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Last week a middle-aged Italian man, Andrea Leombruni, found himself face to face with a bear who was visiting his chicken coop for a light snack.

Frightened out of his wits, as any sensible man would be, Andrea fired his shotgun and dropped the scowling beast where it stood. Little did the hapless Italian realise that the animal was one of about 60 protected Marsican bears left in the region.

The police had to do what they do, investigate, while animal rights groups had to do what they do, make death threats. These were aimed not only at Andrea but also at his 85-year-old mother, who couldn’t understand what she had done wrong, other than giving birth to a murderer.

Having spent a few sleepless nights listening to madmen ranting at the other end of the line, Andrea had to be given police protection. Meanwhile, a local prosecutor hired a ballistics expert to determine whether the angle of firing verified Andrea’s account.

In a related development, which may not look related at first glance but really is, the RSPCA conducted a poll that showed that 60 per cent of Britons turn away from eating meat in favour of vegetarian food.

Now any poll conducted by an organisation that has a vested political interest in the findings must be taken with a grain of salt and, ideally, a shot of tequila. However, even assuming that 60 per cent is wishful thinking, and the real proportion is half that, the poll is most worrying. As worrying, as a matter of fact, as the existence of large numbers of people ready to kill a human being for putting down an animal.

The two news items both illustrate the depth of the spiritual abyss into which modern people are falling at an ever-accelerating speed. In the process, they vindicate Chesterton’s adage that I can’t overquote: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

Replace ‘believe’ with ‘worship’ and the aphorism applies to my subject today. For people don’t just calculate the odds they are facing in the rough-and-tumble of quotidian life. People also have a craving for ideals, for something so much higher than they themselves are that they are unlikely ever to encounter it in this life.

They hate to perceive themselves as just selfish, hedonistic creatures who crawl on the flinty ground without ever looking up towards a supreme, or at least superior, good. The need for an ideal to worship is as fundamental as that for food to eat and water (or tequila, if such is your wont) to drink.

For two millennia the Western world had such an ideal, so people didn’t have to brood over it, nor to look for alternatives. Acquiring that ideal to worship represented real progress; I am tempted to say the only meaningful one in history.

Yet in due course people lost the desire and ability to worship that ideal. It was, again according to Chesterton, “found difficult and left untried”. Since the original need hadn’t disappeared, that crisis of faith left a vacuum, something that, as we know, nature abhors and people try to fill.

They filled that particular vacuum by reverting to the darkest days of paganism, with its worship of nature in general and animals in particular. The first coming of such worship as a mass phenomenon happened roughly towards the end of the French Revolution and the beginning of the Industrial one. It was called Romanticism.

Glorification of nature was its essential aspect, partly caused by a reaction to the mechanical, scientific view of life fostered by the Industrial Revolution. That tectonic shift not only inspired Romanticism but also made it possible by creating a new and growing class of urban intelligentsia far removed from nature.

People staying close to it, farmers and peasants, didn’t worship nature. Nature destroyed their crops with extreme heat or drowned them with torrential rains. Nature sent wild animals their way who slaughtered their poultry, livestock and sometimes children. Nature forced them to break their backs by working dawn to sunset just to keep body and soul together.

Those country folk probably would have hated gaspy, poetic panegyrics to nature had they had time to read them. But they didn’t: the soil needed ploughing, the cows needed milking, the thatched roof needed repairing.

Had someone told them that the simple act of eating meat or killing wild animals had far-reaching moral, and possibly legal, implications, they would have thought they were talking to a lunatic. Fast-forward a couple of centuries, and the lunatics are here en masse, running the asylum.

As far as killing that Marsican bear is concerned, those animal fanatics probably fear the species might become extinct. In other words, that chicken-loving creature might suffer the fate of over 99 per cent of all species that have ever inhabited the world.

You believe in evolution, chaps, don’t you? Darwin is at least a prophet if not quite God? Well then, that’s evolution at work. That favourite book of yours ought to have been titled The Disappearance, rather than Origin, of Species. Numerous species have been vanishing from the face of the earth for longer than man has been around – and no one ever shed too many tears about it.

Yet now the old pagan sensibilities have come back in force, and animals have somehow regained the sacred status they used to enjoy during mankind’s infancy. New pagans are happy to kill a man who killed a bear, from which one can infer that an ursine life is more valuable than a human one.

Not many people seem to mind the 215,000 babies aborted in Britain every year. The idea of knocking off old people, with or without their permission, appeals to greater and greater numbers. But those cuddly teddies (who’ll tear a man apart limb from limb faster than you can say ‘animal rights’) are sacrosanct. Take their life and you’ll pay with yours.

That lot would be dancing around a pole with a bull’s head atop, except that bovine creatures are also supposed to enjoy rights. One of them is right to life, with modern juvenile pagans aghast at the thought of animals suffering an ignominious death to put burgers on our diet.

This reminds me of St Francis, who preached to animals (he called them Brother Wolf or Sister Doe) as if they were human. That was suspect in the eyes of the Church, and Francis was lucky to escape censure. But the salient fact is that even Francis wasn’t a vegetarian. He begged for his food, and, when offered a piece of meat, blessed and thanked the donor.

Actually, Jesus Christ wasn’t a vegetarian either, but today’s lot profess moral standards in excess of the divine and saintly ones. It’s good to know their moral house is in such a spic-and-span order that they can afford setting their sights so high.

One has to wonder why the 20^th century, the first wholly atheistic one in history, delivered more violent deaths than all the previous centuries of recorded history combined. Perhaps modern moral standards are as selective as they are high.

Jews traditionally play the scapegoat to the sacred cow of Russian jingoism.

When things go wrong – and when do they ever go right? – the powers that be either hint or say outright it’s all the Jews’ fault. Such powers may be tsars, party secretaries or presidents – plus ça change and all that.

The people perk up on cue: they’ve always known that, viscerally. After all, they themselves can’t be blamed for the country’s ills, can they? And they’ve been proved right!

Many things are currently going wrong in Russia, but Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine takes pride of place. With hundreds of thousands of Russians killed or maimed and the war not getting anywhere, someone has to carry the can.

One would think that the Jewish card would be the joker popping out of the pack first. Frankly, I expected that to happen immediately after the collapse of Russia’s blitzkrieg on Kiev last year, but an inexplicable delay occurred.

Now things are back to normal: Putin has explained, practically in so many words, that all the problems are caused by that American puppet Zelensky who is an “ethnic Jew”. I heaved a sigh of relief: my claim that I understand Russia was vindicated.

Actually, the first signs appeared on Russian television a couple of weeks ago, when the famous actress, Valentina Talyzina, explained that Jews are the only people inside Russia who oppose Putin’s noble war effort.

Some of those treacherous vermin hide behind their Russian-sounding names, but that mask, explained Talyzina, must be ripped off. Thus one of the country’s best-known singers, Alla Pugacheva, claims that her father’s name was Boris. In fact, it was Boruch! Need she say more?

And it’s not just Pugacheva either. Talyzina’s colleague, Liya Akhedzhakova, who has just left the country in protest against the war, also has some Jewish tar in her family barrel – the people have a right to know such salient and vital facts.

You must understand that every word uttered on Russian TV has been either prompted or directly ordered by the Kremlin in pursuit of its policy. Hence I knew then that before long the Kremlin would dispense with intermediaries and address the country directly.

So it has happened, and let me repeat: I’m amazed it took so long. In an interview the other day Putin confirmed the suspicion his people had had all along.  

“Western overseers”, he said, “have installed a person at the head of modern Ukraine – an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins.

“And thus, in my opinion, they seem to be covering up an anti-human essence that is the foundation… of the modern Ukrainian state… And this makes the whole situation extremely disgusting, in that an ethnic Jew is covering up the glorification of Nazism and covering up those who led the Holocaust in Ukraine at one time – and this is the extermination of one and a half million people.”

Those “Western overseers” must have hypnotised 73 per cent of Ukrainians, the proportion that voted Zelensky into office in 2019. And the stupefied people were even manipulated into accepting the appointment of another Jew, Oleksiy Reznikov, as defence minister.

But then, the other day Zelensky covered his tracks by dismissing Reznikov and replacing him… with another Jewish Nazi? Almost. The Ukraine’s new defence minister is Rustem Umerov, a Crimean Tatar and a Muslim. Now if that isn’t a perfidious Nazi ploy, I don’t know what is.

Putin has reiterated the lies first voiced a year and a half ago: the Ukraine is a fascist country in urgent need of denazifying. Russia’s attack is meant to be a clean-up job to eradicate the Judaeo-Banderite Nazis who survived 1945. Those vermin have to be pushing 100 at least, but that doesn’t make them any less venomous.

Accusing Zelensky of covering up the glorification of Nazism also plays into another KGB myth, that the Jews themselves collaborated with the Holocaust. If so, that must have been history’s unique outburst of collective masochism and death wish – the Jews conspiring with the Nazis to kill millions of Jews.  

That some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis is true – but then so did the denizens of every occupied territory, especially in Eastern Europe. Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Russians could all be found among Nazi murderers.

In fact, some 1.5 million Soviet citizens, most of them Russians, switched sides and donned the Nazi uniform during that war, another unique development in history. They thus advanced, directly or indirectly, Hitler’s war aims, one of which was the extermination of Jews.

Some Ukrainians did massacre Jews, most notably at Babi Yar and, earlier, in Lvov. But Bandera and his nationalist guerrillas weren’t the prime culprits.

In fact, throughout the war (which Bandera himself spent in a Nazi concentration camp) they fought against the Nazis, thus slowing down the Holocaust whether they wanted to or not. Yes, the wartime constitutions of the two Ukrainian nationalist movements were clearly fascist and anti-Semitic. And yes, some Banderites were guilty of anti-Semitic atrocities.

But claiming that today’s Ukrainian state traces its lineage back to the perpetrators of the Holocaust is a pernicious lie calculated to stoke up the anti-Semitic sentiment at Russia’s grassroots. In fact, Putin grossly exaggerated, possibly by an order of magnitude, the number of Jews killed by Ukrainians.

Three million of the six million Jewish victims perished in Nazi death camps, and it wasn’t Banderite Ukrainians who had shipped them there. The claim that half of all other victims were murdered by Ukrainians is both preposterous and arithmetically impossible. But let’s not play the numbers game – it’s the principle that counts.

Whatever atrocities some Ukrainians committed, the Holocaust was a German project, ordered and inspired by the German government, and made possible by the German occupation of Europe. Others collaborated, more or less eagerly and in larger or smaller numbers, but the ultimate sin was committed by the Germans.

Yet there is that outdated doctrine, teaching that sins can be redeemed and forgiven. Thus the world seems satisfied that Germany has lived down the shame of her Nazi past. She is now accepted as a normal Western country, complete with a bicameral parliament, democratic governance, ethnic tolerance and the rule of law.

The Ukraine also features all those attributes of Western polity, and yet she is supposed to be besmirched for ever by some of her denizens who participated in Nazi crimes as junior partners. That proposition is incredible even in theory – and mendacious in practice.

Having got rid first of communists and then of Putin’s puppet Yanukovych, the Ukraine has been fast becoming a civilised, Western-leaning country, one showing more racial tolerance than some. Successive Ukrainian governments have featured Jews, blacks, Buryats, Tatars, Byelorussians, Russians, and the country doesn’t mind.

In fact, the only Eastern European country that hasn’t jettisoned its fascist past is Russia herself. All the worst features of the Russian Empire and communist dictatorship are being revived and lovingly cultivated.

Imperialism, terror external and internal, puppet courts, suppression of independent institutions and media, totalitarian propaganda, total militarisation, massive rewriting of history, claims of racial superiority, rampant xenophobia – such is today’s Russia. And now state anti-Semitism has come off the mothballs too.

People who know Putin say he is not personally anti-Semitic. In fact, he’d be entitled to modify the popular mantra of anti-Semites to say that not just some but most of his friends are Jewish – and have been since his childhood.

But that’s neither here nor there. Personally, Putin may be as Judeophile as they come. However, as a KGB officer and then Russian dictator, he is committed to anti-Semitism institutionally and politically. That’s a bad omen for the few Jews still remaining in Russia.

When the country’s government sends the signal, the population doesn’t take long to remind the world that the word ‘pogrom’ is a Russian contribution to all languages. Russian Jews would be well-advised to catch the first plane out of the country – the last one will be too full.

P.S. To be fair, Ukrainian Jews aren’t the only Nazis out there. This is from the editorial of a major Russian newspaper — please appreciate both the content and style:

“The leaders of a most disgusting Poland, bestial Scandinavian countries, militarist Japan, marsupial animals from Australia and New Zealand and other plague bacilli like the Baltics are all direct or indirect accomplices of the Nazis. And our attitude to them should be the same as to the leaders of the countries in the Nazi coalition.”   

When Polonius gave this advice to his son Laertes, he clearly didn’t foresee the arrival of modernity.

I don’t think many modern banks would put that phrase at the top of their mission statement. You know, next to the requisite assurance that “our people are our most valuable resource”.

Nor are these the words that any governments and most families live by. Every modern economy I know floats on an ocean of debt, with many drowning in it.

And modern people like their gratification the way they like their coffee: instant. That’s why so many families happily borrow vast sums that are almost guaranteed to enslave them for ever, or even push them into bankruptcy.

When I was researching my 2010 book, The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, I found out that over the decade preceding the 2008 crisis personal indebtedness in America had been three times greater than personal income. What do you think of that, Mr Polonius?

(As an unrelated aside, Shakespeare based that character on William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, chief adviser to Queen Elizabeth and perhaps the second most powerful figure during her reign. The list of instructions Polonius issued to Laertes was based on a widely publicised letter Burghley wrote to his son Robert, who later succeeded him as Elizabeth’s Lord Privy Seal.

Polonius was seen at the time as a bitter satire on Burghley, which many proponents of an alternative William Shakespeare have since used as an argument. After all, a mere actor from Stratford wouldn’t have dared to make fun of an all-powerful statesman. Only a social equal, which is to say an aristocrat, could afford such audacity.)

However, what interests me today isn’t finance but culture. For our age is known not only for gluttonous borrowing of money but also for rapacious borrowing of culture, especially its more popular strata.

The two tendencies aren’t completely unrelated, for both owe much to globalisation. A worldwide financial system produces piles of virtual money and then shuffles the pack and deals virtual banknotes to various recipients. America leads the way there because she is in the unique position of having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Thus the Fed can inflate the money supply with reckless abandon, serene in the knowledge that the debt will be denominated in dollars, the currency it controls. What would happen should the dollar lose its exalted status doesn’t bear thinking about – and the Fed doesn’t.

Yet America also exerts a powerful gravitational pull in culture, especially the popular variety. This is felt particularly, though far from exclusively, in the Anglophone countries. Yet it’s hard not to notice that most Europeans who speak English as their second language do so in vaguely American accents and generally American idiom.

The geographic proximity of Britain is trumped by the pulling power of American films and TV shows, acting as tutors to aspiring employees of global financial institutions. Now, I don’t suffer from that popular affliction of European literati, knee-jerk Americanism.

My problem isn’t with America but with modernity, of which the US is one of the founders and the proud flagbearer. In fact, I think Britons have much to learn from Americans: their affable civility, entrepreneurial nature, relative lack of class envy.

I don’t even mind many Americanisms making their way into the English language… Well, I shouldn’t dissemble. I do mind it, but these days that’s like minding spells of extreme heat or cold. They are going to happen, so we might as well grin and bear it, pretending we don’t really mind.

As a general principle, all great languages have largely been formed by borrowings. English wouldn’t be English without its Germanic, French, Celtic and Scandinavian implants, and one could make similar statements about all modern languages.

The French created their Academy largely to combat that tendency, but that has proved to be like trying to keep the cork in a champagne bottle with its muselet removed.  However, people who love their language should indeed fight tooth and nail against some borrowings, while welcoming some others.

Unfortunately, most cultural trends are these days reductive, as opposed to expansive. Language is no different.

Thus some Americanisms add nothing to British English because they try to push out some perfectly good words that already exist. Thus, a shopping cart adds nothing to a shopping trolley, candy to sweets, period to full stop and so forth.

Yet some Americanisms are useful, especially when they introduce concepts borrowed from America, such as a drive-through restaurant. Other Americanisms expand British English by adding a useful distinction where none exists.

Thus an English friend of mine didn’t understand the word ‘gurney’ when I used it. “Do you mean a stretcher?” he asked. I did and I didn’t. A stretcher to me, after many years in America, is only a contraption on which patients are carried, whereas a gurney is one on which they are wheeled. Thus it was a gurney, not a stretcher, that I once spent several hours on in an NHS hospital.

Yet we all have our linguistic bugbears, and mine is the word ‘student’. The way it’s increasingly used in Britain, especially in the media, doesn’t add any new nuances. It destroys an existing one.

To a Briton, a student goes to university or some other higher educational institution, whereas a pupil goes to school. That distinction doesn’t exist in America, where both groups are known as students. Yet the frequency at which our TV presenters mention ‘school students’ suggests that before long the important word ‘pupil’ will become extinct.

Borrowed Americanisms aren’t the only, nor even the principal, culprits there: the British shrink their own language perfectly well on their own with no outside help necessary. This is what I wrote in an earlier book, How the West Was Lost:

“The warning signals are ringing throughout the English-speaking world. Kevin says ‘masterful’ when he means ‘masterly’ – beware! A good word is on its way to perdition. Jill is ‘disinterested’ in classical music – woebetide ‘uninterested’ (not to mention classical music). Gavin thinks ‘simplistic’ is a more elegant way of saying ‘simple’, ‘fulsome’ is a sophisticated version of ‘full’ or ‘naturalistic’ of ‘natural’ – English is coming down to a size where Modmen can handle it comfortably. Trish thinks ‘innocuous’ means ‘innocent’ – in a few years it will. And it is not just words; whole grammatical categories bite the dust. Present Indefinite, where is your brother Subjunctive? Trampled underfoot by Modman and the education he has spawned.”

Whenever one objects against such linguistic impoverishment, a modern ignoramus will utter a platitude like “Language develops”. It no doubt does. But in the past languages developed to become bigger and richer, whereas nowadays the vector is pointing towards smaller and poorer.

We could analyse this degeneration in the terms of general cultural decline. But that would take some effort. Blaming Americans is so much easier, and we know it has always worked in the past.

Three quarters of Church of England priests believe that Britain is no longer a Christian country, says a recent survey.

Being fashionably non-judgemental, the holy fathers, mothers and others didn’t state for the record whether they regarded that situation as negative or positive. But, seeing that only about one per cent of Britons attend Anglican churches, one can’t accuse them of ignoring the evidence before their eyes.

So Britain is no longer Christian, says the Church of England. Yes, but is the Church of England? That survey, along with many others, comes close to answering that question, and not to the satisfaction of those who, unlike three quarters of Britons, still believe in God.

Let me rephrase that, for it’s possible to be a Christian and still shun the Church of England. Catholic churches are chock a block every Sunday, and fundamentalist congregations are popping up like mushrooms after a sun shower.

Obviously those confessions offer things the C of E no longer does. The polled priests weren’t asked to explain, but their responses to other questions provide all the answers anyone would need.

You see, being a religious Christian means not only worshipping Jesus Christ but also venerating Christian doctrine as the translation of Christ’s commandments into a general view – and way – of life. Alas, the C of E gives compelling evidence of its adherence to a different doctrine, that of secular woke modernity.

Thus a majority of priests would love to officiate same-sex weddings. They also see nothing wrong with extramarital sex, homo- or heterosexual.

This sort of thing goes against explicit injunctions in both Testaments, with Christian doctrine fleeing for cover. I suppose, if pressed, those priests would say that such things are so widespread that there’s no point trying to resist them.

But it’s not a priest’s job to resist or promote secular trends. His job is to judge them in the light of Christian doctrine. Such, at any rate, is the theory. The practice, however, is very different.

Priests seem to be doing things the other way around. They judge Christian doctrine by secular standards and favour changing it if it falls short. One of the respondents attributed that inversion to the “pressure of justifying the Church of England’s position to increasingly secular and sceptical audiences”.

One has to assume that people who attend a church service are neither secular nor sceptical, at least not irreversibly so. They may have their doubts, and it’s the priest’s job to dispel them.

Those doubters certainly hope for such reassurance, for otherwise they wouldn’t find themselves in church. Yet somehow I don’t think playing lickspittle to every faddish perversion around is a good way for a priest to reassure his wavering parishioners.

Then the surveys found that more than a third of Anglican priests support assisted dying, although I have to debunk the rumour that many of them are also inclining towards human sacrifice as a sacramental practice. Until further verification this rumour has to be dismissed as purely speculative.

Again, what matters here isn’t the purely secular debate about the advisability of euthanasia. A broad range of opinion exists, both pro and con. The advocates talk about the unbearable suffering of terminal patients, the objectors express a very realistic fear that, if euthanasia is legal, sooner or later it will become compulsory.

Priests are welcome to engage in such arguments, but only as private individuals in the afterhours. Their day job is to state the doctrinal position of euthanasia, which is that it constitutes the taking of life that’s neither for doctors to take nor for patients to give up.

Suicide, assisted or otherwise, is a sin worse than murder because it’s the only sin that can’t be repented. That’s why murderers aren’t denied Christian burial on consecrated grounds, but suicides are.

By condoning euthanasia, priests are guaranteed to repel more potential parishioners than they attract, but the clergy don’t seem to be concerned about that. Pledging allegiance to woke fads, however perverse, is all that matters.

All told, you shouldn’t be surprised that over 80 per cent of priests would back the appointment of a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury. One has to commend them on having their logical faculties intact.

After all, if female priests have been ordained since 1992 and female bishops consecrated since 2014, it would be both churlish and illogical to oppose a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the timelines are telling.

The march of change is going from a measured walk to a jog to a sprint. Female priests had to wait 22 years before they could try on purple vestments. Another seven years, and 80 per cent of priests would welcome a female Archbishop of Canterbury. Since the current holder of that post reaches the mandatory retirement age in two years, if I were a betting man I’d give you good odds on the Lady Archbishop in 2025.

Moreover, two thirds of priests would be willing to get rid of the current practice of the clergy being allowed to reject female bishops. The odds in favour of a woman at Canterbury are becoming prohibitive. However, St Paul had a dim view of this idea, as can be inferred from his epistles.

For example: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” And elsewhere: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

If it is a shame for women to speak in a church, it’s even a greater shame for them to speak to a church. This would seem to put paid to the concept of female priesthood, but only for those who attach any value to Scripture and doctrine, which group manifestly doesn’t include most Anglican priests.

Then there are 26 seats in the Lords currently reserved for Church of England archbishops and bishops. While most priests don’t want to put an end to that practice, over 60 per cent favour some sort of reform, mainly to open the Lords to other denominations and faiths.

Actually, adherents of other denominations and faiths are already represented in the Lords, but only Anglican prelates get their seats automatically on the strength of their religious posts. That’s how it should remain for as long as the Church of England remains established, but here logic fails the respondents.

Mercifully, most of them don’t yet go along with Jonathan Aitken, the former Tory (!) minister, then a jailbird, who is now an Anglican priest. He said that the “whole House of Lords is an illogical structure.” Hence, “The bishops are an illogical part of an illogical structure.”

Which logic would that be? Exactly the same as that behind the Church conducting homosexual weddings, condoning suicide, welcoming female leadership and in general jumping on the bandwagon of woke modernity.

The same logic, in other words, that explains the empty pews in Anglican churches. Are those priests trying to talk themselves out of the job?

What with thousands of migrants, legal or otherwise, arriving every day, Britain needs to hang out a FULL sign, like some popular motels.

However, in the eyes of our influential lumpen intelligentsia, such a sign would be tantamount to saying THIS COUNTRY IS RACIST. The only way of avoiding that capital charge would be continuing to welcome the supposedly invaluable cultural contributions made by arrivals from places like Somalia and Libya.

That’s settled. Alas, the problem of overcrowding isn’t, not to mention the demographic incidental of more and more Britons looking like Somalis or Libyans.

Not only is that problem not solved, but an innocent observer may think it unsolvable. He’d be wrong though, for that’s where the NHS comes in.

According to a popular myth, our fully nationalised health service is the envy of the world. However, so far no advanced country has imitated our dear NHS, which goes to show how slow on the uptake they are. After all, Britain isn’t the only country stuffed to the brim by migration and transmogrified by demographic shifts.

So all those Germanies and Frances could do worse than study the NHS’s achievements in combatting that problem. The underlying principle is simple: the more people are denied medical care, the more of them will die, and the slower will be population growth.

Easier done than said: in come the waiting lists. More than half of people who died in England last year were on on them, the NHS waiting lists. That’s 340,000 dying without medical care, 60 per cent of all deaths in England and a 42 per cent increase on the year before.

One can confidently expect those numbers to go up: the NHS waiting list currently stands at 7.6 million, and many of them will die before seeing an NHS doctor. You might think this is too drastic a way to slow down population growth, but hey, whatever works.

In parallel, the demographic problem is also tackled head on. For most of those patients writhing in pain on waiting lists come from the lower and more ethnic strata of the population. I don’t know if the NHS is doing all this on purpose, but I fail to see how differently it would discharge its business if it were.

This programme is unfolding against the background of NHS staffs taking on more and more administrators, directors of diversity, facilitators of optimisation, optimisers of facilitation and other indispensable experts.

At the same time the frontline medical staffs are shrinking, as is the number of hospital beds. Yet those who use such data as proof that the NHS is failing are missing the point. Doctors and nurses are only essential to save lives. When the unspoken aim is to curtail population growth, directors of diversity are much more important.

Yet to give credit where it’s due, doctors are also doing their level best to advance the same noble end. As government employees, they are all unionised. And as union members, they go on strikes. That’s what union members do.

Over the past few months junior doctors have been on strikes for weeks. (For the outlanders among you, a junior doctor in Britain doesn’t have to be especially young. The term only means he is a level below consultant.)

Now a junior doctor with four years’ experience earns £71,000 a year, plus another 20 per cent to sweeten his pension fund. Hardly penury, one would think, though I’d agree they deserve more, considering the years of training they undergo and the hours they put in.

But how much more? The junior doctors, prodded by their union, won’t budge from a demand for an extortionate 35 per cent rise, as opposed to the 9 per cent offered by the government.

The government refuses even to consider anything like 35 per cent, which gives Labour spokesmen an opening to accuse it of apostasy from the true religion of the British: the NHS. They then mention in passing that a Labour government would reject such a demand too.

Consultants wouldn’t be left behind either. Although their average annual pay is £134,000 (plus often several times that in private practice) they too go on strikes periodically.

Meanwhile, the waiting lists are swelling up, and thousands of people are dying with no doctor or nurse anywhere in sight.

At least, they can go to their Maker happy that our medical care is free at the point of delivery. The demiurge of the NHS has been served, the population growth has been checked.  

About 70,000 Ukrainians and perhaps twice as many Russians are estimated to have been killed so far in Russia’s bandit raid.

Some anti-war, anti-Putin Russian journalists weep for the dead Ukrainians, but they also mourn the untimely passage of “our boys” while still regarding them as murderers.

A certain Mail columnist, who can’t be accused of being anti-Putin, doesn’t regard dead Russian soldiers as murderers. He feels pity for them because “they had no choice”.

That’s simply false but, unlike his other lies, this one might have resulted from ignorance rather than bias. First, many Russian combatants are contract soldiers, which is to say volunteers. They actively chose to invade someone else’s country and kill everyone standing in their way.

Yet even the recruits had any number of ways to dodge conscription. One such was to leave the country, which has been done by tens of thousands of young Russians who’d rather not die just yet. Another, cheaper, way was simply to move somewhere else within Russia and not register with the local recruitment office – again a popular trick.

The third way was to ignore the conscription notice, declare conscientious objection and accept a light prison sentence, usually about a year. That’s a hard option, but one could argue it’s still preferable to killing and being killed.

All that aside, what is the moral, specifically Christian, position to take for someone like me, who regards Putin’s war as criminal and hence every Russian soldier as a murderer? Should I still pity those youngsters who died fighting for their beastly cause?

The question isn’t as straightforward as it may seem. On the one hand, I root for the Ukraine’s victory, which in the context of this moral dilemma means wishing for the death of as many Russian soldiers as possible, ideally all of them.

On the other hand, the ultimate moral authority I recognise commanded that we love not only those we like but even our enemies: “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.”

This is the kind of situation that inspired Chesterton’s aphorism: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

Difficult indeed. As a Christian, I’m supposed to love those Russian soldiers even though I consider them to be the enemies of everything I hold dear. At the same time, as simply a decent man, I want the Ukrainians to kill many, preferably all, of them. So should I mourn their death or rejoice in it?

It may appear that, in this case at least, Christianity is at odds with decency. Since someone like me has to regard such a contradiction as impossible a priori, do let’s try to get to the bottom of this conundrum.

Loving our enemies doesn’t presuppose pacifism. Christianity doesn’t renounce war – provided it’s just.

Augustine put forth, and Aquinas developed, the doctrine of just war, yet even that isn’t quite clear-cut. They both believed that, though killing may be necessary in defence of a just cause, it’s still a sin. A redeemable and forgivable one, but a sin none the less.

This dovetails with Christ’s commandment to love our enemies. For it’s precisely such love that makes the sin of just killing redeemable and forgivable.

The English language, with its unmatched genius for nuance, lends us a helping hand by serving up two verbs, ‘like’ and ‘love’, where, say, French and Russian make do with only one. This is an important nuance because, while we like people for something, we love them in spite of everything.

In that sense, any old love approaches the Christian ideal, but without quite reaching it. For Christian love, like Christ’s kingdom, is not of this world. It lives in a different, higher, realm. Christian love may coincide with the profane variety or even with simple liking, but that would indeed be only a coincidence.

One sine qua non of Christian love is prayer for the salvation of the soul, his own, his neighbour’s – and even his enemy’s. This is also implicit in another commandment: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.”

Killing the body is thus distinct from killing the soul. The former, though sinful, may be necessary; the latter is impossible and, by inference, undesirable.

I think this ties up all the loose ends: the doctrine of just war, killing that may be necessary while still remaining sinful, the nature of Christian love that doesn’t preclude killing in a just cause provided we pray for the souls of our killed enemies. (The same line of thought, incidentally, applies to the issue of the death penalty.)

In that – and only in that – sense, even if a Christian regards Russian soldiers as enemies, he may indeed mourn their death. Does it then justify what I called, with my inability to resist puns, ‘mortal equivalence’?

My reply to that question is an unequivocal, resounding “yes and no”. For there is a catch there somewhere.

The Russian anti-Putin journalists who drew the wrath of their colleagues by expressing pity not only for the Ukrainians but also for “our boys” killed by them, aren’t Christians. One failing of the Russian opposition to Putin is that it’s atheist almost to a man.

That makes their sentiment both ambivalent and deplorable. If we remove the Christian component from that pity, it becomes tantamount to wishing that those Russian boys hadn’t died. However, had they lived, they would have persisted in their grisly mission by killing Ukrainian soldiers, torturing and castrating POWs, kidnapping children, murdering, raping and looting civilians.

Moreover, if not enough of them die, Russia may win her unjust war and, in all likelihood, step it up by attacking NATO members and risking a global catastrophe. That’s why anyone who hopes that Russia loses this war, must rejoice in the death of every Russian soldier.  Such jubilation may not be nice, but then neither is Putin’s war.

You can see how what I call mortal equivalence (equal pity for the dead on both sides) means different things depending on who is talking. It also means different things in the two realms, sacred and profane. This is the kind of moral dilemma that can gore an unbeliever with its horns.

Yes, Chesterton was right: Christianity was indeed found difficult and left untried. Yet those who have tried it nevertheless, have found a surer way out of moral and intellectual cul-de-sacs in this life. They may also find salvation in the other, everlasting, life, but that’s not up to them to decide.

As the founder, chairman and no longer the sole member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism, I welcome any mass celebration of any ethnic culture.

But then I don’t live in Notting Hill.

Those who have never seen the area may know it from the 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill. That part of Central London, the kind the French call bobo (bourgeois bohemian), provided a perfect setting for Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant to play out their distinctly retro romance.

The area itself was romanticised, but not beyond recognition. Notting Hill really is like that: arty, expensive, stucco-pretty, pastel-coloured, notoriously left-wing in the Bollinger Bolshevik sort of way.

Or rather it’s like that for 363 days and 51 weekends a year. On the last weekend of August it turns into hell on earth.

That’s a fair description of the annual Notting Hill Carnival dedicated to the celebration of West Indian culture. You know, steel drums, jerk chicken, dancing, colourful costumes, reggae, that sort of thing.

Up to two million visitors fill Notting Hill to the gunwales, with the bobo residents fleeing to five-star London hotels, their country houses or abroad. Normal life in the area is suspended to accommodate the largest street party in Europe.

All members of the Charles Martel Society are duty-bound to welcome diverse cultures. But such cultures must be accepted in their entirety, the rough with the smooth.

Thus black culture in Britain is known not only for reggae and jerk chicken but also – and it pains me to have to say this – for rather eccentric behaviour. For example, the crime rate among British blacks is higher than among the whites by several orders of magnitude.

People who know such things say the problem isn’t racial but cultural, and I agree – as I would even if I weren’t the founder of the Charles Martel Society. Yet if this is indeed part of that culture (a small part! I hasten to add), one should realistically expect it to come to the fore when hundreds of thousands of rowdy revellers converge in a jampacked place.

So it does. This is how the columnist Nana Akua describes this year’s festivities: “Thugs rampaging with zombie knives. Eight stabbings. 75 police officers hurt. Open drug use. And revellers urinating in the gardens.”

Those owners of the gardens who had unwisely stayed at home could use their CCTV cameras to enjoy the view of the diversely cultured people taking turns to relieve themselves on the topiary and partake in ‘hippy crack’ and nitrous oxide. (I know this is only a palliative measure, but the celebrants should be encouraged to do heroin instead. Unlike crack, at least it’s a downer.)

Add to this people baring the intimatemost parts of their anatomy all over the place and publicly copulating in the streets (at least Julia and Hugh had the decency to do that sort of thing indoors), and the picture is almost complete.

The life of a cop assigned to the Carnival detail must be less than joyous. In addition to the 75 officers badly hurt, others were jostled, bitten and urinated on from the rooftops. The cops tried to defend themselves by making more than 300 arrests for violence, sexual offences, and possession of drugs and dangerous weapons. But they were both outnumbered and hamstrung by woke regulations.

Miss Akua is aghast, rightly so. Luckily, due to the chromatic incidental of her birth, she can be critical of that obscene orgy without risking the accusation of racism that would certainly be levelled at anyone of a less fortunate nativity.

Labour politicians in particular use any such criticism as a stick to beat Tory candidates with. As David Lammy, Shadow Foreign Secretary, explained: “London has been shaped in many ways by Black and Caribbean culture and heritage, and there is no greater celebration of this than Notting Hill Carnival.”

Actually, the Romans founded Londinium, as it then was, in 43 AD, whereas the first 1,000 Caribbean migrants arrived in the UK only 75 years ago. Believing that a city that has existed for two millennia has been shaped by a couple of generations of recent migrants would be assigning extraordinary cultural magnetism to that group.

Miss Akua disagrees with Mr Lammy, but without resorting to historical references: “Well, Mr Lammy, I personally find that insulting. Sex on the streets, urinating on doorsteps and public drug-taking are not a representation of black culture.”

That’s true. They are a representation of uncivilised behaviour, and no group is innately uncivilised or, for that matter, civilised. People are made civilised or otherwise, not born that way. In practical terms, that means that civilisationally challenged minorities need to adapt to the ambient mores of their new land.

Those who do so become indistinguishable from the majority in anything other than appearance. They may still celebrate their ancestral culture on occasion, but such celebrations would have all the authenticity of a fancy-dress party – not that there is anything wrong with such festivities.

In her thoughtful article, Miss Akua tries to find a solution to the problem. Hers is to move the Carnival to an open place, say Hyde Park, and search everyone for weapons and drugs. Add to this a few thousand Portacabins, and her proposal may work – the way aspirin may work to relieve the headache caused by brain cancer.

She proposes purely symptomatic relief that would do nothing to address the underlying problem. And the problem is that, rather than being encouraged to adapt to the customs of a superior civilisation, minority groups are actively encouraged not to do so.

In fact, the very suggestion that one, especially Western, culture may be superior to others is these days deemed not only objectionable but practically criminal. No culture is better or worse than any other – they are just different, diverse in other words. And diversity is an imperative, enforced virtue than which none is higher.

Every virtue dialectically co-exists with its opposite vice, in this case racism. That term has long since left its ertswhile dictionary definition, the belief that one’s own race is congenitally superior to all others, to become an offensive weapon aimed at anyone who observes the unassailable fact that some civilisations are more advanced than others.

This weapon is mostly wielded not by members of various minority groups, but by white liberals, our lumpen intelligentsia enjoying an influence well beyond its numbers. Those people are scattered all over the country but, in London, they tend to gravitate to areas like Notting Hill (those who can afford it, that is).

That’s why I disagree with Miss Akua on this score. I think that by all means the Carnival should continue to be held in Notting Hill. Let its denizens reap what they’ve sown.

Pope Francis has extolled Russian imperialism just as thousands of people are being killed in its name.

His remarks would have been ill-advised at any time. At this time, they are abominably offensive.

During a live video address to young Catholics in St Petersburg, the pontiff delivered a prepared anodyne speech about the virtues of peace. However, speaking from the heart, he then went off script to glorify Russia’s imperial past:

“Never forget your heritage. You are the heirs of the great Russia. The great Russia of the saints, of the kings, of the great Russia of Peter the Great, of Catherine II, that great imperial Russia, cultivated, with so much culture and humanity… Thank you for your way of being, for your way of being Russian.”

The way of being Russian currently involves military aggression, mass murder, torture, looting and rape, all in the name of “that great imperial Russia”. In fact, the Pope’s speech is a carbon copy of countless orations delivered by Putin and his henchmen.

I wonder how well His Holiness knows Russian history, including the periods he mentioned specifically. Quite apart from their general beastliness, all Russian tsars, emphatically including Peter and Catherine, mercilessly persecuted Catholics.

Peter ordered that the most offensive anti-Catholic calumnies be disseminated throughout Russia. He expelled the Jesuits in 1719, issued ukases to force Catholics into Orthodoxy, prohibited the children of mixed marriages from being raised as Catholics, staged monstrous orgies mocking Catholic rites – and even murdered a priest, Theophanus Kolbieczynski, with his own hand.

Throughout the imperial period of Russia, Catholics were hit with discriminatory legislation, some Russian noblemen (such as Alexei Ladygenski and Mikhail Galitzin) were brutally executed for converting to Catholicism, Catholic priests were banned from entering various parts of Russia and so forth, ad infinitum.

This is to say that, by extolling Russian imperialism, His Holiness pushes ecumenism rather too far. He would have done better to reserve his praise for countries less inimical to the confession other Popes have tended to see as special.

Between 1772 and 1795, under Catherine, Russia took part in three partitions of Poland, the stronghold of Catholicism in Eastern Europe. That was done with characteristic brutality, especially when Gen. Suvorov (about to be canonised in the Russian Church) drowned the 1794 Kościuszko Uprising in blood.

Also during this period, in 1783, Prince Potemkin, of the villages fame, conquered the Crimea, which most Russians, thoroughly brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda, believe has always been Russian. In fact, give or take a couple of years on either end, the Crimea was Russian during exactly the same period as India was British.

As to “Russia, cultivated, with so much culture and humanity”, this is a popular misapprehension entirely based on the merited international popularity of a dozen or two Russian writers, half a dozen composers and perhaps as many painters.

However, during much of the period the Pope singled out as an exemplar of culture and cultivation, some 90 per cent of the Russians were illiterate and hence unable to appreciate the fine points of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (both, incidentally, virulently anti-Catholic, especially the latter). And most of those who were literate spoke French at home.

The humanity part doesn’t quite tally with facts either. Between 70 and 40 per cent of the population were, not to cut too fine a legal point, slaves whose status was no higher than that of livestock. Peasants were beaten, tortured, taken advantage of sexually (Leo Tolstoy is a prime example), sold away from their families.

Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the peasants’ lot improved only marginally. That’s why throughout its existence the Russian Empire was torn apart by non-stop uprisings, ranging from minor rebellions to full-blown wars. The deadliest of them, the Pugachev uprising during Catherine’s reign, was supressed with singular brutality by the same busy saint-to-be Suvorov.

During the 19^th century, “the great imperial Russia” acquired the richly deserved soubriquets of ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’. These, one suspects, weren’t references to her culture, cultivation and humanity.

However, even assuming that the Russian Empire was every bit as wonderful as the Pope seems to think, extolling it at this time would be a horrendous misdeed falling in the range between grossly insensitive and downright criminal.

That’s how the Ukrainians took it, along with all those who support their cause (which is to say all decent people). Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, leader of the Eastern Rite Catholic Church in Ukraine, said the Pope’s remarks “refer to the worst example of Russian imperialism and extreme nationalism… We fear that those words are understood by some as an encouragement of precisely this nationalism and imperialism which is the real cause of the war in Ukraine.”

This is exactly how Putin’s gang understood them. Referring to Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov gloated: “The fact that the pontiff, let’s say, sounds in unison with these efforts is very, very gratifying.” Anything that’s gratifying to that lot ought to be horrifying to everyone else.

The Vatican has issued some hasty disclaimers that disclaimed nothing. Thus the papal nuncio in Kiev insisted that Pope Francis is an “opponent and critic of any form of imperialism or colonialism”.

True, the Pope isn’t averse to making general bien pensant noises to that effect. But when it comes specifically to the on-going war, he invariably repeats, often verbatim, the Kremlin line. The war, says the pontiff, was provoked by NATO’s eastward expansion, poetically described by His Holiness as “the barking of NATO at the door of Russia”.

I shan’t repeat what I have said about this many times before (for example, in my piece of 30 August, 2022). Suffice it to say now that His Holiness is in default of his mission of providing moral guidance to Catholics and other Christians.

For a start, he could benefit from a crash course in Russian history. Once he has “read, marked, learned and inwardly digested” that material, he ought to interpret it in the light of Christian doctrine – and I can’t possibly suggest that perhaps he needs a crash course in that as well.  

Never since that little incident at Gethsemane has a kiss caused such an upheaval.

Riotous demonstrations, ringing protests, passions running wild, even the odd hunger strike – Spain is aflame. It’s all for a worthy cause: the kiss Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish Football Federation, planted on the lips of Jenni Hermoso, one of the players who had just won the women’s World Cup.

Once the final whistle sounded, señor Rubiales was so overcome with triumphant emotion that he rushed to the players, and Hermoso was the first one he reached.

The two embraced passionately, and Hermoso proved that her weight training hadn’t gone to waste by lifting Rubiales off the ground in her muscular and heavily tattooed arms. But then, instead of decorously kissing the player on the cheek, Rubiales went straight to her lips. Caramba!

Now, Rubiales is obviously a hotblooded Spanish man who expresses joy both genuinely and genitally. For example, it has been pointed out that immediately before that incident he had grabbed his crotch in the royal box, sitting alongside Queen Letizia and her 16-year-old daughter Infanta Sofia.

However, outrageous as that gesture might have been, at least he grabbed his own crotch, not that of Queen Letizia or Infanta Sofia. But the lips he so brazenly kissed belonged not to him but to Jenni Hermoso and, according to modern sensibilities, that act constituted sexual assault – at least. Let me tell you, Rubiales won’t forget that osculation in a hurry.

By way of a historical aside, as the march of victorious modernity gathered pace in the second half of the 19^th century, the Catholic Church in Spain was doing its best to block it at the country’s borders.

Various governments went along with that reaction, which produced a number of revolutions evenly spaced every few years on the time scale.

The Church suffered heavy casualties, with many priests, monks and nuns killed, and many religious buildings destroyed. The Civil War that broke out in 1936 was the bloodiest and best known of such outbursts, but far from the only one.

The side that preferred to kill communists rather than Catholics won that war, and Spain managed to keep progress at bay for another 40 years or so. But once Franco died in 1975, progress broke banks and flooded Spain. Still, there was a lot of ground to cover and a lot of time to make up.

Hence Spain hasn’t often advanced in step with the aforementioned march. At times, she lagged behind the progressive throng, at other times she outpaced it.

For example, in 2008 the Spanish parliament passed a resolution granting human rights to apes. The apes currently residing in Spain thenceforth have enjoyed the legal rights to life, liberty, freedom from torture — and presumably to the pursuit of bananas.

But some other manifestations of progress were slower in coming. The MeToo movement, for example, waited for a widely publicised precedent to come out in force. Meanwhile, it was rather sluggish, with Spanish men stubbornly reminding the world that the word ‘macho’ is of Spanish origin.

Anyway, how do you say MeToo in Spanish? Do you leave it in English or translate it as something like YoTambién? The time to decide is now, for that frisky reprobate Rubiales got the ball rolling.

Hermoso, picking up the lingo as she went along, said the kiss wasn’t consensual and she felt “vulnerable and the victim of an aggression”. The term ‘sexual assault’ began to scream in large bold type off the front pages of newspapers.

Though Rubiales has so far refused to heed the thunderous demands that he quit, he has been suspended by FIFA, which probably makes his position untenable. And the sack isn’t the worst trouble he is facing.

Spain’s top criminal court has opened a preliminary investigation to establish which rubric Rubiales’s transgression fell under. Sexual assault? Rape? Attempted murder? Hell hath no fury like a woman kissed without prior and duly notarised written consent.

The regional presidents of the Spanish FA joined the battle by issuing a statement saying: “We will urge the corresponding bodies to carry out a deep and imminent organic restructuring in strategic positions of the Federation to give way to a new stage of management in Spanish football.”

However, Rubiales still hasn’t run out of fight, and neither has his family. One of his cousins said that, though Rubiales “made a mistake”, he “has a good heart”. This is what defence attorneys usually say in their appeal to the jury at a murder trial.

And Rubiales’s aged mother has locked herself in the local church and started an “indefinite, day and night” hunger strike, to continue until “justice is served”. I do hope she doesn’t suffer the fate of Bobby Sands, the IRA terrorist who in 1981 starved himself to death in prison.

That death also has a football connection, invoked as it is whenever Glasgow Rangers (a Protestant team) play Glasgow Celtics (Catholic). The Rangers fans like to sing, to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain: “Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands? Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands? Would you like a chicken supper, you filthy Fenian fucker, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?”

I wonder if a similar vocal masterpiece will be created by Spanish feminists and, if so, which tune they’d use. La Cucaracha? Meanwhile they are out in force, marching through the streets of Madrid and bringing the city to a standstill.

As a participant in one such demonstration, I can assure you Madrid won’t come back to normal soon. When the Spanish get going, there is no stopping them.

(In case you are wondering, Penelope and I had a rather liquid lunch in the Salamanca area of Madrid. When we came out, we found ourselves in the midst of a huge crowd marching, waving flags and shouting. Having made inquiries, we found out the occasion was the recent release of several ETA terrorists from prison. Hence I felt duty-bound to join in and shout things like “No más concesiones a ETA! Viva España!” However, my fellow demonstrators began to look at us askance, suspecting a touch of mockery in my badly accented enthusiasm. Penelope dragged me away in the nick of time.)

This whole commotion will definitely rate a longish footnote in the book yet to be written, with the provisional title of A Chronicle of a World Gone Mad.

In case my longish digressions have distracted you from the main point, the whole county is up in arms over a kiss. Verily I say unto you, when it comes to wounded modern sensibilities a kiss isn’t just a kiss. It’s a declaration of war, and one has to expect the shooting to start at any moment.

Lucius Cary, 2^nd Viscount Falkland, was only 33 when he was killed in 1643, fighting for the royal side at Newbury.

Yet he had already accumulated enough wisdom to come up with the thought in the title, one that encapsulates a key aspect of conservatism. The allusion isn’t so much to any particular philosophy or, God forbid, ideology, but to a temperamental predisposition.

A man predisposed to conservatism isn’t only prudent himself, but also holds prudence as one of the highest virtues in life both public and private. Burke, for example, singled out the imprudence of the French Revolution as its catastrophic failing.

Prudence precludes radicalism, whatever its political hue. Radicalism is a property springing from emotional impetuosity, which is why it mostly afflicts young people or those who never grow up and remain infantile even in their dotage.

Predisposition to conservatism tends to manifest itself not only in political convictions but in just about everything. For example, I can’t imagine a conservative sporting a ring in his nose or an ACAB tattoo on his knuckles (if you don’t know what it stands for, I congratulate you: you’ve remained unsullied by the sordid side of life).

Yet predisposition alone does not a conservative make. That’s like the difference between musicality and musicianship: the former is innate, the latter is also a result of a sustained effort and training.

Translating one’s instincts into satisfactory answers to what Dostoyevsky called “the accursed questions of life” is no easy task. That explains why conservatives are – and always have been – greatly outnumbered by radicals (right or left), liberals, socialists of every colour and some such.

Unlike conservatism, none of such views of life requires any effort to develop. Neither a socialist nor a right-wing radical will torment himself trying to work out a proper relationship between the sacral and secular realms. Nor would he wonder how a passionate commitment to something (such as equal education for the whole population or elimination of foreign aid) above all else would affect all else.

Conservatism is neither a philosophy nor a political system, but it is likely to propel a man towards a certain set of ideas about life in general and political life in particular. It can’t be otherwise, for a conservative puts reason before emotion as a cognitive tool and call to action.

If a radical responds to life by dipping into a box of emotionally charged platitudes, a conservative has to think things through before deciding what, if anything, needs to change. That creates a habit of intellectual reflection, gradually deepening and widening a conservative’s mind.

His nemeses, on the other hand, have little need for reflection. Everything is as clear to them as the sum of two plus two. The readymade solution is already there. Just add emotion and stir.

That’s why conservatives tend to be more intelligent than any kind of radicals. A conservative nature demands and encourages a steady development of mental acuity. That doesn’t mean any conservative will be an accomplished intellectual, only that such an ambition naturally flows out of his temperament.

Radicalism or any other antipode of conservatism, on the other hand, thrives on intellectual and moral paucity. That doesn’t mean that any socialist will be a fool, only that intelligence is a hindrance for him – as much as stupidity is for a conservative.

Morality is also an aspect of conservatism, and much of it is closely linked to intelligence. Morality always derives from reason, but not always from man’s reason alone.

The link between reason and morality was established in the book conservatives tend to respect more than their antipodes do: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.”

Serpentine wisdom thus goes hand in hand with dove-like morality (to use a modern word shunned in that book), and that signposts both the intellectual and moral holdings of conservatism. This irrespective of an individual conservative’s faith or lack thereof.

A Western conservative is bound to ask himself what it is that he wishes to conserve. Sooner or later he’ll arrive at the only possible answer: Western civilisation. That answer may not lead him to Christianity, even though this is the foundation on which our civilisation is built. But it would certainly keep him away from fire-eating atheism.

A conservative untouched by the hand bearing the gift of faith may remain an agnostic, someone who treats God with respect even if unsure He exists. But he’ll never become an atheist, someone who aggressively insists that there is no God.

That’s impossible for any number of reasons. First, an atheist performs mental sabotage by blowing up the aforementioned foundation, letting the edifice of Western civilisation totter and collapse in his mind. Also, an atheist expresses a radical view universally espoused by every impassioned enemy within Western civilisation.

A conservative will always remember he is a sheep in the midst of wolves, and he’ll never agree to join their ranks. His intuition if nothing else won’t let him.

Prudence, restraint, intelligence, courage, moral fortitude – such are the qualities every conservative needs to foster in order to survive in a world getting more lupine by the minute. When surrounded by hostility, it’s in human nature to seek allies, the company of one’s own kind (that explains, though not always excuses, the clannishness of minority groups).

It’s also in human nature to shun enemies and everything they stand for. A conservative has a sensitive nose enabling him to smell evil from any distance. The moment a whiff of it touches a conservative’s nostrils, he’ll know it for what it is.

Such sensitivity is partly congenital but mostly acquired over a lifetime of emotional and intellectual self-training. The same education teaches a conservative to detect evil behind the camouflage of seemingly virtuous phraseology.

That ability is a litmus test of conservatism: every conservative trait of mind and soul comes into play to pass it. Conversely, no hapless individual who fails that test can possibly be a conservative.

That’s why, for example, I can’t regard any Putinversteher as a fellow conservative, even if he holds sound views on everything else. Such a man has to be intuitively predisposed to fascistic right-wing radicalism hiding behind a rather thin veneer of conservative slogans.

Putin, with his recruitment skills honed at the KGB, delivered a full compendium of such slogans designed to seduce Western radicals: Christianity, no homosexual or transsexual ‘rights’, a strong hand on the tiller of free enterprise, you name it.

Many Westerners who wrongly believed themselves to be conservative responded to the mantras with emotional, knee-jerk alacrity. That was mellifluous music to their ears, and no Western leader they knew played the same tune.

I remember talking to a conservative Christian woman about Putin’s Russia some ten years ago, listing all the crimes Putin had already committed and those he was bound to commit in the future. Her reply to every item on that list, and there were many, was the same: “But he is against homosexual marriage.”

Eventually, after 2014, she passed the aforementioned litmus test of conservatism, by realising that scowling evil was lurking behind the mask of conservative-sounding shibboleths. Yet many others have failed, and continue failing even after 2022, emphasising yet again the difference between conservatism and its grotesque radical caricatures.

Alas, the Carys and Burkes of yesteryear are gone. Conservatism, though always in retreat, has been routed, at least as a factor in the dynamics of public life. I doubt the few remaining conservatives are in any position to save other people’s souls and especially minds.

But they can still insist on saving their own, and I’ll leave you on this solipsistic note.