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France has much to criticise it for, as do all other countries, even – and I know this will come as a shock to most Americans – the USA. Moreover, France and all other countries must be criticised, especially by those who like and understand them.

Now it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that few Americans like France and even fewer understand it. In general, nuanced sensitivity to foreign ethos isn’t high on the list of most salient American virtues. That’s why, whenever they level opprobrium at other lands, they evince not so much loving concern as obtuse pig-headedness.

Unlike the British, whose understated affection for the French goes back more than 1,000 years, the Americans don’t have such venerable history to fall back on. In fact, but for France’s support during their Revolution, the Americans would today be saluting the Union Jack, not Old Glory.

Much of their resentment is of recent provenance. It goes back about 10 years when the French presciently refused to support the Americans’ concerted effort to Islamise and radicalise the Middle East.

By way of revenge the Americans began to boycott French wine and cheese, which action ought to be mentioned in the dictionary entry for ‘masochism’. They also expurgated the word ‘French’ from their vocabulary, typically replacing it with ‘freedom’, as in ‘freedom fries’ and presumably – I’m guessing here – ‘freedom kissing’, ‘freedom fashion’ and ‘freedom letters’.

This is part of the background to the ill-mannered outburst by Maurice Taylor, CEO of the American tyre maker Titan International. He rudely declined an offer to buy a plant in Amiens, citing the laziness of French workers, the statutorily short hours they work, their long holidays and the time they take for lunch. ‘Do you think we’re stupid?’ he asked indignantly.

No Mr Taylor, I wouldn’t call you stupid. I’d call you ignorant – not so much of France’s work practices as of her ethos, which is fundamentally different from America’s, or for that matter Britain’s.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that the French economy is held back by the country’s stifling labour laws, predominance of vastly corrupt and powerful unions, expropriatory taxation and loyalty to the EU. It’s also true that the French as a nation spend less time at work than the Americans and the British. In fact the French economy is ticking away on 20 percent fewer man-hours than in the UK.

Yet, even though France and Britain have roughly the same population, France’s GDP is greater than ours, which, if my arithmetic serves, suggests their workers are considerably more productive. The quality of the goods they produce, including in the sector served by Mr Taylor, isn’t too shabby either. Show me a man who’d choose Titan’s Goodyear tyres for his car, in preference to Michelins, and I’ll show you someone who knows nothing about driving.

How do they do it, considering all the self-imposed yokes on their economy? I don’t know. But, discounting divine intervention, one could guess at some possible reasons.

For example, for all their recent efforts to reverse the situation, the French are still better educated than either the Americans or the British. They could even be more talented, though something inside me refuses to accept this possibility. It could also be that their absence of maniacal dedication to working themselves into an early grave, something observable in the US, makes French workers happier, calmer, less exhausted and therefore more productive.

Max Weber, who knew a thing or two about such matters, ascribed the rise of capitalism to the Protestant work ethic. One wonders if, should he live today, he’d ascribe some of capitalism’s decline to the same source.

Catholics or, to be more precise and up to date, those raised in a Catholic culture, work to live. Many Protestants, religious or merely cultural, live to work. From their early childhood they have been imbued with belief in the redemptive value of hard work. And even acquisitiveness, to which the traditional Christian attitude is at best tepid, has acquired a religious dimension in Protestant, especially Calvinist, countries.

According to Calvin, wealth is God’s way of telling its recipient that he’s living a righteous life. And hard work is ipso facto a function of virtue. That’s why so many Americans and even Englishmen feel awkward about leaving the office on time, even if there’s no reason to stay late.

To cite the example of the industry with which I’m familiar, advertising on both sides of the Atlantic, someone who heads for the door at 5.30 on the dot draws disapproving glances. Not working weekends is taken as a sign of negligence and moral failure. ‘If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday’ is the motto of one of America’s major agencies.

However, many of my American and British colleagues have worked in France, and they have instructive stories to tell. The French leave work early, have more public holidays, take all of August off (‘toute la France est en vacances,’ as they put it), knock off at lunchtime on Fridays, especially in summer. And yet they get a lot done – at least as much as Anglophone admen do.

Part of the reason is that they spend a lot less time in meetings – another Protestant trait. As work to Protestants is a matter of life or death, it can’t be done in a haphazard manner – every ‘i’ must be dotted and every ‘t’ crossed before actual work can start. Reversing the Anglophone practice, the French do a bit of talking and a lot of working, thus saving hours every day for productive labour. This leaves them enough time and energy for their ubiquitous ‘cinque à sept’ trysts – occasionally even for more time with their families.

Personally, much as I deplore French statism, red tape and incipient government tyranny, I prefer the French take on work ethic to the American. It’s understandable that Americans may feel differently, and they may even be right. But before running off at the mouth they would do well to learn a bit more about different cultures. Who knows, they may then learn to treat them with more respect and express themselves with more tact. As it is, the likes of Taylor give ‘tous les Anglo-Saxons’ a bad name.

    

 

 

 

If you ask your friends which institutions define Britain, each will give you half a dozen answers, and the divergence will be small. It’s a reasonably safe bet that democracy, free enterprise and trial by jury will be on every list.

One has to do with politics, another with economics, still another with justice. But they all have something in common: all three depend on nearly universal popular participation to be successful, or even operative at all. Hence they have to presuppose considerable sophistication on the part of the general population.

A universal-franchise democracy can’t function properly if most people are incapable of casting their votes in an enlightened and responsible manner. Free markets will destroy themselves if deprived of underpinning moral tenets shared by most and obeyed by all. And the jury system will fail in the absence of a large majority of those who have the mind and the knowledge to understand the fundamental principles of justice.

The trial of Vicky Pryce illustrates the last point with the precision of an illuminated manuscript. Chris Huhne’s scorned wife was being tried for perverting the course of justice. This vindictive lady had agreed to take her husband’s speeding points. When he then left her for another woman (technically speaking), she shopped him and, as an inevitable consequence, herself.

The outcome of the trial hinged on a simple argument. The defence claimed that Pryce should be exculpated because she acted under marital coercion (‘her man is what done it’ in colloquial language). The prosecution sought to prove she had acted as a free agent, thus striking a laudable blow for the basic Christian doctrine of free will (‘fair cop, guv, she done it herself’).

The issue at stake seems relatively straightforward, and yet Miss Pryce’s 12 peers failed to reach a verdict. In the process they submitted, in writing, 10 questions that made Mr Justice Sweeny admit that in his 30 years on the bench he had never seen anything like it.

For members of the jury manifested their ignorance of such little things as presumption of innocence, the desirability of ignoring evidence, the meaning of reasonable doubt and so forth. (‘Reasonable doubt is doubt that is reasonable,’ explained His perplexed Honour, reasonably.)

They also proved that they are either too illiterate or too stupid to understand such things even after they had been explained to them in plain English, as all these had been. Some of the questions hinted at severe mental retardation or at best a minuscule attention span, such as the one about Miss Pryce’s religious convictions, which hadn’t been mentioned by either side.

The immediate reaction in the press has correctly focused on the validity of the jury system, with most pundits and Jack Straw suggesting it’s wrong to condemn this institution on the basis of one trial. I wonder on which planet they have been living, or else what they are on.

One trial? You can’t open the papers these days without reading about yet another gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated by juries who simply don’t understand what justice is and how the system is supposed to work.

Thus an argument that a murderer had an impoverished childhood has been known to produce mitigated sentences or even acquittals in Western courts; race has been seen as an extenuating circumstance; and political motives have been accepted as being more noble than simple savagery.

As courts in the West demonstrate their inability to deal sternly with criminals, the jury system looks more and more antiquated. Jurors have to be drawn from the available pool of humanity, which, alas, has been poisoned by decades of ‘liberal’ cant and our moron-spewing education.

As a result, courts are beginning to act as rubber stamps of egalitarianism, rather than agents of justice. Society predictably responds by a climbing crime rate that requires statistical larceny to pass for anything other than a social catastrophe. (One example: in 1954 there were 400 muggings in all of Britain; 2001 produced 400 in Lambeth, a South London borough, in one month.)

A possible response to this deficit of justice would be to limit the size of the pool from which jurors are drawn. Exactly how it’s to be done is a matter of debate, with all sorts of possible qualifications to be considered, from IQ to education testing, from property ownership to tax-paying record, from age to linguistic competence. (Incidentally, the same debate on suffrage is long overdue.)

What is beyond doubt is that some further qualifications are necessary if trial by jury is to serve its purpose, that of punishing the guilty and thereby protecting the innocent. Appeals to the centuries of success ring hollow: modernity has severed its spiritual, intellectual and moral continuity with tradition. ‘O tempora, o morons,’ as Cicero almost said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My good friend’s father was both a manufacturer and a Marxist. In the first capacity he made a lot of money. In his second hypostasis he refused to invest it. Wealth, he was certain, had to be produced by one’s labour, not one’s money.

Even within his own framework he wasn’t wholly consistent. For he still appropriated the ‘surplus value’ of his workers’ labour, thus transgressing against another commandment of his creed. But thank God for such paradoxes: if Marxists were invariably and relentlessly consistent, we’d all be dead.

Many equate Marxism with religion, and it is of course fideistic. But it’s a religion only in the same sense in which the Antichrist is Christ. What Marxism illustrates is that, when political philosophy is cut adrift from religion, sooner or later it’ll destroy itself.

The essence of the West’s dominant faith, Christianity, can be summed up with one word: love. The essence of the West’s dominant philosophy, Marxism, is hate.

The most obvious reason for Marxism’s ascent to its lofty status is its success in taking over Russia in 1917. It thus could spew its venom through the greatest propaganda machine in history, one that extended its tentacles to every corner of the world.

But the real reason lies deeper, as it always does. For, as any publicity man will tell you, propaganda can succeed only if it enunciates and appeals to some intuitive cravings already felt.

Envy is one of the seven deadly sins, and it made that distinguished list precisely because its spread is universal. Add a bit of passion to envy and, ideally, some quasi-scientific post-rationalisation, and it turns into hatred of those on the receiving end. This explains the on-going success of Marxist propaganda: it activates and expiates the least commendable of human emotions.

Marxism neither originated when the Soviet Union appeared nor died when it ‘collapsed’. This pernicious doctrine has been so influential not because it lived for a while in Russia, but because it always lives in the dark recesses of the human heart.

That’s why I see red whenever yet another ignoramus avers that Marxism is a wonderful idea but lamentably one perverted by the Soviets. ‘Have you read The Communist Manifesto?’ I invariably ask, and they invariably answer ‘yes’. They lie.

In fact, I’m often tempted to have a pocket edition of that disgusting brochure with me whenever attending a gathering where such conversations could ensue. For the Manifesto and the entire edifice created on its basis by Marx and Engels contains everything we know and love about modernity. In fact, one can go so far as to say that Marxism inspires most modern governments, either in what I call their nihilist or philistine incarnation.

The nihilist regimes of modernity, those openly calling themselves Marxist, brought to fruition Marxist dictates on concentration camps (Engels called them ‘special guarded places’), slavery (Marx: ‘Slavery is… an economic category of paramount importance’), mass murder (Marx: ‘the victorious party must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries’), anti-Semitism (Marx: ‘…the Polish Jews… this dirtiest of all races,’ ‘Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew’), genocide (Engels: ‘All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary holocaust.’).

The philistine regimes, such as the one governing Britain at present, focus on the less carnivorous legacy of Marxism, singling out its economics as a day-to-day guide. The destruction they perpetrate is therefore delayed-action, but the bomb is ticking away.

The Manifesto demands wholesale abolition of private property, especially of land, but this ideal couldn’t be attained even in the Soviet Union. Still, various Western governments are doing their level best to chip away at private property, relying on other prescriptions from the Manifesto.

The present proposals championed by two and a half of our three major parties are aimed at taxing wealth, from houses to jewellery, from paintings to pension funds – all acquired with money already taxed. Now experience of every country where wealth taxes have been tried shows that their net effect on public finances is negative – even Sweden, in the past the most Marxist of all Western countries, has abolished such taxation, with its finances instantly improving.

But our Eds, Vinces, Nicks and other visceral Marxists prove that sound reason need not apply where evil emotions are at work. As far as they’re concerned, MP may as well stand for Marxist Partisan. These chaps are driven by Marxist envy and resulting hatred, not by actuarial concerns. Their aim is not to cushion failure but to punish success. If this destroys the economy, then so be it. For it’s destruction and not creation that every hater sees in his mind’s eye.

‘Abolition of all rights to inheritance’ is another dictate from the Manifesto. This worthy goal is very much on the agenda, but it’s hard to achieve all at once without ‘revolutionary terror’, so beloved of Marx. In its absence, progress has to be made slowly, but no less surely for that. Thus every mooted plan to increase the threshold of inheritance tax has been shelved, while plans to lower it will soon become law.

It has to be said that both wealth taxes and higher inheritance tax are being opposed by many. What most people are taking for granted these days is another Manifesto prescription: ‘a heavy progressive and graduated income tax’.

One doesn’t hear many protests against this Marxist abomination, and yet it violates the most fundamental principle of Western civilisation: equality before the law. Those who make more money obviously must pay a greater amount in tax. However, making them pay up to five times the proportion of their income is immoral, unjust and economically counterproductive.

Yet our most sacred tenets have no chance when assailed by Marxist envy. If those people who claim they’ve read The Communist Manifesto had actually done so, the situation would perhaps be slightly better. But it wouldn’t be much better: the poison of Marxism has seeped into the bloodstream of the West, and nothing short of a complete transfusion can cure it.

Alas our governments have for generations lacked the conviction and inner resolve to administer such treatment. Now they exceedingly lack even the technical means: the electorate has been so thoroughly corrupted that it’ll never vote in a passionately anti-Marxist government. Hence Marxism lives so the West may die.

 

 

 

The Times is like a magnet. It attracts Tories who think ‘Conservative’ in their party’s name should become as meaningless as the ‘Liberal’ in the name of their coalition partners.

When the word ‘liberal’ first appeared, it designated those supporting private property, free trade and individual liberties. Now, if it means anything at all, it denotes those in favour of bleeding individuals white in order to strengthen and enlarge the state. The exact opposite, not to cut too fine a point.

In parallel, ‘Tory’ used to mean someone whose political ethos could be summed up by the words ‘God, King and Country’. Now, if you believe John ‘Maastricht’ Major and Tim ‘Learn-From-Obama’ Montgomerie, it must mean Open Mind, Socialism and the EU. Sir John’s recent contribution to that effect bears the title Ignore Those Tory Heads with UKIP Hearts. Montgomerie has opined that All Good Tories Should Support a Mansion Tax.

‘The French… now fear the UK will opt out of social and employment provisions to give our economy a further competitive boost. They will not readily concede this,’ warns Major.

My heart bleeds for the French, but having been out of politics for 15 years, Sir John must have forgotten he used to be a British Prime Minister, not a French President. While his concern for our neighbours’ feelings is touching, a British patriot should welcome his country getting a competitive advantage, even if it means upsetting a few continentals.

‘We cannot, legally, simply walk out of the EU… The costs could be substantial,’ is how Major decorates his sentiment with hardnosed pragmatism. In particular, he explains that if we’re no longer in the EU our motor trade will suffer as we’d have to ‘pay a 10 per cent tariff on exports to the EU, and a 5 per cent tariff on components. Would Nissan… and BMW, Honda, Toyota and Ford continue to build at Swindon, Sunderland, Dagenham, Bridgend or Oxford?’

The answer is, yes they will. If fact, they’ll be falling all over themselves to do so, provided a newly independent Britain can do two things. First, we must explain to our trading partners that tariffs beget tariffs. Would they be willing to start a trade war with Britain, knowing that their trade balance with us is hugely positive? Now, when their economies are contracting and they are on the verge of recession? Would Germany, which lives or dies by exports, be willing to see us switch from Audis and BMWs to Toyotas and Kias? I don’t think so.

And should they stand on idiotic principle and indeed impose self-harming tariffs on our car exports, then we could use our newly autonomous tax system to provide incentives for foreign manufacturers. Cut their employment, corporate and income taxes by, say, 20 percent, and you’ll be amazed how attractive they’ll think Sunderland and Dagenham are.

Then Sir John, with his usual intellectual rigour, comes up with a clincher: ‘As a non-member we would have to negotiate our own free trade agreements’. True but irrelevant. The negotiations could be conducted in a lazy afternoon: you don’t use protectionist tariffs against us, we won’t use them against you. That’s it, Robert est ton oncle, as I try to teach my French friends to express themselves. If HMG can’t find anyone to take on this arduous negotiating task, I volunteer.

Every word Sir John utters these days communicates his desire to vindicate his own role at Maastricht and to vilify those who believe that role was treasonous in any other than the purely legal sense. As long as The Times is in business, he won’t be short of a platform, but those willing to listen may be in short supply.

Another professional Tory, Tim Montgomerie, is, according to a mutual friend, ‘a decent bloke who loves a pint.’ Too many pints, by the sound of it.

Montgomerie wants us to follow his lead and learn from Obama’s success. Since Obama is by far the most socialist president in US history, this means we should all become socialists. Allowing for local colour, all Tories must turn Labour or LibDems in all but name and then one day they may win an election outright.

Specifically, we should all fall in love with every form of taxation championed by our home-grown socialists. Mansion tax, inheritance tax, you name it. And why is that? Well, because the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Specifically, it’s awfully unfair that London properties are so much dearer than in the rest of the country and the luxury good market is thriving. Make the bastards pay, in other words. François Hollande, with his ‘fair payer les riches’, must come close to Montgomerie’s ideal of a Tory. Shame he’s French.

‘The decent bloke’ forgot the law of supply-demand. Houses in London cost more than in Pembrokeshire because more people want to live in London. This preference isn’t wholly aesthetic: about a third of British jobs are concentrated in and around London. One reason that’s the case is the corrupting effect of the welfare state, especially in the north of the country. In the Celtic fringe and England’s northern counties, for example, around 70 percent of the economy is in the public sector. These areas, in other words, are socialist.

Vindicating an irrefutable law of history, people vote for socialism with their feet. So it’s exactly the kind of policies advocated by the LibDems, Labour and Tim Montgomerie that are indirectly responsible for London houses being so expensive. Add to this the fact these chaps must lament, that London is the world’s financial centre, and the picture becomes complete.

What’s left of Montgomerie’s argument, other than his desire to have a Tory government even if it means that not a single Tory principle survives? Foam on the walls of his pint glass. This sort of talk goes over big in pubs, especially those in the low-rent areas. The Times seems a good place for it too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch is an eminent church historian, the author of solid (and stolid) books many buy but few read. Still, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about his subject – a truly learned man.

That’s why his post-mortem on the ministry of Benedict XVI piqued my interest: Prof. MacCulloch, I thought, would be in a perfect position to elucidate the place Joseph Ratzinger occupies in history.

Alas, he didn’t write his article A Brilliant Theologian but a Dreadful Leader as a scholar – he wrote it as an ideological leftie and a man obsessed with sex, a defensive reaction one often observes among homosexuals.

Prof. MacCulloch does attach more importance to his sexuality than it warrants, at least to his readers. Actually in 1987 he declined ordination to Anglican priesthood over the Church’s attitude to his own predilection. This fact of his biography matters to him considerably more than to those who, like me, have waded through his excruciatingly detailed history of the Reformation and a rather sentimental biography of Cranmer.

And it’s certainly not an adequate platform from which to launch an analysis of Benedict’s papacy. ‘How disappointingly undistinguished Ratzinger’s time has been, considering that he is probably the most talented theologian to have held the papal office since Gregory I…,’ writes MacCulloch.

He’s entitled to that view, and certainly there would be nothing unusual in a scholar whose leadership qualities don’t quite match his intellect. The time of philosopher kings has passed, if indeed it ever was more than Plato’s wishful thinking.

However, if Ratzinger’s theological brilliance doesn’t require any proof, his dreadful leadership does – just to keep all the ducks in order. Instead MacCulloch kills the birds with a few mad salvos.

First he attacks Benedict’s opposition to ‘the landmark Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, which ended so much authoritarian clerical control, listened to the voices of non-Catholic cultures, introduced worship in the language of the people and implied much more change to come’.

This is rhetorically unsound. The views of a Catholic prelate can only be attacked within the framework of the Catholic Church, not from MacCulloch’s own position on the left wing of evangelical Protestantism.

‘Worship in the language of the people’ is yet another modern perversion – all Abrahamic religions use a liturgical language that’s different from street speak. This applies even to the great scriptural texts of MacCulloch’s own Anglican Church. Though written in the vernacular, they have never been, and certainly aren’t now, merely a reflection of everyday speech. As to the Latin that Vatican II effectively expunged, it was the liturgical language of the people, a great unifying force for Catholics from all over the world.

Obviously a staunch Protestant wouldn’t see things that way, but perhaps the erudite Prof. MacCulloch ought to know that Benedict XVI is a Catholic after all. As to not paying much attention ‘to the voices of non-Catholic cultures’, fair cop. One doubts His Holiness spent sleepless nights wondering if ayatollahs or TV evangelists approved of his policies.

Then we get to the meat of the criticism, with MacCulloch taking exception to ‘the huge sums that the Catholic episcopate has spent… in opposing same-sex marriage, all to no effect: each time some British or American bishop opened their mouths to rally the faithful, it converted hundreds more to the cause of social equality.’

I’m not aware of any great debate within the Catholic Church on this subject. Unlike the C of E, its advocacy there falls into the domain not just of the left, but of the loony left. Nor have I noticed a groundswell of support for same-sex marriage among Catholic laity.

Clearly, MacCulloch’s own sexuality overrides not only his mind, but also his eyesight. The former is particularly lamentable: a thinker must not allow personal quirks to interfere with his judgment. And surely MacCulloch, self-described as someone ‘brought up in the presence of the Bible’, must know that opposition to same-sex marriage, or indeed to homosexuality, isn’t without some scriptural support.

Towards the end of his diatribe MacCulloch graduates from crepuscular, prejudiced thinking to sheer madness: ‘Perhaps the greatest humiliation that the Vatican has experienced in recent months was the re-election of President Obama, when it was quite clear that most of the American episcopate were doing their best to boost the chances of the Republican Party. The US electorate humiliated the Holy Father and his cohorts. Now, quite wrongly, Catholics are associated with begrudging gay people dignity and personal happiness, when only a clique of their clergy and hierarchy are to blame.’

One doesn’t know where to begin, apart from pointing out that this illiterate use of ‘cohorts’ is most unfortunate in a professional writer. The American episcopate, Sir Diarmaid, traditionally stands on the political left, much more so than European bishops. With a few exceptions it has consistently supported the Democrats for as long as Prof. MacCulloch has been around.

He also seems to think that, just like his own life, Obama’s presidency revolves around the issue of same-sex marriage and all it entails. This is cloud-cuckoo land, pure and simple. MacCulloch really ought to steer clear of politics; it’s not his subject.

As to the notion that ‘the US electorate humiliated the Holy Father’, this is grounds for mandatory commitment to an institution, and not one of higher learning. His Holiness neither stood in the US election nor, to the best of my knowledge, acted as Romney’s campaign manager. Privately, he may have been upset by the vote, but it takes madcap stridency to aver that he was in any way humiliated.

The Old Testament, so dear to MacCulloch’s Protestant heart, has a saying about people like him: ‘Hear now this, O foolish people, and without understanding; which have eyes, and see not; which have ears, and hear not.’

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of anti-Semitism. With apology to the authors of The Communist Manifesto, this paraphrase describes the situation accurately.

All over the continent, synagogues are burnt down or covered with obscene graffiti, Jewish cemeteries are desecrated, Jews are attacked in the streets.

True enough, churches are also burnt or otherwise abused – recently I saw a fine collection of photographs depicting European churches tastefully decorated with graffiti, a pig’s head being the artistic device of choice. (That aesthetic preference also manifests itself on synagogue walls – manufacturers of spray paints must be doing brisk business.)

But this is a separate and less pressing subject – after all, since the 4^th century not many Christians have been killed in Western Europe simply for their faith. The mass murder of Jews is rather more recent, which calls for even greater vigilance.

It’s hard not to notice that most outrages are being committed in countries with large Muslim populations, and indeed Christians and atheists aren’t known for expressing hatred via porcine images.

This ethnic slant creates problems for Western governments as it presents a case of clashing pieties. On the one hand, in keeping with their liberal PC image, if not necessarily out of deep inner conviction, they have to decry anti-Semitism. On the other hand, they can’t be overtly critical of Muslims – for the same reasons, and also because many parliamentary seats across Europe depend on the Muslim vote.

Yet the persecution of Jews, while growing, has not reached Krystallnacht proportions, nor is it likely to do so in the near future. The reason is simple: anti-Semitism isn’t institutionalised, as it was in Germany circa 1930s. For as long as it remains a matter of private initiative rather than government policy, Jews will only be abused in isolated incidents.

However, it’s particularly worrying when government figures make overtly anti-Semitic statements. This brings us to David Ward, LibDem MP for Bradford East, a predominantly Muslim area.

Over the last few weeks Ward has been voicing his dismay over the ‘Jewish atrocities’ in Palestine. For example, he informed the readers of his website that he was ‘saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps, be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians…and continue to do so.’ Well, at least he acknowledged that the Holocaust did happen.

Nick Clegg took exception to such outbursts and chastised Ward, threatening him, if rumours are to be believed, with withdrawing the party whip. Eventually Ward offered a feeble apology, but only after stating that he and his party had ‘a difference of opinion.’

Supporters of Israel are routinely accused of equating any criticism of that country with anti-Semitism.  Some indeed may do so, but from this it doesn’t follow that no criticism of Israel is motivated by racial and religious hatred. Indeed anti-Zionism is often used as a mask, a rather flimsy one, for the sentiments associated with such publications as Der Stürmer.

In the Soviet Union, for example, where anti-Semitism was indeed institutionalised, the papers regularly featured cartoons of fat, ugly, hook-nosed Jews doing nasty things to Arabs. The offenders were drawn in the Der Stürmer style, and the readers were left in no doubt of what the real message was. Incidentally, it’s comforting to know that The Times lately has been borrowing this technique for its own cartoons, the difference being that the British are less attuned than the Russians to taking such hints.

Ward naturally claimed that neither he nor his remarks were anti-Semitic. What are they then? If they aren’t motivated by this time-honoured sentiment, then they must be based on a sober assessment of the situation in the Middle East. But this would presuppose a level of cretinism that even our MPs tend not to display.

For what the Israelis are showing is the acme of humanitarian self-restraint. The country has been on a war footing ever since the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in 1947. Arab states immediately attacked the newly formed Israel from every direction, and only by suicidal courage did the greatly outnumbered and outgunned Jewish settlers manage to defend their statehood (that’s what Ward describes as ‘Jewish atrocities’).

Since then rare has been a Muslim leader who hasn’t called for driving the Jews into the sea, which is another way of saying killing them all. From Nasser to Ahmadinejad, Muslim politicians have been screaming that no Holocaust ever took place – but it will.

And it hasn’t been just talk. In 1967 and 1973 Arab states launched full-blown aggression against Israel. Since then the country has been on the receiving end of incessant terrorist outrages. Even as we speak, hundreds of rocket are being fired into Israel, killing people and destroying the products of their loving labour.

Yet even though it’s faced with mortal danger, Israel responds with astounding moderation. Possessing the military means of wiping out all those Hamases and Hezbollahs in one felt swoop, it limits itself to isolated and limited raids whenever attacks on its people become intolerable.

Some of this moderation comes from the simple fact that Israel is the only civilised country in the region, and the methods of its enemies are alien to its very ethos. Part of it is imposed by the West, trying not to upset the owners of oil wells too much.

That is, incidentally, being penny-wise and pound-foolish. In their thirst for hydrocarbons Western governments choose to ignore that Islam is at present going through an impassioned phase. What we are witnessing isn’t just increased terrorist activities but a full-scale war against the West. Israel is our first line of defence, and yet dampeners are being put on its efforts to defend itself – especially now that the most powerful Western country has Barack Hussein Obama for president.

Be that as it may, one can’t imagine any Western country producing as measured a response to attacks on its territory. Yet here is David Ward, talking about Jewish (not Israeli, but Jewish) atrocities. Even he can’t be so stupid as not to see how feeble the face value of his ‘opinion’ is. The underlying emotion, on the other hand, is very strong indeed.

It is of course possible that Ward is at heart a philosemite, some of his best friends are Jewish, and his blatantly anti-Semitic remarks are an attempt to pander to his constituency. If so, this is a powerful argument against having democratic constituencies populated by those who are openly, hysterically hostile to every democratic principle.

This is one those teasing headlines that writers sometimes try on to draw readers in. A slightly dishonest trick, this, and I apologise.

In point of fact, I don’t think massive immigration from Bulgaria and especially Romania is good for us. Over the last decade Britain has already received 1.7 million arrivals from Eastern Europe, most of whom, as if by magic, settled in Labour-voting areas.

There, I’m being facetious again. In fact no magic was involved, unless you believe that Tony Blair possesses supernatural powers. Anyway, about a million out of the 1.7 came from Poland, the rest mostly from Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

A few months ago I made a purely empirical observation based on the experience of Britain and other host countries. All newly arrived communities tend to affect the crime rate, and not in the direction of lowering it. But they don’t affect it equally – a lot depends on where they arrive from. It so happens, and don’t ask me why, that there are proportionally fewer criminals among arrivals from Catholic or Protestant countries than among those espousing the Eastern rite – such as Serbia, Russia and, well, Romania and Bulgaria.

A few days ago that observation was confirmed by a couple of German politicians, who warned that every EU country blessed with a sizeable Romanian community has received, as a side benefit, a massive increase in crime, both organised and spontaneous. Drugs, prostitution, gambling, mugging, robbery, pick-pocketing, murder – nothing is excluded.

That’s partly why I’m feeling a trifle inhospitable in advance of the anticipated deluge a year from now. So I suspect do you. So, more important, do Dave and his jolly friends. Alas, just like you and me, they can’t do much about it. The EU won’t let them.

In a telling aside, our Justice Secretary Chris Grayling has suggested that it just may be possible to overrule the European Court of Human Rights over votes for prisoners, even though we would suffer political repercussions. Parliament, he said, can be sovereign on this issue. The emphasis is mine, for these three words correct my woeful misapprehension. Silly me, I thought Parliament was sovereign, full stop. Just goes to show how little I understand England’s ancient constitution.

Now Parliament doesn’t seem to be sovereign on the issue of a Balkan swarm descending upon England’s land, thereby making it both less green and less pleasant. That’s why HMG has to resort to subterfuge to limit the influx, but without getting on the wrong side of the EU.

To that end Dave called a meeting the other day and told Her Majesty’s ministers ‘to kick the tyres’ on the immigration proposals. More appropriate kicking clichés would include the words ‘long grass’ or ‘touch’, but we already know that immigration doesn’t happen to be an issue on which Parliament is sovereign.

Switzerland, on the other hand, cut its economic throat by staying out of the EU. So we can’t possibly believe all those lying surveys that place its quality of life at Number 1 in the world. That simply can’t be – staying (or getting) out of the EU is tantamount to instant penury and social disintegration, we all know that. Dave, Nick and Ed have told us so.

But it’s undeniable that such suicidal hermeticism does allow greater leeway in little matters like immigration. The Swiss ground rules are simple: do come, but you’re not entitled to any free social services, including healthcare. And the tiniest of transgressions, even if it’s only J-walking, means instant deportation with no due process anywhere in sight. No questions asked, no answers needed.

Of course acting in this manner here would be impossible, for this would run against the grain of my two favourite sets of initials: EU and PC. Witness the fact that the UKIP candidate in Eastleigh, the seat Chris Huhne has vacated to avoid a driving ban, has been made to apologise for suggesting that Romanian migrants have a higher propensity for crime than the Swiss.

The candidate Diane James simply repeated what the Germans told us, that there’s a problem with ‘the crime associated with Romanians.’ Such plagiarism didn’t go unnoticed. The Romanian ambassador called the remark ‘extremist’ and ‘unfounded’ – presumably even if true. ‘This kind of talk,’ he added, ‘is dangerous’. I can see why: if offended, Romanians may cut their supply of horsemeat (otherwise known as beef) to these shores.

A good friend of mine is a professor at a Dutch conservatory, where he has a Romanian student. The young man has a large family and knows dozens of Romanians in Amsterdam. Of the hundred or so people in his immediate circle, he’s the only one who isn’t receiving benefits. They all do some work off the books, but not so that the social will find out. The young pianist is widely regarded as stupid in the Romanian community – not seeking handouts is like throwing money away.

His elder brother put his computer background to good use by designing an authentic-looking website advertising discounted electronic appliances. Having received a large amount in pre-payments, he vanished into thin Romanian air. His victims went to the police, only to be told that such cases were too numerous to be even investigated. When the clamour died down the chap returned to Holland, where he is again receiving every benefit you’ve heard of and a few that you haven’t.

Now Britain is about to go Dutch (and German and French and Italian), while Dave and his mates kick tyres. Careful they don’t burst, fellows. If they do, it’s you who’ll be apologising to the Romanian ambassador.

 

 

 

  

Pope Benedict XVI has announced his resignation, citing frailty of mind and body as the reason. Considering that the last resignation from the Holy See occurred almost 600 years ago, the announcement came out of the blue – or purple, if you’d rather.

Is this the kind of job one resigns from? His Holiness is in a much better position to judge that than anyone else, but comparisons with his predecessor are hard to escape. For John Paul II continued his ministry until his dying breath, even though he had clearly been moribund for a long time.

Perhaps one could argue, proceeding from an orthodox Catholic position, that since a man is called to occupy the throne of St Peter by God himself, only God can divest him of his office. Generally the deity serves the termination notice by calling on the pontiff to join him in heaven. Then again, Benedict XVI may have received a different message – that’s between him and God.

Christians of all denominations or none, adherents of other religions and even the more intelligent non-believers will miss Joseph Ratzinger, possibly the last conservative Pope of our lifetime. His conservatism was different from his predecessor’s in that Benedict clearly set out to reverse the worst excesses of the Second Vatican Council.

In particular, he paved the way to the return of the Tridentine Mass, which is sorely missed in such traditionally Catholic countries as France. Having lost Latin as their liturgical language, they have replaced it with a rather demotic, freshly minted French, which lacks both poetry and grandeur. British Catholics too have to rely on modern translations of liturgical texts, and they eye enviously the glorious scripture of the traditional Anglican rite.

His Holiness’s generous offer of the Ordinature has struck an important blow for ecumenism by inviting Anglo-Catholics into communion with Rome, but without abandoning the beauty of the Anglican mass. He was of course aware of the obstacles in the way of any unification of the English and Roman churches, and these may yet prove insurmountable. But the attempt to find an accommodation came from a noble heart and first-rate intellect.

To a greater extent than John Paul II, Benedict XVI was blessed with the mind of a philosopher, and in that he was a true disciple of St Thomas Aquinas and the earlier Fathers of the Church. For they knew that Christianity isn’t a matter of blind faith. To put it in simple terms, Christianity makes sense – it’s a religion of reason fertilised by faith.

It can’t be otherwise, for if a believer accepts that in the beginning was Logos, which could mean either Word or Reason, then he has to see his own mind as a particle of God’s. While his heart reaches out to God through prayer, his mind remains active too, rushing towards Logos and getting as far along that road as God allows.

This intellectual exertion requires essential philosophical tools, and Christianity only became a world religion when intuitive faith in Jesus Christ fused with the philosophical apparatus of Hellenic antiquity. Thereby Jerusalem and Athens came together in a simulacrum of Christ and his dual nature. By offering itself to the service of faith, the mind soared to heights it had never reached before.

If faith is an act of self-sacrifice at God’s altar, then the mind is perhaps the greatest offering, especially for people with the greatest minds. But giving one’s mind to God doesn’t mean that the believer becomes mindless as a result. Quite the contrary: God accepts the sacrifice and rewards the donor by giving him his mind back, having first cleansed it of everything extraneous, scoured it of everything dreary. Thus purified, the mind acquires the freedom it never had before, because, just as no content is possible without its form, no freedom is possible without discipline. The greater the mind, and the more sincere its original sacrifice, the greater God’s reward, the higher the mind can soar.

In the absence of such a sacrifice, the mind remains for ever shackled to the earth with its mundane concerns – the mind itself remains mundane. Thus prideful refusal to submit one’s reason to God’s is punished by a diminished power of the reason. For, when looking at the world, the mind can see so much more by rising above quotidian problems than by staying mired in their midst.

Seeking empirical proof of this, observe how otherwise intelligent people turn into blithering idiots the moment they try to argue against God. Logic comes from Logos not only semantically but also in substance – and in his own ministry Benedict XVI has given us all an invaluable lesson in how to use a particle of Logos to make intellectual mincemeat out of those who dare fight it.

His Holiness understood and preached the true nature of morality as a derivative of Logos. Even the most strident atheists will accept that moral behaviour makes sense. But this is so not because God teaches it, but because He exists. Morality only makes sense because God does. Remove God as the framework and you won’t find morality anywhere else – especially not, as Kant believed, within yourself. Looking for God inside you, you’ll find only yourself there – effectively you’ll become your own God, with tragic results not only for yourself but for society.

Benedict XVI taught this, and his poignant words will forever remain his legacy:

‘Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognising nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego.’

Good-bye, Your Holiness. Sorry you couldn’t stay.

For all its innocuous-sounding name, waterboarding has more to do with Langley than with Malibu Beach. It’s an elaborate torture shown with harrowing realism in the film Zero Dark Thirty.

The film uses a semi-documentary narrative to depict the protracted CIA hunt of Osama Bin Laden, designated, in the style of those Jimmy Cagney pictures, as Public Enemy Number One.

I shan’t attempt cinematic criticism, other than saying that the picture is as thought-provoking as a complex work of art invariably is, whatever the genre. Instead I’d like to comment on the thoughts Zero Dark Thirty has provoked.

Most of them revolve around the issue of torture, which the director Kathryn Bigelow handles with cold, deadpan neutrality. She doesn’t impose any moral position on the viewer, leaving him to arrive at his own. What seems to concern her more is purely utilitarian questions: Was torture used in the pursuit of bin Laden? Did it play a significant part in the success of the mission? More generally, does torture work?

The director and scriptwriter handled the underlying ethics with subtlety. The explicit moral judgment was left to the critics, who didn’t disappoint. Zero Dark Thirty became the most reviewed film of 2012 and amazingly the arguments pro and con blurred the political lines, with unlikely figures arguing both for and against.

Not that politics never came up. Conservative critics accused Columbia Pictures of having released the film in October, just before the presidential election, thereby reinforcing Obama’s sole claim to fame (apart from being half-black). The studio and more Obama-friendly critics countered by pointing out that Obama, though mentioned a few times, doesn’t even appear in the film.

That’s a silly argument. Hideki Tojo doesn’t appear in The Bridge Over the River Kwai either, yet the film is an unequivocal indictment of Japan’s wartime beastliness and, by inference, of her dictator. Similarly, for all its understatement, this film leaves one in no doubt that Obama was both decisive in sanctioning the assassination and humane in banning any further use of torture. Whether this helped his re-election is a matter of debate, but it couldn’t have hurt.

However, it’s torture that created the greatest critical disagreement, both of a practical and moral nature. In practical terms, is torture a reliable way of getting information? Was the decisive breakthrough in the hunt of Osama obtained by waterboarding?

The first question seems superfluous. Of course torture works – there are only so many electric shocks to the testicles a man can withstand. The only practical argument against torture is that the victim may say any old thing just to stop the pain. However, this is a purely technical problem that surely can be solved in any number of ways. Scopolamine? Hooking the victim to a lie detector? I’d trust the experts to figure out the way.

The second question has already been answered. Three days after the assassination Leon Panetta, CIA Director at the time, admitted that waterboarding had been used to extract crucial information in the hunt of Osama. Panetta’s successor Michael Morell admitted that ‘some [information] came from detainees subjected to enhanced techniques, but there were many other sources as well.’ Fair enough, it wasn’t just torture.

Morality does of course come into the question of torture, though not necessarily in any obvious way. When weak-kneed liberals scream that torture is indefensible whatever the circumstances, it’s not their minds talking but their emotions or, worse still, ideology.

All they’d have to do is imagine a situation where a nuclear device is hidden somewhere in central London, and it’s set to go off in 48 hours. Our intelligence services have in their hands a terrorist who knows where the device is, but won’t tell. Unless he talks, hundreds of thousands will die horrific deaths.

I’d suggest that under such circumstances, any – but any – intelligence outfit in the world would do anything it takes to make the chap more forthcoming. Electrodes, water, acid, pliers, blow torches – you name it. Whatever works. Moreover, no sane person would object to the use of torture if it can save so many lives from extinction and such a beautiful city from destruction.

Hence no absolutist answer can be given to the question ‘Is the use of torture moral?’ The answer has to be a relativist ‘it depends’. When a country tortures terrorists to protect its citizens from mass murder, torture is moral, if distasteful. If a country tortures someone whose politics it doesn’t like, just to see that look on his face, it’s disgusting. This much lies on the surface.

What doesn’t quite is the morality of institutionalised torture, the kind that’s allowed by issuing an executive decree. President Bush was as wrong to do so as President Obama was in banning torture.

Obama’s act came from ideology, both his own and his electorate’s. It’s a bit like Dave pushing through the homomarriage bill – something done not because it’s a good thing but simply to elicit a Pavlovian response from the less intelligent, or more subversive, segment of the populace. Therefore Obama’s ban of torture is unequivocally wrong – it delivers an absolutist answer to a relativist question.

But Bush was equally wrong in having allowed torture. No civilised country should have such a decree on the books, even if the unfortunate necessity to rely on cruelty has to be tacitly acknowledged. To put it bluntly, this isn’t a president’s business.

The President, who in the USA is also the Commander-In-Chief, may issue a general order, in this instance to get Osama. The mechanics of how this can be done must be left to the field operatives’ discretion. If they then go overboard, they besmirch their own reputation, but not that of their country or its leader.

Of course Americans possess this legalistic zeal that compels them to turn every technical or political issue into law – possibly because more than half of those manning their three branches of government are lawyers by profession. The hunt for Osama shows how easily this can bring the country into disrepute.

Over the life of this blog I’ve said many nasty things about Dave, taking exception to just about every policy he has championed. The recent policy I found ill-advised was his fanatical touting of single-sex marriage, but the most frequent criticism has dealt with Dave’s shilly-shallying on Europe – and also his shortage of any noticeable qualifications for high office.

Following his resounding victory in a Brussels all-night squabble, all I can do is kneel, bang my forehead on the floor and keep shouting ‘mea culpa’ as loudly, and for as long, as it takes the neighbours to call the noise police.

For Dave has used his natural charm and debating strength to bring Angela Merkel around to virtue – and he has used his unbending fortitude of character to resist François Hollande’s animadversions, turning the pinko into a snivelling, bad-natured irrelevance. Dave has thus established himself as history’s greatest statesman this side of Pericles, the nation’s greatest asset and saviour, and a shining example for all aspiring politicians to follow.

Just consider the true magnitude of Dave’s triumph: by threatening to use his veto, a concept first developed by the Romans in the sixth century, he managed to make EU leaders – including Rumpy-Pumpy! – agree to a whopping €5-billion reduction in the EU budget over five years.

The clash with François is particularly significant: a third of the EU budget goes on its agricultural subsidies, of which France is the principal beneficiary. Thus François was arguing from a purely parochial position, whereas Dave proved yet again that his concerns laudably transcend purely national interests. Or indeed his own, for there’s every danger that first-growth clarets, to which Dave is reputed to be partial, will now become more expensive just at the time he’ll have to start paying for his own wines.

Five billion! That’s five followed by nine zeros, ladies and gentlemen, a huge amount by most people’s reckoning. Have you got that much in your savings account? Can you even imagine such a huge, or in Dave’s parlance ‘ginormous’, sum of money? I know I can’t, which shifts my response to Dave’s feat from admiration to sheer awe. I’m now ready to take on all naysayers, to whom I so lamentably used to belong, rebuffing their arguments that can only ever be spurious.

I can anticipate their vituperative objections based on something as trivial as maths. Lowering a proposed €913-billion budget to €908 billion, they’ll hiss in their snake-like fashion, represents a puny reduction of merely less than 0.5 percent. Since this will probably be followed by another raid on Britain’s rebate, the nasties will claim, the country will lose rather than gain as a result of Dave’s principled stand. And since the EU is known for its unwavering commitment to parliamentary democracy, the reduced budget still has to be approved by the MEPs, which is highly unlikely.

Trust those vipers always to look on the dark side, especially wherever the great statesman Dave is concerned. They refuse to see that it’s God who proposes everything that Dave disposes.

Didn’t Christ preach universal love? Yes he did. Did he stipulate that the love could be heterosexual only? Of course he didn’t. Hence Dave’s orthodox Christian position on same-sex marriage.

Didn’t Christ state that the poor in spirit are blessed? Hence Dave’s pious stance on education.

Didn’t Christ specify that his kingdom was different from, and implicitly higher than, any kingdom of this world? Hence Dave’s derision of national sovereignty.

Didn’t Paul say, ‘I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…’ Hence Dave’s healthcare policies.

No critic of Dave can henceforth be a friend of mine. Thus I’ll live friendless in the world for everyone I know insists that Dave’s a useless, spineless, self-serving spiv. But that doesn’t matter: with a PM like Dave looking after us, who needs friends?