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Stravinsky once said that music expresses nothing but music. As far as aphorisms go, this is no worse than most and better than some. Yet it raises all manner of questions.

Surely a composer must also express his epoch, if only tangentially? Otherwise why do composers, different as they may be individually, usually all write in a similar style at roughly the same time? Where does vocal music fit in, and how much does it depend on the words?

Once we have wrestled with these, we are compelled to delve into the next, deeper stratum where we are confounded with more difficult questions, such as: What makes one composer greater than another? How does music relate to other arts and, more generally, our civilisation?

In every piece he writes, James MacMillan asks all these questions, wittingly or unwittingly, and answers most of them the way no one else does today. Recently I attended the London premiere of Since It Was the Day of Preparation…, MacMillan’s sequel to his 2007 St John Passion, and afterwards, once I caught my breath, I recalled what Schumann said when he first heard Chopin’s music: ‘Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!’

The music, scored for five instruments and five voices, is utterly modern, but the words are anything but, coming as they do either from the Latin of the Vulgate or from the English of the Revised Standard Version. One would think that the form would be at odds with the content, but in fact the two go into each other without remainder: the same grandeur, the same noble, poignant emotion, all achieved with the same laconic means.

Having first relied on Schumann, I have taken a fortnight to find my own words, drag the appropriate ones out of their chaotic whirlwind and arrange them in more or less the right sequence. The most immediate thoughts had to deal with modern art.

Many persons of an aesthetically conservative disposition will decry modern art because they are incapable of separating it from modern artists. As they realise that the latter are mostly charlatans, they think the former is mostly subversive.

This is a forgivable misapprehension, but a misapprehension nonetheless. Since my present medium does not allow musical examples, perhaps I could illustrate the point by a sample of another art, a sublime poem by E.E. Cummings:

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

he sang his didn’t, he danced his did

women and men (both little and small)

cared for anyone not at all

they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same

sun moon stars rain

children guessed (but only a few

and down they forgot as up they grew

autumn winter spring summer)

that none loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf

she laughed his joy she cried his grief

bird by snow and stir by still

anyone’s any was all for her

someones married their everyones

laughed their cryings and did their dance

(sleep wake hope and then) they

said their nerves they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon

(and only the snow can begin to explain

how children are apt to forget to remember

with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess

(and noone stooped to kiss his face)

busy folk buried them side by side

little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep

and more by more they dream their sleep

noone and anyone earth by april

wish by spirit and if by yes

women and men (both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars rain

The orthography is eccentric, the words modern, but one has to have a tin ear and a neutered spirit not to hear the sound of eternity in every line. We begin to realise that, though the language of even great art changes from one epoch to the next, it never prevents a great artist from conveying orthodox truths, which is what makes him great.

For these orthodox truths are both true and orthodox precisely because they are timeless. Thus, though we are aware that the language of Shakespeare, never mind Chaucer, is archaic, the truth of Romeo and Juliet or The Canterbury Tales is no less true in our time than in any other. Eternal verities cannot superannuate by definition.

An artist will always reflect his time, along with his own personality largely formed by his time. However, if he reflects nothing but his own time and personality, he will never rise above mediocrity. Whether the artist’s work is religious or secular, such an ascent is impossible unless he is able to secure a foothold on the flinty slope of eternal truth reaching for heaven.

Just as a man can speak the truth in any language, an artist can express it in any idiom. Conversely, any language can lend itself to mouthing platitudinous nothings. Bach used counterpoint to convey undying prophecy going beyond his own time, possibly even beyond his own art or indeed his own personality. Yet his contemporaries, the Reinckens, Frobergers and Kerlls of this world, used the same idiom only to chain themselves to their time. As the chain could be neither broken nor slipped, they stayed mired in their own slot for ever.

If artists can do no other than speak in the contemporaneous language, why do we pour scorn on the chaps who plonk abominations like the Shard or Centre Pompidou into our great cities? After all, we can no more expect them to use the architectural language of Lincoln Cathedral than we can demand that Eliot or Cummings write in the English of Macbeth.

The answer is obvious: it is not the language those architects use that is objectionable but what they say in it. It is not that their work deviates from tradition, it is that it breaks away from it completely. Antoni Gaudí, to cite one example, showed that timeless architecture can come across in an idiom that the architect’s contemporaries find shocking. Yet as long as a great artist does not set out deliberately and solely to shock, as long as he merely modifies the means without trying to destroy the content, the shock waves will attenuate in time. The greatness will remain.

I do not wish to speculate on the exact place James MacMillan occupies in the pecking order of Scottish, British or world composers. Artists after all are not tennis players: they neither gain ranking points for wins nor drop them for losses. Suffice it to say that in his every work MacMillan manages to use a very modern, atonal idiom of his time to rise above his time, and also above Scotland, Britain or indeed the world. Only very great artists can do that, and I am convinced that MacMillan’s music will be heard on concert platforms long after Elgar’s or Saint–Saëns’s has joined Ebler’s or Piccini’s in the footnotes of learned monographs.

MacMillan’s language is modern but not shockingly so. In the 61 years since Schoenberg died, our ears have grown accustomed to unusual harmonies and daring tonal systems. Alas, at the same time our souls have been anaesthetised to eternity, and our minds trained to deny its very existence. Therefore I doubt that MacMillan’s mass appeal will ever approach that of much lesser composers, such as Elgar.

But true music lovers will always marvel at the strands of modernity and eternity for which MacMillan’s work is the counterpoint. And I, for one, shall remain grateful for his musical answers to my extra-musical questions, including those I had not thought of asking.

It’s usually accepted by believer and unbeliever alike that our morality, and consequently etiquette, have something to with Jesus Christ. Not everything, perish the thought, not even a lot. But surely something. A teeny-weeny bit.

Now even those who don’t believe that Jesus was the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity will still agree that he was a nice man. Why, he was even nice to his enemies: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ What can be nicer than that?

But then, as if to confuse us in eternity, he had to go and spoil it all by talking to his enemies in a way that can’t possibly be described as nice: ‘Now do ye Pharisees make clean the outside of the cup and the platter; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness.’ Suddenly we realise that Jesus was rude, crude and socially unacceptable. Some may even feel he was inconsistent and contradictory, which must mean he was no God.

This is no place to indulge in homespun theology, but surely what this juxtaposition shows is that Jesus simply didn’t equate loving his enemies with being nice to them. He of course knew firsthand that the earthly realm wasn’t the only one, and this knowledge comes across in the two quotes.

Loving our enemies means praying for their salvation in the heavenly realm. That doesn’t mean we can’t tell them what we think of them here on earth or, should this become necessary, kill them. St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas, reasonably competent interpreters of Christianity, both postulated just war. And St Bernard of Clairvaux, not generally known for rejecting Christ’s dicta, actually preached the Second Crusade.

All this is by way of preamble to our preoccupation with niceness. Being nice, or civilised as the common misnomer goes, is seen as the essential social characteristic. Never mind being ‘civilised’ when disagreeing with someone – we’re even mandated by law to be nice to burglars.

A chap may express views that, if brought to fruition, would spell the destruction of everything we hold dear, including our lives. He may then devote his whole career to bringing those views to fruition. Yet, as long as he’s nice and urbane at a dinner party, these are no reasons for us not to be nice to him, or even have him as a friend.

Elevation of niceness to the highest virtue isn’t an exclusively English trait, but it’s particularly noticeable in England and places culturally derivative from her. This hasn’t always been the case. In a relatively recent past, say three or four centuries ago, the English were prepared to die, and therefore to kill, for their convictions. One’s faith and politics were considered a matter of life and death – or even something more important than that.

Now they are more like a quaint hobby, something one does in one’s spare time when not involved in really important things, like work, DIY or shopping. Why should we be rude to someone whose hobby is different from ours? Mine is DIY, yours is football, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be nice to each other. Forget dying or killing for our convictions. We won’t even be rude.

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost the knowledge that religious or political beliefs may be true or false. The choice between the two is fundamentally moral, and regarding either as an amusing quirk is definitely immoral and possibly amoral.

That brings me back to my theme of the week: eulogies of Eric Hobsbawm. These are perfect illustrations to my theme of today, and I especially wish to focus on comments coming from those who are widely considered to represent the conservative antithesis to Hobsbawm’s Stalinist thesis.

Thus Niall Ferguson: ‘At a time when much smaller ideological differences are regularly the occasion for vituperative ad hominem attacks, Hobsbawm should serve as an example of how civilised people can differ about big questions while agreeing about much else.’

Allow me to launch one of those ‘vituperative ad hominem attacks’ Ferguson decries: his statement is both amoral and stupid. The difference between condoning the massacre of millions and castigating it isn’t merely ideological. It’s moral. Essentially, Hobsbawm devoted his life to advancing the cause of destroying not just millions of people but also our whole civilisation – all in a perfectly civilised way, of course.

This means he proceeded from a set of assumptions that are alien, indeed hostile, not just to Western politics but to everything the West represents. A decent man couldn’t possibly agree with the likes of Hobsbawm on anything of importance. An intelligent man would see the link between his politics and things like aesthetics, philosophy, general view of the world. A moral man would be disgusted by Hobsbawm’s monstrosity. Yet all that matters to Ferguson is that he was nice.

Another supposed conservative Damian Thomson adds his penny’s worth: ‘I’m not suggesting that Hobsbawm’s support for Marxist terror (he once said that the deaths of millions would have been justified if Communism had succeeded) was morally equivalent to the alleged rape of teenage groupies. Hobsbawm was an important scholar, and apparently a charming man.’

I hope I’ve got this right. Contextually, advocating the slaughter of millions isn’t as bad as raping one groupie, if only allegedly. The latter is irredeemable, the former is largely offset by the monster’s being ‘apparently a charming man’. Never mind the monstrosity, feel the niceness. Here we have political correctness meeting a lack of both intellect and moral fibre. If these are conservatives speaking, give me lefties any day. On second thoughts, keep them.

The only way a decent man can talk to a communist is with a gun in his hand – or not at all. Being nice to him isn’t civilised. It’s spineless, amoral and craven. Even worse, it’s stupid.

 

 

Mitt Romney’s resounding triumph in the first televised debate with President Obama reportedly has got his campaign back on track. More to the point, it showed yet again the faults of unchecked democracy run riot.

The assumption behind such TV jousts seems to be that they enable people to make up their minds. And the assumption behind the assumption is that the better debater would make a better statesman.

One can infer that the 67 million Americans who watched the debate would consider voting for a candidate simply because he is blessed with quickness on the uptake, acting ability, a gift of the gab, photogenic appearance, good dental work and a knack for talking much and saying little. Yet not only are such qualities not essential to statesmanship but they are nearer to being antithetical.

Debates fail by a long margin to answer two fundamental questions: 1) What will this man do if elected? and 2) Does he have the strength of mind and character to do it? The only matter settled by such a debate is who that day looked better on camera.

Imagine for the sake of argument St Thomas Aquinas and Christopher Hitchens having a televised debate on the existence of a Trinitarian God, with 67 million people voting on the winner.

Hitchens’s gift of the gab was legendary. In his heyday he was handsome, dapper, witty and insouciantly flippant. Moreover, he was a veteran of many such spectaculars, invariably acquitting himself with glory. By contrast, St Thomas’s introspection and taciturnity earned him the pejorative nickname of ‘dumb ox’ at Paris University. He wasn’t outgoing, elegant or particularly handsome, and neither did he ever display much wit or lightness of touch.

My guess is that in such a debate Christopher would wipe the floor with Thomas. Swayed by his facile arguments and seduced by his clever asides, at least 80 percent of the viewing audience would be persuaded: there is no God. Yet, capitalising on the benefit of hindsight, we know that Aquinas was one of the deepest thinkers in history, while Hitchens was an intellectual pygmy.

Also, Aquinas not only had at his fingertips all the scholarship available on this issue, but he also multiplied it and raised it to an unmatched height. Hitchens, on the other hand, was blissfully ignorant and manifestly unqualified to enlarge on this subject, at least this side of fashionable bars in Hampstead or Manhattan.

Admittedly, which of the two candidates would make a better president is a simpler problem than my hypothetical one. Yet reductio ad absurdum is a time-honoured way of pointing out the inadequacy of one proposition and by inference upholding another: no serious issue can be settled by a televised debate. We’ll know who’s the better debater, not who’s the better statesman. The two aren’t the same.

Much more productive would be for each candidate to present, in writing, his proposed programme of action, complete with detailed, factual and specific explanation of the desirability of each point. If he so wishes, he may also point out the differences between his plans and his opponent’s. He should then give a solemn, preferably legally binding, pledge to keep each promise, stipulating the sole possible circumstances that may prevent him from doing so.

After the people have familiarised themselves with the programmes, each candidate would then make any number of speeches in whatever medium is appropriate and affordable, elucidating the more recondite points and reiterating orally the promises he has made in writing. Then the voters would decide.

The obvious objection to this proposal is that a generation that has made reality TV its crowning intellectual achievement would be unable to evaluate the fine points of either programme, or even possibly to read the documents containing them. Fair enough. This objection is perfectly valid, though not as a negation but as an assertion. For it’s a ringing argument in favour of limited franchise.

This is no implied denigration of government by consent. On the contrary, making sure that only those qualified to vote will do so elevates the notion of consent to intellectual plausibility. For only those qualified to vote can elect those qualified to govern.

A frivolous parallel, if I may. Lately we’ve had quite a few rape cases featuring a victim who was drunk at the time of the incident. The prosecutors argue, and the juries often agree, that, though the sex act appeared to be consensual, the woman wasn’t qualified to give consent because her inebriated mental faculties weren’t up to the task. To revert to political lingo, she wasn’t qualified to cast her vote in favour of having sex.

Why then should we assume that anyone, but anyone, is qualified to give consent on the policies that would better serve his country or on the man better able to carry them out? Surely the complexities involved trump the binary yes-no problem of a night on the town?

Meanwhile, our two jousters rode in on their steeds and broke lances over everything under the sun, not so much scratching the surface of each issue as stroking it. Romney strove to prove that he’s human after all – an act of implicitly begging forgiveness for being rich. He also tried to communicate that, though ostensibly a moderate conservative, he’s at heart a liberal softie. Obama wisely eschewed any serious attempts to defend his lousy record in office. Instead he sought to explain that, though ostensibly a socialist, he’s at heart a hardnosed realist.

Romney did the job better, but whoever wins such a contest it’s always the country that loses. One only wishes that we hadn’t learned from the Americans to stage such vulgar beauty pageants. We should develop our own vulgarities.

 

 

 

 

 

When it comes to the likes of Hobsbawm, nil nisi bonum might as well mean ‘another one bites the dust.’ I wouldn’t have spent two words on the demise of this utterly objectionable man, never mind two articles, if it were his demise only.

Unfortunately, Hobsbawm is symptomatic of a deadly disease afflicting our civilisation in general and Britain in particular: endemic anaemia of mind, will and morality. This is still worth talking about, in the full knowledge that it can’t be talked away.

Newspapers are quoting various things Hobsbawm said at different times, and God knows he said lots of them. However, some of them seem to contradict one another.

For example one paper quotes Hobsbawm as saying that he ‘regarded the suburban petty bourgeoisie with contempt’. That essentially means he despised most Brits he’d ever met, for one doubts he numbered many miners and mechanics among his acquaintances.

Another commentator points out elsewhere that Hobsbawm understood ‘that culture is what shapes the world… [and] that culture is totally democratic and comes from people. [People like Hobsbawm] discovered and popularised the value of popular culture – something so integral to our lives today it seems bizarre it was ever denigrated.’

We also denigrate AIDS, graffiti, puke on the pavement and many other things ‘integral to our lives today’, which doesn’t make them praiseworthy. Of course expecting sound logic from this lot is like expecting celibacy from a prostitute, so nothing new there.

Then Niall Ferguson talks about Hobsbawm’s ‘empathy with the little man’, which seems to tally with the previous panegyric. Until, that is, one recalls that all his life Hobsbawm shilled for regimes that had murdered more than 100 million just such little men.

Ferguson also mentions that he and Hobsbawm both ‘loved modern jazz’. This validates Hobsbawm’s devotion to popular culture, a word combination that can take pride of place among the more egregious oxymorons. Show me a sincere lover of popular culture in general and ‘modern jazz’ in particular, and I’ll show you someone whose hold on Western culture is tenuous at best, but then one expects nothing else from our pop historians.

Anyway, how do we reconcile the different facets of Hobsbawm’s personality, as emerging from these quotes? First, we find out that he despised the common man, which is to be expected from a lifelong communist, and a Hampstead communist to boot. Communists don’t feel empathy with little men, they use them as building materials for their political edifice, and slaughter en masse those who can’t or won’t be used in that capacity. This political affiliation also precludes by definition any excessive affection for democracy, and Hobsbawm never did or said anything to contradict this factual observation.

But then we’re told that he extolled popular culture for being ‘democratic’ and hence popularised its value. Contradictions galore, one would think, but actually it all adds up neatly.

Hobsbawm devoted his life to destroying everything in the West that’s worth keeping. He was also cunning enough to realise that the spread of oxymoronic popular culture worked towards the same end. It was what his idol Lenin called ‘legalism’, which is undermining the West by using the West’s own institutions and breaking no Western laws. In relying on this stratagem Hobsbawm converges with the Frankfurters, who fell out of Marx’s buns (this punning allusion to the hotdog is to establish my own populist credentials).

This is akin to Woodrow Wilson’s campaigning for world government, while proclaiming the sanctity of national self-determination. There was no contradiction between the two: the first was the end, the second the means. Wilson knew that an American-dominated world empire would be impossible to achieve without first breaking up Europe’s traditional empires, the British one emphatically included.

That political democracy, in its modern variant, can act as an aggressive weapon has been amply demonstrated by the democratically elected Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Ahmadinejad and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in). Today’s empire builders of the US neocon species (and their British hangers-on, such as Ferguson) have also inscribed democracy on their banners. Let the world perish so democracy may triumph, is the underlying animus one can infer.

Cultural democracy can be an even deadlier WMD, and Hobsbawm must have felt it in his sick viscera. Had he thought that his purpose would be better served by an advocacy of cannibalism, he would have written tetralogies on the march of man-eating progress through history. As it was, he was a democrat today, a communist tomorrow, an elitist the day after and a populist the day after that. Whatever works.

That’s why the widely asked question, whether he was a member of the Cambridge spy ring in the 30s, is ultimately moot. If he was, how differently would he have acted throughout his life? If he wasn’t, he might as well have been.

This makes me repeat the question I asked yesterday, but so far haven’t answered. How is it that the likes of Hobsbawm and his sycophantic admirers, have come to dominate popular media and, through those, public opinion? The question is too involved for a short piece to tackle, but one can be certain that the answer will have nothing to do with a clash between the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, socialists and capitalists – at least not as those terms are defined today.

What then is the common ground on which the Hobsbawms of this world meet the Fergusons? The answer has to lie in the wholesale rejection of Western tradition, as it has been formed over two millennia. It’s not money that shapes the world, as both Ferguson and Hobsbawm preach, but indeed culture, as Hobsbawm also believed with his usual consistency.

It’s just that when the West was called Christendom, culture, understood here in the broadest possible sense, moved the world in one direction, and today’s cultural simulacrum moves it in the opposite one, towards perdition. One suspects that God alone can reverse this lethal motion. The rest of us can only abhor accolades for its active agents. Such as Hobsbawm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be sure, he made some mistakes, and we must learn from them. He’s also said to have killed six million Jews and a couple of million Gypsies, cripples, homosexuals, psychos. Even if this was the case, and the jury is still out, it was all in good cause: improving the lot of the German people and introducing real social justice. Doesn’t the end justify the means?

Let’s not ignore Hitler’s achievements either: social services, free medicine, guaranteed pensions, full employment, brand new infrastructure. Did you know that it was Hitler’s scientists who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer? Many lives have since been saved as a result, and we shouldn’t forget that. In short, the pluses must be weighed against the minuses if we wish to form a balanced view.

Now what would you think of someone who spent all his life preaching the message of the two opening paragraphs? Do you believe such a man could have a successful academic career in Britain? Be awarded a Companion of Honour by the Queen? Be feted as a great thinker and one of the greatest modern historians? Regularly appear on the BBC? Have a widespread influence on our public opinion? Die to the chorus of sycophantic accolades from intellectuals representing a broad spectrum of opinion and scholarship?

Even imagining such a possibility would be preposterous, and rightly so. In any civilised country, a man like that would live a solitary, miserable life somewhere in a bad part of town and vent his hateful views to empty walls in a dingy pub at a quiet time. And if by some miracle such a man, say David Irving, did gain access to a public forum and mouthed a tenth of the drivel along those lines, he’d be ostracised and locked up in jail – to loud cheers from all decent people.

Yet Eric Hobsbawm built exactly the kind of career I describe on offering fulsome justifications for a regime that outmurdered the Nazis about five to one, and also another one that did even better than that. Among them, the communists of Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, Cambodian and other varieties slaughtered between 100 and 150 million people – and yet Hobsbawm, a lifelong member of the Communist Party, found millions of good words to say and write about that satanic creed.

Hobsbawm used to sit on the advisory board of one of my British publishers. The publisher asked once if I’d like to meet him, to which I replied that I’d refuse to shake the man’s hand. So much more surprising it is then to see our major papers running obituaries produced by people who’d be eager not only to shake that despicable creature’s hand but also to kiss the less visible part of his anatomy.

One expects nothing else from the Guardian-Observer-Independent-Times-BBC crowd. As their worldview is circumscribed by various offshoots of Marxism refracted through the work of multitudes of pseudo-philosophers, these chaps are no better than Hobsbawm. In some respects they’re even worse, for they lack the courage of their convictions. Whereas he proudly wore his cannibalistic views on his sleeve, they cower under the shroud of liberalism, progressivism and whatever else Polly Toynbee extrudes out of her intellectual bowels.

But even those who, one would think, ought to know better toe the same line. For example, Niall Ferguson, described in the Times as ‘a rightwing historian’ talks about Hobsbawm as if he was Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon rolled into one. Ferguson’s obit in the Guardian is titled ‘a historian’s historian’, which sets the tone for the whole article.

Letting my eye slide along, I stumble across such pearls of wisdom as ‘his politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian’, ‘his extraordinary intellectual flexibility’, ‘his best work was characterised by a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, elegant analytical clarity, empathy with the little man and a love of the telling detail’, ‘his extraordinary erudition and quick wit’, ‘he saw how important it was to understand the broader forces of historical change’.

Any sensible person would know that Hobsbawm wasn’t ‘a truly great historian’. He wasn’t a historian at all – he was a propagandist. To that end he systematically and knowingly falsified history, as a card-carrying communist always will. Such Soviet monstrosities as the GULAG, unprovoked attack on Finland, complicity in starting the Second World War, general reliance on violence, propensity for genocide were all either downplayed or excused in his books. Others, such as the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere were never mentioned by Hobsbawm, for all his ‘love of the telling detail’. His books contain not a single idea worthy of the name, nor one page of sound analysis, and his popularity says more about our society than about him.

Ferguson strikes a girlish pose by saying, ‘It may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.’ Not being a Guardian reader, I’m not at all surprised. Ferguson himself spares me the need to explain why: ‘He and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era.’

This belief, Marx’s toxic residue in the world, is false, and any attempt to justify it will be intellectually puny regardless of the beholder’s academic attainment. It’s also ignorant in the fundamental sense of the word, if we define knowledge as a result of learning, not its equivalent. That a communist and a self-professed anti-communist should converge at this point only reinforces my view that the difference between the two is merely that of the mathematical sign. Whether it’s a plus or a minus, they are both cut from the same cloth.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say, ‘speak no evil of the dead’. If followed, this adage would effectively mean never saying a word about Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao – and Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the bolshevik turnover and died a couple of days ago at the age of 95.

 

 

It’s like the same man acting as both judge and defendant in the same trial. No matter how intelligently he goes about his task, his integrity won’t survive intact.

No one demonstrates the accuracy of this observation more persuasively than Boris Johnson. His writing has always been entertaining and reasonably clever, if a bit on the lightweight side. One could never expect being enlightened by his pieces, but one could always count on being amused. A good egg, in other words, if occasionally overcooked.

That changed when Johnson became a politician and especially when he began to harbour the ambition of one day leading his party. Evidently, combining high political office with lucrative moonlighting isn’t against his party’s regulations, though in some quarters the subject of conflicting interests might come up. But that apart, a staggering, if predictable, metamorphosis occurred: overnight Johnson’s pieces stopped being amusing and became frankly emetic.

None more so than his yesterday’s Telegraph article. It neatly encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our spivocratic politicians: cynicism, a distinct lack of either moral or intellectual integrity, willingness to bend the truth beyond breaking point, egoism.

The very title evinces much of this: ‘I’m sorry to say it, but my old school chum isn’t PM material’. Anyone who hasn’t been doing a Rip Van Winkle for the last few months has to be aware of the facts to which the title alludes so flirtatiously.

First, there’s a movement afoot at the Tory grassroots that Dave isn’t up to the job, and only Boris can save the party from being routed at the next election. Second, Boris and Dave both went to Eton, and then to the Bullingdon, a drinking club with a nice little university attached.

Hence the calculated effect of the title, geddit? Boris pretends to believe that any reader would pretend to think that the title refers to Dave, though the reader knows that this would be a sheer impossibility, and Boris knows that the reader knows but chooses to play this silly game nonetheless, both in the title and the whole first paragraph.

The villain of the piece is of course Ed Miliband, not Dave Cameron, he of the classic scholarship fame. Boris proceeds to regale his readers with a few truisms about Ed being a sorry excuse for a statesman, a pernicious leftie redistributor and generally a disaster waiting to happen. Fair enough. The difference between a truth and a truism is that the former needs stating and the latter doesn’t, but hey, it’s only a newspaper piece.

What follows, however, makes one want to fill the proverbial bucket. For Boris then launches into a stupid and disingenuous panegyric to Tony Blair, arguably the worst prime minister in British history, although Gordon and Dave may want to claim that distinction for themselves.

Boris talks, for example about ‘New Labour’s sensible accommodation with the wealth creators of this country’. Excuse me? Are we talking about the same New Labour that created the economic disaster we’re stuck with for at least the next generation? The government that raided the pension funds of ‘the wealth creators of this country’? Raised public spending to suicidal levels? Increased the overall tax burden? Printed more money than in the previous two centuries? Suffocated businesses with red tape, both domestic and especially European? Apparently we are. And it’s a Tory who does the talking.

Hold on, Boris isn’t finished yet. ‘You could vote for Blair and use private medicine,’ he goes on. ‘You could vote for Blair and send your children to fee-paying schools. You could vote for Blair and run a vast multinational corporation… ANYONE could vote for Blair.’

Under Blair, much of the NHS frontline staff were replaced with administrators, which was in line with the overall drive to shift employment into the public sector. If under John Major the country lost 800,000 public jobs, Blair created 500,000 new ones in just his first five years. The immediate effect on the NHS was that even many people who couldn’t really afford private medicine had to use it if they didn’t want to die (spoken from personal experience).

The same applies to fee-paying schools. The destruction of state education in this country, perpetrated by Blair’s parteigenossen and exacerbated during his tenure, made many middle-class people, already impoverished by Labour taxes, spend their last pennies on educating their children privately. The alternative to that was not to have them educated at all.

As to running a ‘vast multinational corporation’, that was indeed possible, but exceedingly difficult unless said corporation had intimate links to Tony and his cronies. In short, ‘anyone could vote for Blair’, provided he only had half a brain, and not the better half.

But, according to Boris, ‘voters aren’t fools’. If he really thinks that, he’d be well-advised to learn what Winston Churchill once said: ‘the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter’. But then Boris already knows it – he just won’t let on that he does.

He ends with a rousing chord: ‘David Cameron will be returned with a thumping majority in 2015’. On second thoughts, perhaps Boris does think we’re all fools.

Dave wasn’t able to win a clear, never mind ‘thumping’, majority in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe in Britain’s history, and standing against the party directly responsible for it. Only an imbecile would think he’ll be able to achieve this feat on the strength of his pathetic record. Even his coalition partners are ready to jump ship, even his close colleagues are plotting behind his back.

But Boris doesn’t believe what he says. Moreover, he’s clearly conducting a surreptitious campaign to replace Dave as party leader. And the campaign may yet succeed because the Tories know what Boris won’t admit for tactical reasons – Dave is a loser.

So of course is Ed Miliband, but the safe bet is that he won’t contest the next election – especially if Labour follow the course kindly charted for them by Boris. Revert to New Labour empty promises, pledge allegiance to the same vacuous policies and they just may get in.

The voters may not be stupid, but they’re certainly not blessed with a long memory. They may well forget the disastrous tenure of New Labour and vote in its successors. Particularly if the competition comes from the likes of Dave and Boris, Tony Blair groupies.

Not so long ago a judge praised burglars for their courage. Now, with equal justification, Dave is being extolled for the courage he displayed in implicitly attacking Russia and China in his UN speech:

“The blood of these young [Syrian] children is a terrible stain on the reputation of this United Nations. And in particular, a stain on those who have failed to stand up to these atrocities and in some cases aided and abetted Assad’s reign of terror.”

That’ll be Russia and China then. Dave must have a spectral analyser built into his eyes to be able to distinguish the blood of Syrian children from the blood of millions already dripping from the hands of those two regimes. On second thoughts, perhaps he doesn’t. For, just this once, the blood whose spilling he decries adorns a different set of hands.

As is normally the case, the blood of victims is on their murderers’ hands, in this instance on those belonging, in roughly equal measure, to Assad’s troops and the rebels. The second set of culprits are those who inspired, provoked, financed and supported the outbreak of violence that goes by the name of the Arab Spring. That is to say mainly the US administration, egged on by harebrained neocon effluvia, and HMG, so courageously led by Dave.

The courage of a statesman isn’t in making fiery and irresponsible speeches. It’s in being a statesman, something that Dave manifestly is not. Rather than uttering the rubbish he saw fit to mouth, a statesman would follow, and act upon, a totally different logic in the present situation: 

That Messrs Assad, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, Qaddafi et al are not to be confused with Mother Teresa is beyond doubt. Equally certain is that, in an ideal world, all of us would work diligently towards overthrowing their sanguinary regimes. In such a world, we’d all close ranks with those champions of goodness and democracy who rose against those regimes; we’d all joyously die on the barricades erected in the name of human liberty and world peace.

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in one in which bad Middle Eastern tyrants tend to be replaced by worse ones (remember the Shah of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini?). One way or the other, the people in those countries are going to be mistreated, often killed. This doesn’t depend on any specific government there, and it would be sheer folly to believe that a benign, liberal Muslim state could ever be anything other than a figment of neocon imagination. Our actions must depend on an accurate understanding of the region and how the events there affect our national interests.

It’s hard not to notice that for the better part of a millennium and a half Islam has been waging war against the West, or Christendom as it once was. That doesn’t mean 1,500 years of non-stop fighting any more than the Hundred Years’ War meant a hundred years of incessant hostilities. There would be a remission, then a flare-up, then a remission again. We’re into an acute phase at present.

Now why has Islam been so consistently belligerent? Because it’s that kind of religion. There are 107 verses in the Koran calling for the murder of infidels, apostates and anyone else who holds back the global march of Islam. Unlike us, the Muslims follow the tenets of their religion, well, religiously. This means that a Muslim country will always be aggressive towards us in direct proportion to its religious fervour.

Consequently, it’s in our interests to encourage and prop up the most secular Muslim regimes, regardless of how beastly they are to their own people. We must realise that, for as long as Islam holds sway over the Middle East, any alternative regime, in addition to probably being even more cruel internally, will also present a clear and present danger both to us and our allies.

Hard as it is to accept such a view on abstractly humanitarian grounds, we must also encourage, or at least not try very hard to stop, any internecine hostilities there. The more the Muslims fight one another, the weaker they’ll be to do harm to us.

This ought to be the general line of thought guiding a true statesman endowed with the courage to think straight and dispassionately. And what’s Dave saying?

“If the United Nations Charter is to have any value in the 21st Century we must now join together to support a rapid political transition.” [A transition to a fire-eating Islamist regime that’ll destabilise the region, endanger our few allies there and jeopardise world peace, is what this really means.]

“…Libyan public, who were not prepared to allow extremists to ‘hijack their chance for democracy,’ ” [Any chance for democracy in a Muslim country, Dave, is inversely proportionate to its being Muslim. The Arab Spring has so far brought to power Islamist regimes in every country that until then had been run by an awful but reasonably secular regime.]

“Today is not the time to turn back – but to keep the faith and redouble our support for open societies, and for people’s demands for a job and a voice.” [Those people don’t just demand a job and a voice. They also demand on-going war on the West waged by demographic or other means, the literal following of sharia law and an immediate annihilation of the West’s sole ally in the region.]

If this is courage, I’ll take a cowardly prime minister any day. But Dave’s courage or lack thereof comes out of the latest session with focus groups. A truly courageous statesman wouldn’t blabber away, tossing off at best meaningless and at worst dangerously idiotic phrases. He’d understand the situation and do what’s good for his country, her allies and the West in general.

Only a coward would resort to the easy option of making a speech like Dave’s oration at the UN. Only a naïve, or else ideologically inspired, commentator wouldn’t recognise this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the old adage about our enemies’ enemies, anyone who dislikes billionaire Vladimir Putin is supposed to like billionaire Alexander Lebedev. Yet without in any way denigrating folk wisdom, one finds it hard to apply in this instance, though our papers don’t seem to share this problem.

Parallels are being drawn between Lebedev and Pussy Riot, with the altogether correct conclusion that justice in Putin’s Russia falls short of our standards. Fair enough, a quick phone call from the Kremlin can indeed open or close any case, and those that stay open often have the verdict decided in advance. But that makes neither Pussy Riot less hideous nor Mr Lebedev more innocent. 

Lebedev has been charged with hooliganism for beating up a fellow guest on a Moscow TV show. Taking exception to Sergei Polonsky’s perfectly innocent remarks, the oligarch got up and threw a well-rehearsed combination of punches, knocking the unsuspecting man off his chair to the floor.

The Times refers to the incident as a ‘punch-up’, implying bilateral action. It wasn’t. It was a savage, surprise attack that was neither provoked nor reciprocated.

Now Lebedev’s pugilistic exploits may earn him several years in prison, which on the surface of it doesn’t sound like terrible injustice. Nor is the vicious attack a groundless accusation: anyone with access to YouTube can watch it in living colour. Fair cop? Not according to the accused, who doesn’t mind venting his views urbi et orbi. And he can.

Unlike other Russian billionaires Mr Lebedev has easy access to British newspapers. After all, his family owns several of them, The Standard and The Independent being the jewels in their portfolio. About a year ago, the whisper started that Lebedev was also about to acquire The Times, but we’re not going to indulge in rumour-mongering, are we?

His self-defence is as virtuosic as his boxing technique (not every brawler can throw such short, straight punches, especially in combinations). ‘Anyone in my position would have done the same,’ says Lebedev. ‘The only thing I regret is that people might now perceive me as a violent person, which I am absolutely not.’

Perish the thought, whatever would give anybody that idea? Publicly beating up a man who doesn’t share our opinions is a perfectly normal, non-violent thing to do. Especially for a career KGB officer, which Lebedev was.

His son’s comment is breathtaking in its effrontery: ‘My father has spent his life trying to promote freedom of expression and justice in his fight against corruption in Russia.’ Of course he has. Shame on you for thinking KGB officers may devote their lives to anything other than promoting human liberties or, as The Mail described it, ‘quality journalism’.

Lebedev Jr was alluding to Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, which his father owns in partnership with Gorbachev. The paper has indeed taken an anti-Putin stance, and several of its correspondents, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been rather unceremoniously bumped off in assorted dark alleys – though not in ‘the shithouse’, as Putin once identified his preferred killing venue.

But even if, at a moment of weakness, we accept that Lebedev is animated by a noble spirit, rather than political ambitions or a personal squabble with his KGB colleague Putin, we still may find it hard to contain some disbelief. Much as we crave seeing Lebedev in the light shone by his son, facts just won’t let us. (Russophones can get these on kompromat.ru.)

Upon graduation from the Institute for International Relations, the notorious KGB breeding ground, Lebedev joined his alma mater’s sponsoring organisation and in 1987 was posted under diplomatic cover to the Soviet embassy in London. This was a more prestigious posting than Dresden, where Putin served, which may partly explain the colonel’s persistent resentment of Lebedev.

Exactly what assignments Lebedev carried out here isn’t known. Yet at the start of his ‘business’ career he liked to threaten his competitors with KGB ‘torture chambers’, boasting about his experience in their use.

After the 1991 transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, otherwise known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, the ruling elite felt compelled to portray Russia as a new oasis of freedom, democracy and free enterprise. To that end, state assets were transferred into the tender care of ‘appointed’ oligarchs, mainly drawn from three groups: komsomol (Young Communist League) functionaries, KGB officers and common criminals. In their moral principles and modus operandi the three groups were barely distinguishable, so their fusion into a single entity proceeded apace.

Lebedev was one of those who drew the long straw. He started a finance company that instantly prospered, then in 1995 bought the National Reserve Bank. How he managed in just a couple of years to put together enough money to buy even a struggling bank is a mystery, but then Russia is full of them.

What’s important is that government-owned Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, instantly transferred $300 million into the bank, even though it seemed to be on its last legs. But then, to use the Lebedev mantra, any major energy company, be it BP, Esso or Shell, would jump at the chance of transferring their hard-earned into a moribund bank days after it was acquired by someone with little experience in business. Wouldn’t it?

In due course, Lebedev bought a big share of Aeroflot and never looked back – until now, that is. For eventually a rift appeared between the ‘appointed’ oligarch and Putin.

Such oligarchs don’t really own their money – they keep an eye on it and are allowed to use some. This arrangement is contingent upon their behaviour. If they just enjoy their instantly acquired wealth and jump when Putin tells them to, they are welcome to their toys, such as jets, yachts, English football clubs or, in Lebedev’s case, London newspapers. But, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky will agree, the moment they launch unauthorised forays into politics they’re in trouble.

Lebedev too got ideas above their station. ‘Money for me,’ he once said, ‘is rather an opportunity to… affect public life.’ Now indulging in anti-Putin politics leaves an oligarch only two options: either do a Berezovsky and go west, preferably to London, or do a Khodorkovsky and go east, to a Siberian prison camp. Lebedev has rejected the former, so the latter may await.

Yet only someone who knows nothing about Russia or indeed people in general can portray him as a ‘freedom fighter’ committed to ‘quality journalism’. I don’t always understand the meaning of ‘quality’ as a modifier, but, assuming they mean high quality, one would suggest that perhaps The Independent and The Standard aren’t the brightest-shining examples of journalistic excellence. Under Lebedev’s stewardship the latter has reduced its price to nothing, which is about what it’s worth.

No, Mr Lebedev is committed to something else, and I wouldn’t venture a guess as to what that might be. Neither am I going to deny that, if Putin’s poodle Abramovich had indulged in TV violence, he probably would have got away with it.

But by the standards of any civilised country, what Lebedev did would be classified as assault. That Russia isn’t a civilised country shouldn’t mean that Lebedev’s thuggery wasn’t assault. If he’s thrown into jail, I, for one, won’t shed any tears.

What does vex me is that chaps like him are allowed to buy means of affecting public opinion in England. Free enterprise should be encouraged – but not allowed to become a suicide pact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One would have thought that Dave’s experience with talk shows would make him steer clear of David Letterman and his little traps.

In 2006 Dave appeared on Jonathan Ross’s BBC show, only to be asked if, as a young lad, he had ever masturbated to a photo of Margaret Thatcher. Any normal man would have instantly got up and left. Then, if by some stroke of luck, that same man became prime minister a few years later, he’d question exactly how hideous, unfunny vulgarians like Ross contribute to ‘promoting education and learning’ and ‘stimulating creativity and cultural excellence’, both stipulated in the BBC Charter. He’d then threaten to revoke this charter unless the BBC complied with it.

Our Dave of course did none of those things. Walking out would have communicated to the electorate that he’s not a MAN OF THE PEOPLE. That cherished distinction presupposes regarding words like ‘wank’ as ipso facto amusing. So Dave just smiled as if he had heard a dazzling witticism. And, judging by the fact that the BBC continues to churn out trivial, mindless and often offensive entertainment, its compliance with its charter has never been questioned.

Now Dave has got into hot water over another charter, the Great one. Letterman offered him a brief quiz on things British, such as who wrote Rule, Britannia. Not only was Dave blissfully unaware of this piece of trivia, but, by guessing it was Elgar, he was at least a full century out. A couple of decades ago, any primary school pupil unburdened by learning difficulties would have known the name of Thomas Arne and what he was famous for, but we’ll let it pass.

The next test Dave failed involved Magna Carta, and this one wouldn’t inconvenience a moderately bright kindergarten pupil. To Dave’s credit, he knew what Magna Carta was and when it was signed. After some visible mental effort he even identified the place where that momentous event took place. What utterly defeated our old Etonian was the English translation of those two devilishly difficult words.

Now let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Dave has never read history books, many of which refer to this document as The Great Charter. Let’s further suppose that he played truant when Latin was taught at Eton and then spent all of his university years getting pissed at the Bullingdon Club to the exclusion of any academic studies. Such suppositions hurt, for generally one expects that a national leader would have been drawn from the pool of those who did well at school. But I, for one, am ready to be lenient about such gaping holes in Dave’s education.

The next problem is much worse. For any averagely intelligent man, even if he never attended a single Latin lesson, ought to be able to guess what these two words mean. The normal thought process would lead him towards other words sharing the same root. Let me show you how this is done, Dave, and for once in your life pay attention.

You must have ordered magnums of Bolli at the Bullingdon, didn’t you? Fine, fine, it wasn’t Bolli but Krug, but that’s beside the point. It’s the word ‘magnum’ that I want you to concentrate on. You know what it is, don’t you? Excellent. It’s indeed a bottle twice the normal size. A very big bottle, in other words. And how do we say ‘very big’ in one word? No, not ‘huge’. Not ‘bloody humongous’ either, and anyway it’s two words, not one. And not even ‘gigantic’, though we’re getting warmer. What was that? Super. You got it in one, or four rather. It’s ‘great’!

Now where else do we find this root Dave? Yes, that’s right, magnum also means a big cartridge in firearms, but I was thinking of different words. No? All right, I’ll give you a tip. What kind of glass do we hold to objects to make them appear larger? That’s right, good lad. A magnifying glass.

That’ll do us for the first word. Admittedly, one has to make the mental jump from ‘magnum’ and ‘magnify’ to ‘Magna’, but even Dave’s cerebral agility should be up to this task.

Now for the second word. Here we’re on shakier grounds, as connecting ‘Carta’ with ‘charter’ may require an IQ in three digits, or certainly no lower than 90. Words like ‘card’, ‘cartography’, ‘carte blanche’ should lead us to ‘chart’, and then we’re within one hop, skip and jump of ‘charter’.

There we have it Dave. The Great Charter, the bedrock of Englishmen’s liberties, commonly though not exclusively referred to as Magna Carta.

Now please tell me it was all a publicity stunt, another trick designed to position Dave as a MAN OF THE PEOPLE. THE PEOPLE, on average, probably wouldn’t even know what Magna Carta was, never mind what the words mean. Is that what your focus groups say, Dave? Do they also confirm that THE PEOPLE don’t want their elected representatives to be cleverer than they are?

On second thoughts, perhaps it may be better to have a mentally challenged ignoramus for prime minister than a devious, calculating spiv. Then again, it may not.

And Dave? Next time you appear on a talk show, make sure it’s prerecorded. Those live ones can land a chap in a spot of bother, what?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why do you think we need an EU?

No nation in Europe can by itself achieve the necessary scale of economic freedom to meet all social demands.

So essentially we are putting collective security above individual sovereignty?

Now at last the time has finally come when the people of Europe, in their understandable striving for economic security, can make the decisive step to co-operation.

That still doesn’t address the issue of national interest in relation to collective security.

The will towards European Community effort… must become the leading concern of the basic, ruling economies… It means a readiness in certain circumstances to subordinate one’s own interests to those of the European Community. That is the highest goal which we require from the European states and we are striving to attain it. In individual cases this will mean sacrifices but the outcome is that all people will benefit.

But surely the tendency in the EU runs towards creating a protectionist bloc, something generally regarded as economically counterproductive?

If one considers the natural potential of our continent, it becomes apparent that Europe, in fact, meets all the requirements of a complete, self-sufficient economic area.

How do you think a unified economy can accommodate the interests of individual countries?

The preconditions for a political order to achieve the co-operation of the peoples of Europe are clearly identified. Its essence: respect for national character, development of own economic resources, long-term economic treaties. Economic interdependence is endorsed by destiny. The economic unity of Europe is manifest.

Aren’t we talking about essentially a statist economy?

The new empowerment of the originative and creative power of the individual is grounded in the community, the creation of a uniform economic understanding and attitude, the allocation of decisive tasks through the political leadership… Apart from this, the economy is free and self-responsible.

Don’t you think that the only major freedom remaining in individual states is that of running suicidal debts?

It has to be said that the debt is generally overstated compared to what it actually is. The arithmetical error runs on because differences in accounting periods, balances and balances in contra are not simultaneously taken into account.

That may be. But surely the monetary union inevitably presupposes the pooling of debt?

This task [of creating a single currency] is only possible if we first bring the European national economies into order…

But one can’t help noticing that the current austerity measures, feeble as they are, are causing unrest among people used to getting something for nothing.

Such a fundamental economic belief demands a social conscience. The people of Europe must and can demand social responsibility and consciousness from their state leadership in the realisation of the new economic order.

You seem to be suggesting that social responsibility may have to come at a cost to prosperity.

The new European economy will have to consider as its first task the fulfilment of its social obligations.

Thank you, Mr…

Well, replacing the ellipsis with the interviewee’s name would be telling, wouldn’t it? You still haven’t had the chance to guess who he was.

In the good, if recent, tradition of British education, I’ll give you a multiple choice. Was it a) José Manuel Barroso, b) Jacques Delors? c) Jacques Santer? d) Romano Prodi?

Got you going there, didn’t I? The interviewee could have been any one of those venerable gentlemen, but wasn’t. The correct answer is e) None of the above.

Every reply to my questions came from a speech delivered in 1942 by Walther Funk, Hitler’s Economy Minister and President of the Reichsbank (published in English by SMP Ltd.). Herr Funk spoke from the heart and with his usual eloquence about the EEC,  Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft for short.

In pursuit of his high-minded ideals Herr Funk indulged in certain peccadilloes that eventually earned him a life sentence at Nuremberg, with a hangman’s noose a distinct possibility until the last moment. But in a modern context his words speak louder than his deeds.

Each one of them shows an uncanny resemblance to the language of every formative document of the EU and the organisations out of which it came like Eve from Adam’s rib. Such likeness of words must betoken at least partial, if not yet total, similarity of principle and purpose.

Suffice it to say that the glittering prize Herr Funk saw in his mind’s eye, a federal Europe dominated by Germany, is a whisker away from becoming a reality. It’s true that some of the trappings of the Third Reich, those revolving around mass murder, are so far absent from the everyday practices of the EU.

However, much too often, when talking about either Reich, people concentrate on the consequences of the founding principles, rather than the principles themselves. Far be it from me to suggest that these are identical in the EU dominated by today’s Germany and wartime Europe dominated by Nazi Germany.

Yet it takes a blind man, or else one who won’t see, not to realise that they aren’t a million miles apart. And if you don’t believe me, I suggest you talk to the spirit of Walther Funk.