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The title sounds both defeatist and wrong. It’s the former because the Ukrainians have stopped the Russian invasion in its tracks. It’s the latter because Israel is pounding HAMAS into the ground.

True, neither evil gang is winning the war fought with shells and bullets. But they are doing much better in the war fought with words and keyboards.

Gen. Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, is unlikely to go down in history as a major military strategist. However, he is credited with conceiving the concept of ‘hybrid warfare’: combining military, propaganda, diplomatic, economic, cultural and other tactics to achieve strategic goals.

The idea isn’t new, but it has had to be thoroughly rehashed to accommodate modern information technology. That the Russians have done, adding a massive electronic effort to the traditional stratagems of creating spy networks and recruiting ‘useful idiots’. And in a display of characteristic Russian generosity, they have shared their knowhow with HAMAS and other similar setups.

The underlying intent is to exploit the inchoate sentiments already existing at Western grassroots. Russian propagandists realise that about two thirds of all Westerners occupy an inert and malleable middle ground, with the remaining third evenly divided between the right and left fringes.

Both are ideologically programmed to respond in a Pavlovian manner to any messages catering to their ideologies. Both, therefore, are gullible and recruitable. The recruitment may be carried out the old-fashioned way involving documents signed in blood or more subtly, with expert brainwashing.

The right fringe is made up of malcontents usually (and incorrectly) called conservatives, but who are in fact Right-wing radicals. They are dissatisfied with where their countries are going, and with good reason.

To take Britain as an example, her indigenous population is being diluted in an influx of alien immigration, her traditional values are being mocked, her whole history is being derided, her education doesn’t educate, her children are encouraged to change sex and so forth – the litany can go on for ever.

People inhabiting the Right fringe have a certain ideal society in their minds, and they increasingly realise their own governments don’t share those ideals and will do nothing to realise them. Hence they are desperate to find someone, anyone, who speaks the same language they do, whose every word tickles their nerve endings.

Putin’s government, made up almost entirely of KGB officers, knows all that. Those KGB operatives still remember the glorious days of the Soviet Union, when millions of Western Lefties were successfully fed the canard of a peace-loving, democratic Soviet Union where everyone is equal, no one is rich, and everything is free.

That pumped endorphins into millions of Western bloodstreams, creating a sense of well-being impervious to facts. Later the Lefties would say they didn’t know about mass executions, concentration camps, torture, murderous artificial famines and other hard Soviet realities. That’s a lie: of course, they knew. But what they knew couldn’t make inroads on what they felt: the ideal might have only existed in their minds, but it was none the less tangible for it, more real than reality.

Some, such as the American playwright Lillian Hellman, kept their Stalinist faith long after the Soviets themselves had described Stalin’s crimes in harrowing detail. However, the hard Stalinist Left later transformed into what’s mislabelled as liberalism, the softer version of the same thing.

Hence, starting from the 1970s and steadily accelerating over the next generation, Soviet propaganda began to express itself in the language of Western campus liberals. The stress was on racial equality, distributionism, Third World virtues, peace, love and respect all around. That set up the outburst of enthusiasm in the West greeting the transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’ and even – especially idiotic – as ‘the end of history’.

It took about 10 years for the KGB to progress from being the power behind the scenes to becoming the power, tout court. Russia, already thoroughly criminalised under Yeltsyn, became fascistic under Putin and his ruling KGB gang.

The intention was from the beginning to recreate the Soviet Union, by force if necessary. Since that aim was unlikely to find many allies on the Western Left, both the thrust and the target of propaganda had to change. Putin’s trolls started peddling ‘traditional values’ to Western malcontents on the Right.

Those people were fed the very verbal sustenance their own governments starved them of: traditional sexual morality, strong decisive government with a muscular leader at the helm, religiosity, a strong line on immigration and Islam – again, you can continue this litany on your own. Facts pointing at the bogus nature of all such claims and the real fascistic nature of Putin’s Russia have always been in the readily available public domain, but virtual reality has again trumped the actual kind.

Those eager to dupe themselves are easy to dupe. Hence the propaganda part of the hybrid went into overdrive with the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression against the Ukraine.

While a third of a million Russians were being butchered in human-wave attacks on Ukrainian positions, Russian trolls, agents of influence and useful idiots created a fake picture of the proceedings. The Right-wing malcontents all over the world liked what they saw.

The Ukrainian government was depicted as a corrupt regime with strong Nazi tendencies that came to power as a result of a ‘putsch’. That evocative word was chosen in preference to ‘coup’, ‘overthrow’ or, God forbid, ‘revolution’. The upshot was that the West shouldn’t spend billions trying to prop up that reincarnation of evil.

A thoughtful reader commented on my piece the other day by saying: “Most Republicans do not view aiding Ukraine as stopping facism, but as propping up a corrupt regime.” Exactly. And the prevalence of that view testifies to the success of Putin’s propaganda.

Of course, the Ukraine is corrupt. What do you expect after being ruled for almost 100 years by Soviet communism and Putin fascism? She is, however, nowhere near as corrupt as Russia, whose whole government is a fusion of secret police and organised crime.

The Ukrainian people finally became independent when they overthrew their Russian puppet government in 2014, and they have since made giant strides towards civilisation, with the Russians moving just as fast in the opposite direction. Witness the fact that – at wartime! – there exists widespread criticism of the Zelensky government, with Ukrainian media often openly disapproving of its conduct of the war.

Meanwhile in Russia, the KGB government is doling out draconian prison sentences for every whiff of criticism and even for referring to the war as just that, not by the prescribed term of a “special military operation”. Putin’s opponents are being routinely murdered not only in Russia, but all over the world, and Russian money laundromats continue to operate globally in spite of the sanctions.

All that is widely ignored, with ‘conservative’ Western papers happily lending their space to mendacious propaganda of Russian fascism, accompanied by references to Ukrainian ‘Nazis’. That’s why so many Westerners who consider themselves conservative are questioning the advisability of supporting the Ukraine. Russian propaganda there is boosted by the homespun fringe parties that are in Putin’s pocket ideologically and often financially.

The scale of the Russian propaganda effort far exceeds the 1930s achievements of Willi Munzenberg’s Popular Front machine, complete with its own papers, magazines and film studios. And the Russians’ HAMAS pupils are doing very well too.

The other day The Times featured this headline: “Mummy, are they going to bomb our house?” That’s tear-jerking demagoguery at its very best, and the adman in me can’t fail to identify the guiding hand behind such messages in all the ‘liberal’ media.

The original revulsion following the HAMAS raid was short-lived. At first, even the most ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Western and pro-Third World) media shuddered at the stories of mass murders and savage rapes. Yet the underlying sense that HAMAS’s cause is just had been so cleverly planted into the ‘liberal’ psyche that, when the Israelis began to retaliate, the Arab savagery was quickly forgotten.

Coming to the fore were endless stories to the effect of “Yes, the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but…” provided they don’t kill any Muslims. Such stories have been richly illustrated with pictures of destroyed Gaza buildings, killed or maimed ‘civilians’, crying children and so on.

The mindset required for such gross misrepresentations of reality didn’t appear by itself. Western ‘liberals’ may have been inclined in that direction, but that inclination has had to be lovingly cultivated and rewarded. And the Russians didn’t just train HAMAS and other terrorist gangs in the use of arms and explosives. They have also taught Third World radicals how to shill for their cause by pressing the right buttons in the Left psyche.

Neither the Russians nor certainly HAMAS is any good at any creative activity, and they aren’t even so good at war. But their two-prong propaganda effort is scoring notable successes all over the world, right, left and centre. The pen yet again is proving to be mightier than the sword, and the prospects for the triumph of the good appear to be bleak.

Next Tuesday, Parliament will vote on the government’s proposal to fly unwanted migrants to Rwanda. That country is seen as a sensible replacement for the three-star British hotels in which many migrants are currently housed.

Now Rwanda’s record on human rights shouldn’t make many asylum seekers see the country as exactly the kind of asylum they seek. Even assuming Rwanda has changed since the events depicted in the film alluded to in the title above, the memory is too fresh to be just a memory.

Hence, I suspect the government’s idea is an iceberg. The visible part is the desire to remove the overflow of boat people as far from Britain as geography and geopolitics will allow. What lies underneath the surface though is the possible deterrent effect on future seekers of British pastures green.

If today’s lot end up in Hotel Rwanda, rather than a three-star hotel in the Home Counties, the next generation may think twice about risking their lives in those cross-Channel dinghies. Oh well, best-laid plans and all that, but I can’t for the life of me see this solution as the best one possible.

Everything I read on the subject (or watch on Sky News between my two breakfast croissants) regales me with a plethora of fine legal points that take me so far out of my depth that I suspect the real purpose is to obfuscate, not to elucidate.

The previous attempt to put migrants on Rwanda-bound planes was blocked by the Supreme Court, a body shoved down Britain’s throat by Tony Blair, which by itself means its remit is mostly subversion. On general principle, any superfluous institution is ipso facto subversive, violating as it does the 17^th century principle that says: “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

The Supreme Court is superfluous because it at best duplicates and at worst usurps the judiciary function of the House of Lords. That House has managed to review British laws for centuries, but the problem with it, as seen by the Blair lot, was precisely that it was strictly British. That’s why our international socialists needed a bypass that could take them around parochial British interests. Enter the Supreme Court.

The principal function of this defective child of Tony Blair is to ensure compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Thus the Supreme Court was supposed to be one of the chains binding Britain to the EU, effectively turning her into a province of a giant, unaccountable superstate.

One would think that Brexit ought to have put paid to the Supreme Court. After all, the British people, voting in greater numbers than they had ever voted for anything else, communicated their desire to hang on to their, which is to say parliamentary, sovereignty.

The natural thing to do would have been to go back to how things used to be when it was Parliament that governed the country, not the European Commission and its various offshoots. Yet as we know, the idea of getting Brexit done has been steadily undermined by unreconstructed Remainers who want to get Brexit done in.

They hang on to the anachronistic survivals of the EU, such as ECHR and consequently the Supreme Court. That usurping body was thus able to stop those Rwanda planes from taking off.

Now the government has come up with a devilishly casuistic way of bypassing the bypass to make sure all those migrants can fly to Africa. I can’t judge the legal nuances of the proposed legislation, but Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick evidently could.

That’s why he resigned in disgust, correctly stating, albeit in the jargon of political equivocation, that no satisfactory solution to the problem can be found for as long as Britain stays in ECHR. Though he didn’t write that, Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from any European body, considering that we’ve had documents codifying basic liberties for almost a millennium – and an exemplary record for centuries.

By contrast, one dominant member of the EU, France, has had 17 different constitutions since 1789 and long periods of a rather spotty record on human rights. As to the other dominant member, Germany, the less said about her the better.

Mr Jenrick obviously regards ECHR as the millstone pulling Britain down to the bottom of the EU swamp. A truly satisfactory solution to the migrants’ problem is impossible for as long as Britain has that weight around her neck.

No country is truly sovereign if it can’t control who is allowed to cross its borders, and in what kind of numbers. That realisation should be the starting point of any thinking on the subject.

The next logical step would be to introduce effective border controls guaranteed to work. In common with any practical measure, this one must start with clear thinking unsullied by extraneous concerns.

Legal asylum applications must be processed quickly and decisively. A certain number of people who can legitimately show that their lives would be in danger if they stayed in their native lands can be admitted.

Even that number has to be limited on purely arithmetic grounds: people who can make such a claim credible must number in at least tens of millions around the world. I doubt even Tony Blair would hospitably invite as many.

Yet HMG has been way too generous in its definition of legitimate asylum seekers. Thus 55 per cent of the Albanians who have requested that status got it – and Albania is about to join the EU. Not a single Albanian is in real need of asylum, although I’m sure many are in need of a higher standard of living.

As to the illegal migrants, the key to their treatment should come from the adjective, not the noun. ‘Illegal’ means they break the law, which makes them criminals, to be dealt with as such. One likes to think Britain hasn’t completely lost her wherewithal to combat criminality, although anyone walking through some areas of London may be forgiven for getting that impression.

We do still have the Royal Navy that has successfully defended Britain’s coastline from enemy fleets sent out by Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler. I realise we are no longer the naval power we used to be, but surely we still have the capacity of stopping a few dozen unarmed dinghies.

If we haven’t, the problem isn’t physical but metaphysical: the paralysis of will. If that’s the case, a few airliners here or there carrying several hundred illegals to Africa won’t offer even a viable solution.

That’s what the much-despised conservative wing of the Conservative Party are saying. They correctly prophesy that the government’s namby-pamby dithering on immigration could wipe the party out as a parliamentary force. Such right-minded Tories are likely to switch over to the Reform Party, heir to UKIP, thereby hastening the arrival of the doom they predict.

That will guarantee a Labour domination for a generation at least, with catastrophic consequences for the country. A meaningful step towards preventing that disaster would be giving the British people what they demanded in 2016: the reclaiming of parliamentary sovereignty.

That includes regaining control of the national borders – real control, that is. Not the fly-by-night palliatives amounting to little more than smoke and mirrors.

God Save the King will no longer be played at Bristol University’s graduation ceremonies. After some students complained it’s “old-fashioned”, “irrelevant” and “offensive to some”, the administration promptly complied.

Now, I don’t think Britons are any less patriotic than Americans, but they are certainly less demonstrative about it. Britons see hand-over-heart professions of loyalty as a bit embarrassing, some would say borderline vulgar. Nor does God Save the King get as much airing as The Star-Spangled Banner does in the US. And if our politicians shouted “God bless Great Britain” at the end of their speeches, they’d be laughed out of Westminster.

But less demonstrative doesn’t mean less real. In their own understated, quietly assured way the British people are as patriotic as anyone. Now, British academics are a different story, and it’s not a good read. (The same, incidentally, goes for American academics – many of them like nothing more than denigrating their own country.)

As far as university dons are concerned, the British have nothing to be proud of and much to be ashamed for. Our universities, whose mission is to forge a national intellectual elite out of the raw cerebral material of our youth, are busily churning out deracinated ignoramuses who insist on treating the entire British history as an uninterrupted sequence of evil deeds.

They wouldn’t be able to put forth anything resembling a sound argument in favour of that interpretation but, thanks to their teachers, they don’t have to. The grown-ups who run our universities insist on taking any idiocy springing from the students’ immature minds as gospel truth and a call to action.

That bothers me more than the understated patriotism of our academics. Dr Johnson did say “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, though he didn’t mean that as a general statement. He was talking specifically about one man, William Pitt, whom Dr Johnson considered a scoundrel wearing his patriotism on his sleeve.

Even so, patriotism is rather low down on my list of virtues, although it does appear on that list. To exhaust the daily ration of quotations I allow myself, another great man, Edmund Burke, put it in a nutshell: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely”.

Burke didn’t object to patriotism as such, but he despised blind devotion along the lines of “my country, right or wrong”. (There, I’ve just exceeded my quota of borrowed phrases.) The greater the number of people who feel that way, the more likely the country will be to go wrong more often.

And if a country is an evil tyranny, like Russia, China or Iran, then it forfeits all claims to love and allegiance. However, I don’t think that even students of Bristol University would put Britain next to those states.

So the problem is not their lack of patriotism but their ideological idiocy, and one has to blame the university for not doing something about it. To wit, one student, who at 21 is still hovering on the edge of post-pubescence, explained: “The monarchy isn’t really relevant to my generation, so it wouldn’t be missed.”

First, God Save the King is the national anthem, and we have no other. Thus, if even a committed republican refuses to listen to it, he offends not just the monarchy but the whole nation.

Second, the UK is a constitutional monarchy that has evolved over many centuries. Hence saying that the monarchy isn’t relevant is tantamount to saying that the constitution isn’t relevant.

Does that student know that the monarchy is the crossroads where all constitutional paths converge? That, even with the worst of wills, it’s legally impossible to get rid of the king without plunging the country into anarchy at best, civil war at worst?

Thus, the monarchy isn’t just ‘relevant’ (whatever that means), but absolutely indispensable. That student would be well-advised to study English history between 1640 and 1660, to learn what happens when the monarch is removed.

Judging from her age, she is close to graduation. Now, her excuse is that, at 21, a person’s brain isn’t even wired properly. But what’s her professors’ excuse for not having taught that silly twit the fundamentals of her country’s history and constitution?

In fact, our academe is in the grips of paedocracy, which is a much greater social danger than the more popular word of the same root. If our universities are asylums, then students are the lunatics running them.

They wield the kind of power they are ill-equipped to wield, psychologically, intellectually and institutionally. Unlike the Chinese Hongweibings, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, our students can’t kill or maim their professors – yet. But they can silence and ‘cancel’ them. They can also force university administrations to go along with any subversive idiocy that crosses their underdeveloped minds.

Thus, the statue of Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest, with students of Bristol University marching in the front row of the rioters. Now they’ve forced the university to remove the dolphin (Colston’s emblem) from its logo.

Now, Colston was involved in the slave trade in the late 17^th, early 18^th centuries. That occupation wasn’t illegal in Britain at the time, although it was already widely regarded as immoral. On the plus side, however, Colston left his whole fortune to endow schools, universities and alms houses in Bristol.

Bristol University was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1909, long after the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, and almost 200 years after Colston’s death. But without the foundation he bequeathed to the city, the university would probably not even exist. In acknowledgement of that fact, the Colston dolphin has featured in the logo of the grateful institution ever since – before it came into conflict with the flaming conscience of the young dimwits.

I wonder if their conscience prevailed over their education or was informed by it. Looking at some of the university’s professors, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the latter.

Thus Harriet Bradley, Bristol University’s Emeritus Professor of sociology, was aghast when the premises were offered to the Jewish Labour Movement to hold its annual conference. In her tweet she called for “someone to blow up the venue”.

Now that sort of thing could be regarded in some quarters as incitement to terrorism, but I wondered what upset the good professor so much. At first, I thought she was averse to socialism, but then I found she used to be a Labour Councillor. So she was averse to something else, or rather some people else.

After a public outcry, the academic had her Honorary status withdrawn. But I wonder how much venom she had injected into her students’ brains – and how much more comes from her colleagues. Bucketfuls, would be my guess.

None of this would be worth mentioning if our ideologised, moron-spewing education were confined to a single rogue university. Alas, it isn’t. All this is indicative of the general dismal state of our universities. The groves of academe? The graves, more like it.

The on-going inquiry into the way Boris Johnson handled the Covid pandemic reinforces the conclusion in the title. Actually, not the inquiry as such, but the TV coverage of it.

This morning I again consumed my requisite five minutes of Sky News at breakfast and almost suffered catastrophic reflux. The croissant I was eating couldn’t force its way into my stomach, already filled to the brim with cloying on-screen sentimentality.

The announcer was interviewing a fiftyish woman with frizzy hair whose father had died of Covid, one of over 200,000 Britons suffering that fate. The statistics involved have been investigated from every possible angle, demographic, ethnographic, psychographic, cardiographic – even pornographic for all I know.

One breakdown that’s sorely missing is moral, which leaves us in the dark about the personalities of the deceased. However, judging by media coverage, such information would be superfluous. We already know that every victim had to be an upstanding individual adored by everyone he ever came in contact with, including fellow passengers on public transport.

Today’s bereaved interviewee said nothing to compromise that impression: her recollections of her late father were nothing short of gushing. To be fair, she had been encouraged by the interviewer who was dead-set on exploring the hell out of the human angle.

“Tell us about your father,” she invited with a compassionate half-smile.

Let me remind you that the segment was about the Covid inquiry, not the personality profile of the British population. Hence the only relevant reply would have been “He died of Covid”. I wish someone had reminded the interviewer of that salient fact. In the absence of such prompting, she popped that leading question, and it could only lead one way.

The bereaved woman proceeded to sketch a verbal portrait that would put some saints to shame. Her hallowed father was gentle, affectionate, kind, still hard-working in his early seventies. He loved nothing more than playing with his grandchildren, mowing his neighbours’ lawns, helping old ladies across the street – frankly, I don’t remember every detail. But you get the overall picture.

Since for old times’ sake I like to establish logical links, I tried to understand exactly what that information had to do with the topic in hand, the government’s handling or mishandling of the pandemic.

Let me see if I can detect the underlying assumption. If the deceased was a dyed-in-the-wool bastard who used his grandchildren for punching bags when he didn’t use them for sexual gratification, who poisoned his neighbours’ pets, drove a petrol car, cheated on his taxes and voted Leave, then he would have deserved dying, and Johnson would have no case to answer.

Is that it? No? Then what is? And why is it that whenever our media cover victims of anything, be it crime, war, epidemic or terrorism, each one has to be a picture of perfection? Why isn’t a single one ever a sorry excuse for a human being? Such reprobates do exist, don’t they? If so, they have to be statistically represented in any large sample, give or take a percentage point.

Staying in the realm of logic, one has to come to the conclusion that good-for-nothing reprobates never die. And since we happen to know that’s not the case, logic can’t possible apply here.

As to the inquiry itself, I can’t make heads or tails of it. Some people accuse Johnson of imposing the lockdown too early. Others say he imposed it too late. Some say the lockdown was too tight. Others say it was too lax. Still others say he shouldn’t have imposed it at all.

Poor Boris Johnson seems as confused as I am. He started out by stating how very sorry he was for all the tragic deaths, which didn’t go down well with the baying public. The building where Johnson lies stretched on the rack is permanently surrounded by crowds bearing placards.

They say “The dead can’t hear your apologies”, which is undeniably true. They also say all kinds of other things, such as asking Mr Johnson if he could bring daddy back. That question is consistent with this Christmas season, although one can’t easily imagine a British prime minister saying: “Arise and walk”.

One protester screamed “You are a murderer!” from the galleries, which accusation suggested malice aforethought on Mr Johnson’s part. Yet even his political detractors refrain from insisting he is part of a sinister conspiracy to depopulate Britain.

While this morning’s interviewee commendably didn’t couch her displeasure with Johnson in such uncompromising terms, she made it clear she held him personally responsible for her father’s demise. A man like that, she said, should never be allowed to hold any public office again.

The interviewer, an empathetic grimace permanently pasted onto her face, egged on the bereaved woman expertly, thanking her in the end for sharing her story of woe with the audience. The viewers, I among them, had to dine on the froth while being denied the meat of the issue.

In a way, that’s understandable because no one really knows what the meat is. I certainly don’t, which is why I’ve always expressed myself on the issue of Covid with uncharacteristic reticence.

When I criticise public officials for doing something wrong, I usually know – or at least think I know – how they should have done it right. In this case I don’t, which is why I sympathise with Mr Johnson.

He had no experience in handling pandemics. And whatever prior knowledge he had encouraged complacency. Things like swine flu or assorted Asian blights, for example, had caused a great outburst of scaremongering that later proved unjustified.

Even when the scale of the Covid pandemic became clearer, Johnson was flooded with contradictory advice.

Some experts insisted on introducing an immediate lockdown, others were arguing that doing so early, before the pandemic reached its peak, would lead to ‘behavioural fatigue’ and reduced public compliance at the time it was most needed. Others beseeched Johnson to consider the economic, social and educational consequences of a lockdown. Accepting a certain number of excess deaths, they were saying, was the lesser evil.

His political advisers, a breed not known for putting emotional sensitivity first, were calculating the electoral credit and debit of each possible decision, which caused the ire of today’s interviewee. All the politicians wanted, she said, was to cover their own… she didn’t utter the word on her mind and instead took a couple of seconds to find a nicer one, ‘interests’.

In effect, she accused politicians of being politicians, which is an irrefutable charge if I’ve ever heard one.

All in all, the programme did nothing to elucidate the issue for me. It left too many lingering questions unanswered. Such as, why did Covid selectively target only saintly men, leaving TV announcers intact?

And New Mexico. And Arizona. And California. The Ukraine hugs the entire 2,000 miles of the border separating the United States from Mexico.

That proximity isn’t geographical; it’s much closer than that. For the Republicans in Congress have made military assistance to the Ukraine contingent on the solidity of the US southern frontier.

As it is, that border has always been porous, and now more than ever. During the three years of Biden’s tenure, some 6.5 million illegal migrants have seeped through the barely guided threshold.

During his presidency, Trump, doubtless inspired by the shining example of the Berlin Wall, began to build a similar structure along the Mexican border. Yet even had the project been completed, I doubt creating a physical barrier would have solved the problem.

The Berlin Wall did succeed on its own evil terms, but, at merely 96 miles, it was less than one-tenth the length. More important, its ‘success’ depended on the vigilant border guards, numbering 47,000 at their peak.

Pro rata, that would mean 500,000 for the US-Mexico border, and I have a nice bridge to sell to anyone who believes any American president would ever be able to put together a force that size. Unless, of course, Mexico sends an army across the Rio Grande to reclaim the aforementioned states that used to be hers.

(The very first article I ever wrote for a local Texas paper almost 50 years ago dealt with that very problem. I interviewed the head of the Immigration Service, who informed me mournfully that the entire force guarding the border numbered 200 men working in two shifts. I don’t know how large it is now, but I bet it’s nowhere near 500,000.)

Nor is it just the numbers. Those East German guards had orders to shoot on sight, and they complied with alacrity. Some 140 people were killed trying to scale the Wall, and the score would have been run up much higher had the people not got the message early on.

Again, I doubt, in fact hope, that no American president can ever issue similar instructions, effective though they might be. Yet our residually decent Western states are still unprepared to pay the moral cost of such efficacy. So the problem seems hard to solve.

Still, at least Trump tried. The Biden administration hasn’t, and it even stopped the construction of the border wall. That has been driving the Republicans, well, up the wall. Their core support sees, not unreasonably, the issue of uncontrolled illegal immigration as an existential threat, whereas the Democrats see it as an opportunity to beef up their own electoral base.

That’s where the Ukraine comes in. The Democrats have been assisting the Ukraine almost without demur. The support has fallen far short of what the Ukraine needs to roll back the fascist threat to Europe, but it has been sufficient to stop it in its tracks, at least for a while.

However, even keeping the military assistance at the same subsistence level requires new appropriations, and it’s the Republicans who hold a slender majority in the House. If the Democrats’ support for the Ukraine can be described as half-hearted, the Republicans have committed even less of their cardiac capacity to that cause.

The party traditionally has a strong isolationist element, and the idea of saving billions in Taxpayers’ Money (always implicitly capitalised in America) during the run-up to the presidential election sounds like a winner. Yet at the same time, the Democrats have a majority in the Senate, and they can block another potential vote-getter for the Republicans, tightening up the controls on the Mexican border.

Since modern politics is nothing if not transactional, the Republicans offered the Democrats a deal: you commit funds to our border defences, and we’ll vote for Ukrainian appropriations. Not high enough to enable the Ukrainians to reclaim their stolen territories, but enough to keep them bleeding white for years in a war of attrition.

Such horse-trading strikes me as both immoral and ill-advised.

If in the 19^th century it was still possible for America to debate whether or not she wanted to be a world power, it now no longer is. Americans can echo Matteo Ricci’s intransigent stance: “Simus, ut sumus, aut non simus” (“We shall remain as we are or we shall not remain at all”). The status of the Leader of the Free World is like a merry-go-round spinning at full speed: jumping off may break your neck.

That leadership position entails confronting deadly threats to the existing world order wherever they arise. Such is the downside of that position, but there exist numerous benefits as well, both tangible economic and intangible moral. Sticking to the former, America’s losing that status may conceivably lead to the dollar no longer acting as the world’s reserve currency – with catastrophic consequences for the US (and generally Western) economy.

That the emergence of an emboldened, victorious fascist power in the middle of Europe would be detrimental to American interests is thus self-evident. If unprojected around the world, America’s power will begin to weaken and eventually atrophy.

Republican isolationists, going back to the America First Committee in the 1930s, have always had doubts on this, which saddens me. After all, I find such Republicans much more attractive than their antipodes, FDR’s New Dealers and their Democratic heirs. Yet, though it pains me to admit this, on that one issue Roosevelt showed the greater clarity of thought.

As to the morality involved, engaging in transactional toing and froing at a time when thousands of Ukrainians are dying to keep the fascist wolf away from NATO’s door strikes me as utterly decrepit. This is yet another instance when morality and pragmatism converge: if history teaches anything, it’s that stopping a juggernaut after it has gathered momentum is much costlier than preventing it from rolling in the first place.

If the Republicans persist, I’ll have to start hoping for a Democratic victory, and I thought such words would never cross my lips. At least the Democrats will be less likely to sell the Ukraine down the Rio Grande.   

Nowadays this sentence, with possible variations, represents a shortcut to a charge of hate crime. It could always have been construed as offensive, but now it can well be criminally offensive.

In the film Anger Management, the Adam Sandler character gets into an argument with the stewards on his flight. Finally, he cries out in exasperation: “What’s the matter with you people?”

It so happened that the steward immediately in front of him was black. He took the question as a racial slur, and Adam got into all sorts of trouble.

“You people” is a locution that violates several inviolable rules of woke etiquette. First, it lumps a large group of people into a generalised category, which is already bad, if not yet criminal. You see, we are all supposed to be unique individuals defying any group identity, except one we explicitly and proudly claim for ourselves.

Yet this phrase isn’t just any old generalisation. Its implications are almost always pejorative. The person on the receiving end is rebuked not just for his own failings, if any, but for carrying the stigma of belonging to an objectionable category.

Since according to modern mythology no category can be deemed ipso facto objectionable, except perhaps Tory voters, a faux pas has been committed. For that to reach the level of criminality, however, the maligned category has to be protected by the new-fangled code.

If it’s defined by gender, any sexual proclivity formerly regarded as perverse, race or ethnicity, then belonging to it can’t on pain of censure be regarded as anything other than a badge of honour. Since these days a hate crime is anything perceived as offensive by the person presumably hated, the transgressor may well have his collar felt.

But even barring that possibility, whoever uses that awful phrase is at least an insensitive boor, even if the existing law provides a loophole through which he can sneak to avoid criminal charges. Yet there is one target group that isn’t off limits for derogatory generalisation. Can you guess which one?

If you live in Britain, you’ll have no trouble identifying that defenceless group. These are people commonly known as ‘posh’, those who occupy one of the top rungs on the social ladder and don’t try to disguise that contemptible fact by adopting demotic accents and attitudes.

Such an attempt goes a long way towards exoneration even for such innately ‘posh’ people as Prince Harry. If his brother has taken his accent a notch down from his father’s (and the latter a notch down from his own mother’s), Harry has pushed his even further towards the bottom. He gets top marks for trying to overcome his unfortunate accident of birth, especially since his generally vulgar personality reinforces his phonetic persona.

Yet someone like Boris Johnson is unapologetically ‘posh’. He still enunciates his vowels the way one was supposed to at Eton and Oxford, his two educational smithies. That automatically puts him into the only group unprotected by woke aversion to generalisation.

I was reminded of that the other day, when catching about two minutes of a Sky chat show. The chat involved two editors, one of Politico, an on-line Leftie magazine, the other of Sky News itself, a Leftie TV channel.

The two gentlemen were discussing the upcoming legal inquiry into Boris Johnson’s handling of the Covid lockdowns. The inquest will be conducted by a barrister who bears the stigma of having gone to the same school and university as his mark. That gave the two journalists cause to sneer, in their own accents that fall into the lower reaches of the middle-class range.

“All those people know each other,” one of them said, with a dismissive wave of the hand. All of which people, exactly? The barrister involved is neither a journalist nor a politician, Mr Johnson’s two known occupations. He, on the other hand, has no legal background.

Hence “all those people” was a statement of class hatred or at least contempt or possibly envy. However, since the target class in question is rather high, the two chaps risked no opprobrium for openly mocking a whole category of people. Quite the opposite: they established their own credentials as card-carrying members of the downtrodden classes, those drawing six-figure salaries at woke media.

Now imagine Boris Johnson saying something similar about his detractors. What if he said publicly “All those people talk funny” or “All those people have no table manners” or, for that matter, “All those people” anything, provided the people in question weren’t ‘posh’?

He’d be kicked from pillar to post for being a snob, a toffee-nosed elitist, a Hooray Henry, or some such. If Johnson still harbours hopes of a political comeback, these would be nipped in the bud. A British politician can just about get away with sounding like him, but not with looking down on the phonetically disadvantaged.

Our stand-up comedians know that all they have to do to get a laugh is to put on a caricature version of an educated accent. Sounding the way BBC announcers sounded a generation ago makes one a figure of fun at best, a target for derision usually.

The British were first force-fed the concept of class war, then were armed and trained to make sure the wrong people won it. By wrong people I don’t mean those who speak with regional or lower-class accents. In fact, two of the most brilliant people I know carry a distinct geographic imprint on their pronunciation.

Of course, it helps if people from the same country have no difficulty understanding one another, a condition that’s not always met in Britain. To that end, some kind of received pronunciation, the same or not drastically different for all, is useful.

But those speaking in the general middle-class range or higher understand one another perfectly well. The problem is in imposing demotic, proletarian culture on society as a stratagem of destructive political crusade.

When people speaking in cultivated accents are held to ridicule for no other reason, and by the same people who worship at the altar of diversity, something sinister is under way. I have one thing to say to such ideologues: You people are all the same.   

In 1971 National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger embarked on a secret mission. So secret that even America’s closest allies hadn’t been informed of it.

He ended his tour of Asia in Pakistan, where it was announced Kissinger was to spend a few days relaxing in the mountains. Instead he was whisked away to a military airfield, whence a Pakistani plane flew him to China.

There Kissinger spent three days negotiating with Mao’s second-in-command, Zhou Enlai. This had every characteristic of a cloak and dagger story: the cloak of secrecy shrouded the mission, and the dagger was plunged into the back of Taiwan, America’s loyal ally.

At that time the US had no diplomatic relations with China, relegating Mao’s cannibalistic regime to international wilderness. Its legitimacy wasn’t recognised; it was Taiwan that was America’s diplomatic partner. And it was Taiwan that, as the Republic of China, held a permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

By contrast, America’s relations with Mao’s China had been frankly hostile until then. In the early 1950s the two countries found themselves on opposite sides in the sanguinary Korean war, producing hundreds of thousands of Chinese casualties and tens of thousands of American ones.

However, America wasn’t the only power China was at daggers drawn with. Mao and Soviet leaders didn’t see eye to eye on ideology, and none so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. Following the 1969 Sino-Soviet split, the two countries had a series of border clashes.

The most serious one occurred at Damansky Island on the Ussuri River, when Chinese soldiers ambushed Soviet border guards. The Soviets responded with missile barrages and managed to hold on to the island. Since then, the two communist giants had been on the brink of war, possibly a nuclear one, a situation Kissinger saw as an opportunity.

Actually, America didn’t need China to defeat the Soviet Union in any war, cold or otherwise. The US and her NATO allies had a prohibitive strategic advantage over the Soviets, and both sides knew it. However, it took moral strength and determination to press that advantage home, and those commodities were in short supply throughout the West. Hence having a billion Chinese allies threatening Russia from the east seemed like a painless alternative to taking a principled stance.

Kissinger’s task was to convince Zhou that China should ally herself with America, with each acting as the jaw of a vice crushing the Soviet strength to fight the Cold War – or for that matter a hot one of the nuclear variety that the Soviets had been threatening to unleash on China.

Zhou was amenable; he too craved normal relations with the United States. Zhou was ready to treat America as a friend, but Confucius say friends must help one another. He wanted his new American friend to recognise the People’s Republic as the only legitimate China. No problem, Zhou. Kissinger thought it was a peachy idea.

The two sides set up a summit meeting between Nixon and Mao, and in February 1972 Nixon arrived in Peking. After his conference with Mao, the rapprochement went full speed ahead. Taiwan was kicked off her seat in the Security Council, with the People’s Republic squeezing her own bulk in. She was recognised as the only legal representative of China, with Taiwan’s status becoming rather loosely defined.

The United States was now fully committed to drawing China into her orbit. But magnets were required, of the economic kind. China’s economy was a shambles following all those Cultural Revolutions and Great Leaps forward. However, if China was the Augean Stables, America, inspired by Kissinger’s realpolitik, was ready to play Hercules.

China received instant and unlimited access to Western capital and technologies. Those few technologies that the West preferred to keep for itself were stolen by China’s industrial espionage. Nobody minded too much – the Soviet Union was being neutralised.

Within a few decades China managed to blend those Western gifts with her own industrious, cheap, semi-enslaved labour force to become the West’s manufacturing base. That turned China into an economic giant and, more to the point, a military one.

Some of the internal reins got loosened, and China began to mass-produce not only assorted trinkets but also billionaires. The traditional thinking – if it merits such a lofty term – was that, once a communist country got a taste of Western consumerism and free enterprise, it would stop being communist, first de facto, then de jure.

That belief is another aspect of what I call totalitarian economism, a false theory bringing together such supposed antipodes as Marxists and libertarians. The two groups have joined forces to create a fake picture of a life mostly driven by economic concerns.

They simply have to shorten the distance between humans and animals. The latter, after all, also have their lives circumscribed by a pursuit of food and shelter. What totalitarian economists created was a more sophisticated human version of the same thing: foie gras instead of bananas or cud, Lake Como villas instead of lairs and dens.

Since the so-called Left and Right are in agreement, differing only in the type of materialism they favour, who’s going to argue? No one. The forged picture of life has been certified as original, and never mind the facts. Ideology has spoken.

Yet facts refuse to go away. For example, if you look at the two on-going wars, in the Ukraine and Gaza, the two aggressors, Russia and Hamas, knew beforehand that their actions would hurt their economic interests no end. Yet they went ahead because they aren’t simians but humans. Evil humans, but humans nonetheless.

And human beings, while still preferring to live in comfort, are mostly driven by non-material concerns. These could be honour, wounded pride, ideology, religion, love, hate, nationalism, internationalism – all those things, good or bad, that ought to remind our totalitarian economists that man does not live by bread alone.

China has vindicated my iconoclasm by building up a mammoth economy, but without changing her communist, which is to say evil, spots. The periphery of the system has changed, but the core remains the same. China is still a communist country bent on world domination – and she now has the means to make attempts towards that end.

At some point, Americans began to get an inkling of this, but the economic benefits they derived from the giant pool of cheap yet qualified Chinese labour put blinkers on their eyes. However, the sinister shadow China’s bulk was casting on the world, and specifically on American interests, has forced some of the blinkers to be pushed aside.

Three consecutive American presidents have been fighting back, if half-heartedly. Joe Biden has publicly declared China to be the main global challenge (that’s the modern for ‘threat’) and introduced a packet of sanctions. But that’s like trying to push toothpaste back into the tube, if you’ll pardon the cliché.

And the paste was originally squeezed out by Henry Kissinger, the feted maestro of realpolitik. China is now waiting for the propitious moment to claim the prize she was implicitly promised: Taiwan. That’s creating another flashpoint, eminently capable of flaring up into a global war, and the first nuclear bomb falling down should have Kissinger’s name on it.

Now imagine that the US policy towards China in the early 1970s was set by a less Machiavellian politician, a firm believer in first principles. Such a politician would never have made it easy for China to build up her economic and military brawn. Rather than playing footsies with the communists, he would have declared that he considered their ideology evil and saw his task in containing it.

China, while still remaining a formidable threat because of her sheer mass, would never have developed on her own the economic and technological wherewithal to challenge the West in earnest. The world would today be a safer place, and America’s position in the world much stronger.

Henry Kissinger had many admirable qualities, and quite a few not so admirable ones. That’s why what he himself saw as his greatest coup many others have got to see as a catastrophic and irreversible error. History has taught yet another lesson, but most pupils were playing truant as usual.

Concluding his speech at the Copout28… sorry, I mean Cop28, HM Charles III said: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”

Such statements are never queried, but I’d be curious how a man who holds meaningful conversations with his plants would respond to counterarguments. One such would invoke HM’s coronation, on 6 May 2023.

The King had to take an oath, which included his promise to uphold “the laws of God and the true profession of the gospel.” That was a noble undertaking, and an essential one.

For our kings are neither appointed nor elected. They are anointed, which surely strengthens their claim to legitimacy and places them above politics. Hence, when the laws of God come into conflict with quotidian political concerns (which is what Cop28 is all about), our monarch is duty-bound to put divine laws first.

Anyone who understands our constitution has to agree, whatever his own religious beliefs if any. For the issue is indeed constitutional, not confessional.

If so, then His Majesty flagrantly violated his sacred oath. For the laws of God specifically state that the Earth does belong to us and not the other way around.

Thus Psalms 115:116 are unequivocal on the subject: “The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s: But the earth hath he given to the children of men.”

Genesis 1:28 expressed the same thought in different words: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Such are “the laws of God” that the King has sworn to uphold. Instead he sank into a primitive form of heathen pantheism, which would be his privilege to do if he were a private individual. But he isn’t and it isn’t.

However, if King Charles continues to put hare-brained political fads before his constitutional obligations, he may well become a private individual before long, a citizen of the British republic.

Republican sentiments may be dormant at the moment, but if the King becomes a crowned version of Greta Thunberg, people may begin to question his legitimacy. Or perhaps invite Greta to become our woke queen – why settle for a copy when you can have the original?

The rest of the King’s speech was usual scaremongering demagoguery, complete with tear-jerking references to his grandchildren who will be “living with the consequences of what we did or didn’t do”, and heartfelt regrets that we aren’t destroying the economy fast enough to save the future generations.

His Majesty describes such destruction as “transformational action.” Perhaps that’s what his plants call it – the more advanced of them must be capable of producing the intellectual content of the King’s speech.

I especially liked his reference to “unprecedented floods”. Has HM heard of Noah’s Ark? If not, he should go back to the book that contains the laws of God he has sworn to uphold.

It’s widely, if perhaps erroneously, believed that the Kubrick character was based on Henry Kissinger, who died yesterday aged 100.

The film was made in 1964, before Kissinger held any official post in the US  government, but he was already known as foreign policy consultant to the high and mighty. He was also known for his elastic conscience enabling him to reshape his ideas and allegiances to fit the moment.

Kissinger called himself a master of  “constructive ambiguity”, and it’s in that spirit that I find myself reacting to his death. On the one hand, he was far and away the most brilliant State Secretary in my lifetime. On the other hand, well… let’s talk about the good hand first.

The obituaries describe Kissinger as a diplomat, which constitutes a demotion. A diplomat merely communicates his government’s foreign policy to foreign countries; he doesn’t formulate it. Kissinger did.

Throughout Nixon’s presidency and some of Ford’s, he sidelined the State Department, first to set the foreign policy and then to carry it out singlehandedly. In that Kissinger displayed a certain distrust of traditions, even some constitutional ones, but one could argue that his distrust wasn’t altogether misplaced.

That was a back-breaking load for one man to carry, but Kissinger’s back was up there with the strongest. One can imagine him at the 1815 Vienna Congress, rubbing shoulders or locking horns with the likes of Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh. He was a figure of a similar calibre, and I can’t think offhand of too many post-Vienna statesmen fitting the same description.

Yet if a brilliant mind isn’t matched by a superlative character, it can keep firing blanks — those with a blinding flash and deafening noise, but blanks nonetheless. No one illustrates this simple observation as vividly as Henry Kissinger.

Granted, anyone involved in diplomatic wheeling and dealing will sometimes wheel into moral cul-de-sacs. It would be naïve to expect any statesman to avoid immorality completely. But immorality isn’t the same as amorality, and this is another point Kissinger illustrates.

He took pride in his mastery of realpolitik, sacrificing moral principles and intellectual convictions for the sake of achieving immediate practical results. In fact, he was so good at it that one could legitimately wonder if he genuinely had any moral principles or held any intellectual convictions.

While it would be silly to deny that realpolitik is an important tool of statecraft, it’s hard to ignore that it often leads to a divorce from reality for the sake of instant political gratification. It can’t be otherwise.

Global interlacing of well-nigh incompatible national interests creates such a jumble of variables that it may well be beyond any man or even any group to untangle. Hence it’s usually impossible to calculate the consequences of a foreign policy on a purely realpolitik basis.

What looks like solid reality today may well prove to be ephemeral tomorrow and its exact opposite the day after. Suddenly the amoral pragmatism of yesteryear stops looking pragmatic while still remaining amoral.

Conversely, what at first looks like foolhardy obtuseness based on nebulous principles (all principles are nebulous to the realpolitik set) may well produce the best practical results.

If you look at Kissinger’s greatest putative triumphs, détente with the Soviet Union, SALT 1, reconciliation with China, ending the Vietnam War, peace between Egypt and Israel, only the last one can in hindsight be judged as a qualified success.

Détente was negotiated at a time when the US had an overwhelming strategic superiority over the Soviet Union. A principled stance, later adopted by Ronald Reagan, could have made “the evil empire” come apart at the seams at least a decade earlier.

Instead, Kissinger’s policy of appeasement led to a massive transfer of capital and technologies to the Soviet Union, which enabled her almost to achieve military parity with NATO in the 1970s.

SALT 1 also contributed to that development. It was strictly an act of PR grandstanding because everyone, including Kissinger, knew the Soviets would cheat. The ‘real’ in realpolitik was effectively replaced with ‘virtual’. The US public had its fears of nuclear bombs allayed, while the Soviets surreptitiously kept stockpiling those bombs sky high under the cover of SALT.

China provided another reason for Kissinger to give himself a contortionist pat on the back. He secretly travelled there in 1971 to set up what was billed as a historic meeting between Nixon and Mao, followed by a thaw in the frosty relations between the two countries.

Kissinger’s idea was to use China as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the Cold War. To that end, the US created a communist monster now challenging her power all over the globe – this without forestalling the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which cost the US billions to reverse. Aggressive Muslim gangs, trained and armed by Americans, sprang up as a result, a problem still with us today.

In 1973 Kissinger negotiated the Paris Accords, which again everyone knew was delivering South Vietnam to the communists. People who always insist on ending wars ought to remember that surrender is a guaranteed way of doing so – even if it’s passed off as a diplomatic coup.

The Nobel Committee hastily awarded its Peace Prize to Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho. The latter had the decency to turn it down; he knew that what he had signed was America’s capitulation, not a peace treaty. No such compunctions for Kissinger, even though he knew it too. A year and a half later, South Vietnam was turned into a giant concentration camp.

Kissinger set out to emulate his idols, the stars of the Vienna Congress, who created a blueprint for lasting peace in Europe. But their compact lasted a century; his, only a fraction of that period, if that. However, I doubt the long-term failure of Kissinger’s short-term achievements made a dent in his vain self-regard. He knew he was a genius, and he didn’t care who else knew it.

Unsurprisingly, when a more principled Reagan administration took over, there was no place in it for Kissinger. And even a less confrontational George H.W. Bush left his talents unused. So did Bush’s intellectually challenged son, although he could have used any help he could get – especially since he and Kissinger agreed in their assessment of the new villain, Putin.

After Bush met Putin, he said:  “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.” Congratulations to Dubya: he got a sense of something that didn’t exist.

Being an academic, rather than an oilman, Kissinger put a more intellectual spin on exactly the same assessment. He saw Putin as a character out of a Dostoyevsky novel, sharing all the same “contradictions and doubts about his people.” One suspects that, if Kissinger were in charge of the US foreign policy now, Kiev would already be a regional centre in the Russian Federation – while he would be collecting another Nobel Peace Prize.

A brilliant man, no doubt. But his character flaws prevented Henry Kissinger from becoming a great one. Still, I’ll miss him, the way one misses one’s youth with all its illusions.  

Noam Chomsky can’t boast the precision of a broken clock that, as we know, is right twice a day. Outside his day job, linguistics, he gets things right much less frequently.

But infrequently doesn’t mean never. And here I must yet again remind my conservative friends (and especially myself!) that ideas shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand just because they come from someone whose politics we dislike. Once an idea is enunciated, it breaks the umbilical connecting it to the enunciator and starts walking – or falling – on its own.

Thus, Chomsky wrote in 1968 that: “… the processes by which the human mind achieved its present stage of complexity and its particular form of innate organisation are a total mystery… It is perfectly safe to attribute this development to ‘natural selection’, so long as we realise that there is no substance to this assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for these phenomena.”

Here is an atheist scholar capable of thinking not only as an atheist but also as a scholar. This is a rare ability nowadays, when ideologies have replaced both ideas and ideals.

Chomsky brings to mind Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s contemporary and fellow evolutionist. In 1858, when Darwin was researching his “big species book”, Wallace beat him to the punch by publishing an article on natural selection produced by competition among and within species.

Darwin, who was obsessed with priority, immediately set his magnum opus aside, wrote a sketchy outline of the book and published it next year as On the Origin of Species. Later, in his preface to The Descent of Man, he wrote that his work on evolution was motivated by an urgent need to prove that God doesn’t exist. At work there was the mind of an ideologue, not a scientist.

Wallace, on the other hand, kept his atheism and his science in separate compartments. Thus, though he couched his disagreements with Darwin in polite terms, he presaged Chomsky by denying outright that natural selection could account for the complexity of the human brain.

“The human brain,” he wrote, was “a totally new factor in the history of life”. Hence he refused to “regard modern primitives as almost filling the gap between man and ape”. No missing links then, thank you very much.

Wallace saw that the evolutionary theory was too small to contain giants like Newton, Bach or Dante. Genius for music, mathematics, philosophy or art belonged in a different domain, “the unseen universe of Spirit”.

That Spirit, which he refused to call God, had, according to Wallace, taken matters in its own hands at least three times in history: “the creation of life from inorganic matter, the introduction of consciousness in the higher animals, and the generation of the higher mental faculties in man.”

Wallace also believed that natural selection was teleological, proceeding not chaotically but towards achieving a certain objective. It’s that “unseen universe of Spirit” again, for setting objectives isn’t what inanimate nature does for a living.

That’s the problem with ideological evolutionists. While denying that Christianity is true, which is legitimate, they also deny it’s true to life, which is disingenuous.

It’s astounding that, for all the amazing scientific progress in the subsequent two centuries, our understanding of the mind hasn’t advanced since the time of Darwin and Wallace. Yet anyone untouched by rabid ideology has to realise that, even though the brain is a physical entity, the mind isn’t.

It indeed functions in “the unseen universe of Spirit”, which removes it as an object of study from the domain of natural science and shifts it into the realm of metaphysics. It’s only in that realm that the mind can be explained soundly, if not necessarily to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s what Jacques Maritain meant when insisting that philosophy was superior to natural science, and theology was superior to philosophy.

Both metaphysical sciences are devoted to the study of first principles and primary causes, and man’s mind has to act as Exhibit 1 in any such investigation. Even those who deny it’s made in the image of God’s mind struggle to suggest what else it could possibly be made in the image of.

Still, the natural science of the brain shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. It has made some startling discoveries, the greatest of which is that the brain is indeed the centre of mental activity. This trivial fact, these days known even to children, escaped even the man with a valid claim to history’s greatest intellect, Aristotle.

Today we know that mental activity produces electrical pulses clearly visible on oscillograph displays. We also know, within limits, which sections of the brain are responsible for various mental processes. What scientists don’t know is what the mind is. That’s where philosophy comes in, lending a helping hand and emphasising the inanity of intellectual pygmies who insist that science and religion are incompatible.

Before modernity emerged fetidly victorious, important scientists of the past, from Copernicus to Maxwell, from Newton to Mandel, were believers who saw the symbiotic potential of fusing physics with metaphysics. Even half of today’s scientists agree that science and religion can complement each other. It is only for those ignorant of philosophy and incapable of ascending to its intellectual heights that they become incompatible.

The key word in Chomsky’s passage is “belief”. What we see here is opposition not between faith and science but between two faiths. One is based on God’s revelation given by methods both natural (through the possibility of perceiving much of his creation experimentally) and supernatural (through the Scripture and church tradition). The other is based on nothing but man’s own fanciful speculation. As such, it’s not so much faith as superstition.

Unable to believe that God could create something out of nothing, atheists have to believe that nothing could create everything. That represents a suspension of disbelief much greater than anything a believer has to enact.

Even scientists trying to use science to vindicate their atheism start from accepting the existence of rational natural laws. If they wish to be logical, then, while rejecting the existence of a rational law-giver, they are forced to ascribe rational behaviour to nature itself.

That’s the most primitive pantheism, discarded by all serious thinkers long before Christ. Strip such inanities bare of scientific cant, and they descend to the intellectual level of a prehistoric shaman.

A theocentric thinker will be able to explain next to everything that matters, while his anthropocentric counterpart will explain next to nothing. Above all, the theist will be able to get closer to an understanding of what makes us human.

Unlike other parts of nature, we don’t merely function according to the law of causality. Man’s future can’t be predetermined because man himself isn’t predetermined.

An animal, vegetable or mineral has no choice in its destiny. It can’t break out of the predetermined rut of its chemical or biochemical makeup. Man can do so because he possesses both the will and the ability to make free choices. In a world ruled by causality he seems to be an envoy from another world, one governed by freedom.

Two atheists born a century apart, Wallace and Chomsky, agree with all that, although neither would use the same language and especially not the G word. They also prove inadvertently that intelligent atheists must at times compromise their atheism or risk compromising their intelligence.