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Love is in the air

“Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it”. That’s how Dr Johnson stopped a tedious debate on what he correctly considered a self-evident truth.

That quip doesn’t meet the requirements of rigorous rhetoric, and yet it’s legitimate. For when it comes to anything more complex than two and two makes four, much of our knowledge is intuitive.

And what can be more intuitive than love? Any rationalisation of it would merely be post-rationalisation of something already known intuitively. So why bother?

This also applies to politics. And my intuition says that Republicans in Congress are setting up a massive betrayal of the Ukraine.

Moreover, having spoken in this fashion, my intuition refuses to shut up. It then insists that, whatever arguments those gentlemen put forth, their plan is at least partly based on their latent affection for Putin and their whole-hearted desire to hitch their political wagons to Trump.

The first emotion is visceral; the second, pragmatic. Though not all Republicans love Trump, they have obviously decided to align the party behind him, now he has the nomination in the bag.

That’s why they are doing all they can to block aid to the Ukraine. I’ll get to the possible nature of the scenario they may be setting up in a second. But first I’d like to talk about the intuitive disposition behind it.

When I first laid my eyes on Putin, I instantly knew all there is to know about him. That evil yet cunning nonentity united in his person the two formative components of Russian post-1991 government: KGB and organised crime. That’s all; everything else is just hot air.

Hence nothing Putin has since said or done came as a surprise to me. When evil nonentities reach power, they only ever use it to evil and idiotic ends. Whenever I looked at Putin, I saw the living proof of this historical observation.

But that’s not how many other Westerners, especially those on the political right, saw him. Fair enough, they lacked my native knowledge of Russia. And when it comes to that doctrinally enigmatic land, there is no substitute for native knowledge, ideally backed up with the rational kind.

None of this is unique to me. People of similar interests and background, which is to say other academically inclined ex-Russians, see and think the same things, with only a minor diversion here or there.

However, most American, French or British conservatives see something else. Even if they agree with the general thrust of my understanding of Putin’s Russia, there’s always an unspoken “yes, but” at the tail end.

They have their own longings for public virtue, and these are left unsatisfied by their own governments. Their minds can produce cogent arguments on what it is they are missing in the contemporary West, but their hearts still feel dejected and empty.

They desperately need some electrodes, if only rhetorical ones, that can touch the far recesses of their minds to produce an instant emotional spark. And Putin, his own instincts honed in the KGB, knows how to serve up such electrodes.

Most of those people say they don’t like Putin, and they mean it. But liking is different from loving. We like people for something; we love them in spite of everything.

Each carefully designed conservative pronouncement by Putin is a touch he adds to the picture of a political ideal right-thinking Westerners have in their minds. They respond with love that takes permanent residence in their souls. Every time Putin does something beastly, the cerebral room they allocate for that feeling gets smaller. But residual love is hardly ever evicted altogether.

Even when it is, it leaves a warm memory behind. That’s why even those congressional Republicans who deplore Putin’s atrocities are receptive to specious arguments about America having no dog in that fight and American taxpayers being ripped off for no good reason. Okay, Putin is ghastly, they admit – and then comes that lapidary ending: yes, but… .

I’m not going to speculate on the links between Trump and Putin – many others have written books on that subject, catering to my intuitive understanding without providing the factual tools to chisel it in stone. Nor am I going to deliver another litany of loving things Trump has said about Putin over the years – I’ve done it often enough, and so have many others.

Yet that love is discernible. Putin is Trump’s kinda guy, even if Trump himself wouldn’t do most things Putin has done. And I’m sure many congressional Republicans feel the same way.

That’s why they don’t have overwhelming moral reasons not to deny aid to the Ukraine, or to use the threat of such denial for their own purposes. Chief among these is sincere, wholehearted commitment to political self-perpetuation. And if delivering the Ukraine to Putin serves that end, then so be it. Nothing personal, Ukraine. Just business.    

Yesterday the US Senate passed a $95 billion aid package for the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The bill now travels to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where it may well die.

The bill needs a simple majority, 218 votes, to pass, and every indication is the votes are there. All 212 Democrats are likely to support it, and more than six Republicans are inclined to do so. Yet Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, has already said he wouldn’t put the bill to a vote no matter what.

He can invoke the Hastert Rule saying that, even if the overall congressional support is there, the Speaker doesn’t have to schedule any vote that doesn’t have majority support within his own party. So nobody can budge Johnson, and he is one of those with love of Putin in his heart.

Johnson, a Southern Baptist, is a conservative’s conservative, in the American sense of the word. And Putin has used the electrodes I mentioned earlier to excite every erogenous zone in Johnson’s brain.

Evolution, climate, abortion, homomarriage, Gay Day parades, immigration, Christianity – Putin has enunciated every belief Johnson cherishes (as do I, for that matter), except perhaps one about the Earth being only 6,000 years old. That’s why Johnson had no problem accepting a $38,000 campaign contribution from American Ethane, a company controlled by Russian ‘oligarchs’ (Putin’s proxies) Nikolayev, Yuriev, Kunatbayev and Abramov.

I’m not implying he has been bribed to support Putin’s corner, only that doing so doesn’t go against his convictions, both rational and intuitive. Putin may be a bastard, but, to paraphrase FDR, he is Mike Johnson’s bastard.

Johnson shares my misgivings about Trump’s presidency. When the latter first appeared on the political stage, Johnson dismissed him out of hand: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief. … I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

As a faithful Republican and practical man, however, Johnson supports Trump’s bid, and his attempts to torpedo the aid package for the Ukraine may be part of the overall party strategy.

I think the Republicans are setting up a grandstanding gesture for Trump to re-enter the White House as the peacemaker and possibly a Nobel laureate.

As close to 5 November as possible, Trump may announce a ‘deal’ he has struck with Putin and Zelensky. I can’t speculate on the specifics, but it’ll be an exchange of some Ukrainian territory for Putin’s empty promise to respect the integrity of whatever is left.

How much territory, I don’t know. Probably whatever Russia currently occupies or a bit less, but that’s sheer conjecture. The important thing is that Putin will get off with what he’ll be able to sell internally as a win or at least an honourable draw.

Yet how can Trump and his Republican friends ensure that Russia and the Ukraine will accept that deal? The only lever they have in their hands is aid: bringing Zelensky around by denying it, and Putin, by threatening to step it up.

Meanwhile the Republicans have a vested interest in making sure the Democrats don’t use the same lever to prise their own deal out of that war. That would steal Trump’s thunder, conceivably denying him entry into the White House.

This explains the current tactics used by Mike Johnson and other Republicans in Congress. They want their man to win, and they don’t care how many Ukrainians have to die to make sure he does.

Lest you accuse them of naked cynicism, I must come to their defence. Cynicism, yes, of course, but not just that. There’s also a small compartment in their hearts where love of Putin lives, or used to.

And today of all days, who can speak ill of love? Happy St Valentine’s Day!  

Amicus Plato…

… sed magis amica veritas, goes the ancient saying, a Latin paraphrase of what Aristotle said in Greek (“Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater one”). It’s in that spirit of friendly and regretful criticism that I’ll comment on the Russian émigré press and the United States.

The former has never denied column inches to the latter, and it’s now even more generous than ever. Understandably so, because the anti-Putin publications are still abuzz with comments on that interview.

Most writers accuse Putin of playing fast and loose with Russian history, and Carlson of being too ignorant of it to make that point, not to mention too sycophantic. All of that is as true as it is beside my point today.

For much to my chagrin I have to remark that most of those commentators are as ignorant about the West as Carlson is about Russia. That’s most unfortunate, especially since the West is where most of them live now.

Moreover, they use the West in general and the USA in particular as the gold standard Russia fails to meet, and again there’s no objection in these quarters. Indeed, the US is a much better country than Russia any way you look at it, and so she offers much to learn. However, if in the process those commentators falsify American history to make their point, they do more harm than good.

The only proper response to falsifications of history is the truth, not other, contradicting falsifications. Thus it’s true that American history is more benign than Russian. But it’s not true that American history is as white as those commentators are painting it.

By way of illustration, I’ll focus on today’s article by Andrei Nikulin, which is, regrettably, typical of those publications. Mr Nikulin is commenting on Putin’s outrageous claim that Russia attacked the Ukraine because she had to, with NATO having left her no other choice.

To wit: “An important part of justifying Russia’s actions in this imperial conflict is a question constantly asked: What would the US do if a hostile state appeared on her borders? Empire-hounds assume a supposedly self-evident answer suiting their purposes: probably the same thing Russia is doing now and always has done.”

Those ignoramuses miss the point, says Nikulin. They “cite Mexico as a hypothetical example, but ironically this example works only for those who don’t know the history of North America. For the States used to have such a neighbour, but to the north, not to the south. It was called Canada, and still is.”

Fair enough, continues Nikulin. Britain did use Canada as a base for harassing the US. That’s why America indeed tried to annex that territory in two wars, first during the Revolution, then in 1812. However, a negotiated peace was worked out eventually, which produced an amicable accommodation lasting to this day. “This proves that, in the long run, the way of quiet, dull, long and difficult negotiations turns out to be the most reliable and profitable.”

Be that as it may, words like ‘glass houses’ and ‘stones’ spring to mind. For Nikulin is guilty of the same sin of ignorance he justifiably ascribes to others.

Actually, there was nothing hypothetical about the history of US relations with Mexico. And, though it pains me to point this out, the way America handled those relations wasn’t so drastically different from what Putin is trying to do to the Ukraine.

The US annexed Texas in 1845, thereby bringing slavery to a territory where none had existed until then. The annexation was welcomed by most Texans, but as a result the US inherited the border disputes Texas had with Mexico.

President Polk resolved the situation in a fairly Putinesque way: by attacking Mexico in 1846. The war raged for two years and ended in Mexico’s defeat. As a result she lost 55 per cent of her territory: present-day Texas, California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of today’s Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

I’m not going to delve into the complexities of American history now. It’s Russia, not America, that’s my subject in hand. Suffice it to say that, though the US isn’t doing all that well at present, over history the country has shown her ability to ride all sorts of storms, both at home and abroad. There is always hope for America.

That, alas, is more than I can say for Russia. She is currently governed by a frankly evil, fascist regime pouncing on Russia’s neighbours like a rabid dog and threatening to embroil the whole world in a cataclysmic conflict. Moreover, one can’t discern much in Russian history, especially that of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st, that would encourage an optimistic outlook into the future.

But that, as the Russians say, is only half the trouble. What spells trouble with a capital T is the absence of any realistic opposition, the kind that can combine intellect with courage and resolve to give Russia a brighter future in the post-Putin era.

In the beginning, we are taught, was the Word, which applies equally to sacred and temporal history. A successful physical attack on a way of life (which is what all revolutions worthy of the name are) can only proceed from a solid metaphysical beachhead.

That Russia lacks any sizeable group of potential revolutionaries is visible to the naked eye. But unfortunately she also lacks any profusion of sound thinkers who could give potential revolutionaries a bouncy springboard.

The émigré press is trying to find a viable alternative to Putinism in the pages of The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde, which are the last places where it could be found. Regurgitating woke platitudes that are even more alien to the Russians than to Westerners isn’t going to make Putin run scared.

Desperately needed is a political philosophy blending together everything usable in Russian history and everything useful in Western history. But mindless borrowing of faddish Western fallacies has already done much harm in Russia from the 18th century onwards, and it will do more if the Russians aren’t careful.

They need to analyse the history of the West deeply and dispassionately to see what has and hasn’t worked, and also what saplings could conceivably bear fruit if transplanted into the Russian soil. The starting point of such analysis is understanding based on knowledge. Alas, both are in short supply, and the article under review is only one proof among many.

Language develops. But from what?

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

This tactless question makes materialists squirm in every context in which it’s posed. Especially if the question is backed up with a reference to Parmenides who already knew in the 5th century BC that “nothing comes from nothing”.

In other words, before things develop they have to be. And when a materialist tries to explain how things came into being, he sounds childish at best.

In this as in most other areas, the Biblical explanation makes more sense on a purely logical and factual level – even if it’s read as a purely historical account and not a sacred text.

For example, Genesis helpfully provides the exact dimensions of Noah’s Ark. It so happens that these are ideal for any sea-going vessel, which mankind only discovered, or rather re-discovered, in the 18th century AD.

Here’s what the same book says about the origin of language: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” (Genesis 11:6)

Keeping the Lord out of it and staying impeccably secular for as long as logic allows, this says that to start with all people had the same language. Actually, linguists agree.

An overwhelming majority of them accept that all Indo-European languages (which is to say just about all languages) came from a single source, what they call the Proto-Indo-European Language. The general belief is that it was Sanskrit, but most linguists agree that Sanskrit too had precursors.

That stands to reason for any polyglot. He’d notice that all the languages he knows share a whole glossary of common roots, and practically every word recurs in one form or another throughout the linguistic atlas. That much is beyond dispute.

But how did the very first language, whatever it was, come about? Was it a collective human effort similar to that which produced the King James Bible translation? Then, 54 scholars led by the poet and philosopher Lancelot Andrewes got together and spent several years arguing in Latin about every English word to be used.

We know that’s how the KJV was produced, just as we know that the first language couldn’t possibly have been devised the same way.

For language is inseparable from thought, and thought from language. Every word is the symbol of a thing, action or concept. These can’t exist in man’s mind without their symbols, and nor can the symbols exist without them.

For the proto-Lancelot-Andreweses to design their proto-language, they already had to have a language to discuss which symbols were appropriate for which concepts. This is a logical oxymoron we have to dismiss with the contempt it deserves.

Thus we arrive at what looks like an irrefutable syllogism. Thesis: thought is the defining and exclusive property of man. Antithesis: thought is inseparable from language and vice versa. Synthesis: ergo, thought, language and man are co-extensive. The proto-man always had his proto-language.

Plato knew all this, as he knew most othe things: “For myself, I consider it an obvious truth that words could only have been imposed on things originally by a power above man.”

Now let’s cast another glance at that Genesis 11:6. Suddenly it’s a bit harder to argue against, isn’t it? That perfect logician Sherlock Holmes did say that, when all the options but one have been discarded, the remaining option is correct no matter how improbable it sounds.

A materialist may argue that, since thought uses information delivered by the senses, and all animals are capable of processing sensory data, thinking isn’t man’s exclusive property. This is a logical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question, assuming the conclusion).

This particular fallacy, that thought comes from the senses, was destroyed by Aquinas back in the 13th century. He distinguished between passive and active intellect. The former is indeed the ability to gather and process sensory data, and it’s common to all animals. Yet active intellect, the ability to raise sensory data to a generalised concept, belongs to man only.

Thus a dog may know that it gets dark at night, but only man can come up with the concept of night darkness. Language clearly divides its time between both types of intellect, which is why it belongs only to man and has done so since man took his first steps on earth.

Has it developed? But of course it has. Everything and everyone develops. However, insisting that development explains origin is another fallacy – but I’ve promised myself not to say nasty things about Darwin just this once.

The same logic can be applied to any institution man is assumed to have created, but could only have developed. The state is one such.

The materialist explanation is that at some point those primordial half-apes, the noble savages of Rousseau’s fancy, decided they needed to cooperate the better to protect themselves against other half-simian savages who were, by contrast, ignoble.

At that point, they got together in their cave, put their clubs aside, and designed a proto-state, the primitive entity that eventually evolved into the United Kingdom. This is yet another case of the simplest explanation being the silliest.

One can see how those proto-humans felt their natural rights to life, liberty and pursuit of wild animals were being violated by other proto-humans and indeed the stronger wild animals. In fact, people only ever talk about their rights when they feel they are under threat.

Yet for our ancestors to feel that way, they already had to have at their fingertips (or talontips, if you’d rather) the concept of their inalienable rights, something they were all entitled to and hence something they all had to come together to protect.

Hence the basics of social organisation had to exist from the very beginning, for otherwise there wouldn’t have remained any ‘primitive’ people to produce those ineffably beautiful cave paintings at Santander. That inchoate social organisation wasn’t delivered by any development, though of course it later evolved into more complex institutions.

The ancient thinkers knew all about such development millennia before Darwin, and they were aware of natural selection as one of its essential biological mechanisms.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses, contributing to the survival of the faster ones and thereby speeding up the whole species.

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before,” was how Chesterton described his arrival at theological truth. Darwin could have said the same thing about his ‘discovering’ natural selection, but didn’t. He was a different kind of man…

Yes, I know I promised not to be beastly to Darwin. But you know better than to trust an old liar like me.

Too old to be president?

Slippy Joe

Joe Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory [suffering from] diminished faculties in advancing age.”

Thus spoke special counsel Robert Hur, explaining why President Biden has to be cleared of mishandling classified documents. It doesn’t take a logician of Aristotelian attainment to see that a man deemed mentally incompetent to stand prosecution isn’t competent enough to sit in the White House.

The finding created a maelstrom of rhetoric, making up in breadth for what it lacks in depth. Mooted proposals ranged from invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (dismissing a president medically unfit to govern) to amending the Constitution.

If we have the lower age limit of 35 for any prospective president, the argument goes, it stands to reason that a higher limit should also be introduced. The most popular cut-off point is 75, although one gets the feeling that, if Trump were 57 rather than 77, most American pundits would favour nominating 56 as an age beyond which senility beckons.

A few remarks are in order. First, the existing threshold is too low: the 18th century’s 35 is today’s 50.

That limit was set when the average life expectancy wasn’t much higher than 35. A man that age (the possibility of a female president was discounted at the time) was thus in an advanced middle age and at the peak of his powers.

These days, he is widely regarded (in my family of two) as a barely post-pubescent youngster. Looking at this more objectively, it’s easy to argue that no one under 35 has enough experience of life to lead a nation. Such a man can be trusted to head a major bank where he’d only be risking other people’s money, but not a major country where he’d be risking other people’s lives.

Such a blanket premise seems straightforward to me. However, any specific upper limit is too open to dispute. One could make a persuasive argument that each case ought to be judged individually.

Show me a septuagenarian who claims his cognitive abilities haven’t declined, and I’ll show you a liar. The decline can be expressed as a proportion, say 10, 20 or 30 per cent. But a proportion of what?

Speaking from personal experience, my memory is nowhere near what it was 50 years ago, when I could memorise long poems after a single reading. But it’s still pretty decent, with most lapses occurring when I’m stuck for a word being interviewed in Russian.

Having an excellent memory is an accident of birth; its decline is a consequence of age. Fair enough. But what matters is the absolute cognitive level, not a relative one. If a chap has a capital of £500,000 and loses 50 per cent of it, he is still richer than someone who merely loses 10 per cent of his £50,000.

Getting back to Biden, of course he isn’t qualified to be president. And of course it’s instantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he isn’t compos mentis. But that’s not because he is 81, but because his proportional decline started from an abysmally low point.

Has he ever been fit to be president even when his cognitive faculties were in working order? Which career highlights prove Biden’s superlative statesmanship? Or indeed his towering intellect and razor sharpness? If there ever has been a walking argument against one-man-one-vote democracy, Biden is it.

There have been dangerously senile presidents before him. Woodrow Wilson’s wife ran the country in his second term. During Eisenhower’s second term, Nixon was more influential than vice presidents traditionally are. During Reagan’s second term, the country was effectively run by James Baker.

Yet ‘second term’ are the key words. Yes, there have been senile presidents before Biden. But he holds the distinction of having started out that way when first elected. His cognitive ability should have been tested when he first declared his candidature, which would have removed him from the ballot there and then.

That, to me, points to the solution. If insufficient experience before age 35 is universal, cognitive ability at any age is individual. Hence all presidential candidates regardless of age should undergo appropriate tests, including those measuring their IQ. Then it would be possible to talk in reliable absolute values, not meaningless relative ones.

Biden’s defenders, which in reality means Trump haters, point out that their bogeyman isn’t exactly a spring chicken either. And he too has had memory lapses in public.

Of course he has. A 77-year-old with the memory of a youngster would be superhuman and, whatever Trump’s fans aver, he isn’t. But he started from a much higher intellectual and cognitive plateau than Joe Biden. Hence a similar proportional decline has produced a less detrimental effect, and I for one am convinced that Trump is cognitively qualified to be president.

His other qualifications are something else again. Yesterday, for example, Trump made a staggeringly irresponsible statement that, if a NATO country didn’t spend enough on defence, he’d encourage Putin to attack it.

Putin has shown on several occasions that he doesn’t need any encouragement from US presidents. However, I’m sure he’d welcome this call to action. Saying what Trump said is especially inexcusable because it can’t be put down to any cognitive decline.

If he wanted to make the perfectly valid point that other NATO countries should spend more, much more, on defence, he should have just said it. In fact, those countries are beginning to get the message on their own, if too slowly.

However, it may come as a surprise to Trump, but some issues are more complex than just dollars and cents. It’s not just how much but also how effectively money is spent on defence. Britain, for example, is the world’s sixth biggest defence spender, and yet much of the funds are squandered by incompetence and corruption (for details, I recommend this article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13066863/Andrew-Neil-Britain-biggest-defence-spender-Armed-Forces-badly-equipped-incompetence.html)

The issue of NATO defence must be discussed seriously and urgently. However, doing so in Trump’s loose-cannon terms makes one wonder how much safer America would be in his hands.

Whenever anyone offers the slightest criticism of Trump’s logorrhoea, his admirers have a ready-made mantra: it’s not words but deeds that matter. It’s almost unsporting to offer the blindingly obvious retort to that: words become deeds when uttered by top politicians. Much blood has been spilled throughout history because of injudicious phrasing.

One example off the top: when meeting Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon unwisely alluded to the role the tsar had played in the assassination of his father. No lasting peace was possible after that. Alexander formed or joined one anti-Napoleon coalition after another, which eventually led to the carnage of 1812.

On balance, I’m glad I no longer vote in US elections, although if I did, I’d close my eyes, pinch my nostrils and go for Trump – hoping that, if he can encourage Putin to attack a Nato country, he’ll also be able to discourage him from doing so.

P.S. Speaking of imbecilic pronouncements on Putin, Peter Hitchens has outdone himself in his pro-appeasement article today. In the middle of it, à propos of nothing, he informed his geographically curious readers that Moscow is “magnificent amid snow”. The only conceivable logical connection I could think of was that we should stop arming the Ukraine because Moscow is pretty in white.

Just deserts aren’t what they used to be

It’s possible to stop working as English teacher, but impossible to stop being one. So, as a tribute to my education and first career, here’s the first mistake many people make: it’s indeed deserts, not desserts.

The second is usually sweet, the first is as often as not bitter. Both words come from French, respectively deservir (deserve) and desservir (clear the table).

The first word migrated to English some 600 years earlier than the second, married the word ‘just’, and the couple got to mean getting either the reward or punishment one deserves. The expression got a long lease on life because the English cherish the idea of justice – and words of French derivation.

These days, however, many use the word ‘justice’ interchangeably with ‘fairness’, which is another solecism. To make matters worse, they then identify fairness with equity, which in its turn they misinterpret as sameness and, consequently, mandated equality of outcomes.

For Miss Smith to feel she is getting her just deserts, she first has to change her honorific to ‘Ms’ and then get exactly the same reward for what she does as Mr Jones. Pursuing this quest to its supposedly logical end, she may also insist on acquiring the same primary sex characteristics as Mr Jones. That necessitates another change in the honorific, this time to Mr Smith, and typically also in her preferred pronouns, chosen from a growing list that puts Dr Johnson to shame.

Since such transition involves hormonal treatments, a person who only recently was Ms Smith may end up going bald or, even worse, getting testicular cancer. This possibility is relatively new, but the tendency towards it isn’t. I can prove this with a longish quotation from my favourite political thinker, Joseph de Maistre. It appears in his book St Petersburg Dialogues (1821):

“Hippocrates, the illustrious founder of the guild and profession of medicine, remarked that women never lost their hair or suffered pain in their feet; and yet nowadays they run short of hair and are afflicted with gout. They have put off their womanly nature and are therefore condemned to suffer the diseases of men. May heaven curse them for the infamous usurpation that these miserable creatures have dared to perpetrate on our sex!”

Note that in those unsophisticated times, the definition of a woman seemed to be rigid, lacking our progressive fluidity. None of those simpletons, including Maistre, envisaged the possibility of a Ms Smith turning into a Mr Smith, complete with all the fixtures such a transition would entail.

Since I prefer women to men, I’m not so much bothered by their usurpation of our sex as their betrayal of their own. But the problem, as you can see, goes back a long way.

Thanks to the ideas that were popular in Maistre’s time, the concept of equality, woefully misunderstood as sameness, became standard, and eventually dominant, currency. But this currency is counterfeit. Those who pass it are villains.

Just as women want to become men or men to become women, so have familiar concepts been turned inside out and upside down. Thus justice got to mean injustice in many contexts, and fairness now really stands for unfairness.

This takes me back to just deserts, everyone getting what he deserves. I’d suggest that, if this concept hadn’t been perverted, and people really got their due, no more and no less, millions of Britons would starve, few women would remain in the labour force, and unemployment among certain social and racial groups would be off the scale.

People’s rewards increasingly depend not on what their actions merit but on the volume of egalitarian clamour produced by the group they represent. Everyone hails meritocracy whenever it’s time to knock hereditary privilege. Yet meritocracy has got to mean clamocracy (my portmanteau neologism based on the Latin for ‘to scream’ and the Greek for ‘to rule’).

I first detected this problem in the mid-70s, when I worked as translator at NASA. There were eight of us in the department, but I was the only native Russian speaker fresh off the boat and the only professionally trained translator. Hence I did as much work as the other seven combined, and twice as fast.

Four of my colleagues were women, and somehow they discovered that I was earning some 15 per cent more than any of them. Considering both the quality and quantity of our comparative outputs, that disparity was more than fair. However, considering the insipient madness of modernity, the women weren’t getting their just deserts.

An investigation followed. We were all questioned, but the outcome was predetermined. The ladies all received backdated compensation for the injustice they had suffered. I was actually happy for them – we were all good friends. But that was the first time that I began to reassess my understanding of fairness and justice, by itself or in combination with ‘deserts’.

Today, it’s fashionable not just for children to ‘transition’ to a sex other than their natal own, but also for hitherto indisputable notions to ‘transition’ in the direction of their opposites. This, I believe, leaves the domain of philosophy, linguistics, political science, sociology and even psychology, to enter one of psychiatry.

The world has become certifiably mad, and Maistre thought he had problems. Had someone seriously demanded that he define a woman, he would have called for the men in white coats. Being locked up in a loony bin would have been just deserts for his interrogator.

Tucker isn’t Nancy

Tucker Carlson spent two and a half hours lobbing puffballs at Putin, predictably letting Vlad run off at the mouth, uttering one deranged lie after another.

The former Fox hack clearly didn’t go to the Nancy Astor school of interviewing evil despots.

When Lady Astor met Stalin in 1931, she asked him point-blank: “When will you stop killing people?” “When it’s no longer necessary,” replied Stalin, which was his tactful way of saying ‘never’. Though Lady Astor later went on to blot her copybook, that one question earns her my retroactive gratitude.

Today’s journalists have refined the art of subjecting politicians to third-degree interrogations, but they practise that art selectively. The Kennedy years come to mind, when he was the journalists’ darling and Nixon their bogeyman.

Comparing the questions put to the two politicians at press conferences, one could be forgiven for wondering if freedom of the press had a downside. Watching Carlson’s sycophantic interview of Putin, one could be forgiven for wondering just how free our press is.

Regardless of how much Carlson admires Putin, he should have remembered he was questioning an indicted war criminal. Basic professional integrity demanded that he ask Putin to respond to that indictment.

Launching an unprovoked aggression of a sovereign country, Mr Putin? Torturing and murdering civilians at Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and elsewhere? Mass rapes and looting? Kidnapping Ukrainian children and shipping them to Russian re-education camps? Indiscriminate bombing of residential areas? Threatening the West with nuclear annihilation?

And what about Russia’s internal situation? Meting out long prison terms for even the gentlest dissent? Murdering dissidents at home and abroad? Suppressing free press? Turning elections into a sham? Conducting a propaganda offensive so vile, mendacious, thunderous and incessant that even post-Stalin Soviets look moderate by comparison?

Any honest journalist, in fact any journalist, would have asked such questions. He wouldn’t have started an argument – that’s not what interviews are for. He wouldn’t have accused Putin of lying. But he definitely would have asked tough questions.

Yet Carlson is no objective journalist, certainly not when he covers this subject. He makes no secret of admiring Putin and taking Russia’s side in this conflict. That’s why he started out by letting Putin waffle on for about an hour about Russia’s God-given history.

Anyone with a modicum of education would have known he was listening to the rant of a man suffering from paranoid delusions. Russia, said Putin, had suffered foreign invasions from the time Scandinavian marauders arrived in the 9th century and the Mongols in the 13th.

Does Carlson know that Russia didn’t even exist in the 13th century, never mind the 9th? That it was merely so many separate and typically hostile principalities? That it was only in the 15th century that the word ‘Russia’ was first used? Carlson probably doesn’t know any of this. But he wouldn’t have interrupted his idol’s monologue even if he did.

Yet even Carlson probably knew enough history to take issue with Putin’s assertion that the Second World War was started by Poland provoking Germany and leaving Hitler no option but to attack. Putin was clearly implying a parallel between Poland and today’s Ukraine. But then what does it make him?

A point of logic, Mr President, please. Let’s assume all you are saying is correct. Russia has been on the receiving end of foreign invasions since the time she didn’t even exist. But how is this relevant to the problem in hand? Are you suggesting it was the Ukraine that attacked Russia, not the other way around?

Rather than asking this question, Carlson asked what Mark Twain used to call its third cousin twice removed. Did Putin think America was going to invade Russia? Putin responded by describing that question as childish and for once he was right.

Then came leading, and clearly pre-arranged, questions that allowed Putin to repeat his stock lie about having been provoked into action by NATO’s eastward expansion. I would have asked two questions at that point (which explains why I’ll never be in a position to do so).

If Putin correctly regarded the question about a possible NATO invasion of Russia as silly, then how did that expansion threaten Russia in any way? And why did he think not only former Soviet colonies but even Finland and Sweden wished to join NATO? Could it be because they justifiably feared a Russian invasion?

In fact, Carlson screwed up his courage and did ask if Russia had any plans to attack Poland. Only if Poland attacked us, replied Putin. Russia had no interest in Poland, Latvia or anything else, other than the Ukraine. We would never invade, he promised.

Considering that Putin had dispelled provocative rumours of an impending Russian invasion of the Ukraine a few days before it occurred, the promise was somewhat lacking in credibility. But Carlson didn’t bat an eyelid.

What about a negotiated end to the war? he asked. Are you up for it? But of course, replied Putin. He had always been ready to negotiate. But that ghastly Zelensky had banned any talks with Russia, ever.

In fact, the war could have ended a year and a half ago, added Putin, when Russia had prepared a thick volume of premises for peace talks. The Ukraine was amenable, but then another ghastly politician, Boris Johnson, then Britain’s PM, expressly forbade her to sit down with the Russians.

Mr Johnson ought to take that as a compliment. I doubt he was aware of the dictatorial powers he had over foreign leaders.

Still, Johnson is no longer in politics, Putin pointed out gleefully. That’s the problem with Western politicians: here today, gone tomorrow. Hard to do business that way – dictatorships, such as Putin’s own, implicitly work much better.

Still, he had good working relationships with some US presidents, notably Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump. No wonder.

Clinton supposedly mooted the possibility of Russia joining NATO. Bush met Putin and: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” And the less said about Trump’s pronouncements on Putin, the better.

Speaking of America, continued Putin, expertly guided by Carlson’s loving hand. She has her own problems galore: no control of the Mexican border, a $33-trillion debt and so forth. Does she really need arming the Ukraine? Does she, hell.

Stop supplying weapons to the Ukraine, explained Putin, and the war would end within weeks. That’s true, it would. But not the way either the Ukraine or the West would find acceptable.

Lest Carlson’s detractors accused him of bias, he did ask a semblance of a tough question. Was Russia planning to release the WSJ reporter Elan Gershkovich, arrested on a trumped-up espionage charge? (Carlson continued to pronounce his name as ‘Hershkowitz’, subtly denying that Elan’s parents had a right to spell their name as they pronounced it when they emigrated from the Soviet Union.)   

“We’ve made so many gestures of good will,” replied Putin, “that we are fresh out of them”. He didn’t specify, and Carlson didn’t ask, which gestures he had in mind.

Carlson was angling for the great PR coup of taking ‘Hershkowitz’ back home with him, thereby becoming a national hero. Yet Putin wouldn’t come out and play.

He did, however, hint he might agree to swap Gershkovich for Vadim Krasikov, the FSB hitman serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of a Chechen militant (‘bandit’ in Putin’s parlance) in Berlin. Carlson’s broad smile concealed his disappointment well.

Mine, however, is unconcealable. What was the point of the whole exercise, other than giving Putin yet another loudspeaker for broadcasting his venomous lies? Boosting Carlson’s professional reputation? That didn’t work, as far as I’m concerned. Nancy Astor he ain’t.

What the Dickens?

Charles Dickens was born 212 years ago yesterday, and even an insignificant anniversary of a comparably significant cultural figure would be on every front page in France.

In England, however, it largely went ignored. In fact, I espied only one reference to it, and even that was on Facebook. This is what I’d like to talk about, but first a few remarks about our arguably greatest novelist.

In fact, my personal, limited and very inadequate experience suggests that Dickens wrote the greatest half-novels in English literature. Usually, they were the first halves, where the writer’s eagle-eyed social observations, mordant view of human nature and coruscating humour came to the fore.

After that, he tended to sink into gooey sentimentality and rather trite melodrama, thereby losing me as a reader. Then again, I have similar problems with Dickens’s contemporary, Dostoyevsky. I suppose the 19th century zeitgeist was largely to blame, but giants are supposed to stand tall enough to look down on temporal maelstroms down below.

A propos of nothing, Dickens got a bad turn from Russian translators. When I was little, a 30-volume collection was published in Russia. In fact, it was overpublished, which is why those black-and-green volumes adorned every bookshelf I can recall.

That’s how most people used them, as an aspect of interior decoration. Reading those novels was the lot of the very few, and to a large extent that was the translators’ fault.

There are two basic schools of translation, which in Russia were called ‘literalist’ and ‘adequate’. The former preached verbatim rendering of the text, the latter believed that the translator’s task is for the work to achieve the same effect in the target language as it did in the original one. If that meant deviating from the letter of the text here and there, then so be it. The cost of doing business.

Now literal translation isn’t without merit when it comes to scholarly essays, though even there one must respect the idiosyncrasies of the target tongue. However, when it comes to literature produced by great stylists and satirists like Dickens, literalism is lethal. The translations of his novels into Russian prove that.

The hacks who undertook the task did a good job preserving everything I find objectionable in Dickens, such as his soppy sentimentality and propensity for cheap melodrama. At the same time, they killed stone-dead everything that makes him a writer of genius.

Yet the quotation I saw on social media today had nothing to do with Dickens’s novels. Instead it was his comment on the ongoing Civil War in America: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal a desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

If I referred to Dickens’s day job as writing great half-novels, then this is a great half-thought. Dickens saw through the Northern ploy of selling its aggression on the South as a noble effort to liberate enslaved human beings. That indeed was humbug, to use Dickens’s favourite word.

He correctly identified the reason for the war as having little to do with slavery as such, and having much to do with the North’s desire to bring the South to heel. But the control the North sought wasn’t so much economic as political.

True enough, the eleven Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories. However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to retain and expand the power of the central government. “If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

That war was produced by what I see as the key political clash of modernity, one between localism and centralism. This terminology is, I think, more elucidating, in politics at any rate, than the Marxist dichotomy of capitalism and socialism. Both can be seen as merely subsets of the overarching conflict.

The greatest political crimes of modernity have been committed by the centralisers. It mattered little whether they described themselves as socialists (national or international), fascists, republicans or democrats.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, closed down 300 pro-Southern newspapers (and had their presses smashed), suppressed the writ of habeas corpus and, according to the Commissary General of Prisoners, had 13,535 Northern citizens arrested for political crimes from February 1862 to April 1865.

Comparing his record with that of Mussolini, who only managed 1,624 political convictions in 20 years and yet is universally and justly reviled, one begins to see modern hagiography in a different light.

So Dickens only got his assessment half-right, but he still did better than many other commentators, both at the time and now. Tolstoy, for example, a greater novelist than Dickens, had none of his perspicacity. What the Russian wrote on Lincoln has to be described as bilge, and even that would be charitable:

“Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Frederick the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone and even Washington stand in greatness of character, in depth of feeling and in a certain moral power far behind Lincoln. Lincoln was a man of whom a nation has a right to be proud; he was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations. We are still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Quite. I get it. Lincoln was Jesus Christ come again.

So let’s wish a happy anniversary to Charles Dickens. In addition to his artistic achievements, he was a counterweight to the likes of Tolstoy, and we should be for ever grateful.

What’s that Tucker doing in Moscow?

The other day I suggested that Tucker Carlson was in Moscow to interview Putin, which frankly didn’t involve any oracular powers. Why else would he go there at this time? To watch Spartacus at the Bolshoi?

Then I ventured a few other guesses about the possible content of the forthcoming encounter, and again that was stating the blindingly obvious. Carlson is a Putin admirer of long standing (which I illustrated with a compendium of his panegyrics), and he both buys and sells on the Kremlin version of the on-going war.

Anyway, Carlson’s televised address yesterday has turned conjecture into fact. “Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed,” he said. “They have no real idea what’s happening in this region. But they should know, they’re paying for much of it in ways they might not fully perceive.”

Now, I’m not a regular consumer of American reporting, but even the snippets I have seen show that there is certainly no dearth of information on the war. If “most Americans are not informed”, it’s because they have no interest in this particular subject.

Whatever Carlson does in the interview is unlikely to change that state of selective ignorance. So exactly what void is he proposing to fill?

Not to repeat myself, I can again refer you to my Monday article. In Carlson’s view, what Americans are suffering from isn’t the amount of information but its content, which is generally pro-Ukrainian. Putin’s propaganda machine seems short of outlets in the mainstream Western media, and that’s an outrage Carlson will try to correct.

In passing, Carlson tried to come across as a selfless, heroic victim of the Democrats’ attempts to suppress his selfless, heroic attempts to shill for Putin. “But this time, we came to Moscow anyway,” he said, “and did not take money from any government or group.”

The implication is that the mainstream media aren’t so disinterested. It’s that dastardly Joe Biden who pays them to libel Vlad, the strong leader Tucker (and his friend Donald) admires. Moreover, the government censors truthful accounts of the war, which is to say those coming from Putin through Carlson et al.

But not this time: Elon Musk has “promised not to suppress or block this interview.” Since Musk is another self-proclaimed admirer of Putin, no surprises there.

Anyway, all that is on the surface, and I wouldn’t waste your time and mine repeating what I said two days ago unless I had something interesting to add. So I do: more conjecture. This time, however, it isn’t my own.

The following version is being discussed in the Russian émigré press, and I find it plausible enough to share with you. According to that hypothesis, in addition to his journalistic mission, Carlson is acting as Trump’s emissary to Putin.

This stands to reason: it would be politically suicidal for Trump to establish a direct contact with the Kremlin, and Carlson is his friend and trusted ally. Some commentators are even mooting the possibility that Trump may choose Carlson as his running mate.

So what kind of message could that be? Any hypothesis, taught Aristotle, should start from known facts. In that spirit, let’s rely on that time-honoured starting point.

Fact 1: Trump’s main (only?) concern at the moment is winning the presidential election.

Fact 2: Trump has said it a thousand times if he has said it once that Biden’s vacillating policy towards the Ukraine war will conflagrate the world. Trump himself, by contrast, would end that war within days or hours, can’t remember which, thereby saving the world from nuclear annihilation. If he can be seen to be as good as his word, Trump will not only win the election at a canter, but will also gain vast powers to carry out whatever plans he has.

Fact 3: Trump isn’t omnipotent. He may put pressure on Putin or, more likely, Zelensky to stop firing, but he can’t bring peace without their cooperation. Yet neither Zelensky nor Putin will want to end the war as it now stands. For different reasons, that would spell suicide for both of them.

Fact 4: Since Trump has a stronger relationship with Putin, he’d be more likely to choose Vlad as a partner in any ‘deal’ he may concoct – and we know that Trump’s faith in the power of a mutually beneficial transaction is unshakable.

Fact 5: Not only Putin, but also Trump and any number of influential commentators, see the Ukraine as a proxy of NATO in this war. If so, then NATO has a vested interest in an outcome strengthening its short-term position in Europe, or at least not weakening it too much.

These facts act as the building blocks of the hypothesis I’ve mentioned, and the resulting edifice looks sturdy enough to withstand quite a few slings and arrows:

Putin may force NATO’s hand by conquering the three Baltic republics and issuing yet another ultimatum to the West. Either you end the war in the Ukraine on Putin’s terms, or else. Since the Baltics are NATO members, the West will certainly want to respond in kind. But how?

We can safely disregard the possibility of a strategic nuclear response, for obvious reasons. NATO’s counterattack has to be conventional, and the alliance certainly has the wherewithal to rout the invading army. But not instantly.

It would take at least six months to form a coalition, mobilise and equip an expeditionary corps, deploy it at the frontline. Meanwhile, the US elections are getting closer.

Trump would crank up the volume of his I-told-you-so campaign. He told you ‘Sleepy Joe’ would bring the world to the brink of a major war, didn’t he? And he was right. But Trump also told you he could stop that war and he’d be proved right again. As long as you vote the right way.

A Trump landslide would follow, and peace talks with Putin immediately thereafter. And what do you know, Donald would go down in history as one of the peacemakers who are, as we know blessed – in this case with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump would get the Baltics back peacefully, but on Putin’s terms: a corridor to Kaliningrad, recognition of Russia’s conquest of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine, a solemn undertaking never to accept any former Soviet republics into NATO. The public by that time would have been so scared of a world war, it would demand that Trump accept the terms he wanted all along.

And the Baltics? NATO would be welcome to them, in their new, neutered state.

In that scenario, the deal would work a dream for both Trump and Putin. The Ukraine would suffer, but her plight would be seen as strictly a sub-plot to the real drama of saving the world from a holocaust.

Yes, the ‘deal’ could work, but only if Putin and Trump synchronised their timing. If Putin moved too early, NATO would have enough time before 5 November to defeat the new aggression, and Biden would go into the election with the halo of a victor. Too late, and American voters wouldn’t have enough time to get really terrified.

Late spring, early summer would be perfect: NATO would be in no position to mount a decisive counterattack before the election, the threat of a world war would be at its peak. In comes Trump, riding his white horse and wearing the white hat of the man who saved the world.

Could it be that this is the message Carlson is conveying to Putin? This sounds plausible to me, sufficiently so to put the hypothesis before you. We’ll see one way or the other before long. Meanwhile, brace yourself for Carlson’s fawning… sorry, I mean truthful interview.

Cruel and unusual punishment

Kenneth Eugene Smith

The phrase was first used in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Together with much else of our common law, it then moved across the Atlantic to become part of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution (1791).

Like many other legal terms, this one is open to debates, most of them specious but some quite reasonable. This opening is often used, and more often abused, by people taking exception to each of the two adjectives or even the noun.

I’ve twice appeared on BBC shows trying to ward off the arguments that, if stripped down to bare essentials, any punishment is cruel, if, alas, not yet unusual. Criminals, I was told in rather shrill tones, shouldn’t be punished. They should be treated, educated and eventually rehabilitated.

The assumption that crimes were caused by either illness or ignorance took my breath away. Where did one begin pointing out that this view tallied with no empirical evidence, no sensible concept of justice, nor even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature?

My total contribution to the two debates lasted about 30 seconds, which was how long it took the lovely hostess to cut me off once I uttered the word ‘evil’ in the first and ‘justice’ in the second. Anyway, I received £300 for my two appearances, which, at £10 a second, amounts to a decent wage.

Such extreme situations apart, the term ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ usually appears in the context of the death penalty. And in most civilised places it’s these days used to describe the death penalty as such, which makes one wish to enclose the word ‘civilised’ in quotes. Such punishment, say its opponents, negates the value of a human life.

I disagree. In fact, the opposite is true: the death penalty asserts the value of a human life by communicating in no uncertain terms that no wanton, arbitrary taking of it can be weighed against any term of imprisonment.

If I wished to go deep into the issue, I’d perhaps argue that, if Western morality is based on both Testaments, with more accent on the second, our justice relies more widely on OT tenets. Continuing in the same vein, I’d probably insist that the death penalty doesn’t defy the divine commandment to love our enemies. Then I’d test my cognitive health by trying to quote Matthew 10:28 from memory.

But all that is for another occasion. Today, let’s assume that the death penalty is legitimate and acknowledge the fact that 27 American states recognise it as such. However, any civilised advocate of it will agree that some methods of administering the death penalty may indeed be regarded as cruel and unusual.

Pouring molten pitch down the throat, flailing alive, drawing and quartering, unanaesthetised disembowelling, stoning – please stop me before my morbid imagination runs away with me. However, you’ll be happy to know that none of the 27 American states that practise the death penalty does so by such old-fashioned methods.

That, unfortunately, doesn’t mean they are always immune to justified accusations of meting out cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, the recent events in Alabama give the death penalty a bad name.

Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder for hire of a pastor’s wife. Her hubby-wubby, a minister in the Church of Christ (and I knew those sects were up to no good), paid Smith and his accomplice $1,000 each, which wasn’t all that much money even then. When suspicion fell on the minister, he killed himself, whereas the State of Alabama undertook to provide that service for Smith.

Considering he was only executed on 25 January, a fortnight ago, Smith spent 35 years on death row, which some people may regard as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. Some others, with perhaps better justification, may think that, if it takes 35 years of legal wrangling to execute a man, perhaps he shouldn’t be executed at all.

Finally, legal obstacles out of the way, Smith was strapped to a gurney last November, and the authorities tried to kill him by legal injection, the most widespread execution method in the US. ‘Tried’ is the operative word: it took them four hours to abandon endless unsuccessful attempts to stick two needles into Smith’s veins.

Finally, the inept executioners accepted defeat and sent Smith back to his cell. Now, in the old days, if the first attempt to hang a convict failed, he was usually reprieved, but that was before we became civilised. Drawing on our new-fangled humanism, Alabama decided to have another go. Here the words ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ again gained some validity.

Now, apart from the inexplicable difficulties of using the syringe, execution by lethal injection has another, more real, problem. Our humane pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, now routinely refuse to supply chemicals to be used for that purpose. My recommendation would be to contract Bayer, a company that has plenty of experience in this field. But I understand that using German suppliers may be considered unpatriotic in Alabama — and too evocative everywhere else.

Hence the decision was made to kill Smith by a new, experimental method. The prisoner is made to inhale pure nitrogen, which cuts off the supply of oxygen to the brain and kills by what’s known as ‘nitrogen hypoxia’.

I’d be wary of experimenting on humans, even such rotten ones as Smith, if only because of the negative associations. But according to experts, that method is perfectly humane, with no cruelty anywhere in sight. That, however, isn’t how it turned out.

Smith took 22 minutes to die, and for several of those minutes he remained conscious, thrashing about and shaking convulsively in pure agony. By contrast, the NKVD method of firing a bullet into the back of the head seemed kindness personified.

Yet the executed man had only himself to blame for his suffering, explained John Hamm, the Alabama Corrections Commissioner. “It appeared that Smith was holding his breath as long as he could,” he said. I’d describe that as an involuntary reaction, but perhaps Mr Hamm should try to inhale nitrogen for a few seconds and see how he’d get on.

One, in my view valid, argument in favour of the death penalty is that it’s the only way of attenuating the shock waves that a vile crime sends through society. However, when it genuinely is cruel and unusual punishment, the death penalty does much harm.

The Alabama incident cocks the guns loaded not only by opponents of the death penalty but also by America’s enemies. Having the condemned man experience minutes of agony before dying violates the fundamental principles of morality and justice, not to mention legality.

In civilised countries, that is, of which the US is one. I do hope she’ll provide no more reasons for doubting that.  

Carlson, that dumb Tucker

“Okay, you can ask me these questions”

America’s answer to our own dear Peter Hitchens has arrived in Moscow, where it’s widely believed he’ll be granted an interview with Putin.

That little junket has drawn a great deal of criticism, which galvanised Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene into springing to Carlson’s defence. “We have a free press in this country and it’s people like Tucker Carlson who we depend on to speak the truth,” she said.

What if we replaced “to speak the truth” with “to provide a mouthpiece for enemy propaganda?” Would Mrs Greene still think the sentence made perfect sense? I bet she wouldn’t.

Therefore she must believe that Carlson’s interview with Putin will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I, on the other hand, am certain that Carlson will turn his little têteàtête into a weapon for Putin to use in his hybrid war on the West. Propaganda is as essential a component of that hybrid as warfare, sabotage, terrorism and assassinations, all of them arrows from Putin’s quiver.

Now, neither Mrs Greene nor I possess prophetic powers. We don’t know for sure what Carlson’s interview with Putin could be like.

All we have to go by is history, the only possible, if not always reliable, predictor of the future. Both Mrs Greene and I know how Carlson has covered Putin’s Russia in the past. We just draw different conclusions from this knowledge.

She believes that the supposedly upcoming interview will open millions of American eyes to the truth. I, on the other hand, have no doubt that the KGB colonel will use Carlson either as a useful idiot or a knowing agent to dupe the West into cutting assistance to the Ukraine.

I don’t know what it is about Carlson’s past that convinces Mrs Greene he is likely to speak the truth on this subject. However, I know exactly what the basis for my judgement is. And, unlike her, I’m happy to share my sources with you.

So here are a few ‘truths’ Carlson has vouchsafed his devoted viewers since the start of Russian aggression on the Ukraine in 2014:

“Why is Vladimir Putin such a bad guy? He’s not Saddam Hussein, he’s not Adolf Hitler, he’s not a danger to the United States.”

“The Left sees Putin behind every problem, and they’re trying to convince us to see him too. They want to drum up a new Cold War, and you’re the target.”

“There’s a lot of lying going on, and there’s a lot of propaganda, and there’s a lot of bad journalism. And there’s a lot of people with a vested interest in making us hate Russia. And so we should be sceptical.”

“We should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

“Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as [American liberals] do.”

“The Cold War ended a long time ago. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is not our enemy. It’s just not.”

All the following statements have been uttered immediately before and after the full-scale Russian aggression:

“It may be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is: ‘No.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”

“[The Ukraine is] a pure client state of the United States State Department.”

“The Russians don’t want American missiles on their border. They don’t want a hostile government next door.”

“Ideologues within the Biden administration did not want a negotiated peace in Ukraine. They wanted, all along, and it’s very clear now, a regime-change war against Russia.”

“Whatever you think of the war in Ukraine, it is pretty clear Zelensky has no interest in freedom and democracy. In fact, Zelensky is far closer to Lenin than to George Washington. He is a dictator. He is a dangerous authoritarian who has used a hundred billion in U.S. tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine.”

These are the lies, or what Mrs Greene regards as truths, that Carlson has been peddling for years. And these happen to be, verbatim, the message bullets Kremlin propagandists and trolls have been firing at the West for the better part of 20 years.

Now if it’s true that Putin has granted an interview to Carlson, my innate inquisitiveness makes me ask why. Dictators don’t agree to interviews unless they are absolutely certain about the interviewer’s loyalty. They want the resulting article to advance their cause, in this case that of eroding the West’s resolve to support the Ukraine.

Say what you wish about our media – and God knows I’ve said plenty – but they aren’t bursting at the seams with Putin’s agents of influence, witting or unwitting. That’s why he hasn’t granted a single interview to a Western reporter since 2022.

Now why would he single out our hero for that career-boosting gift? Tucker Carlson has answered this question himself, many times over (see the quotations above).