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Keir Starmer and his accomplices from several other Western countries colluded to commemorate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, in their own special manner.

They’ve officially recognised Hamas as a sovereign state. “In the face of the growing horror in the Middle East,” explained Starmer, “we are acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution. That means a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state.”

This takes pride of place in the long list of other statements made by the prime minister, which span a full range between cynical and idiotic, with ignorant, subversive and Marxist in between.

First, ‘Palestinians’, the received term for Hamas, don’t want a two-state solution. They want a single-state one, from the river to the sea. All Jews currently living in that territory or – according to the Hamas Charter – anywhere else are to be exterminated.

That constitutional intent is hardly conducive to keeping “the possibility of peace” alive, unless all Israelis decide to enter into a national suicide pact. In the absence of that decision, Starmer’s recognition won’t add a single jot or tittle to peace in the region.

However, it will almost certainly enable the new ‘state’ to seek reparations for the egregious oppression ‘Palestinians’ suffered during the 30 years of the British mandate (1917-1947). Those dastardly British mandarins tyrannised the local Arabs by not letting them slit one another’s throats and do to the Jews what their descendants did on 7 October, 2023. How much more oppressive can you get?

More to the point, how do you attach a monetary value to the suffering of those poor people whose fingers itched for the knives to carve up some Jews?

Denominating anguish in pounds sterling seems hard, but it’s not impossible. Trillions have been mentioned in that context, so Starmer had better nationalise the whole economy and pay Britons whatever is left after the new ‘state’ has been properly compensated.

All in all, the effect of the recognition will be either nonexistent or, more likely, negative. This isn’t just a probability but an ironclad guarantee.

So why did Starmer (along with Macron et al.) do it? There are several reasons, and I assure you the desire to bring peace to the Middle East isn’t one of them.

First, Labour politicians, both nationally and locally, depend on the Muslim vote. And Muslims vote as a bloc for the party most hostile to Israel — that’s a given.

It’s in the confident expectation of boosting their electoral chances that Labour governments have always flung Britain’s doors open to welcome culturally alien immigrants. When Mandelson was Blair’s consiglieri, he openly admitted to this stratagem with his unmatched cynicism.

A voting bloc of millions of Muslims may or may not anoint a king, figuratively speaking, but they can certainly become a king maker. Millions of Muslims can also paralyse cities by staging riotous pro-Hamas (or anti-Israel) rallies, causing serious economic and social damage.

Second, Starmer and his government are Marxists, viscerally if not institutionally. And, taking their cue from their founder and patron saint, Marxists are ideologically anti-Semitic. For many of them, anti-Zionism is a more socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism.

“I recognise the Palestinian state” has a nicer, more self-righteous ring to it than “I hate Jews”, but for most British Muslims and many Labour members the two phrases are synonymous. Starmer’s disgusting decision thus has everything to do with Labour’s intraparty and domestic politics and nothing at all to do with any peaceful urges.

The third reason also springs from their Marxism. Marxists are prepared to love Britain as an abstract ideal they see in their minds’ eye, while meanwhile hating Britain as she is and especially has been throughout her history.

The Labour Party doesn’t mind affirming its Marxist credentials by flying the communist red flag at its conferences and singing the Italian communist song Bandiera Rossa, occasionally breaking into a rousing rendition of the Internationale.

The former has sinister lyrics, such as “From the country to the sea, to the mine/ To the workshop, those who suffer and hope/ Be ready, it’s the hour of vengeance/ Red flag will triumph.” Meanwhile, the latter declares war on tradition: “Servile masses arise, arise/ We’ll change henceforth the old tradition/ And spurn the dust to win the prize.”

This is the vocal expression of visceral hatred extending to every aspect of British history, but especially its imperial phase punctuated by the Industrial Revolution. This is depicted as nothing but rapacious, acquisitive exploitation of the downtrodden masses at home and downtrodden colonies abroad.

‘Colonialism’ and ‘capitalism’ stand side by side on the Marxist hit list, and all socialists are emotionally committed to atone for the former and destroy the latter. This explains Labour’s intentionally ruinous economic policies and, more to my point today, their febrile affection for what they perceive as the colonies those dastardly mandarins used to oppress.

Ignorant of history, and ideologically unwilling to learn, they dispense with details and broadly sympathise with the Third World in its every confrontation with the First. Israel, in their eyes, exacerbates the sins of the Mandate by stubbornly insisting on her own survival. Hamas, on the other hand, emits a warm glow of anti-Western animosity our Marxists share.

And not just our Marxists. Anti-colonial, anti-Western sentiments predominate in every international forum, including the UN.

Since 2023, the subject of Israel violating the human rights of the ‘Palestinians’ has come up 60 times in the General Assembly. And the human rights of the Ukrainians on the receiving end of Putin’s murdering, torturing, raping, looting hordes? Not even once.

Such are the more obvious streams flowing into the mighty river of the socialists’ deracinated hatred for their own countries and Western civilisation in general. Starmer’s willingness to recognise the nonexistent Palestinian state is consonant with his reluctance to recognise the benefits of free markets.

Both can be traced back to the Marxist longings of our ruling elite, its lust for the slogans sung in Bandiera Rossa and the Internationale to become calls to action. We must be able to see through the smokescreen of bien pensant waffle they emit to hide their wicked impulses.

And yes, a very Happy New Year to all my Jewish readers — with none of the sarcasm implied in the title above.

Over the past few days, Putin has been treating NATO’s airspace as his own training ground.

First, 23 Russian drones flew over Poland. A day later a Russian drone appeared over Romania. Then, four days ago, the Russians switched to manned aircraft, sending three MIG-31 fighter jets on a mission over Estonia.

NATO’s responses to those flagrant violations of its members’ sovereignty have varied from feeble to nonexistent. Most commentators treated the overflights as ‘provocations’, which raises a question.

Exactly what was Putin trying to provoke? A diplomatic rebuke? NATO’s customary expression of deep concern, later to be upgraded to a warning? Not likely. He has already gathered such a large collection of such things that I doubt there’s any room left for more in his trophy cabinet.

Western commentators and, worse still, governments act like scared children who cover their eyes in the hope that the perceived danger will thereby disappear. It won’t, and grown-ups should know that.

Allow me to spell it out, chaps: Putin is preparing for war. An aggressive one. With NATO. And this preparation is in its final stages.

Every offensive in history has started with a scouting mission to determine the target’s strength, deployment and likely response. For the past 100 years or so, overflights of enemy territory have figured prominently among such stratagems.

They test both the enemy’s ability to resist aerial attacks and its resolve to do so. If the ability is unimpeachable and the resolve unshakable, the aggressor may have second thoughts or perhaps change tack. If, on the other hand, the enemy shows neither ability nor resolve, the aggressor’s finger will inch closer to the ‘Go’ button.

Putin’s finger is twitching at the moment. For in all three cases NATO failed both tests, showing that neither its air defences nor, more important, its morale is battle-worthy.

It probably hasn’t escaped commentators’ attention that Russia is already fighting a war against a NATO ally, though regrettably still not its member. And over the past three and a half years, the nature of that war has changed dramatically.

Generals, goes the saying attributed to Churchill, always fight the last war. That was said in 1940, when Rundstedt, Manstein and Guderian showed Gamelin and Weygand how hopelessly behind the times they were. Modern war was all about lightning strikes with massed armour, not suicidal infantry attacks on fortified positions.

That was the last war for the Russian high command in 2022, and at first their invasion of the Ukraine followed the same pattern. Columns after columns of Russian armour poured into the Ukraine, only for the Ukrainian artillery, missiles and drones to turn them into heaps of charred scrap metal.

Ukrainians too tried to use their own tank thrusts as counteroffensive, with largely the same result. Both sides have since learned the lessons, paying their tuition fees in hundreds of thousands of lives and billions’ worth of wrecked kit. Step by step, they turned their battle stations into PlayStations.

Unmanned aircraft, drones, are for modern war what tank pincer movements were for the Second World War and cavalry charges for the First. Costing next to nothing in the general scheme of things, drones, augmented with manned aircraft, can paralyse a country’s economy, terrorise populations and negate any possible counteroffensive.

That’s why anti-aircraft defences in general and anti-drone defences in particular become vitally important. Both the Ukraine and Russia are churning out thousands of the blasted things, with the Russians also importing them from the friendly ayatollahs.

And Ukrainians have learned how to deal with those deadly locusts. They shoot down close to 90 per cent of them, which is impressive even though, considering the numbers involved, the remaining 10 per cent still cause horrendous damage.

When 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace, the response was pathetic. The combined efforts of Polish, Dutch, Italian and German AA defences managed to down only four of the drones, falling far short of the Ukrainian ratio.

Can you imagine what would have happened to Poland had it been attacked not by 23 unarmed drones but by 2,400 armed ones? I can’t.

The key question there isn’t just ‘how many?’ but also ‘how?’. NATO scrambled fighter jets that fired at the Russian drones with their air-to-air missiles. Each AIM-120 AMRAAM missile costs about $1 million, while the next-generation AIM-260 will cost several times that.

If it takes a million-dollar missile to hit a Shahed drone costing a few hundred dollars, one realises that even if NATO countries increase their defence spending to 100, not five, per cent of GDP, they’ll run out of money within days of combat.

Ukrainians have learned a more cost-effective method. They use YAK-52 training planes made between 1979 and 1999. These cheap aircraft, some with wooden propellers, have open cockpits from which gunners fire their rifles at the drones with devastating effect.

That particular recce yielded another encouraging finding for Putin. Even though three US bases are sited in Poland, American forces took no part in the action. One can just see Putin grinning ear to ear: his friend Donald may occasionally talk tough but, push come to shove, he’ll just coo like a dove of peace and do nothing.

When a Russian drone appeared in the sky over Romania, the pilots were authorised to shoot it down but decided not to. The country’s defence ministry said it “assessed the collateral risks and decided not to open fire”.

What collateral risks exactly? Since the drone didn’t overfly any densely populated areas, downing it wouldn’t have endangered life and property. The only collateral risk I can imagine would have been Putin’s displeasure, meaning that yet again NATO couldn’t conceal its cowardly tendency to appease the evil aggressor.

Oh yes, I forgot, Romanians did respond to that criminal attack by summoning the Russian ambassador and berating him in no uncertain terms. Who says NATO leaves aggression unanswered?

As for the violation of Estonia’s airspace, an historical reminder is in order. On 24 November 2015, a Russian SU-24M fighter-bomber penetrated Turkish territory to a depth of 1.36 miles and stayed there for 17 seconds. That was enough time for a Turkish F-16 to shoot it down.

In the aftermath, Putin huffed, puffed and threatened every manner of apocalypse. Soon thereafter, however, he and Erdogan kissed and made up, though I’m not sure about the kissing part. Like all bullies, the KGB dictator respects leaders who speak his language, using missiles in lieu of words.

On 19 September 2025, three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated the Estonian airspace near Vaindaloo Island (not to be confused with an Indian curry). There they stayed for 12 minutes (as distinct from 17 seconds) before two Italian F-35s intercepted the invading MiGs and…. shot them down?

Don’t be silly. What do you think this is, Turkey c. 2015? No, the Italians gallantly escorted the MiGs back to the border and waved their wings good-bye.

Understandably irate, Estonia invoked Article 4 of the NATO Charter, which initiates discussion among members but without mandating any response.

When the doors of that talk shop opened, Estonia correctly stated that the incursion into its airspace was “part of a broader pattern of testing Europe’s and NATO’s resolve”, and “another dangerous act to further escalate regional and global tensions as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine”.

The situation is so fraught with danger that nothing short of an expression of concern or perhaps even a stern warning will do. Make it grave concern and final warning to emphasise the magnitude of the problem. That’ll send Putin back to his bunker, tail between his legs.

As far back as the 6^th century BC, the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu formulated this principle: “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” The idea of the former was to lure the enemy into precipitate action, the better to rout its forces.

NATO got it almost right: it appears weak when it is weak. Unless this situation changes quickly – and I don’t know what kind of timetable Russian generals are plotting – well, you don’t need me to tell you what can happen.

Take it from someone who grew up with Russian bullies, schoolyard to KGB. As Turkey showed in 2015, they retreat from a show of force. And, as I’m afraid we’ll soon find out, they pounce on a show of weakness.

Russian jingoists insist that Russia was brought into this world to teach it a lesson. They have a point, though not the one they mean. It’s a lesson in how not to do things.

Now that the initial excitement following the murder of Charlie Kirk has subsided, commentators begin to ponder the roots of political assassination. No such analysis is possible without historical references, and these aren’t in short supply.

Just in this morning’s papers, I’ve seen the US, Ireland, Austria-Hungary, France and a few other countries mentioned in that context. However, one country, Russia, is a notable omission, which offends my sense of fairness.

For, during the 50 years before the 1917 revolution, Russia boasted more assassinations than the rest of the world combined. She also showed that yes, the tendency to kill politicians may be traceable back to human nature, as one of today’s pundits correctly claimed.

Yet justice is there precisely to prevent flaws in human nature from doing too much harm. We wouldn’t need cops and courts if we were all little angels.

It’s ineffectual justice that turns a propensity for assassination into isolated outbreaks and then into a pandemic, and this point is often ignored. Ignored with it is a valuable lesson for today’s West.

One teacher worth heeding was Sergei Nechayev, a seminal figure in Russian, and therefore the world’s, history. It wasn’t so much Marx as Nechayev who was the role model for Lenin. In particular, Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary (1869) provided the blueprint for Lenin’s What Is to Be Done (1902).

Nechayev was a Left-wing extremist and, like his Western counterparts today, he enjoyed the support of liberal intellectuals. His most prominent sponsor was the London resident Alexander Herzen, whose family money took Nechayev from his Swiss exile back to Russia.

Once on his native soil, Nechayev organised the terrorist gang called the People’s Reprisal (Narodnaya rasprava). When the student Ivanov tried to leave the gang, he was brutally murdered, and the Nechayevites had their collars felt. (The incident was the inspiration behind Dostoyevsky’s novel The Possessed).

This was the inaugural test case for the newly instituted trial by jury which failed the test miserably. Though the defendants were found guilty of murder, only four were sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

A message was thus sent to society that honestly felt political hatred went a long way towards exonerating even murderers. The message was taken, and an open season on tsarist officials began.

One case, that of the terrorist Vera Zasulich, became a European cause célèbre. A French magazine even named Zasulich “the most famous woman in Europe”, a great accolade indeed. (Later, Time Magazine awarded its Man of the Year distinction to Hitler and to Stalin, twice.)

That pan-European celebrity was tried in 1878 for an attempt to murder Fyodor Trepov, St Petersburg’s governor. Zasulich, incidentally, had some previous: she had been imprisoned for a while on suspicion of complicity in the Ivanov murder. However, she had been soon released for lack of evidence. This time she was caught red-handed.

Though this is neither here nor there, Trepov wasn’t entirely blameless. He had ordered that the student Bogolyubov, serving time in prison, be flogged for insubordination. The law, however, banned corporal punishment for noblemen, which Bogolyubov was, and the legally minded Zasulich was incensed enough to pull the trigger. On second thoughts, perhaps she wasn’t as legally minded as all that.

Alas, neither was the court. The defence successfully turned the proceedings into a trial not of the terrorist but of Trepov, and the jury of Zasulich’s peers found her innocent on the grounds of her political, rather than simply criminal, motive. (In 1883 she co-founded the first Marxist group in Russia, the Liberation of Labour.)

That miscarriage of justice showed that jury trial was useless in Russia, and from then on political crimes were mostly tried by military tribunals. Those proved only marginally less lenient, at least until nihilist terror reached pandemic proportions in the early twentieth century.

Russian judges came to their senses then and, in return for the murders of 1,600 officials, including some members of the royal family, passed about 5,000 death sentences in 1905-1907. But by then it was too late. The country’s madness had flared up and in a few years she’d go on a murderous rampage the likes of which the world had never seen.

The failure of Russian courts to save the country from nihilist outrages could have taught a useful lesson to posterity even in the West: institutions are only as good as the people who man them.

Trial by jury, for example, can’t survive as an instrument of justice in the absence of a broadly based group of people who understand what justice really means. Such understanding is impossible without an ability to draw a line between good and evil, which alone can make legal justice morally just. Yet we’ve been house-trained not to think in such categories any longer.

Today’s British criminals, expertly guided by their barristers, recite in chorus the mantra “it’s all society’s fault”, knowing that the twelve good men would nod their assent.

As a personal example, the man who robbed my mother-in-law while she lay on her deathbed got off with a derisory punishment having declared, “I did this on account of my childhood.” No country can have real justice if such statements can be made, never mind accepted.

That condition wasn’t met in Russia in Zasulich’s time, and it’s not being met in the West today. Thus an argument that a criminal had an impoverished childhood has been known to draw mild 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 common-or-garden savagery.

As a result, courts are beginning to act as rubber stamps of egalitarianism, rather than agents of justice. Society predictably responds with a climbing crime rate that only statistical larceny can pass for anything other than a social catastrophe. One example: in 1954 there were 400 muggings in all of Britain; one month of 2001 produced the same number in Lambeth, a South London borough (p. 318,000).

The craven weakness of the judiciary system creates an atmosphere of general lawlessness irrespective of the law acting tough in isolated cases. I have no doubt, for example, that the murderer of Charlie Kirk will be punished severely, possibly terminally. Yet even in America, to say nothing of Britain, the liberal mindset prevails.

Judges throughout the West are passing light sentences or none at all for acts that ought to have brought the whole weight of the law on the criminals’ heads. Capital punishment has been abolished throughout Europe, and any punishment is increasingly seen as too cruel and superfluous.

Regardless of the odd tough sentence, such wishy-washy liberalism diminishes collective respect for the law. And when people don’t respect the law collectively, they are more likely to break it individually.

In due course, the rule of law may become an empty phrase full of deadly ramifications. Granted, today’s Western democracies are a far cry from 19^th century Russia, where independent judiciary was still in the experimental stage that it has never progressed from.

One hopes that, say, Britain will be spared the kind of diabolical collapse that befell Russia and, with her as the agent, may yet destroy life on earth. But let’s not confuse hope with certainty. “It can’t happen here” is right up there on the list of famous last words.

More or less everything conceivable has been tried during the 5,000 years of recorded history. That makes the past a compendium of invaluable teaching aids, and Russian history may claim pride of place among them.

It teaches how desperately wrong things can turn out when justice fails and mindless liberalism reigns.

Political thought needs thinkers, logicians, scholars and philosophers. Political movements need activists, organisers, ideologues and propagandists.

This isn’t to say that no cross-pollination between the two categories is possible. In his spare time a philosopher may well dabble in activism or an activist in philosophy.

But such pastimes will come at the expense of efficacy in their day jobs, or at least so I’d like to believe. After all, though not utterly hopeless as a political thinker, I’m constitutionally incapable of doing activism, organisation, ideology and propaganda.

Moreover, in my weaker moments I look down on those who excel where I fail. Such snobbery is a mistake though, and whenever I sense that knee-jerk reaction coming up I should nip it in the bud. People capable of turning thought into action deserve respect.

This is a realisation I reached after spending an hour or so listening to Charlie Kirk take on all comers in campus debates. Having done so, I now feel even sadder that this young man is no longer with us.

I can’t even begin to comprehend the immensity of the effort and perseverance it must have taken to found Turning Point USA and build it into a political force. Charlie understood something essential about political debates: they are ultimately won not by arguments but by slogans.

Choose the mantras that appeal to your audience and you’re 90 per cent there. The rest is just the gift of the gab, the ability to deliver every word with eloquence and conviction. Charlie had eloquence and conviction to burn, and he knew how to pare ideas down to their kernels, slogans.

Unfortunately, when it came to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, he went even further than his idol Trump in preaching pro-Russian views and regurgitating pro-Putin propaganda.

Zelensky was to Kirk a “CIA puppet” and “gangster” who “sent his own people to a senseless massacre”. And Crimea couldn’t be returned to the Ukraine because “it has always been part of Russia”.

That’s where the propagandist ought to have been helped by the scholar: the Crimea hasn’t always been part of Russia. It was that from 1783, when Grigory Potemkin annexed the Crimean Khanate, to 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukraine. That was almost exactly the period when India was part of the British Empire, which still doesn’t give us the right to send the Royal Marines to take over, say, Goa.

But I did tell you that Charlie was no intellectual. His job was to win debates and drum up support, not to delve deep into issues and come up with serious arguments.

Watching those videos I was envious: I couldn’t do what Charlie did day in, day out. Even at his age, I never quite had the energy. I’m not sure he could do what I do either, but we’ll never know because he never tried. He was too good at what he did to want to veer into other areas.

Several of his opponents brought up the issue of abortion, trying to punch holes in Charlie’s staunch pro-life stance. He argued his corner from the evangelical Christian standpoint, referring to abortion as murder of babies.

That’s good Christianity but not so good rhetoric. To borrow a phrase from Laplace, the anti-abortion argument doesn’t “need the hypothesis” of Christianity.

In fact, Charlie’s statement was a rhetorical fallacy known as petitio principii, begging the question. That means using the desired outcome of an argument as the argument itself. (It doesn’t, however, mean ‘raising the question’, which is how some people misuse the expression.)

For, unfamiliar with Aristotle’s concept of potentiality, fans of abortion deny that a foetus is actually an autonomous being. They see it as an annoying part of a woman’s body, sort of like an in-grown toenail, which the woman can get rid of without being impaled on the horns of moral dilemmas.

Calling an abortionist a baby murderer may be true, but rather than winning the debate that statement turns it into a yes-it-is, no-it-isn’t shouting match. And appealing to Christian rectitude rings hollow with atheists, which most of Charlie’s listeners were.

When against my better judgement I find myself arguing this issue with Leftists, I use the Socratic methodology of sequential questions based on my ‘minus-one-day’ argument.

First, I ask if my opponent believes it’s wrong to take a human life without due process. If he does, then the only way he can support abortion morally is by claiming that no human life has yet begun.

When does it start then? At birth. What about at birth minus one day? How is abortion at birth minus one day morally different from killing a baby at birth plus one day? It’s a moot argument, goes the usual reply. In England abortion is only allowed up to 23 weeks and six days of pregnancy.

Fine. So this means that, according to our law, human life starts at exactly 24 weeks, which makes abortion illegal at that point. What about 23 weeks and five days? Or four? Or three? Exactly what is that miracle that occurs at precisely 23 weeks and six days?

How can you say that human life starts at that moment and not a day earlier? It’s purely arbitrary, as is any point in pregnancy to which we can backtrack other than one: conception. Any other moment gives at least grounds for doubt, and surely any doubt should be interpreted in favour of saving a human life?

But what about pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, asked Charlie’s opponents. Surely that entitles the victim to abort? No, answered Charlie. That would be committing an evil act to correct another evil act. But since he hadn’t yet proved logically that abortion is an evil act, that argument fell flat.

Incidentally, it’s estimated that out of some 200,000 abortions performed in Britain every year, less than one per cent result from rape or incest. And yet those crimes inevitably come up whenever a fan of abortion wants to deliver a QED.

Another question came from a chap from India who questioned Charlie’s statement that Christian moral dicta are objectively true. How could he say that if there are many different religions in the world, each with an equally valid claim to objective truth?

Charlie skirted around that issue, instead citing Josephus’s and Tacitus’s books as testimony of the Resurrection. Even if the references were unimpeachable, that didn’t answer the question. But they weren’t unimpeachable, not quite.

Tacitus only mentions that there once was a man named Jesus crucified in Judaea by Pontius Pilate and worshipped by his hideous followers as God (“All kinds of riffraff gather in Rome.”). Josephus, in his book The Jewish Antiquities, does talk about Jesus rising the third day, but only as something Christians believe, not as historical fact.

Had his student audience been educated rather than indoctrinated, Charlie could have found himself in an embarrassing situation.

He should have talked about the role specifically Christian faith played in our civilisation, which is after all called Judaeo-Christian, not Hinduist, Islamic or Zoroastrian. No disrespect to other religions and all that, but our civilisation (along with our jurisprudence) was founded on the Scripture and church tradition, not the Vedas.

Still, by now you must have realised why Charlie Kirk claimed more followers than I have.

He is a great loss for the MAGA movement, which is what Americans see as conservatism. I have my reservations about it, but I suppose MAGA quasi-conservatism is better than none, which is roughly what we have in Europe.

Charlie was to Trump what Tommy Robinson is to Nigel Farage, and what a difference. Trump had in his corner a genial, civilised man capable of coherent speech and looking forward to a bright political future.

Whereas Farage has a violent thug with a long list of criminal convictions to his name, spewing hatred and looking forward to another stint in prison. It’s a macabre coincidence that Charlie Kirk’s murderer is also named Robinson.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, one sees moral indignation bursting out of newspaper pages and social media posts.

One is also regaled with obscene gloating and shrieks of joy, but let’s disregard those for the time being. Let’s just concentrate on what the good people are saying.

Let’s also agree with them: the hideous creature who committed that crime should follow his victim to the celestial crossroads, where their paths will diverge. Kirk will go up to join the angels, whereas his murderer will be evenly browned on all sides by the fires of hell.

However, inductive thinking takes some commentators from this particular crime to a general, absolutist statement: any assassination is wrong. Is it though? This is a genuine question, not an expression of doubt.

Imagine for the sake of argument that some far-sighted, trigger-happy chap killed both Lenin and Trotsky in September, 1917. It’s plausible that a Bolshevik coup wouldn’t have happened the next month: those two energumens were the principal engines of that evil event.

We are none of us determinists, are we? We don’t think that, if things happen, they were bound to happen. So yes, what Lenin called a revolutionary situation did exist in Russia. But with him and the other ghoul gone, it’s possible that situation would have fizzled out.

I’ll spare you a list of tragedies that would have been prevented, the exact count of the millions of lives that would have been saved, wars that would have been averted. So is assassination really wrong? Any assassination?

Or look at what happened in Munich on 9 November, 1923. During the Beer Hall Putsch, the police killed 15 rampaging Nazis. Hitler, along with Göring, Hess and Rosenberg, was in the front row of the marchers, but he survived.

What if he hadn’t? Again, it’s conceivable that the Nazis wouldn’t have risen to power, which would have spared the world untold miseries. That’s another blow delivered to the conviction that all assassinations are wrong. That absolute turns out to be interlaced with relativism.

Suddenly we are entering the area of what used to be called ‘Hottentot morality’, a term that was coined in the 17^th century with deplorable disregard for the future placing of racism at the top of the deadly sins. The concept is usually encapsulated in the phrase: “If he steals my cow, that’s bad. If I steal his cow, that’s good.”

Once we find ourselves in this territory, God only knows where we’ll end up. For example, Boris Johnson was, and Sadiq Khan is, the mayor of London. Would you have been equally outraged had both of them found themselves on the receiving end of an assassin’s bullet?

Yes, I know, you’d be outraged in both cases. But equally? Don’t lie to me, your mother taught you to tell the truth. Admit your response would be at least partly tinged with your feelings about those gentlemen – I know mine would be.

Moving on, pacifists insist that any war is evil, and fair enough: most wars are. However, some wars, evil though they may be, prevent a greater evil. In that case they are just, and Augustine settled that point 1,600-odd years ago.

Relativism again breaks into the beautiful edifice of a priori certainty, forcing us to make a judgement, something today’s ethos insists we shouldn’t do. ‘Judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’ are among the worst things to be, almost as bad as ‘racist’ and ‘transphobe’.

Yet the very people who use those words that way express opinions every day and pass judgement every minute. Theirs, however, come down from a high moral ground, which spares them the branding iron of ‘judgemental’ and ‘opinionated’. It’s that relativism again, following us everywhere we go.

Even such beautiful concepts as freedom stop working if unqualified. There the English language offers an essential nuance absent in many other languages, such as French.

We distinguish between freedom and liberty, with the former being more inward, spiritual and the latter more outward, political. Freedom is more or less God-given; liberty is more or less a matter of consent.

But absolutes don’t apply to either: Penelope’s freedom to play the piano at home may interfere with our neighbours’ freedom to have a nap whenever they feel like one. People’s freedom to gridlock Westminster to register a lawful protest impinges on my freedom to drive to Covent Garden. Everyone’s democratic liberty to vote may destroy the country by giving it Keir Starmer.

An equitable accommodation, which is to say compromise, must be found in each case. But it takes subjective judgement to decide what is or isn’t equitable, so there goes another absolute, relativised right out of the window.

How do we make judgements, especially moral ones? What if my idea of morality is different from yours, yours from theirs, and theirs from anything known this side of hell?

How do we decide? More important, how do we throw all those private moralities into a cauldron, boil them together and produce a homogeneous and reasonably palatable mix called civilised society?

I know only one answer to this question, although I’m happy to entertain any others. All those relativist judgements must be traceable back to something immutable and unmovable. RG Collingwood called it the ‘absolute presupposition’, I have referred to it as the ‘metaphysical premise’, but we both meant the same thing: religious faith.

If we each practise our little relativities and at the same time judge their morality, that’s like the same man acting as both player and referee in a football match. If rules don’t come down from a single moral authority superior to us, it’s children’s time and there are no rules. Read Lord of the Flies to see what happens next.

Our judgements are all at least latently comparative. When rating the morality of a person, we judge him against a certain unquestionable standard and find him either wanting or in agreement. That doesn’t mean we’ll all reach the same conclusion; we may not.

But at least we’ll have a subject for sensible discussion. We may argue, but only about interpretation, not the criteria.

At the end of the argument, we may agree or disagree. In either case, we may remain friendly enough to have a drink together (mine is whisky, in case you’re wondering). More to the point, we’ll be able to squeeze our individualities into the framework of a corporate entity called society.

If, however, we have no such absolute authority, we’ll have not freedom but license, not liberty but anarchy, not society but an aggregate of atomised individuals illustrating Hobbes’s idea about war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes).

That may not happen instantly or even quickly. But if our relativities aren’t all originally built on the foundation of something all or most of us accept as absolute truth, it will happen eventually. That’s how civilisations end, and it’s arrogant in the extreme to think that ours is any different.

Over the past few days 30,000 Russian and Belarusian soldiers have conducted the Zapad exercise, figuring out how best to expand Russian colonial aggression.

By way of the warm-up, 23 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace on 9 September, obviously to test the state of NATO air defences.

That state turned out to be rather worrying: the combined efforts of Polish, Italian, Dutch and German contingents managed to shoot down only four invaders. By comparison, the Ukrainians tend to destroy up to 90 per cent of Russian drones.

That performance must have encouraged the commanders of the Zapad exercise to put even more effort into preparing to recreate the Soviet empire. Missile launches, simulated airstrikes, logistics fine-tuning have all been honed to maximum sharpness.

But, as Messrs Stalin and Hitler demonstrated in the 1940s, it’s not enough to have efficient soldiers, planes and tanks. Success in war may well depend not only on martial efforts but also on diplomatic ones.

Hitler found it out the hard way, by forming his Pact of Steel with Mussolini’s Italy first and then turning it into the Axis by adding Japan. Yet on balance those allies did more harm than good for the Nazi war effort.

The Italian army constantly needed help from German troops that could otherwise have been deployed on the eastern front. The German Supreme Commander in Italy, Field Marshal Kesselring, often complained that it took one German division to keep one Italian division in the fight, which rather negated the overall purpose.

Moreover, not being an industrial power, Italy could produce little in the way of armaments other than state-of-the-art warships. However, after the first clash with the greatly outnumbered Royal Navy in the Mediterranean, those wonderful ships still afloat stayed bottled up in their harbours for the duration of the war.

Meanwhile, Hitler was begging his other major ally, Japan, to strike at Russia from the east just as he was attacking her from the west. Had Japan done so, the Soviet Union would have probably collapsed before 1941 was out.

But, deaf to those entreaties, Japan chose to strike against the US instead. That enabled the Soviets to throw their fresh and now superfluous Far Eastern divisions into the Battle of Moscow, which stopped the German advance and enabled Stalin eventually to win the war.

The other effect of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor was enabling FDR to take the US into the war, against the wishes of most Americans and a sizeable congressional pressure. Hitler must have been muttering the German equivalent of “with allies like Italy and Japan, who needs enemies?”.

Stalin, on the other hand, had the US and Britain as allies, and what a difference. Not only was Hitler forced to fight a two-front conflict, but British Arctic convoys and American Pacific ones also carried supplies to Russia, without which Stalin admitted he would have lost the war.

The US in particular supplied over $11 billion worth of goods (some $150 billion in today’s money), including 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks and mountains of food, fuel, explosives, metals and other raw materials.

This time Russia and the West aren’t allies but enemies, which the former realises more keenly than the latter. As a result, while Trump continues to alienate America’s current or potential friends, Putin is doing his level KGB best to secure useful alliances for Russia in her war on the West.

He can count in his camp both China and India, together amounting to 36 per cent of the world’s population. China is a separate case, what with her harbouring global ambitions of her own. But India could have swung either way before Trump announced a 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods.

He also hosted the head of the Pakistani army at the White House, boasting that he had personally ended a four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May. Thereby Trump reinforced, mainly in his own eyes, his claim to being a peacemaker worthy of divine blessing and, more to the point, the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the past few weeks Trump also claimed to have singlehandedly ended the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the first time on a radio show in late August: “And I said, ‘I’m not going to do a trade deal if you guys are going to fight – it’s crazy. Anyway, one thing led to another, and I got that one settled.”

Unfortunately, he said ‘Aberb-aijan’ instead of Azerbaijan and ‘Albania’ instead of Armenia. That confused stenographers no end as they assumed the president spoke of some mysterious ‘Arabaijan’. As for Albania, another Muslim country, as far as they knew she wasn’t at war with either Arabaijan or anyone else.

That slip of the tongue was put down to Trump’s venerable age, which probably was true. However, a fortnight later he confused Armenia with Albania a second time, again claiming credit for bringing peace to two countries whose names he either didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce.

Focusing on the president’s deeds rather than words, one has to admit with some chagrin that they are just about as incoherent. He has successfully pushed India into an alliance with China and hence Russia at a time when India was beginning to edge closer to the West.

In late August, the Indian prime minister Modi engaged in public foreplay with Xi and Putin at the summit of the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation. That was the first time in seven years that Indian leaders had agreed to meet with their Chinese counterparts.

Then the Indian government issued a press release, saying it wanted to “further strengthen defence co-operation and foster camaraderie between India and Russia, thereby reinforcing the spirit of collaboration and mutual trust”.

In that collaborative and trustful spirit, 65 Indian officers from elite regiments took part in the Zapad exercise demonstrably aimed against the West (which is what the Russian word zapad means). The number may be symbolic but symbols matter, not by themselves but by what they, well, symbolise.

In this case, they symbolise a singular failure of Trump’s foreign policy to secure strong alliances for America and NATO in the likely future war with Russia. Russia, on the other hand, seems to be doing better in that department. If China and India throw their bulk behind Putin’s aggression in Europe, that juggernaut will be so much harder to stop.

All in all, the world would be more secure if Trump got his coveted Nobel Peace Prize, possibly augmented with the Vatican accolade of canonisation, and then withdrew himself from peace-making efforts. They are making a Third World War more, rather than less, likely.

The other day Trump saw an open goal and hit it.

When European NATO members demanded yet again that the US impose new sanctions on Russia, he said he’d do so – provided NATO members stopped buying Russian hydrocarbons.

Now, only those who won’t see fail to notice that Trump hates to upset his friend Vlad. And nothing would upset Putin more than the kind of sanctions that don’t so much hurt his economy as destroy it.

That’s why Trump plays his final-warning game so crudely and ludicrously. He keeps telling Putin that he’d visit apocalyptic plagues on Russia unless Putin starts peace negotiations within a certain period, usually a fortnight.

When that term expires, Trump repeats the same mantra word for word: unless… peace… two weeks. And if the current two-week deadline isn’t honoured, why, Putin had better brace himself for another final warning.

Each time Trump finds a pretext not to act on his threats. But for once NATO’s shameful boost to Russia’s war economy gives him a legitimate excuse.

Of all NATO members, Turkey is the biggest culprit. Last month alone, Turkey spent almost €3 billion on Russian hydrocarbons, making her the third biggest buyer after China and India.

The EU, mainly Putin-friendly Hungary and Slovakia, buy Russian oil to the tune of €22 billion a year, while France, Belgium, Spain and Holland import Russian liquefied natural gas.

This makes NATO’s demands on America hypocritical to the point of being cynical, which Trump was only too happy to point out in his idiosyncratic style:

“I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing, and when all NATO Nations STOP BUYING OIL FROM RUSSIA.

“As you know, NATO’S commitment to WIN has been far less than 100 per cent, and the purchase of Russian Oil, by some, has been shocking! It greatly weakens your negotiating position, and bargaining power, over Russia. Anyway, I am ready to ‘go’ when you are.”

That was calling NATO’s bluff, but then Trump went on to prove he needs no lessons in hypocrisy and cynicism from his European allies. He issued a counter-demand that Europe impose crippling tariffs on China, the biggest importer of Russian oil.

However, while slapping ridiculously high tariffs on countries like Switzerland and Brazil, Trump himself has refrained from imposing extra tariffs on China. His reasons are the same as Europe’s are for buying  Russian oil: the American economy is in hock to cheap Chinese imports.

Yet Trump’s statement is worth looking at in some detail. This is what he wrote: “China has a strong control, and even grip, over Russia, and these powerful Tariffs will break that grip. This is not TRUMP’S WAR (it would never have started if I was President!), it is Biden’s and Zelensky’s WAR.”

The second part is staggering in its fatuousness: “it is Biden’s and Zelensky’s WAR”. Not Putin’s by any chance? Perish the thought. Trump happily exculpates his friend Vlad, thereby validating the Kremlin canard that it was the West that attacked Russia using the Ukraine as a proxy.

But the first part is interesting, for there Trump repeats the claims regularly made by émigré Russian experts. They wonder why, given the West’s craven response to Russian aggression, Putin has so far refrained from using tactical nuclear weapons.

The risk of escalation into a full-scale nuclear exchange with NATO would be minimal, they argue, and I agree. If NATO refuses to supply long-range missiles to the Ukraine, one can’t realistically hope it’ll opt for a cataclysmic response to yet another Russian atrocity.

The same experts conclude that Putin keeps his nukes in his trousers specifically because China ordered him to do so.

There is little doubt, of course, as to who is the senior partner in the Russia-China alliance. Russia has inexorably and willingly been turning herself into Xi’s vassal. But vassalage isn’t slavery.

It’s possible that Xi can tell Putin how far he can or can’t go in his war effort, but I for one tend to take any news coming from Russian sources with a grain of salt, a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila.

It’s in that spirit that I look at the news broken the other day by Putin’s loyal newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta. It quoted Putin as saying:

“The acute period of war conflict with the West in the fields of the Ukraine is entering its final stage. Having decided not to use the most terrifying weapons, trying to save the lives of our brave warriors and civilian population, Russia seems unlikely to score the kind of victory she achieved against Napoleon’s army. That war secured four decades of peace in Europe. Unlikely also is a complete rout similar to the one of Hitler’s army.”

Hold on a moment, let me find that bottle of tequila. This smacks of an exercise in strategic deception, the only martial art in which KGB Russia excels. However, if the statement is genuine, it spells a complete turnaround in Russian dealings with the West.

Her key stratagem is nuclear blackmail, with Putin saying more than once that, yes, he’s aware that Russia can’t compete with the West in conventional warfare. However, Russia is a great nuclear power, at least equal to the US and in some areas superior to it.

Therefore… and out come the usual threats about turning America into radioactive dust, creating a giant strait between Canada and Mexico, putting Britain on the ocean bed and so on. The blackmail worked, by limiting Western aid to the Ukraine to a bare minimum.

If true, that statement means that Putin has forsworn nuclear weapons as a blackmail tactic. If untrue, it’s an attempt to lull the West into a sense of security while Russia prepares a surprise strike. In any case, commentary from Western intelligence analysts would be welcome.

Or, to save time, Trump could just ask his friend Vlad about that. As he once explained, he trusts Putin more than America’s own intelligence services.

 P.S. Tyler Robinson, the murderer of Charlie Kirk, was ‘romantically’ involved with a transsexual furry (a chap who identifies as an animal and walks on all fours wearing furry pelts). Apparently, it was his paramour who shopped Tyler to the police. Can’t you trust anybody?

The Greeks called it ochlocracy, mob rule to you. Aristotle described it as a pathological form of government, one of the three ‘bad’ ones, tyranny and oligarchy being the other two. His teacher Plato saw no valid difference between ochlocracy and democracy, and his spirit must have wafted through Westminster yesterday.

I don’t know how many in the 150,000-strong mob that overran Whitehall yesterday were familiar with such antecedents. If I were to venture a guess, I’d suggest, in round numbers, none.

However lacking their book knowledge was, their tattoos were abundant. To a naked eye their number certainly exceeded one per capita, which neatly harmonised with the feral expressions on faces contorted in hatred. Eyewitnesses report that many of those faces were adorned with broken noses, bespeaking lives lived hard.

The men, and most of the participants were male, came out to protest against unchecked immigration, or rather against immigration tout court. We could discuss the justice of their cause at our leisure, and I don’t doubt for a second that it was just.

Similarly, the Russians who were killing government officials and policemen in 1905-1917 had legitimate grievances. So did the German SA gangs in the 1920s – the Weimar Republic was indeed running Germany into the ground.

Lest I be accused of polemical hyperbole, I’m not equating Tommy Robinson types with either the Bolsheviks or the Nazis. My point is that, when the rule of law disintegrates, and the mob acquires illicit power, the results may well turn out much worse than whatever provoked such mass action.

Some of those who stampeded and screamed their way through Whitehall and Trafalgar Square might have genuinely wanted to engage in lawful protest. Yet such mass outings also invariably attract a violent mob, thuggish trouble-makers out to have the kind of fun they normally have at football matches.

Let me qualify this observation. The likelihood of mayhem at such events depends on the demographic composition of the crowd. For example, when in 2002 another Labour class warrior, Tony Blair, banned hunting with dogs, 450,000 farmers and Barbour-wearing country folk also marched through Westminster.

(Most people I knew were there, but since I’m pathologically averse to crowds of any kind, I stayed at home. This little phobia may have something to do with my first cousin having been trampled to death by a Moscow football crowd when I was little.)

Yet that Liberty and Livelihood March produced no disorder, no attacks on the police and even no littering. This, though the crowd was three times the size of yesterday’s throng.

Relatively small the numbers might have been, but they made up for it by putting their hearts and fists into the action.

The lads came prepared. Not just a sea of Union Jacks but also blown up photographs of Charlie Kirk were waved in the cops’ faces, which strikes me as somewhat incongruous.

First, most people there hadn’t even heard Kirk’s name until his tragic death the other day. Second, he was murdered by an American born and bred, not by a migrant, legal or otherwise. The photos of the girls groomed and raped by Muslim gangs would have been more appropriate, if somewhat less current.

The crowd were also shouting invective alluding to Starmer’s perverse sexual practices and questioning the nature of his relations with his mother. This suggested they found fault not just with the influx of cultural aliens, but also with the whole ethos that made that invasion welcome.

Again, I sympathise with such sentiments wholeheartedly. If it were up to me, that whole subversive lot of our rulers would be run out of Westminster and replaced with… Sorry, that’s where I stumble.

Tommy Robinson and other savage thugs? God forbid. Nigel Farage’s Reform? Perhaps. However, I distrust single-issue politics, even if I happen to agree with the single issue, as I do in this case.

Farage has tried, rather successfully, to broaden his electoral appeal in recent years. But essentially he remains lucid and convincing on one issue only: Britain’s sovereignty, which he correctly sees as threatened in the short term by the EU and in the long term by swarms of aliens diluting the nation’s identity.

This is a vital issue, no question about it. But suppose for a second that the country finally manages to shake the EU dust (with its ECHR particles) off its feet and to secure her borders against those dinghies. What then? Other concerns would come into play, the economy prime among them.

When broaching such subjects, Farage and his people are rather vague, or sometimes even not fundamentally different from Labour. I understand why: not all of Reform’s grassroots support comes from conservative types.

Farage’s earlier party, UKIP, as one of its leaders explained to me, contained as many national socialists as national conservatives, which is why it couldn’t come out fighting the general conservative corner. National socialism, of course, has had a rather bad press due to some widely publicised historical events.

There was a tendency on the part of UKIP to join forces with Tommy Robinson and his thugs, which I found worrying then and still do, now that UKIP has been rebranded as Reform. Yesterday supplied plenty of reasons to worry.

The tattooed mob attacked the police with sticks, stones, empty bottles, flares, traffic cones and everything else within reach. To the accompaniment of Elgar’s music blaring through the sound system, 26 cops got various injuries, including broken teeth, a broken nose, a concussion, a prolapsed disc and a head trauma.

Tommy Robinson, who recently got away with yet another assault charge, was having a field day, making incendiary speeches and egging his troops on. Nigel Farage had wisely refrained from lending his voice or his name to the proceedings.

He harbours prime ministerial ambitions, and there is a groundswell of public support for his Reform. But our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it extremely hard for third parties to translate votes into seats.

In last year’s general elections, Reform got roughly four million votes, 14 per cent of all votes cast. However, that gave the party only one per cent of the seats in the Commons. On the other hand, Labour’s 34 per cent of the popular vote gave it 65 per cent of the seats.

Though I believe that the only natural political home for conservatives is the Tory Party, it has become so useless as to become marginal. It may eventually get its act together, but by that time there may be no Britain qua Britain left for it to govern.

Hence, if Reform can become agile enough to wiggle its way through the thicket of first-past-the-post, it may provide the only realistic alternative to the two main parties, one subversive ideologically, the other by default. However, that battle must be fought in Westminster Palace, not Westminster streets.

If the mob is used as the battering ram of new politics, it will eventually hold the resulting government to ransom, in effect telling it “We put you there, and we can kick you out unless…” What follows that ellipsis may well spell the end of our civilisation.

If there is no other way to stop the systematic – and accelerating – destruction of the country, then Britain has no hope. Here I must caution you against the belief that things have got to be so bad that they can only get better.

Our despair may plumb such depths that we forget history that teaches that things can always get much, much worse. I remember screaming myself hoarse making this point in the run-up to the 2024 election, when many good people were so furious with the useless Tories that they were ready to welcome any alternative.

Yes, tsarist Russia was rotten, but what eventually replaced it was the devil incarnate. The Weimar Republic was incompetent, but what followed was unadulterated evil. I’m not saying the same is likely to happen in Britain. But we’ll be making a grave mistake if we at least don’t consider the possibility.

Predictably, American vocabulary has changed since I left the country in 1988. Hundreds of new words have appeared, old words have acquired new meanings and – more to my point today – old denotations now convey new connotations.

One such is ‘American exceptionalism’. The expression existed in my day, but it was hardly ever used in a positive sense. Liberals associated it with conservatism, conservatives with the loony fringe, and the apolitical masses didn’t use it at all.

That connotation reflected the atmosphere of relative restraint prevalent in public discourse. The political landscape resembled a gently undulating valley with fluffy sheep grazing on the slopes, with only the odd wolf distorting the pastoral serenity. This has since changed into sharply contrasting peaks and troughs regularly shaken up by violent tremors.

Hence ‘American exceptionalism’ has evidently moved from the loony fringe into the Right part of the mainstream where it has been elevated to an ideal. I realised this by listening to the late Charlie Kirk’s orations, all delivered with the sermonising aura typical of American propagandists of both Right and Left.

To me, or any other National Review reader or writer of my day, terms like ‘American exceptionalism’ or ‘American nationalism’ are extremist statements of patriotism, the love of one’s country. And extremism doesn’t belong in conservative – or any other serious – thought.

Such terms turn a laudable feeling into an objectionable cult. Talking to some MAGA people and listening to Kirk’s speeches, one gets the impression that any demarcation line between the two has been smudged.

If we put ourselves in the moccasins of the first Americans, we’ll see that they could hardly avoid a certain amount of pantheistic mysticism when finding themselves face to face with a vast, promising and yet hostile expanse.

Much as they prayed for riches in the future, they knew that the present was more likely to greet them with the fangs of wild beasts or the tomahawks of aboriginal scalpers. The only way to keep going was to lay some groundwork for optimistic fatalism: they had to deify their exploits.

God had to be on their side because no one else was. To find enough resolve to build a new country they had to strive to build a new Jerusalem.

But there is only one real Jerusalem – everything else, including England’s green and pleasant land, can only be its simulacrum. However, this particular American simulacrum has survived to this day, almost 400 years after John Winthrop first described America with a quotation from St Matthew about “a city on a hill”.

The overall sentiment is that America isn’t just different from all other countries. It’s saintlier and therefore morally superior. Hence it’s America’s holy mission to solve every little problem of life internally – and then shine the torch of truth and goodness on other countries, even those that try to shield their eyes from the blinding light.

In 1809 Jefferson, at best a deist, expressed the principle of America as a beacon without relying on biblical references: “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence.”

Tastes differ but facts shouldn’t: America was not “the only monument… and the sole depository… of freedom and self-government”. Britain, to name one other country, had form in those areas too. But then the puffery of political pietism knows no bounds.

Never in the history of the world, at least not between the collapse of Rome and the emergence of Bolshevik Russia, had there existed another nation so bursting with such refreshingly sanctimonious arrogance. Many have commented on the perverse references to religion in Bolshevik iconography, with atheistic people expected to worship the mummified relics of a secular saint, but few have noticed that the same mimicry is just as robust in America.

Hardly any speech by American leaders from the 18^th century onwards has omitted quasi-religious references to canonised historical figures, whose deeds are routinely described in Biblical terms. “Fellow citizens, the ark of your covenant is the Declaration of Independence,” pronounced John Quincy Adams, and he meant it exactly as it sounded.

Sacral visual imagery also abounds, as do the mock-religious shrines to past leaders. George Washington in particular is worshipped in a religious manner as the ‘Great Father of the Country’.

The interior of the Capitol dome in Washington displays a fresco entitled The Apotheosis of Washington where the sainted Father is surrounded by Baroque angels and also representations of other Founders in contact with various pagan gods, such as Neptune, Vulcan and Minerva.

The Jefferson Memorial, not far away, is also a replica of a pagan shrine, with various quasi-religious references inscribed. Cited, for example, is a quotation from Jefferson’s letter to Washington preaching “God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? … Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”

It is useful to remember that these ringing words were uttered by a deist, more likely an agnostic, who had his chattel slaves flogged to mincemeat for trying to escape. The statement would therefore be hypocritical if we were to forget that by then ‘God’ had become the shorthand for ‘America’.

In due course, another term was added to the lexicon of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s the journalist John L. O’Sullivan coined the term ‘manifest destiny’ to describe America’s messianic mission in the world. Said manifest destiny was according to him ‘divine’: it was incumbent upon America “to establish on earth the moral dignity and salvation of man”.

In other words, it was now up to America, not Jesus Christ, to save the world. Americans thus corrected the conservative triad of God, king and country by eliminating the middle element and merging the other two into one.

Such sentiments have always existed at the grassroots of American conservatism. But in my day they were seldom enunciated in the mainstream. American conservatives, such as aforementioned NR readers and writers, tended to be civilised gentlemen, not loudmouthed zealots.

They were the ones who created a minor revolution in the American political mind, making conservatism intellectually, culturally and socially respectable. However, judging by the shift in the connotation of ‘American exceptionalism’, the relay baton has been passed from the gentlemen to the uncouth touts and ideologues.

Connotation has triumphed over denotation, and most activists may be unaware of the historical undercurrents into which I’ve barely dipped. They proudly list ‘exceptionalism’ in their rota of American virtues, and no one questions their conservative credentials.

No one with any influence or public presence, that is. Civilised, erudite, well-spoken conservatives still exist in America, and in fact I know a few who are quite appalled. But they no longer have an audible voice. The Right has fallen into the hands of shrill demagogues who confuse jingoism with patriotism, chest-thumping ardour with arguments and semi-literate musings with rhetoric.

That’s why European conservatives don’t see the MAGA types as their kin. Conservatism, as I never tire of arguing, is above all a matter of style and temperamental predisposition, not ideology. A real conservative wouldn’t be caught dead sporting a legible baseball cap and spouting slogans in elementary-school English.

And of course, loud protestations of American exclusivity have a rather limited international appeal. This is unfortunate because, issue by issue, the MAGA types and British conservatives agree more than they disagree.

However, much as they may be consonant in their ideas, they are stylistically incompatible. That makes them incompatible, full stop.

When MAGA activist Charlie Kirk was murdered yesterday, he was doing what he did best: debating politics with students on their campus. A sniper bullet hit him in the neck, and life gushed out of his severed artery.

One would expect that brutal crime to bring people of different political views together: Right, Left of Centre, they are all members of civilised society. And civilised people react to the murder of even political opponents in, well, a civilised way.

By way of illustration, I’d like to offer my own response to the murder of the Left-wing Labour MP Jo Cox on 16 June 2016.

To set the scene, Mrs Cox espoused ideas and policies I found as deplorable as American ‘liberals’ doubtless found the ideas and policies of Charlie Kirk (some of his pronouncements don’t sit well with me either, but that’s a different matter). With that in mind, I invite you to compare my reaction with theirs.

Lest you accuse me of bragging, I’m using my own words not out of egotism but out of laziness. I know many other conservatives wrote similar things, but it would take time and effort to look up their comments. My own, however, are at my fingertips:

“I don’t care what objectionable or noble causes Mrs Cox supported, what kind of politician she was or wasn’t, what her career might or might not have held in store for her.

“When a young woman in the prime of her life is butchered by a lunatic degenerate, when she dies with the last words ‘My pain is too much’, when she leaves a bereaved husband and two motherless children behind, I can feel the tragedy of it all as much as anyone. I pray for her soul and for her family; I hope God will judge her with kindness and she’ll rest in peace.”

So much for the point. Now comes the counterpoint of ‘liberal’ social media comments on the murder of a 31-year-old man leaving behind a young wife and two little children:

“Hitler giving Charlie Kirk a tour in hell.”

“He was “a f***ing Nazi. And you know what kind of Nazi is the best Nazi? A dead one. Thank God that s***stain of a person is no longer in this world”.

“Why didn’t Charlie Kirk just debate the bullet? He would have easily deflected.”

“I don’t know I think getting killed by your favorite thing in the world is sweet. It’s a nice gesture.” [A reference to Kirk’s championship of the Second Amendment.]

“If he doesn’t make it at least he died with the love of his life, school shootings.” [Ditto]

“This wouldn’t have happened if Charlie Kirk had been armed.” [Ditto]

Such feral gloating is a verbal equivalent of a savage devouring the liver of his dead enemy. Alas, this is the tonal quality of current political debate, and not only in the US.

People no longer have opponents they want to prove wrong. They have enemies they want to see dead.

It hasn’t always been like this. For example, in the early ‘50s William F Buckley published two books that attacked the liberal mindset dominant in America, God and Man at Yale and McCarthy and His Enemies. Tempers were running hot at the time, with McCarthy accusing every liberal of being a communist and every communist of being a Soviet spy.

Not all of his accusations were justified, although many were. But his language was intemperate, emotive, often rude and slanderous. McCarthy’s targets responded in kind, and the air was think with invective.

Then Buckley’s books came out, with one showing the totalitarian nature of ‘liberalism’ at Yale, the other defending McCarthy’s message if not necessarily his style. Most reviewers, some of whom were mentioned in the books by name, took issue with Buckley’s assertions, indeed with his politics as such.

Yet most of them complimented his style and verve, saying how pleased they were to have such a talented and erudite opponent. Today he’d be getting death threats.

The level of public discourse has dropped below the lower limit possible within a viable civilisation. Political zealotry now rides roughshod over manners, style, integrity, even common decency. People no longer hold their speech to such tests, or even the tests of logic and common sense.

As they move farther and farther away from the source of our civilisation, they gradually lose all links with it. Their own passions, however expressed, take precedence over civility, that irreplaceable cognate of civilisation.

That turns them into barbarians, which word originally designated those outside civilisation, in that case Greek. And barbarians don’t recognise any checks on their words and increasingly their deeds. Not all of them vent their feelings with a high-powered rifle, but many of them can do so and, given the chance, will.

People who fear the possibility of apocalyptic nuclear war should look no further than social media comments on Charlie Kirk’s death. Those who cheer a homicidal act are capable of pushing the suicidal button. Having slipped the shackles of civilisation, they haven’t replaced them with any other restraints.

The political arena is resonant with jarring shrieks, and the most piercing ones come from savages incongruously called ‘liberals’ or those more appropriately called ‘populists’. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I dare say.

Charlie Kirk, RIP