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Kim Jong-un and Putin met at Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Far East, and it was a meeting of minds and souls.

After a record-breaking 40-second handshake, Kim promised Putin his unwavering support in Russia’s “sacred fight” against the West. He was “sure that the Russian army and people will win against evil”, and he was eager to form with Russia a single “anti-imperialist” front.

There is nothing new about this phraseology. It comes straight from the communist phrasebook in circulation since the early 1950s, when the West began to live in fear of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets.

Now the language is back, as is the situation that inspired it. Russia is no longer communist, technically speaking, North Korea still is, as is China. Yet the word “evil” used by Kim should emphasise how meaningless political nomenclatures are.

‘Communism’, ‘socialism’, various brands of ‘democracy’, ‘capitalism’ – none of these rubrics comes close to designating the subcutaneous reality of the modern world. That is the never-ending clash between good and evil, in which no compromise is possible and no middle ground exists.

In this case, the ultimate confrontation is between the West, good relatively speaking, and the new axis of absolute evil: fascist Russia and communist North Korea, both increasingly controlled by communist China. Kim’s view of who plays the evil part is different, but he understands the dichotomy.

Alas, the West no longer thinks in such absolutist categories. That’s a mistake, for not knowing where the battle lines are drawn puts one at a disadvantage.

I’m sure Kim Jong-un feels like a top dog, being mentioned as an equal in that company. Although, considering his people’s culinary preferences, he probably wouldn’t use this particular canine expression.

For decades North Korea has been a client state of the Soviet Union and China, a poor relation totally dependent on the adjacent evil empires for her supply of weapons, food and just about everything else. Yet now Putin, heir to the USSR, comes to Kim with an outstretched hand, begging for artillery shells and anti-tank missiles. Kim must be puffed up with pride, with the puffing up hard to miss in his photographs.

He also has enough animal smarts to know he is in a unique bargaining position, vis-à-vis not only Russia, but also the West. I can almost hear Kim’s singsong: “That’s gonna cost you…”

It’s definitely quid pro quo. If Korean weapons are the quid, then what’s the quo? In addition to the cash on the nail payment for the weapons, it’s almost certainly transfer of Russian nuclear and rocket technology. Since Kim already brags about having an ICBM that can reach the American coast, Putin could equip it with a rather nasty payload.

The traditional Western diplomacy based on sanctions has always been ineffective and in this case it’s especially impotent. Kim doesn’t fear sanctions because he is already under every conceivable one. And the Russians, though undoubtedly hurt by Western sanctions, have learned to get around them, with a little help from their Chinese friends.

Hence Kim can now send a quiet message to the West: if you don’t want me to replenish Putin’s stockpiles, remove the sanctions.

I wouldn’t put it past our craven leaders to accept such a deal, which would enable Kim to develop nuclear weapons even without Putin’s help. One way or the other, places like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan may soon become too dangerous for human habitation.

There is room in foreign relations for nuanced attempts to explore various hues between black and white. But there also ought to be room for not doing so. Ronald Reagan understood that, which is why he openly spoke of the axis of evil.

Today’s Western leaders think they can talk their way out of trouble, find a path to lasting peace so far unexplored. But they are wrong about that: the path of appeasement or at best half-hearted resistance is well-trodden.

The only way to start dealing with the current evil the way it should be dealt with is supplying the Ukraine with everything she needs to win this war. Should that happen, Putin’s regime would probably collapse. Russia would no longer need Kim’s ordnance, and he wouldn’t be able to blackmail the West.

That is relatively easy, or would be if Reagan and Thatcher were still around. The problem of China is much more serious, and it’s all the West’s fault. We have systematically built up China, turning it into a monster with realistic ambitions to dominate the world.

Part of it was the West’s inertia, not to say cowardice. Yet also coming into play was the problem I mentioned earlier: the inability to comprehend the nature – indeed the existence – of unvarnished evil.

Coupled with that was the misplaced belief in the redemptive power of free enterprise. The West believed that, once China privatised much of her economy and began to compete in the free market, she would become a country just like us. She would remain communist only nominally, the way Britain is Christian.

All those decades of confrontation with communism taught no lesson to the West, but then history never does. We still refuse to acknowledge the evil nature of any communist regime, with or without free enterprise. And evil regimes pursue evil ends – history serves up no exceptions to this rule.

When China began to adopt a pragmatic, that is deceptively pro-Western, approach to the economy, sighs of relief were heard throughout Western governments. The Chinese are like us, hedonistic, money-mad chaps free of any ideology, whatever language they use in domestic communications.

Although we had a vested, vital interest in keeping China as weak as possible, we have systematically built her up to her present status of a global power with far-reaching imperial ambitions.

Disengaging China from the world economy now would be practically impossible. Instead the West has to pump all the profits made from trade with China, multiplied by orders of magnitude, into arming itself against the Chinese threat. For all I know, it may already be too late, and in any case no appetite for such an effort is discernible.

‘Pragmatic’ voices in Washington, London and other Western capitals are talking about creating a new, Sino-Western, world order. They want to sup with the devil, forgetting that no spoon will ever be long enough.

China is effectively turning both Russia and North Korea into her vassals, thus gaining immense geopolitical clout. She is already getting Russian natural resources at half the price, and she is already colonising the Russian Far East and Siberia at an ever-increasing pace.

North Korea can act as China’s stormtroopers, ready to pounce on designated enemies when China decides the time is right. And meanwhile Kim is talking on even terms with Putin, the luxury his grandfather, Kim I, couldn’t afford when talking to Khrushchev or Brezhnev.

We live in fraught times, ladies and gentlemen. It’s time we began to do something about that in earnest before we find out exactly how fraught.

You aren’t going to win any prizes: the west façade of Reims Cathedral is unmistakable.

For what it’s worth, I find it the most beautiful west façade in Christendom. Its perfect proportions and stylistic unity testify to the advantages of building the whole thing at roughly the same time.

Unlike, say, Rouen Cathedral, Reims was built over a few decades of the late 13^th, early 14^th century, rather than passing from one generation of builders and stonemasons to the next for centuries on end.

Other than its aesthetic aspect, Reims Cathedral plays a vital role in Western history. French kings were traditionally crowned there – including the Merovingian king Clovis, generally regarded as the first French monarch because he brought all the Frankish principalities together.

Actually, Clovis (d. 511) was crowned in the original church on the same site that was destroyed by fire in the 13^th century. More important, it was there that Clovis converted himself and proto-France to Christianity in 496 AD.

In common with many European princes, he was browbeaten into conversion by his wife, Clotilde. In general, Christianity owes its universal spread to women at least as much as to men, perhaps even more so.

Men like Clovis stubbornly clung to their paganism because it suited their temperaments better. It took the gentle, civilising touch of women like St Clotilde to lead them to Christ. Characteristically, Clotilde was officially canonised, but Clovis never was – it was only by popular acclaim that he got to be known as St Clovis.

(There is an argument there somewhere that women don’t have to be ordained to play a vital role in Christianity. But that’s for another day.)

Like most great Romanesque and Gothic buildings, Reims Cathedral bears the stigmata of modernity. In fact, the medievalist Régine Pernoud estimates that some 80 per cent of all such buildings were destroyed in France during the Revolution and – which is less known – the following century. Add to that the Reformation before and the two world wars after that mayhem, and it’s amazing that any great architecture is left standing.

One can only imagine what France would look like if we could admire 100 per cent of the beauty that keeps us spellbound even after such attrition. That’s what I invariably tell my friends who badmouth the French, a popular sport in both England and the US: the people who created such treasures can’t be all bad. And don’t get me started on their wine and cheese…

Reims Cathedral didn’t escape its share of barbaric destruction: the Germans heavily shelled it several times during the First World War, and it took much intricate restoration to return the cathedral to its original splendour.

But not quite: the expertise required to replace the smashed stained glass with replicas had been lost. Rather than simply putting in plain glass, as a reminder of modern vandalism, the powers that be invited Marc Chagall to create his own version of stained glass. That produced a jarring visual dissonance, suggesting that the French had lost not only their ability to make stained glass but also much of their taste.

After the war, the Germans staged a show of regret, putting it all down to an accident. But it wasn’t; they were acting in character. Those cannoneers were Modern Men, the sociocultural type brought about by the hatred of Christendom and everything it produced.

This kind of hatred was trenchantly described by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, whose testimony of modern Germany under and before the Nazis is exceptionally moving. In his book Diary of a Man in Despair, he recalls General Ludendorff, effectively in command of the German forces in the First World War, ordering the destruction of Coucy castle.

That priceless treasure of Western past had no military significance to either side. And yet Ludendorff ordered the castle razed. “He hated Coucy,” writes Reck, “because he hated everything which lay outside his barracks view of life – spirit, taste, elegance, everything that gives distinction to life.” Everything produced by Christianity, I would have been tempted to add.

This kind of hatred must be capable of releasing immense energy, for it produced Modern Man and weaned him to maturity on the congealing red liquor that is his favoured sustenance. And lest you may think I have it in specifically for the Germans, they aren’t the only culprits.

Again one has to go no farther than France to find proof of that. Towards the end of July, 1944, when the Allies enjoyed air supremacy on the Western front, the RAF bombed and seriously damaged the 11^th century cathedral at Nevers, in our part of France. (Alas, it was never restored as seamlessly as Reims.)

That was a low-altitude daytime raid, and yet the pilots explained they had mistaken the cathedral for the railway junction several miles away. I’m no expert in aerial bombardment, but it seems to me a Romanesque-Gothic cathedral looks rather different from a smallish railway station even from a couple of thousand feet.

In fact, those pilots neither loved nor even respected the culture that celebrated itself, God and humanity by erecting that magnificent structure. The “bombs away” command was a scream of hatred for Christendom and all its creations.

Such thoughts flashed through my mind yesterday, as Penelope was taking the touristy shot above. I had no time for more involved thought – we still had 300 miles to go, and all that wine at lunch was making me sluggish.

One man’s freedom is another’s man’s licence; one man’s licence is another man’s degeneracy. Where does one end and the other begin? If you ever wonder about this, Amsterdam can provide a useful visual aid.

Some 23 million overnight tourists will have visited the place this year, and one is tempted to compliment their good taste.

The city has some of the world’s best residential architecture, a beautiful frame for the picturesque canals. The Rijksmuseum’s collection is a pilgrimage site for lovers of 17^th century art. The Van Gogh Museum is a magnetic attraction for lovers of, well, Van Gogh. The nearby Keukenhof tulip farm is a revelation for lovers of exuberant floral creativity.

No wonder all those lovers of 17^th century art, Van Gogh and tulips flock to Amsterdam in such numbers. Those highlights are simply not to be missed.

Oh well, they do flock. But in nowhere near such numbers, and any compliments on the tourists’ good taste would be premature. For the 23-million horde is mainly made up of dissipated youngsters attracted by the window brothels of Amsterdam’s red light district and the drugs freely served in designated cafés.

Walk through the Oudekennissteeg, the oldest part of central Amsterdam, and a parade of variously hideous half-naked prostitutes will be smiling at you seductively from every window. They do get plenty of custom, though their commitment to fair trade is distinctly understated.

As a former colleague of mine found out the hard way, or not so hard as the case was, what you see in the window isn’t necessarily what you get when you step inside (I’ll spare you the details). In fact, those scantily clad young ladies often relate to the actual goods the way an ad for a cheap car relates to its road performance.

I started going to Amsterdam more or less regularly some 35 years ago, to visit friends. Yet even back then, during a more hormonally active period of my life, I couldn’t imagine being attracted to such tawdry promises of gratification.

But then I wasn’t what admen call the target audience. That group, on purely visual evidence, consists of young, tattooed, facially-metalled chaps either drunk or high on drugs or typically both. Judging by their accents, most of them come from Britain’s northern counties, although I can’t claim access to the relevant statistics.

Once, again in the company of my advertising colleagues, I peeked into one of those coffee shops that specialised in things other than coffee. My visit lasted about a minute, which is how long it took me to make a mental note that the place looked just like the opium dens Sherlock Holmes patronised.

The barely lit room was full of people, mostly but not exclusively under 40, smoking cannabis or munching hash cookies. They were like spooky mirages floating in and out of the dense smoky fog. Even if I used drugs, which I never did, I wouldn’t have wanted to do them in such a place, for the same reason I wouldn’t have wanted to partake of the goods advertised in window brothels.

My problem with such places isn’t so much moral as aesthetic. They are fine to look at from afar, as a way of satisfying one’s morbid interest in skirting around the seedy part of life. Yet no one with a modicum of taste would want to swap the role of casual spectator for that of active participant.

Prostitution and drugs inevitably become the foundation on which a vast criminal superstructure is built. Pimps, thuggish bouncers, pushers of harder drugs than cannabis, muggers, pickpockets all buzz around the red light district like bluebottles around a cowpat.

That creates an air of decadence cum degeneracy, so much more jarring against the background of beautiful terraces of 16^th and 17^th century houses lining scenic canals. Harm and charm fighting each other, with the former winning.

My friends who live there hate seeing their city overrun with mobs of drunk, drugged up Britons howling through the night and throwing up on the towpaths of the scenic canals. Yet my friends accept that outrage with stoic acquiescence: such things just are. The way of the world, in Amsterdam at any rate, or in any other port city.

Yet Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, has found a solution, or so she thinks. She wants to get the prostitutes out of the windows and put them all into an ‘erotic centre’ skyscraper elsewhere in the city.

That would act as a sex factory or one-stop shopping centre for prostitution, pornography, erotic aids, pole dancing, live sex shows and everything else a juvenile vulgarian may desire. All very modern, industrialised, centralised, privately owned but state-controlled – a sort of exercise in below-the-belt corporatism.

The idea isn’t without its merits, especially if that complex is built somewhere in the outskirts. At least the oldest part of Amsterdam would be less befouled with herds of tattooed youngsters who can’t get laid in any other way, nor obtain drugs without courting trouble with police in their native habitat.

Nevertheless, there is something too orderly and, well, Germanic about this project. In general, whenever Northern Europeans start out doing eroticism, they end up doing sleaze. And institutionalised sleaze is somehow even sleazier than the chaotic variety.

Still, that’s the Amsterdammers’ problem. They are the ones living there, whereas we have the option of going elsewhere for a weekend.

Yet the city does raise certain thoughts about the paradoxical conflict between liberty and libertarianism, with the latter sometimes leading to the denial of the former. Libertarians have a simple solution to all problems: let the people do what they want, provided they don’t hurt others.

Alas, the problem with many simple solutions is that they are simplistic and therefore not especially clever. Actions have consequences, and when it comes to complex social organisms, most consequences are unforeseen.

Hayek used that fact as an argument against an activist, meddling state: since no one can calculate the outcome of any action, it’s best to do nothing unless absolutely necessary. But this argument also works the other way because letting people do as they please may also produce unpredictable ricochets — not least by denying people’s right to live in a clean, safe place.

For example, how do you calculate the social consequences of legalising drugs and prostitution? The libertarian argument would be that a wide demand for a commodity will guarantee its steady supply even if it’s illegal.

Indeed, the inability to stem the flow of drugs even in prisons, in conditions of maximum unfreedom, would suggest that’s indeed the case. And female prison guards happily break every regulation by copulating with male inmates – and vice versa.

So yes, drugs and sex will be sold even if such activities are banned. But laws aren’t there just to stop an undesirable practice. For even if they are unenforced and unenforceable, they also express society’s attitudes; they draw the lines society sees as uncrossable.

If drugs and prostitution are legalised, they can become more or less widespread – I don’t know, though I’ve heard arguments either way.

But I am certain that such legalisation causes great moral and aesthetic damage, for it’s society’s way of saying all is permitted, nothing is immoral, tawdry and tasteless. That cauterises the finer sensibilities of one generation after another by smudging the line between beauty and ugliness, taste and tastelessness, morality and immorality.

And then great cities are turned into dens of iniquity, with their whole atmosphere reeking of dissolution and depravity. If you don’t believe me, visit Amsterdam, see what you think.

Every morning, Sky News invites two journalists to review the papers.

In the past, one or two token conservatives used to appear on the roster of potential candidates, but Sky has abandoned that silly subterfuge. All its reviewers now have impeccable woke credentials, accompanied by evident learning difficulties.

Today’s duo were a man and a woman, both ex-editors of something or other. The man filled the requisite racial quota, while the woman had so much makeup on her face and peroxide in her hair that she looked like a walking environmental hazard.

Among other things, they were asked to comment on the cover story in The Express about the woke judges who had scuppered the government’s plan to deport illegal aliens. That request was greeted with the smug know-all smiles that are essential ingredients in the Left semiotic repertoire.

The word ‘woke’, agreed the reviewers, is grossly overused. And it doesn’t mean anything anyway. That reminded me of my advertising colleague who didn’t know the difference between ‘appraise’ and ‘apprise’, and hence insisted that the latter word didn’t exist.

That was the first word game the reviewers chose, and I’m happy to join in belatedly.

Since they do have learning difficulties, I’ll try to elucidate that sticky semantic point. The adjective ‘woke’ describes inordinate attachment to every subversive fad that can be used as a weapon against what Tony Blair called ‘the forces of conservatism’ and what is in fact common sense, education and moral integrity.

These fads include climate, LGBTQA with any number of pluses you fancy, gender fluidity, race, immigration or anything else going at the time – provided it chips away at every worthy tradition of our civilisation. There, I hope I’ve made this clear.

At issue this morning was illegal immigration, which the reviewers welcomed, and the government’s efforts to curb it, which they deplored. This vindicated Thomas Sowell’s quip that immigration laws are the only ones discussed in terms of how to help the people who break them.

Actually, the article under scrutiny made a good point: the woke judges of the Supreme Court (itself a woke, Blairite institution) used the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to block any deportation plans. Hence, if we wish to regain control of our borders – which is an essential requirement for any serious country – we must leave ECHR.

Peroxide Babe would have none of that. She fired another semiotic arrow from the quiver of the Left by issuing a dismissive chortle. Leave ECHR? Let’s be serious now. Human rights are for everybody, aren’t they?

Indeed they are. But do let’s recognise that there was another word game being played there. Normally I signal my reluctance to take part by suggesting that my interlocutor arrange in the right sequence two words, one of which is ‘off’.

However, I’m willing to make an exception here and join the game for the benefit of Peroxide Babe, her partner and other slow learners. So yes, human rights – or civil liberties, to use the term I prefer – are for everybody. And yes, they are good things to have, provided they are genuine rights and not fig leaves covering up woke appetites.

However – read my lips – saying in that context that human rights are for everybody is a horrendous non sequitur. It springs from either the speaker’s rampant idiocy or, worse, her virulent ideology.

The implicit suggestion is that human rights can only exist under the aegis of ECHR. Therefore, any country that isn’t a member or, worse still, isn’t a member any longer, has no regard for human rights and will trample them into the dirt sooner or later.

Now ECHR was drafted in 1950, in the immediate aftermath of a period when observance of human rights hadn’t been a top priority on the Continent. Hitler, with his Gestapo, SS and the Einsatzgruppen, reminded Europeans that basic rights, including the one to life, were hardly inalienable.

Post-war bureaucrats, mostly French and German, with the odd Italian taking care of diversity, responded by contriving a way of preserving Hitler’s idea of a united Europe, while eliminating its ugly excesses, such as death camps, mass executions and general contempt for human rights.

Hence the gradual but seemingly inexorable push, still on-going, for a single European state. Hence also ECHR, acting as a quasi-constitutional reassurance of the Eurocrats’ good nature. However, though I regard the EU as a wicked contrivance, I do recognise that such a Johnny-come-lately had to state its commitment to essential liberties to allay some ugly suspicions.

The EU (and its precursors) also needed ECHR as another strand in the rope tying a federal Europe together. Homogenised laws are as important as homogenised economies to create an illusion of unity.

All that is fine and well. Yet England institutionalised – and constitutionalised – essential liberties some 500 years before, say, the French did. And the English didn’t have to kill millions of people to produce such a document.

Fair enough, when Britain was a member of the EU she had to be part of a unified system of pan-European laws. Yet the British people voted, correctly and overwhelmingly, to leave the EU. (No prizes for guessing which way Peroxide Babe voted in that referendum.) That decision was taken partly because they sensed no need for a set of laws that either duplicated the ancient national ones or, more sinister, made them inoperable.

Equating ECHR with human rights is, in other words, cheating in a verbal game, like dealing oneself four aces from the bottom of the pack. A similar trick is to equate the EU with Europe, as in “if you dislike the European Union, you hate Europe”.

Peroxide Babe is dumb enough to cheat at such games and inept enough to get caught. But as long as she is on the right side, the woke one, she’ll remain a welcome guest on national TV channels. We need people like that, to remind us all of how many slow learners are in need of special education.

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.