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Whole books have been written about Donald Trump’s special bond with Putin, an affair based on mutual attraction and a sense of spiritual kinship.

Some commentators have suggested that other factors, such as an FSB dossier of kompromat, may be a factor as well, but the romantic in me insists on ascribing the relationship to warm feelings rather than cold calculations.

Anything more than that falls into the category of treason, and such accusations can’t be levelled without prima facie evidence, which in this case is lacking. However, if lawyers demand proof, commentators can make do with indications.

Trump has always been generously obliging in providing those, but seldom as much so as in the immediate aftermath of Navalny’s murder.

That crime has caused global shouts of outrage, with most of the West’s top politicians especially in fine voice. Probably not all of them felt genuine wrath and a sense of personal loss, but they all acknowledged the political benefits of not showing callous indifference to that brutality. Some might even have been guided by simple decency, although I wouldn’t bet on it.

Against that background, here’s how one of the world’s most influential politicians, Trump, commented on that crime: “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction.”

Every word is a real gem (as is the orthography), but especially precious are the words that didn’t appear in that typically illiterate missive: ‘Putin’ and ‘murder’. Instead, Trump repeated the mockingly cynical diagnosis issued by Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service (FPS): sudden death syndrome.

Another possibility offered by the same source was a loose blood clot, which diagnosis was made within minutes of Navalny’s death. None of those ridiculous Western expedients, such as scans or even X-Rays – Russian diagnosticians don’t need them, they are that good.

Incidentally, that second diagnosis immediately inspired Russian rappers. Just two days later federal TV channels ran a video of youngsters disco-dancing to the deafening sound of the band bellowing “Loose clot, loose clot!” Nice clean fun, Russian-style.

That alone is enough to tell you all there is to know about the moral degradation of the Russians. But what interests me today is the moral degradation of Donald Trump. And let’s not forget his unique take on logic, which, to follow current fashion, may be held as evidence of cognitive decline.

I for one fail to see any obvious connection between Navalny’s “sudden death” and the “CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction”.

My feeling about those reprobates are every bit as vehement as Trump’s, even though they so far haven’t made me shell out $350 million (good luck with that). But is Trump suggesting it’s those miscreants who are directly responsible for Navalny’s “sudden death”?

The Romans used to call this sort of thing non sequitur, while the Russians came up with a proverb, “Where is the water and where’s the estate?”. Next time Trump talks about Biden’s stupidity and senility, he ought to remember the English proverb about glass houses and stones.

In case Trump really does think that it’s those $350-million extortionists who caused Navalny’s sudden death, then his friend in the Kremlin has happily disabused him of that notion. While everyone knows who ordered the murder, Putin blithely revealed the names of those who responded “Yessir!” to the order.

Yesterday it was announced that several FPS officers had been promoted without the requisite time in service.

Valery Boyarinov, Deputy Director, was bumped up to Colonel General; Alexander Rozin, another Deputy Director, to Lieutenant General; Dmitry Sharovatov, Administrative head, to Major General; and Alexander Fedorov, Head of Personnel, to the same rank.

Since the promotions came in circumvention of the statutory requirements, these officers must have provided a special service to Russia. You aren’t getting any prizes for guessing what kind.

The name of the hands-on murderer hasn’t been made public yet, but I’m sure he was rewarded internally. It must have taken a lot of courage and skill to kill an emaciated prisoner with a single blow to the heart.

Trump’s response to Navalny’s murder, sorry, I mean “sudden death”, amounts to disgraceful toadying, making him an accomplice after the fact. Next to that salient fact, it seems almost petty to mention another murder ordered by Trump’s friend who is on a roll.

On 9 August last year, the Russian pilot Maxim Kuzminov flew his Mi-8 helicopter across the frontline and defected to the Ukraine. The young officer risked his life – and make no mistake: the risk was huge – because his conscience couldn’t allow him to take part in Putin’s mega-crime.

Unfortunately, Capt. Kuzminov didn’t stay in the Ukraine, where he would have been relatively safe. Instead he took his $500,000 reward and went to Spain, somewhere near Benidorm. There Putin’s hitmen riddled him with bullets the other day.

That didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who had watched an earlier interview with Russian Spetsnaz soldiers. Their voices firm and masculine, their faces hidden by balaclavas, the soldiers swore vengeance. “We’ll punish him where he is,” they promised, and they or their colleagues have been as good as their word.

The murder (what Trump would probably also call “sudden death”) of Capt. Kuzminov sends, or rather reiterates, a message ad urbi et orbi: Putin is prepared to murder anyone he considers his enemy anywhere in the world. Whether his victim is completely in his power, like Navalny, or at large, like Kuzminov, is immaterial. “We have long arms,” as those Spetsnaz soldiers put it.

The world, specifically the West, is facing the onslaught of absolute evil, Putin’s Russia. Like its other manifestations, such as Nazism and communism, its triumph depends not only on the originators but also on the servile collaborators.

If Trump’s shameful response to Navalny’s murder is any indication, one of them stands a good chance of ending up in the White House, which is supposed to be the headquarters of the West’s resistance. Considering that, and also the available alternative, I can’t look to the future with a song in my heart. Unless that song is a dirge.

When talking about elections in any Western country, I show my commitment to responsible recycling by often talking about the evil of two lessers. One can understand the growing popularity of my favourite candidate, Mr None of the Above.  

Prince William seems hellbent on following in the footsteps of his mother, who was woke long before the word even entered the Oxford Dictionary.

The other day HRH delivered himself of a view on the Gaza war, leaving one thankful that he stopped short of wrapping himself in the Palestinian flag and shouting “From the river to the sea!”

On the plus side, William clearly knows that Gaza isn’t the nickname of a former England footballer. On the minus side, he spoke of the “terrible human cost of the conflict in the Middle East since the Hamas terrorist attack”. [My emphasis.]

It’s that little word ‘since’ that shows where the prince’s heart is. Contextually, he was talking about the Israelis’ desperate attempts to wipe out sadistic Hamas murderers baying for their blood.

The pattern is all too familiar: first the Muslims, either terrorist gangs or actual states, attack Israel under variously worded slogans calling for another Holocaust. The woke majority in the Western media registers perfunctory disapproval, only then to unleash its full wrath when Israel begins to fight back.

Speaking of dictionaries, our lexicographers should add another meaning to ‘disproportionate’: “adj. the nature of any response by Israel to Muslim attacks”. HRH hinted at that meaning when he added that “too many have been killed”.

He must have a quota of permissible casualties in his mind, and Israel is guilty of exceeding it. Actually, Your Royal Highness, there is only one valid reply to anyone wondering how many should be killed in a war: as many as it takes to achieve the stated objective.

Israel’s objective is to defang Hamas and prevent repeat performances. Even though I haven’t been authorised to speak on behalf of the Israeli government, I can assure HRH that the killing will stop the moment that objective has been achieved. Until then, the phrase “too many” will remain meaningless.

As will the prince’s desire for “an end to the fighting as soon as possible”. PM Sunak rushed to William’s defence, saying that this was consistent with the government’s position.

I’ll let both gentlemen in on a secret: everyone in the world hopes the fighting will soon end. It’s just that different people hope it will end in different ways.

The only moral position is hoping that as a result of this war Israel will be left in peace, with its citizens allowed to go about their daily business without fearing that their babies could be disembowelled by diabolical ghouls.

Stopping before that wish becomes reality would mean admitting defeat. That’s why the superficially humane calls for a ceasefire in Gaza (or for that matter in the Ukraine) promote the triumph of evil over good – and I’m sorry to be using such outdated absolute categories.  

William’s sainted mother used to carry on ad nauseam about saving the homeless leprous whales in the rain forest from the landmines, which she saw as an unqualified evil. That enraged several generations of our veterans who tried to explain to her that minefields are an essential way of protecting one’s own soldiers. Like most other battlefield weapons, mines are morally neutral. It all depends on who lays them and to what end.

Yet Diana kept uttering abstract bien pensant phrases she thought were “humanitarian”, but were in fact silly and woke. And her son proves that some apples don’t fall from the tree at all, making one reassess one’s views on nature versus nurture.

The prince’s remarks have angered quite a few conservatives, who insist that our royals are constitutionally obligated not to make political pronouncements. One irate Tory even reminded William of what happened to his ancestor Charles I who also decided to dabble in politics.

It’s always nice to be kept abreast of the fine constitutional points, but we no longer live in 1649, nor even in 1688. In those days it was easy to categorise statements as political or apolitical. Alas, our world has been politicised to such an extent that everything we now say has political connotations.

Prince William, for example, has often voiced his heartfelt desire to save ‘our planet’ from, well, anything ‘our planet’ needs to be saved from. Whatever its astrophysical or climatological justifications, if any, that quest is a statement of political allegiance above all else. The prince might as well wear an ‘I’m woke’ pin in his Savile Row lapel.

This is to say that forbidding our royals to utter political statements is these days tantamount to hushing them up altogether, on any subject. Unless Buckingham Palace is ever inhabited by deaf-mutes, this strikes me as unrealistic – and also undesirable.

I wouldn’t even have a problem with the royals making overtly political pronouncements, provided such statements reflect the dignity and significance of the office they have inherited. In that regard, it’s important to remember that republican sentiments may be latent in Britain, but only as much as the pressure building up in the cooker.

If the slightest weakness develops, the pressure may blow the lid off and burst out. The greatest constitutional harm our royals could possibly cause would be for them to cater to the dormant antimonarchism by waking it up with woke statements.

A monarchy is a conservative institution by definition, out of keeping with the Enlightenment zeitgeist sucking oxygen out of our civilisation. Even though our royals are now devoid of executive power, they should keep reminding their subjects of everything constant and eternal, everything that links the generations past, present and future to make Britain British.

Since the monarchy has to survive in our party-political world, it must cast its lot with Tory principles, if not necessarily the politics of the present Conservative Party. The Tories, aka Conservatives, used to believe in a social order based on authority and traditional hierarchy, although not without flexibility.

Above all, they believed in the sacral meaning of the state in general and monarchy in particular. As an epigrammatic encapsulation of that mission, Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, observed that “he who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed therefore the state.”

(Burke was one of the leaders of the Whigs, but in fact just about every leitmotif of modern conservative thought, including constitutional monarchism, can be found in his Reflections. In a way, the French Revolution helped Burke to open his political eyes, which the contemporaneous liberals castigated as apostasy. Thomas Jefferson, for example, spoke of the “rottenness of [Burke’s] mind,” which could only be ascribed to his “wicked motives”.)

That’s why the coronation ritual in Britain is not a political inauguration but a religious rite, and what can be more conservative than that?

William’s father, who had made all sorts of unconservative noises before his accession, wisely kept up that tradition at his own coronation. He must have realised, or was reminded, that our monarchy is conservative – or it is nothing. That overarching umbrella covers a whole slew of specific political beliefs, leaving no room for woke platitudes.

I hope his son will reach the same understanding when his turn comes. For the time being, his farcical statements make me fear that this hope may well end up forlorn.

Whenever party talk veers towards the death penalty, its supporters are easily outnumbered and outshouted by its opponents.

Their arguments start out as being rational, but eventually get personal. Most of the former are based on the possibility of judicial error, which in such cases would be irreversible.

Granted, few people would like to see a man killed for a crime he didn’t commit. However, not many more would rejoice at seeing a man wrongly sentenced to life in prison either, yet calls for the abolition of imprisonment are rare among sensible people.

The right to life is usually mentioned in this context, often by those who see nothing wrong with abortion. I haven’t run any statistically significant surveys, but observation suggests that most proponents of the death penalty are opposed to abortion and vice versa, with the right to life invoked by both sides.

We can discuss this incongruity some other time, at any length you wish. However, my experience suggests that, after every rational argument pro and con has had an airing, the question in the title inevitably crops up.

That is of course a rhetorical fallacy, known as argumentum ad hominem. But hey, what’s the odd rhetorical fallacy among friends? He who is without sin… and all that.

This question is usually directed at supporters of the death penalty, a group in which I’ve often found myself, if without excessive enthusiasm. My stock reply is that I wouldn’t want to drive a sewage truck either, but I realise that someone has to.

That response is fine as far as rhetorical tricks go, but it’s too flippant to have any real meaning. It would be more serious and honest to examine my feelings, a scrutiny that could only yield one answer: no, I wouldn’t.

Under any circumstances? Well, we can come up with any number of fanciful situations, but barring such extremes, no, I wouldn’t want to execute people, under any circumstances.

That usually triggers related questions. Would you agree to shake hands with an executioner? Entertain him at your dinner table? My answers are a qualified yes and an unqualified no, for whatever that’s worth.

But now it’s time to launch a counterattack against myself. Can I imagine a situation where I’d become a soldier? Easily, is the answer to that. Shake hands with a soldier? But of course. Have him as a guest? I’d consider it an honour, if he fought for my side.

These would be the spur of the moment replies of someone who hasn’t considered the issue deeply enough. Joseph de Maistre did, and he pointed out the absurdity of that kneejerk response.

Both the executioner and the soldier, he wrote, kill legally. However, the former puts to death convicted and condemned criminals, while the latter indiscriminately kills innocent men whose only fault is wearing a different uniform.

“Of these two professional killers, the soldier and the executioner, the one is greatly honoured… . The other, on the contrary, has just as generally been declared infamous.”

Now, Maistre didn’t just support the death penalty, but regarded the executioner as the central and most essential figure in any successful realm. That may be a bit eccentric, but it’s true that, when God wasn’t just considered a figure of speech, the death penalty was never seen as cruel or unusual.

Neither Scripture nor Catholic doctrine opposed the capital punishment, but there were always reservations. Aquinas, for example, insisted that, though he supported in principle the state’s right to execute criminals in pursuit of common good, the arguments either pro or con can’t be absolute. Each case must be decided by human reason.

The same, in St Thomas’s nuanced view, applied to warfare. While he condoned just war, he still regarded killing on the battlefield as a sin – a necessary one, but a sin nonetheless, something requiring absolution.

In 1908, Pope Pius X summed up the argument in this way: “It is lawful to kill when fighting in a just war; when carrying out by order of the Supreme Authority a sentence of death in punishment of a crime; and, finally, in cases of necessary and lawful defence of one’s own life against an unjust aggressor.”

Lawful, yes. Moral, possibly. But what about one’s gut reaction to execution and executioners? Back come the lapidary questions, each falling down with a stone-like thud: Would you want to be an executioner or even invite one to dinner?

This brings me to one of the most famous (or infamous, if you’d rather) executioners ever, Charles-Henri Sanson (d. 1806). This colourful gentleman was in the fourth generation of his family dynasty of executioners, and there were two more generations after him.

Chevalier de Longval, as Sanson was known on the Paris party circuit, pioneered the use of the guillotine, with the help of which contraption he executed almost 3,000 people, King Louis XVI among them. That last act rendered him somewhat unpopular at society soirées, but until then his ‘de’ particle had made him socially welcome. In fact, many of the people he put to death were his friends.

(However, even such impressive numbers didn’t get Sanson into The Guinness Book of World Records. That honour, if that’s the right word, went to the NKVD executioner Vasily Blokhin, who dispatched tens of thousands with his own hand. He outdid even himself at Katyn, where he personally shot 7,000 Poles in just 28 days – hence the Guinness entry.) 

As a bit of poetic justice, Sanson’s eldest son Gabriel (d. 1792), his assistant and heir apparent, died after slipping off a scaffold as he triumphantly waved a severed head to the crowd. Teaches you not to gloat, doesn’t it?

It’s silly trying to imagine oneself in the shoes of those who lived centuries earlier. An Alexander Boot of the 18^th century would have had different sensibilities and ideas from the present-day version. But just this once: if miraculously transported as I am now to Paris circa 1793, would I have wanted to break bread with Sanson?

Honestly? No, I wouldn’t, and don’t try asking me to explain. I ought to keep this irrational reaction in mind next time I present rational arguments in favour of the death penalty. Which I probably shall.

Once, intelligence officers are taught, is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

In other words, if an enemy does three or more seemingly unconnected things at the same time, ‘seemingly’ is the key word. There is always a pattern there, and it’s just a matter of being able to discern it.

The four events of the past few days that add up to enemy action are the murder of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s capture of Avdiivka after many months of desperate fighting, the announcement that Russian nuclear weapons will be put on satellites, and Medvedev’s hysterical threat to take out Western capitals.

To grasp the connection among them, one has to understand Putin’s mentality, formed as it was in the rough-and-tumble of Russian inner cities. Having a similar background helps, and that’s something I can boast, or rather bemoan.

When we were growing up, both his native Leningrad and my native Moscow were overrun with youth gangs. Putin ran with them, I ran from them, but we both had to acquire certain survival skills.

He and I were both smaller than most bullies around, making it impossible to fight them off. Following the tired maxim of joining them if you can’t beat them was one way out, and that was the path little Vova Putin followed. My upbringing took that option off the list, but our problems were similar.

Being a gang member didn’t protect a lad from violence meted out by rival gangs or indeed his mates. “Beat your own so others will fear you” is an old Russian proverb that has inspired the nation throughout its history. Hence both insiders like Vova and outsiders like me had to find an accommodation.

We tried to seek salvation in martial arts, for him judo, for me boxing. But that ran head on into another Russian proverb, this one of more recent vintage: “There’s no technique against a crowbar except another crowbar.” All that training only meant one got even a worse thrashing in the end. Neither judo nor boxing offered enough protection against stronger foes, especially several at a time.

The only thing left to do was pretend to be a psycho, what the Russians call a ‘no limiter’. “Don’t touch me, I’m a psycho!” was the battle cry of smaller, weedier boys. Meaning that, in response to some normal bullying, an attacker could get a pencil stuck in his eye or a brick broken over his head.

Once a ‘psycho’ had acted on his newly acquired reputation a couple of times, he was usually left alone. There was plenty of easier prey around, so why risk a serious injury picking on a ‘no limiter’?

Sorry about this exercise in nostalgia, but that’s what helps me understand Putin. I know where he is coming from.

His rival gang today is made up of bigger and stronger boys, otherwise known as NATO. There’s no way Russia can take them on in a fair fight, especially if they pool their resources. Yet take them on Putin must: his position as gang leader hinges on that. Show weakness, and one of his closest lieutenants will stick a shiv into his back. And the possibility of a popular uprising always looms large.

So little Vova, now the big cheese in the Kremlin, has to resort to the stratagem that used to get him out of trouble in his youth. He has to scream “I’m a psycho!” and come across as a real no limiter.

If we take that mentality out of the back alleys of Leningrad (as it then was) and transpose it into the somewhat wider field of geopolitics, it means Putin wants to scare off the West and also those of his own people who are beginning to get second thoughts.

Many commentators, those who grew up in different circumstances from his or mine, didn’t believe Putin would kill Navalny. That would turn world opinion against him, they explained. Such a vile act would disgust and galvanise the opposition both in Russia and abroad. People in his own country would come out in their millions to throw him out of the Kremlin.

Yet those analysts got their numbers wrong, if not their moral rating of that murder. A few thousand people in the West protested against that crime, an action that doubtless made them feel good about themselves, but predictably failed to achieve any other effect. In any case they weren’t the target audience for that particular bravura performance.

By doing something so many people considered implausible, Putin sent the “I’m a no limiter psycho” message to the Russians. If he killed a man of Navalny’s international renown, he can kill thousands more without batting an eyelid, millions if he has to.

This explains why internal protests against Kremlin fascism involved hundreds of thousands 15 years ago, tens of thousands a few years later and merely hundreds now. People have bought the psycho act and they are justifiably scared.

Now, Avdiivka was the last Ukrainian stronghold in the Donetsk area, after the metropolis was captured by Putin’s troops years ago. Quite apart from its strategic value (which experts say is minimal), Avdiivka thus had a huge symbolic significance for both sides.

The other day the Ukrainian high command decided to withdraw its battle group from Avdiivka, because otherwise it risked encirclement and destruction. The Russians finally grabbed what’s left of the town after years of fighting, every inch of the way paved with corpses piled up many layers high.

Their success was inevitable because in that artillery-dominated war the Russians outnumbered Avdiivka defenders 10 to one in artillery rounds fired. The Ukrainians ran out of ammunition, in other words.

That showed Putin that his psycho act worked not just domestically but also internationally. The Ukraine had to relinquish her nuclear weapons according to the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, with the US, Britain and Russia offering her security guarantees in exchange.

How Russia honoured those guarantees is well known, but NATO’s help to the Ukraine’s struggle for survival has been sluggish from the beginning. The West has fallen for the psycho act, with Putin and his propagandists constantly waving the nuclear shiv in the air.

If we lose, you’ll lose, they screamed. Do you think we’ll go without trouble? Think again, you NATO wimps. If those Ukie Nazis look like they are going to defeat us with your help, we’ll push the nuclear button and take the whole shebang down with us. I’m a no limiter, screamed the collective Putin. I’m a psycho!

And what do you know: the trick worked. Western supplies were going up one month, down the next, but the overall vector was unmistakable: they were dwindling away.

But not fast enough, as far as Putin is concerned. So he did what his gang members used to do in his youth: if the mark wasn’t scared enough, he had to be scared more.

To that end, Putin declared that he’d put nuclear weapons into space to destroy American satellites. Whether that threat is feasible is up to the experts to decide. Those I’ve read so far say it’s a bluff because a nuclear blast causes much of the damage by a shock wave, the combination of the pressure jump (called the overpressure) and the dynamic pressure. That can’t exist in space. I can’t judge the physics of it, but I understand the intention behind the threat very well.

For the other threat, Putin selected his loyal stooge Medvedev, formerly Russia’s sham president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council. In the past 30 years, Medvedev hasn’t uttered a single word unprompted by Putin. The latter uses him to scream “I’m a psycho!” the loudest, especially since Medvedev has acquired a carefully cultivated reputation for drunkenness.

This time around, Putin, speaking through Medvedev, screamed “I’m a psycho!” in this way:

“Attempts to return Russia to the borders of 1991 will lead to only one thing, [Armaggedon]. Towards a global war with Western countries using the entire strategic arsenal of our state. In Kyiv, Berlin, London, Washington.”

If I were a Parisian, I’d resent that omission of my city. “And what am I, foie haché?” I’d say, with put-on anger and genuine relief. But this isn’t a joking matter.

It’s a direct threat to retaliate in an insane fashion against continued supplies of armaments to the Ukraine. In response, European nations still appear to be standing fast. The Danes have pledged to transfer all their artillery to the Ukraine, while the Czechs have miraculously found a million loose artillery shells sitting forgotten in their warehouses.

Yet by far the biggest supplier, the US, is clearly responding the way Putin’s bespectacled victims did in the Leningrad of his youth. They submit to the threats, their cowardice covered up with pseudo-rational excuses (“Not our war”, “We have our own problems we must solve first”, “Why should our taxpayers shell out for that war?”)

That’s not how you deal with blackmailing thugs, chaps. And you certainly shouldn’t expect their demands to stop once the first ones have been satisfied. They’ll be ratcheted up instead – take it from someone who grew up dealing with the likes of Putin.

P.S. After Navalny was poisoned by the FSB three years ago, he rang up one of the murderers and, pretending to be a government official, got him to describe the crime in detail. This is the video of that call, with English subtitles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ibqiet6Bg38&si=bkxGC8J5nTaePCNz

The title comes from the 1929 novel by Richard Aldington, whose main protagonist is killed in the First World War.

While both sides in that war claimed they defended good against evil, neither had a valid claim to such moral ascendancy. The lines weren’t so clearly drawn, as if to remind us that our post-Christian world allows for no absolute standards of goodness.

It’s more generous when it comes to absolute standards of evil. There is always room for those, and in Russia that space has been pre-booked for centuries in advance. Public, if not yet private, virtue has been expunged there, the very possibility of it consigned to oblivion.

Yet some people still harbour hopes, although few are prepared to die for them. Alexei Navalny was, and he will go down in history as a hero, a man who had the courage of his convictions. His murder by Putin has forever put his courage before his convictions, and this is the only order in which they can be discussed in the aftermath of the tragic news.

In 2020, Putin’s hitmen poisoned Navalny with Novichok, the nerve agent they had already used to murder other dissidents at home and abroad. Unlike others, Navalny didn’t die, and the public outcry around the world was such that Putin agreed for Navalny to be flown to Germany for treatment.

A fortnight later Navalny emerged out of his coma and felt strong enough to go back to Russia. His friends desperately tried to talk him out of that suicidal intention, but to no avail. Navalny knew he’d be arrested on return and imprisoned for a long spell. But he felt that his whole life had left him no choice. He had to either repudiate it or take Putin head on.

A series of sham trials followed, with more and more years tagged on to Navalny’s original sentence. He refused to indulge in jailhouse arithmetic, knowing that he was in prison for life, either his own or Putin’s, whichever lasted longer. Unfortunately, Navalny’s hearse beat Putin’s in that race to death.

“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” wrote Tertullian, and the same goes for any revolution. I hope Navalny’s martyrdom will fertilise the soil in which what he called “a beautiful future Russia” may grow, but this hope has little realistic basis.

I’m not going to go over every detail of Navalny’s epic struggle against those he described as “a party of crooks and thieves”. The papers are full of such accounts, and I have nothing to add to them. Instead I’ll try to understand Navalny’s reasons for delivering himself voluntarily into the blood-stained hands of Putin’s torturers and murderers.

Why didn’t he just stay in the West, joining hundreds of Russian dissidents, journalists, bloggers, political scientists who had fled for their lives to the sanctuary of Europe or America? The question contains the answer: Navalny was neither a dissident, nor a journalist, nor a blogger, nor a political scientist.

He was an active politician who felt he had a fighting chance to supplant Putin and drive his “crooks and thieves” out of the Kremlin. In that regard, I can only repeat what I wrote on 22 January, 2022, when Navalny received yet another tagged-on sentence:

“Navalny certainly has a talent for what some may describe as inspiring the masses and others as rabble-rousing. He has become the focal point of dissent, and the only political figure seen as a plausible challenger to Putin.

“He is trying to unify various factions in what may become a sustained protest movement, to which end Navalny is uttering plenty of liberal phrases. But his heart lies elsewhere.

“Navalny’s problem is with Putin’s epic corruption, not his declared political sentiments: Russian nationalism, empire building, suspicion (if not hatred) of the West and so forth.

“Hence one hopes that Navalny will only act as a battering ram breaching the wall surrounding the kleptofascist regime, not as its one-for-one replacement. But such hopes are probably forlorn.

“Navalny may not get the chance to challenge Putin in earnest. Vlad has shown that he doesn’t mind turning Navalny into a martyr, and he may still feel Navalny is more dangerous alive than dead. After all, another plausible challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead 100 yards from the Kremlin six years ago, and no mass opposition has rallied around his body.

“Hence I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Navalny suffering a sudden heart attack in prison…”

In another article written at about that time, I wondered how the West would respond should that possibility become reality:

“Biden tried to answer that implicit question by threatening ‘devastating consequences’ should Navalny die in prison. By the looks of it, the devastating consequences will take the shape of another stern expression of deep concern.

“Anyway, why weren’t there any consequences, devastating or otherwise, when the previous opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead a few feet from the Kremlin wall? Or when another opposition leader, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered? Or after dozens of other dissidents (Starovytova, Shchekochihin, Sheremet, Litvinenko et al.)  were ‘whacked’ in Russia and elsewhere?

“Where were the consequences of a London restaurant being poisoned with polonium and half of Salisbury with Novichok? What about that Chechen émigré shot in Germany? Boris Berezovsky garrotted in England? Alexander Perepelichny poisoned in Surrey?”

This isn’t a boast of my prescience: anyone with a modicum of understanding and knowledge could have predicted such gruesome events and the West’s cowardly response to them. But the question is still nagging: what was the source of the suicidal courage with which Navalny marched towards his tragic death? After all, such an outcome was even likelier than the death of Aldington’s hero.

I’m sure the role model Navalny saw with his mind’s eye was Václav Havel, who emerged from communist captivity to become the first president of the Czech Republic. Another example of a political Phoenix rising from the ashes of prison was Nelson Mandela, but I doubt Alexei found him as inspiring.

Whatever gifts Havel possessed as playwright and intellectual, Navalny was a more talented politician. Had he been born anywhere in the West, he could have reached the political summit. He certainly had every prerequisite: charisma, oratorial brilliance, campaigning stamina, leadership qualities – even a law degree.

Yet Navalny wasn’t born in the West. He was born in Russia, the place where politics has died, or perhaps has never lived. Power there changes hands by revolution, coup or fiat, never by anything a Westerner would recognise as politics.

And revolutionaries need a different set of skills, of which Navalny had some but not others. He had suicidal courage but not homicidal cruelty, which is de rigueur for a Russian revolutionary. Navalny was ready to accept his own martyrdom, but not to send others to theirs.

He watched most of his comrades in the Anti-Corruption Foundation flee to the West, and he was neither prudent enough to follow nor cruel enough to stop them. Navalny could have formed an effective political party but not a subversive cabal. And he didn’t realise that only the latter could possibly succeed in unseating “the crooks and thieves”.

Most successful revolutionaries in history led the masses by offering a drastically different vision of government expressible in simple slogans. Yet Navalny was consistent only in his opposition to the Kremlin, not in the premises from which he mounted such opposition.

In his younger days he was a nationalist whose pronouncements weren’t dramatically different from Putin’s. Navalny welcomed Russia’s attack on Georgia and subsequent annexation of the Crimea. In private, he also expressed pride in his Nordic looks and wasn’t averse to racial invective, such as describing Georgians as “rats”.

Displaying a certain amount of elasticity, so typical of Western politicians, Navalny sensed that a Putin Mark II, even if free of corruption, wouldn’t be able to rally the opposition. He then adopted the phraseology of the predominantly liberal dissidents, who, unable to come up with equally powerful leaders, accepted him as their own.

Yet even pooling their resources, they were unable to offer much beyond the usual phrases about freedom, democracy and real elections. Since the Russians have never tried such delicacies, they have no taste for them. Hence Putin’s stormtroopers have had no problem isolating such dissidents and either squeezing them out of the country or putting them in prison.

Navalny, the only real politician among them, had to die, just to be on the safe side. For Putin, already covered head to toe with the blood of hundreds of thousands, spilling another drop is no hardship, especially if that eliminates a potential nuisance.

The rest of us, whether or not we shared Navalny’s convictions, such as they were, should bow our heads to his courage. He lived and died as a hero, his whole life proving he was a man, not what Dostoyevsky called “a trembling creature”. May God look after his soul with the loving care his martyrdom deserves.

Both purveyors and consumers of culture, narrowly understood as high art, often assign demiurgic powers to it. Culture, they say, is the world’s only hope.

In support, they quote Dostoyevsky, whose Prince Myshkin insists that “beauty will save the world”. Our champions of high culture then translate that promise into a simple, and false, syllogism: beauty will save the world – culture is beautiful – therefore, culture will save the world.

That’s not what Dostoyevsky or any intelligent man could have possibly meant. Myshkin’s statement was either subtle philosophy or arrant nonsense, and it becomes the second when simplistically understood.

Beauty, along with truth and goodness, is part of the ‘transcendental’ triad that many thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas, regarded as the inseparable ontological properties of being.

They all agreed that a deficit in one part would also lead to a diminution in the other two. Hence, replace ‘beauty’ with ‘ugliness’, and mankind also loses truth and virtue, bringing about a global blood-sodden chaos. In that sense, beauty may indeed save the world, just as its lack may spell the world’s destruction.

However, narrowing the meaning of beauty to culture (and the meaning of culture to art) is wrong on any number of levels you care to name: aesthetic, philosophical, social, anthropological, political and so on.

Nevertheless the saving power of culture constantly crops up in all sorts of questions asked by people anxious to detect a link where none exists. How is it possible, they wonder, that two of Europe’s most cultured nations, Russia and Germany, produced the two most evil regimes in history?

Look at what they’ve given the world, they say: [a roll call of great names follows]. How could the same nation that produced Bach and Goethe also produce Hitler and Himmler? Replace the first two names with Tchaikovsky and Pushkin, the last two with Lenin and Stalin, and you’ll hear the same why-oh-why question posed over and over again.

Invariably, people who ask such questions themselves fall into one or both of the same groups I mentioned earlier, purveyors or consumers of art. Far from every member of these groups can genuinely feel the saving grace of art, yet those who can find it hard to understand why others don’t feel the same way.

Similarly, believers who are in communion with God and live their lives accordingly fail to see why others bypass this obvious route to private and public goodness. This is less of a fallacy because such believers can at least cite historical evidence of religion having that effect at times. Their opponents, however, cite evidence to the contrary, and a lively debate ensues.

But at least there’s something to argue about. When it comes to culture, no one can show any instances of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky preventing people from murdering one another in all sorts of imaginative ways and apocalyptic numbers.

So whenever our literati bemoan that those two gentlemen and their colleagues failed to mitigate their nations’ beastliness, I always reply: “Why, would you have expected them to?”

The kind of art that can raise a man a rung or two closer to God is produced for few by fewer. Lump those two groups together, and you’ll still only get an infinitesimally tiny fraction of one per cent of the population.

Even when looking at a pre-selected group, say audiences at classical concerts, I often wonder how many of them really feel elevated and purified by the music. Judging by the enthusiasm with which they applaud charlatans reducing musical performance to a circus act, not very many. Let’s say 10 per cent if we are feeling generous.

If asked, they’ll all say they enjoy music. Of course they do. But that’s not what music is for. You may enjoy a good meal followed by flatulent excretions and a post-prandial snooze. You may enjoy driving fast or dancing slowly. Why, some people even claim they enjoy pop pandemonia, and one has to take them at their word.

But Bach and Beethoven aren’t there to be enjoyed. Their music cracks ajar the door beyond which lies salvation in Dostoyevsky’s sense of the word. However many subjects a Bach fugue has, three are always present if not always perceived: beauty, truth, virtue. Three in one, and one as three. So by all means do let’s talk about this when delving into philosophical or theological depths. But please leave art out of any sociological context.

Yes, some sublime poetry was written during the early years of Bolshevism, and some serious philosophy during the Third Reich. And yes, great German conductors still led great orchestras in masterly renditions of Beethoven symphonies throughout the Nazi years, even as Allied bombs rained on Berlin.

But that’s like saying that the sun sometimes shone when the Bolsheviks were machinegunning peasants or the Nazis were gassing Jews. One had nothing to do with the other. And no, art neither prevents evil from happening nor redeems it after it has been perpetrated.

What could reduce the amount of evil in the world is a social arrangement allowing the same spirit that flows into art to break banks and engulf society as a whole. For that to happen, all or at least most members of society must be raised in a way that leads them to beauty, truth and virtue – even if they remain deaf to Mozart and Schubert.

Not everyone can be taught to appreciate Bach’s counterpoint or Homer’s hexameters, but everyone can be taught to respect others, obey just laws, protest against unjust ones, and be able to tell the difference. Everyone can be taught not to be selfish and always remember that the Earth revolves around the Sun, not one’s own person.

I’m not saying that everyone can heed such lessons, but perhaps enough people will to make the world a slightly more civilised place. It’s not down to any temporal institution to erase original sin, thereby saving the world. That prerogative is reserved for a higher authority. But human institutions should still be able to do a better job than they are doing now.

The distinction between culture and civilisation isn’t deeply entrenched in Anglophone thought, coming as it does mostly from 18^th century German philosophy. Although that isn’t my favourite period, the distinction is valid and useful.

While Western culture thrives on esoteric exclusivity, a civilisation can’t last unless it includes all, or at least most, members of society. Some may drive it, some may sleep in the back seat, but they all must be inside. Culture is merely a part of civilisation, and not the most important part at that.

In fact, one could even say that, unlike civilisation, culture is divisive. Cultural elitism (not unlike that which you can sometimes detect in this space) builds a social moat between people, with no drawbridge provided. But civilisation can fill that moat with, well, beauty, truth and goodness – leaving culture for the delectation of the very few.    

These days one can’t go for a walk without overhearing one passer-by or another say nasty things about someone.

Most of the insults allude to the target’s Oedipal tendency to corrupt his mother’s morals or else to his propensity for self-gratification. Lest you may consider me a prude, I have nothing against that sort of thing in principle.

Why, on occasion (well, regularly, if I’m being totally honest) I’ve been known to use such words myself, much to Penelope’s chagrin. I defend myself with the technique refined by thieves and murderers: using my tough childhood as an excuse.

I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, I say. And when my wife points out that I grew up a stone’s throw away from the Kremlin, I explain, truthfully, that all of Russia is the wrong side of the tracks. The country is the world’s ultimate bad neighbourhood.

When that excuse is rejected, I invoke ecclesiastical authority, specifically emanating from the first priest of my life. He was appalled when I once took the Lord’s name in vain, adding the middle initial ‘H’ to his name. The servant of God explained to me that was repellent. If you have to swear, he said, use sexual allusions instead. To his credit, the clerical gentleman practised what he preached.

We first met some 30 years ago, at a dinner honouring G.K. Chesterton. The priest wore the insignia of his vocation, and I was suitably cowed sitting next to him. But then he tried the food and commented that “the grub is fucking awful”. The contrast with the clerical collar created such a delicious cognitive dissonance that we became friends for life there and then.

However, it can’t be gainsaid that swearing is the easy way out. All clichés are just that. They are the verbal equivalent of frozen pizzas and other ready-made foods. Anyone who prefers to do his own lexical cooking should be able to avoid lazy shortcuts.

Now, I can’t claim intimate familiarity with every national culture in His Creation. But I am familiar with a few, and it’s France and England (with her colonial offshoots) that excel in the art of the witty putdown.

Even our politicians used to be able to give the celebrated wits of the day a good run for their money (and there I was, forswearing clichés). Today’s lot are occasionally capable of humour, but hardly ever wit. And they may not even be aware of the difference.

But two Tories of the past, Disraeli and Churchill, knew how to handle themselves in verbal jousts.

Thus another member of parliament told Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of a venereal disease”. “That all depends, Sir,” replied Disraeli, “on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

Churchill often chose Labour politicians as bull’s eyes for his wit. Speaking of Stafford Cripps, the leftmost MP at the time, Churchill said: “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” (I wish I had used that when writing about Donald Trump. Perhaps I will one day.)

Churchill’s direct competitor, Clement Attlee, often found himself in the great man’s crosshairs. Two examples will suffice: “An empty taxi drew up, and Mr Attlee got out.” And “Mr Attlee is a very modest man, but then again, he has much to be modest about.”

The previous generation of our royal family were no slouches either. For example, Princess Margaret once attended a New York party, where she was asked: “Your Royal Highness, and may I ask, how is the Queen?” “Are you asking about my mother, my sister or my husband?”, replied the princess off the cuff, drawing my retrospective applause.

But it’s Her Majesty Elizabeth II, our late Queen, who often belied her stern image with the odd cutting word. Her stock in trade wasn’t so much a memorable phrase as a subtle understatement. Much of it revolved around the intensifier ‘too’.

Thus she once described Tony Blair as “too presidential”. And after she first met Princess Michael of Kent (née Baroness Marie-Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz), Her Majesty quipped: “She is a bit too grand for us”.

It was Harry and Meghan who found themselves on the receiving end of some of the last putdowns in the Queen’s life. It’s no secret that Her Majesty wasn’t ecstatic about that match, and she made her feelings known without resorting to any obvious epithets.

Commenting on the wedding ceremony, the Queen said that Meghan’s dress was “too white”. Indeed, the white dress is supposed to symbolise the bride’s virginity or at least first marriage, neither of which Meghan could boast.

On another occasion, appalled at seeing her grandson henpecked by a Hollywood starlet, the Queen said “he is too in love.” That’s so much more poignant than any common phrase alluding to a certain part of a woman’s anatomy used as a whip.

That art of understatement, used in putdowns or otherwise, has been largely lost in England, along with most other admirable traits of the national character. We can safely chalk it up in the loss column, next to dignified stoicism, quiet courage, noble restraint, irrepressible cheerfulness, patriotism assumed, rather than shouted off the rooftops.

Far from being the exclusive property of the high and mighty, such characteristics used to cut across the social hierarchy. Yesterday, for example, I chatted with a wonderful woman who works at our local supermarket.

We always exchange pleasantries, and she is never short of a smile and a joke. When I told her a few years ago that my wife was ill, she gave me a bunch of flowers for her, and refused to accept payment. Since then she has always asked after Penelope, and I’ve dutifully kept her updated.

She’ll be retiring in April, she said yesterday, so now she’ll have time to do things she has always wanted to do. What, going on a cruise? I asked. No, working at the homeless shelter next door, replied my supermarket friend. She then joked about her career, with not a touch of bitterness or rancour anywhere.

When I look at her young co-workers, sporting tattoos, sullen expressions and telling the world with every gesture that they are hard done by, I can’t think of anything funny or witty to say. But then I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.

“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!  

… 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 20^th century and the first quarter of the 21^st, 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 18^th 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.

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 5^th 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 18^th 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 13^th 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.