhaps lay in the suspension of tonic resolution until the absolute limit – all of Tristan is one continuous search for the tonic. In other areas, including the ‘expanded tonality’ of the Tristan chord, he borrowed liberally not only from Chopin but also from Liszt.

If the technical aspect of the article shows up the author’s ignorance, the comment about Wagner’s supposedly unprecedented ability to ‘express intense emotion’ reveals his lack of taste. I’d suggest that our anonym listen, off the top, to the final chorus or the duet of mezzo and violin from St Matthew’s Passion, or to the slow movement of Mozart’s K488. At a pinch I could, without straining myself, mention a couple of hundred other works, whose expressive power Wagner couldn’t approximate even remotely.

What Wagner added to the emotional palette of Western music wasn’t expressiveness but naked sensuality often bordering on downright vulgarity. He didn’t invent emotional expression; he just lowered it. In that Wagner jumped backwards to Germany’s pagan, sylvan past, leapfrogging the intervening centuries of Christendom. It wasn’t angels but hobgoblins that Wagner saw in his mind’s eye.

That’s why it’s wrong, when talking about Wagner’s disgusting philosophy, to say, as the anonym does, that ‘Wagner’s genius does not soften this characteristic but is independent of it.’ No artist is independent of his innermost convictions – he just expresses them in a different, indirect way.

Both Wagner’s philosophy and his music have the same provenance in Germany’s pre-Christian past, which the anonym acknowledges without even realising he’s refuting himself. ‘The racism Wagner espoused… runs through his operas.’ I’m confused: is Wagner’s music independent of his philosophy or is it not? It can’t be both, you know.

Having said all that, it’s sheer parochialism and philistinism to ban performances of Wagner. That is what Israel did until Daniel Barenboim rode in on his white horse called Self-Promotion. Banning art produced by men whose views we find abhorrent, be it anti-Semitism, liberalism or even paganism, is both wrong and fraught with danger.

Practically every Russian writer worth his salt, most emphatically including Dostoyevsky, was an anti-Semite. So were Chesterton, Belloc, Waugh and quite possibly Shakespeare. Céline wasn’t just a garden-variety anti-Semite but an out-and-out Nazi. Gabriel García Márquez was a communist. So was Picasso. Getting back to music, neither Chopin nor Brahms nor Rachmaninov nor Prokofiev nor especially Medtner had much time for Jews. Are we going to ban all their works? Before long we’d run out of good things to hear, see or read.

Artists should be judged for their art, full stop. Even though the art is never independent of the artist’s personality and philosophy, failings of the latter shouldn’t be held against the former.

By all means, let’s play Wagner’s music for those who have the enviable capacity for listening to it without dozing off. But do spare us inane commentary – of the kind The Times seems to wish to monopolise these days.

 

 

 

 

 

  

A brave, courageous, gallant, valiant, freedom-loving, democracy-supporting [insert your own modifier] Syrian rebel Khalid al-Hamad has had to resort to desperate measures.

Driven to distraction by Assad’s stubbornness and the West’s meanness, he has decided to emphasise the plight of Syrian democracy-fighters by using every advantage of modern technology.

In a video that has gone viral on the Internet, he cuts open the body of an Alawite soldier, pulls the heart out and eats some of it. He then gives a Skype interview to Time magazine, justifying his action.

Some squeamish commentators are appalled, and indeed the video is strictly 18-rated (‘some viewers may find some of the images disturbing’). Words like ‘cannibalism’, ‘inhumanity’, ‘savagery’ are still being bandied about mindlessly.

Such haters of democracy miss the point. Yes, Abu Sakkar (Khalid’s nom de guerre), a Sunni born and bred, professed hatred for the Shiite Alawite sect and, by extrapolation, the Shiites in general. Yes, he did say, as he was munching on his chosen organ meat, ‘I hope we’ll slaughter them all.’ (Presumably, all of the world’s 163 million Shiites, but who’s counting? Numbers don’t change the principle.) And yes, such actions and statements may ostensibly justify some of the outrage the video has caused.

But only ostensibly. The commentators simply refuse to go to the heart of the matter, as it were. They refuse to acknowledge that any fighter for democracy in the Middle East is driven exclusively by noble, charitable motives. What they all have in their heart, as it were, is a desire to live as free men (and women!) under conditions of universal suffrage and parliamentary representation.

As we all know, such conditions are both essential and sufficient for the universal propagation of human goodness. Any man who fights for democracy is fighting for virtue – indeed he’s the very embodiment of virtue, a sort of St Francis, Mother Teresa and Good Samaritan all rolled into one.

This means that Abu doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, nor any malice in his heart, as it were. The poor man – and I’m proud of realising this – was just peckish.

Why does he, and by extrapolation all Syrian democracy-fighters, have to go hungry, barefoot and unarmed? Look deep into your own heart, as it were, and you’ll find the answer: they are starved of our supplies. That’s what drives them to dining on things not manifestly designed for human consumption.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s all society’s fault. Our society’s, to be exact. And if you don’t believe me, listen to our PM Dave who always takes the interests of democracy – and only such interests! – to heart, as it were.

‘Look,’ he said at an American press conference, and I love every sentence that starts that way, ‘if we don’t help the Syrian opposition who we do recognise as legitimate, who’ve signed up to a future for Syria that’s democratic, then extremism will grow.’

Hear, hear. Up with democracy, down with poncy words like ‘whom’ – ‘who’ is so much cosier, closer to the people, so much more democratic and therefore virtuous.

A Foreign Office mandarin bearing the traditional stiff-upper-lip mandarin name of Reza Afshar went into greater detail but stayed in the same spirit. Mr Afshar thinks the EU weapons embargo must be lifted immediately to encourage ‘the good guys’ like Sakkar to negotiate with ‘the bad guys’ like Assad.

‘The political reality,’ explained the man who runs Syria for the FCO, ‘is that in order to get them to the table we need to amend the arms embargo. It is that simple. They need an incentive.’  All sides in the Syrian conflict have access to weapons, lamented Mr Afshar, ‘except the good guys’ – like Sakkar.

Everything Dave and the mandarin tell us is God’s own truth. But it’s not the whole truth. For it’s not only weapons that the democracy-fighters are lacking but demonstrably also food.

In fact, several other videos starring Sakkar and his friends show him handling some fairly sophisticated kit, like multi-barrel grenade launchers, not to mention Kalashnikovs. But in that part of the world these don’t really count as weapons; they’re more like children’s toys. Still, by playing with such toys democracy enthusiasts have managed to make significant advances against ‘the bad guys’.

It’s food that they most urgently need, and Abu Sakkar’s take on gastronomy drives this point home. So I hope you’ll join me in putting pressure on Dave and other world leaders to strike a blow for the triumph of goodness (and taste).

Lift the weapons embargo, by all means – and if this involves a transfer of low-yield nuclear weapons to ‘the good guys’, then so much the better. However, we must also at least double our overall foreign-aid budget, for there are many other ‘good guys’ out there whose Swiss bank accounts are going as hungry as Sakkar obviously is.

Above all, let’s campaign for an immediate airlift of food to Abu Sakkar and his friends. God only knows what they’ll eat next if we suppress our charitable impulses. Ladies and gentlemen, have a heart! As it were.

 

 

The Washington Post has published a survey by two Swedish economists bent on finding out which countries are more racist than others.

The survey asked respondents in more than 80 countries to identify kinds of people they wouldn’t want as neighbours. The Swedes then calculated the percentage of those choosing ‘people of a different race’ and drew earth-shattering conclusions.

Britain and her former white colonies, including the USA, along with Latin American countries, excepting Venezuela, are the most tolerant – they don’t seem to have any problems with piebald neighbourhoods.

By most lamentable contrast, 43.5 percent of Indians, 51.4 percent of Jordanians, 71.8 percent of Hong Kongers and 71.7 percent of Bangladeshis turned out to be inveterate NIMBYs – they didn’t want any diversity in their backyard.

European countries generally comply with EU guidelines on racial tolerance and multicultural diversity: most of them scored a commendably low 3-4 percent, with only the French covering themselves with eternal shame by polling an egregiously high 22.7 percent.

Clearly, Hollande’s government still has a lot of work to do. Its aim ought to be to increase the proportion of Muslims in the population from the current 10 percent to at least double that, and preferably triple. Then more Frenchmen will get to know and love Mohammedans – or else they’ll learn how dangerous it may be to give wrong answers to such questionnaires.

Now between us boys, completely off the record, with nary a diversity officer anywhere in sight and no results to be reported anonymously or otherwise – would you like to live in an area where so many ethnic groups are represented that your own is in a minority? If you answer yes to yourself, there’s a discreet and competent psychiatrist I can recommend.

For no sane person wants to live surrounded by cultural aliens, practising what to him would be odd and vaguely menacing rites, emanating smells of spices he considers unpleasant and babbling in tongues he doesn’t understand.

Different racial, ethnic, religious and class populations – even if they all speak the same language, which isn’t these days to be taken for granted – have their own behavioural codes they hold sacrosanct. They often treat any deviation from such codes as a grave insult, while avidly offending – wittingly or usually unwittingly – the codes of others.

Anyone is capable of learning one or two such codes. A keen ethnographer may be able to learn three or four. No one will ever learn dozens, and this is the task facing people in many European and American areas. This unavoidable ignorance makes life difficult, as if we didn’t have enough problems already.

It’s a natural human trait to seek the company of one’s own kind – and certainly to live among one’s own kind. That’s how families became clans, clans became villages, villages became cities and cities became nations. When the proportion of those who aren’t one’s own kind exceeds a certain critical mass, nations – and neighbourhoods – become Balkanised. In due course they’ll lose their identity and implode.

The whole thing about our maniacal drive for multi-culti diversity, indeed about modernity in general, is that governments seek to override natural human traits for the sake of political expediency. And their definition of political expediency is anything that advances their own power towards absolute.

To that end, the modern post-Enlightenment state pursues the objective of destroying every survival of what used to be called Christendom and what’s now more inaccurately called the West. ‘Racial tolerance’ for them isn’t the end; it’s the means. It’s their weapon against obdurate humanity.

There are other weapons as well: feminism, whose aim is to destroy family; same-sex marriage, designed to debauch our most fundamental institution; legal enforcement of political correctness, which amounts to policing language and thought; equality of education and medical care, which spells their demise. The arsenal is growing, and it’s deadly.

Anyone offering the most feeble resistance is being routinely accused of – and increasingly charged with – all sorts of phobias. Like a thief who runs away screaming ‘Stop thief!’ the haters of our very humanity accuse us of hating others.

We don’t. Opposition to feminism doesn’t mean hatred of women. Rejection of same-sex marriage doesn’t mean hatred of homosexuals. And the desire to live in a more or less homogeneous neighbourhood doesn’t mean ‘racial intolerance’. It just means sanity.

Bullied, browbeaten and marginalised by PC militancy, Americans and Europeans are no longer able to give honest answers to such questionnaires as the one undertaken by the two Swedes. In a world run by humanoids, they’re terrified of betraying themselves as normal human beings.

Such fear was prophetically described in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, whose protagonist was sentenced to death because his body was opaque in a society that insisted on everyone being transparent. Our life is now imitating Nabokov’s art.

The survey was fatally flawed. It proceeded from a wrong premise, asked a wrong question, sought the wrong answer – and got a meaningless result. But aren’t you glad only three percent of us are racists?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More than half of his backbenchers have effectively told Dave his EU policy is rubbish, some in as many words. Add to this the growing threat of UKIP, now polling 50 percent higher than Dave’s coalition partners, and Dave must feel some drastic move is called for.

Nadine Dorries has come up with the bright idea of Tory candidates doing a deal to stand jointly with UKIP, but Dave rang up from his foreign junket to stand on principle: ‘We don’t do deals,’ he said. Except the deal he struck with the LibDems, he might have added but didn’t. Quite right too. It’s a man who’s in command of his principles, not vice versa.

At the same time, Dave arranged a conference call with Angela and François to start negotiating a better deal for Britain. Said negotiations, we’ve been told in no uncertain terms, will take at least four years but, as Dave’s fellow conservative once put it, ‘a journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step.’

Anyway, I’ve been fortunate enough to obtain the transcript of the ensuing conversation, which I’m only too happy to share with you.

D: Guten morgen, Angela. Bonjour, François.

F: Zut alors, Daveed, stop pretending you’re un linguiste extraordinaire. Good morning to you too, and what do you want? Speak fast, Angie asn’t ad er morning wurst yet.

A: Oh shut up, Frank.

F: C’est François, not your sale boche de Frank! And don’t tell me to la fermer! Not in front of ze children!

D: Chaps, chaps, please. Actually the reason I’ve called is that…

F: Eez zat it’s up to us whether you lose your job or UKIP it. Get it? UKIP it? You like l’esprit français?

D: Er, the joke doesn’t quite work in English…

A: Ze joke is on you, my friend. You vant concessions form us, nicht wahr? Sehr gut. How about a McDonald’s one? Or vould you prefer KFC? 

D: Do let’s be serious, please. I need something from you, chaps, some sort of gag I can shove down the bastards’ throats…

F: Valérie me tells…

A: Oh shut up, Frank. No one cares vot your bit on ze side tells you. Dave here has a point. Vee don’t give him somesing, it’s auf wiedersehen, England, in ze near future.

D: Exactly. I can only keep the bastards at bay for so long. They’re already saying I’m a lame-duck party leader and a sitting-duck PM…

F: Duck, c’est votre Cockney rhyming slang, but no?

A: Oh shut up, Frank. Let’s give Dave his fish back, for example…

D: Er… that’s a good idea, Angie. But I was thinking more along the lines of going back to just a free-trade deal. You know, no Court of Human Rights, no political integration…

A: Das ist ausgeschlossen! Out of ze question! Unmöglich! Im-bloody-possible!

F: Ange has reason, Daveed. Eizer in or out. Oui like you, you’re a European true. So if you vant somesing fishy, like some of your fish back, we can talk dinde, turkey. Valérie me tells…

A: Oh shut up, Frank. But do pay achtung to ze tings Frank says, Dave. Vee can help, but vee don’t vant to make a mess of ze EU…

Here the transcript ends. According to my source, Dave turned off his tape recorder just as he began to explain to his European partners what’s what.

If I’m ousted as party leader, he said off the record, Britain will have an in-out referendum immediately, not in four years, not in five years, not when pigs will fly. Schweinen don’t fly, Angela is reported to have replied. François then seemed to have suggested that taking things literally is a national German trait, only to be told to shut up by Angela.

As Valérie says, objected François, we must learn to adapt to the situation as it changes. Ach nein, said Angela as quoted by my source, you can’t teach an old rottweiler new tricks, especially not after she’s done half of Paris.

After that the conversation degenerated to mutual insults, with Angela calling François der Frosch, and François countering that the word rhymes with boche. During that exchange Dave stayed on the sidelines, thinking that his estimate of four years for negotiations was, if anything, too optimistic.

 

Call me a lowbrow ignoramus, but I like a good spy yarn – especially since the best purveyors of this genre can write rings around the pretentious stuff knocked off by our lionised literati like Hilary Mantel.

At their best John Le Carré or his American near-namesake Charles McCarry can match any contemporary novelist in verve, style, characterisation, psychological insight. They can also devise a complex yet utterly believable plot with the best of them (Mr Conan Doyle, ring your office).

However, even as the reality of politics can make the most vicious satirist sound benignly anodyne, real spy stories make the best made-up plots sound over-elaborate and too clever by half.

One hates to repeat the old saw of life being stranger than fiction, but no pot-boiler writer worth his salt would come up with such a silly and unrealistic storyline as the one played out in Moscow over the last couple of days.

Ryan C. Fogle, a low-level employee of the US embassy, was publicly busted for espionage in the very centre of Moscow. When FSB officers converged on him, the hapless spy was carrying the kind of kit Le Carré wouldn’t even consider putting into his protagonists’ hands.

As Fogle was pinned to the grimy Moscow asphalt, intrepid spy-catchers found in his possession two wigs, one blond one dark, several pairs of sun glasses, $130,000 dollars in cash, a knife, a street atlas of Moscow, a few batteries, a notepad, a mobile phone that was already obsolete 10 years ago, a compass and a Russian-language letter addressed (as ‘Dear Friend’) to the anti-terrorist officer Fogle was supposedly trying to recruit.

Let me tell you, at the CIA they don’t make spies like they used to. The only thing missing in Fogle’s gear was a legible T-shirt saying ‘Kiss me, I’m a spy’. Someone at Langley is going to be reprimanded for this oversight.

The recruitment letter, or rather the way it was commented upon in the Russian press, is particularly amusing. The gist of it is that the potential recruit was being offered $100,000 for a general chitchat and another $1,000,000 for some classified information.

What made me snigger was the text analysis one commentator undertook to prove that the whole affair sounds suspicious. First he cites two paragraphs from the letter, suggesting, correctly, that they’re written in awful Russian. Not only is the letter stylistically and grammatically illiterate, remarks the commentator, but it reads like a bad translation from English.

In other words, those Langley spymasters must have created a skeleton missive in English, to be translated and adapted as necessary to the situation at hand. To test this hypothesis, the journalist used an online translation service (PROMT translator.ru) to render the Russian text back into English.

And – Eureka! The back translation turned out to be what the commentator describes as a ‘stylistically reasonable, dispassionate letter’ – ‘this is how administrative services at the State Department and other American institutions are taught to write’.

Well, it isn’t. Government officials in any country are seldom among its most accomplished stylists but, however badly they express themselves, they do sound like native speakers. The translation cited doesn’t meet this basic requirement. But judge for yourself:

‘It is advance payment from the one who is very impressed with your professionalism and who would highly appreciate your cooperation with us in the future. For us your safety and therefore to contact you, we chose this way has paramount value. And we will continue to take steps for preservation of safety and privacy of our correspondence.’ The Russian text was bad, but at least it was native. This isn’t.

Now there’s no shame in a Russian journalist not knowing enough English to realise this is a clumsy caricature. There is, however, considerable shame in putting on all-knowing airs for the benefit of his obviously credulous readers. And here I was, thinking only our journalists pretend to be a Mr Know-All when they’re indeed closer to a Mr Know-Sod-All. Apparently the contagion has spread internationally.

The scribe then does a Sherlock Holmes and explains what it all means. You see, Fogle got so fed up with Russia that he wanted to go back home by hook or by crook. So rather than simply asking for a transfer, he came up with this fiendish ploy to force the CIA’s hand.

This hypothesis is so full of holes it isn’t worthy of the name. The most gaping hole is the presence of the $130,000 in Fogle’s possession. If the money was his own, then he’s independently wealthy. If it isn’t his own, then he purloined it from CIA funds. In the first case Fogle could have just resigned his lowly position – a rich man like him doesn’t need all that aggro. In the second case he committed a felony, for which he’ll go to prison. Again, a transfer request or, barring that, resignation would have been a saner option.

I don’t know about you, but next time I say nasty things about our pundits I’ll choose milder words. Some people, specifically those poor Russians starved of serious journalism, are even worse off than we are. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before running out onto the track, an athlete always stretches and warms up. Before going to his cello in the morning, Pablo Casals always played two preludes and fugues from Bach’s 48.

Devoid of either athletic or musical talent, I warm up for my daily exertions at the computer by playing a few mindless mind games. Polygons, codewords, crosswords, that sort of thing. This seldom shifts my mind into sixth gear, but at least it gets it out of first.

One clue in today’s crossword features the words in the title. Once I got all the letters in, there was only one possible answer: enormity. So I scribbled it in, but not before uttering a word that still only ever appears in unabridged dictionaries.

‘Enormity’ doesn’t mean that. It means ‘ghastliness’. True, the same root also does service in ‘enormous’, but travelling from the adjective to the noun it changed its meaning. This semantic shift is recognised by any prescriptive, as distinct from descriptive, dictionary, as it was by all educated speakers of English not so long ago.

These days, however, we’re supposed to despise any cultural prescription, to say nothing of proscription. Whoever tries to insist on proper usage is routinely accused of poncy pedantry (pedants, as I hope you realise, can only be poncy – rugged masculinity is reserved for chaps with learning difficulties).

‘Language changes,’ declare our indignant lexical levellers. ‘It’s just a means of communication,’  add others. The first claim is unassailable: language does change, as any reader of Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales or even Macbeth will doubtless confirm. But both the direction of the change and sometimes its final destination depend on the influences affecting it.

When English developed along the pathway signposted by Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and Macbeth, it became the richest language in Europe. When Latin developed under the influence of illiterate Levantine and Venetian traders, it became an antiquated curiosity.

(The break-up of the Western Roman Empire admittedly had something to do with that as well, but an empire’s language can outlive the empire. Witness the fact that Australians and Americans still speak a reasonable approximation of English.)

While refraining from macabre predictions, one still ought to mention that English is currently being shaped mostly by people compared to whom those Levantine and Venetian traders were giants of refinement. It’s a truism that any language either develops or dies. However, it’s worth remembering that it can sometimes also develop and die.

The second claim, that language is just a means of communication, is almost correct – and it would be absolutely correct if we interpreted communication in the broadest possible sense. That, however, isn’t how our lexical levellers use the word. What they mean by communication is whatever is needed for negotiating the quotidian demands of practical life.

If that were the sole purpose of language, we would have had neither Beowulf nor The Canterbury Tales nor Macbeth. Yet even accepting the demotic arguments, one could still insist that the general spread of comprehensively educated illiteracy often defeats even such elementary communication.

For example, when a BBC commentator says that ‘David Cameron is aware of the enormity of the task he faces in getting the gay-marriage bill through the Lords’, does he mean that the task is huge or ghastly? Either meaning makes sense, especially the second, but one would like to be certain.

When Imogen Cooper delivers a performance described by the reviewer as ‘masterful’, is the reader supposed to guess whether he really means ‘masterly’? There exists a potential for confusion since a musical performance can be both or either or, in Imogen Cooper’s case, neither.

Words have a set meaning precisely for the purpose of enabling communication. Punctuation, including the now discarded hyphen, has exactly the same purpose. When I read about a ‘first class performance’, is the performance first-class, delivered by the first class or the first one delivered by this class?

Aristotle once remarked that in a democracy people will sooner or later assume that, because they’re equal in one respect, they’re equal in all respects. This gruesome outcome is not only upon us, but it is these days enforced institutionally – and increasingly often legally.

Even when it stays in the political domain, democracy produces the kind of ‘leaders’ who a century ago wouldn’t have been deemed qualified to run a furniture warehouse. When democracy strikes out into cultural areas, it wreaks havoc by making everyone equally educated, which is to say equally ignorant.

It has always been taken for granted that not all speakers of English speak it the same way. English could be grammatical or ungrammatical, cultured or uncultured, correct or incorrect. As long as people knew the difference, no one got unduly excited about that – all part of the rich panoply of life, if you’ll pardon a cliché.

Moreover, people understood that if they all sounded like one another’s clones, life would be dull. Conversely, phonetic, grammatical and lexical divergences could be used for comic effect. Messrs Pickwick, Weller and Jingle all spoke differently, but Dickens’s readers all laughed the same way. Yet anyone suggesting at the time that Pickwick’s and Weller’s ways of speaking were equally correct would have been laughed out of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese.

Democracy wages war against discrimination not only among races, which is commendable, but also among tastes and cultures, which is destructive. This encourages a downward, gravity-assisted slide of avalanche proprtions. Moving in the opposite direction is always harder and the universal, politicised presumption of equality may well make it impossible.

Nowadays isolated intrepid individuals doing battle to preserve what’s left of our culture are widely despised and generally marginalised. They are defeated by the sheer enormity of the task.