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A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine found himself at a New York dinner party sitting next to Pyotr Aven, one of the men inaccurately called ‘Russian oligarchs’.

Mr Aven is under sanctions and criminal investigations in both Britain and the EU, and just a few days later he was also sanctioned by the US government.

An oligarch [olig– ‘few’) +‎ –arch (‘ruler’)] isn’t always, and never merely, a very rich man. Above all, he is a member of a small clique wielding political power. Such a group may have existed in Russia in the ‘90s, when billionaires like Berezovsky and Abramovich could deliver (or veto) appointments to Yeltsyn’s government.

By now Russian billionaires have vested all political power into the person of one man, Putin, and possibly a shadowy KGB cabal hiding behind him. Some of the erstwhile oligarchs are allowed to hold on to their billions, but theirs is only a leasehold.

In the good Russian tradition going back to the tsars, the ruler treats the whole country and everything in it as his patrimonial estate. The wealth of the wealthy is strictly contingent on their proximity to the throne. Only if they are in the ruler’s good books will they be allowed to use their capital as they see fit – provided they loosen their purse strings without demur whenever the great leader needs some quick liquidity.

The closer they are to the ruler, the richer they’ll be. That’s why whenever you see an extremely rich Russian, you can be assured he is close to Putin, part of his inner circle. And Aven is one of the closest and hence one of the richest.

One stays close to Putin by toeing the line, supporting every action and tacitly, or not so tacitly, conveying the great leader’s thoughts to the world. Mr Aven too is willing to act as dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, which is why my friend was hanging on to every word. Aven was moving his lips, but it was Putin talking.

At the beginning, Aven (Putin) said, Putin simply loved the West. His dearest dream was for Russia to be integrated into it, perhaps even becoming a NATO member. All the West had to do was meet him halfway.

How? Simple. By making Russia the recipient of another Marshall Plan. The West, or specifically America, should have helped Russia out to the tune of some trifling amount, a trillion dollars or two – and Boris is your uncle, Gorby is your aunt. Russia would have become the West’s best friend and a paragon of peace, democracy and general goodness.

And what did the West do? A square root of sod-all. America was happy to help Soviet satellites, the Polands of this world, but not Russia. So what was Putin, chopped liver? A poor relation?

Naturally, he was mortally offended. You don’t want to scratch my back, he thought, I’ll bomb yours. It was then that he became an implacable enemy of the West, and it was then that he decided to rape any former part of the Soviet empire that sought genuine rapprochement with the West.

In other words, a mere pittance offered with alacrity could have bought Russia’s virtue for ever, and it would have prevented the current bloodshed Putin wholeheartedly regrets.

My friend recounted that conversation without comment, but I made a mental note that what he had heard was the current Kremlin line. Unsaid but probably implied was a hint that perhaps it wasn’t too late even now. A few trillion here or there, and Putin would be ready to talk peace.

It was possible, however, that Aven was speaking strictly for himself. The idea that it was – perhaps still is – possible to buy Russia’s good behaviour might have been his own, not Putin’s.

Hence I refrained from commenting on that conversation until I got a confirmation. If that indeed was the Kremlin line, Aven couldn’t be the only communication channel. The message had to be refracted through reliable Western prisms, and few are more reliable than our own dear Peter Hitchens.

I’ve pointed out a thousand times if I’ve done it once that everything Hitchens says on this subject faithfully echoes the current Kremlin position. This could be an osmotic connection, ESP or something more prosaic and less commendable. One way or another, if you want to know what Putin thinks, read Hitchens. You can’t go wrong.

He didn’t disappoint. Hitchens’s article today is a faithful reproduction of Aven’s – actually Putin’s – pronouncements.      

We must “stop being swayed by crude emotion, especially in matters of politics… It suited us all (me included) to believe that the Cold War was a simple conflict between good and evil. And so we rejoiced when Moscow’s Evil Empire fell.”

The implication is that the Cold War wasn’t a conflict between good and evil, and those who felt that way were driven by crude emotion.

Now, I’d suggest there is nothing crude or especially emotional about opposing a regime that has murdered some 60 million of its own subjects and systematically threatened the world with nuclear annihilation. That sort of thing strikes me as unequivocally evil, but Hitchens’s thinking is evidently more nuanced.

Then comes the Putin-Aven line: “Look at Poland, ruined by Communism in 1989, then wisely rescued, subsidised and helped, so that it is now a wealthy, reasonably free and democratic country. Why could we not have achieved the same in Russia? It would have been a bigger job but it would still have cost us far less than the current mess is costing us and will cost us.”

Alas, that dastardly West wanted to keep Russia on her knees: “Was it perhaps because certain people in the West still felt bitterly towards Russia and wanted that country to remain weak and poor? It is a possible explanation.”

It’s not. The West pumped billions, nay trillions, into Russia, as both capital investment and payment for Russia’s natural resources. For, unlike Poland, Russia had things to sell. And there was no shortage of Western buyers.

I’d suggest this was a better way of helping a country prosper than delivering uncountable handouts would have been. The late economist Lord Bauer defined foreign aid epigrammatically as “a transfer of capital from the poor people in rich countries to the rich people in poor countries.”

That’s exactly what happened to the money rushing into post-Communist Russia in a mighty stream. Somewhere between one and two trillion dollars of it (estimates differ) were recycled back into the West to finance the palaces and yachts of assorted gangsters, from Berezovsky and Abramovich to Aven, Deripaska and ultimately Putin.

They lived the life of Riley a millions times over while much of the country starved. That’s what would have happened to any funds transferred to Russia, either as investments or payments or alms.  

And look what we have instead, continues Putin-Aven-Hitchens with a touch of fulsome emotion: “There are now credible suggestions that 70,000 Ukrainian young men, sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, have been killed in the war in that country, which I believe was totally avoidable… Still more have been wounded, maimed and disfigured.”

Alas, “Any attempt to discuss bringing this war to an end with a lasting compromise is dismissed as little short of treason.”

This is a cri de coeur, a not-so-subtle reference to those who correctly identify Hitchens as a Kremlin stooge. And the lasting compromise Hitchens-Putin-Aven envisage is the Ukraine’s surrender to the klepto-Nazi country Hitchens has been describing for over 20 years as “the most conservative and Christian in Europe”.

A few trillion dollars later Putin would thaw and graciously agree to become our friend again. Happiness all around, hats are being tossed up in the air to the accompaniment of regimental bands playing ‘God save Putin’.

I’m not going to say what I think of this vision – you can infer that easily enough. I’m just satisfied that Aven’s dinnertime chat was indeed the current Kremlin line. It has now been confirmed.   

In his article about Napoleon, the historian Dominic Sandbrook puts his subject into a historical frame of reference. The easiest way of doing so is to compare him with historical figures he is supposed to resemble. Thus:

“There’s never been a historical figure like Napoleon. He’d have hit it off with Putin, was as tyrannical as Hitler and his egomania would have made Kim Jong Un proud…”

And again: “He would, in other words, have got on well with Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump.”

Now, I’ve commented on Sandbrook’s outpourings on several occasions, and you can dredge up those pieces by typing his name into the Search function on my blog. While the topics were different, the conclusion was the same: Sandbrook is the most typical of today’s pop historians.

He combines poor intellectual content with woeful ignorance and lack of scholarly integrity. Sandbrook is essentially a trendy leftie shining the light of his inane politics on history to pick out only what he wants to see. Sandbrook’s commitment to truth is negligible; his commitment to leftie platitudes is absolute.

Yesterday’s article is a case in point. Having acknowledged that Napoleon “was one of the most compelling individuals in all world history”, Sandbrook explains what it was that made him so: “Perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that he wasn’t actually French at all.”

He then treats his gasping readers to the discovery that Napoleon was actually Corsican. Crikey. Learn something every day. So that was the most remarkable thing about Napoleon? That he was from Corsica? Trust our historians to offer deep insights and startling erudition.

But let’s get back to those chaps whom, according to Sandbrook, Napoleon most resembles. So fine, he sees Napoleon as a tyrant bent on expansionist conquest. That must be the point of putative similarity with Hitler and Putin. But what on earth is Trump doing in that company, other than being disliked by Sandbrook?

Trump is certainly not bent on building a boundless empire. If anything, he is an isolationist, not an imperialist. He may be bossy, but he operates within a system that discourages tyranny, certainly that of a single man. All things considered, mentioning him in the same breath as Hitler, Putin and, come to that, Napoleon is worse than idiotic. It’s irresponsible.

“Yet [Napoleon’s] life overflowed with contradictions,” continues Sandbrook. “A fervent supporter of the French Revolution, he betrayed its ideals by seizing absolute power.”

Considering how many nasty, tyrannical regimes spun out of the French Revolution, one wonders which of its ideals Napoleon betrayed. He certainly never guillotined hundreds of thousands of his political opponents. Neither did he commit what Prof. Rummel called ‘democide’, murder by category. He did fire grapeshot indiscriminately on crowds of Parisians, but that was a royalist uprising against “the ideals of the French Revolution” that Napoleon was upholding, not betraying.

Sandbrook loves the leftie notion of the Enlightenment and the Revolution as much as he hates Donald Trump. Hence another display of vacuous, platitudinous irresponsibility. What else?

“A keen advocate of the Enlightenment, he had an insatiable greed for jewels and money.” Am I the only one to smell a non sequitur here? I’m not aware of asceticism being one of the proclaimed virtues of the Enlightenment. Is Sandbrook perchance confusing it with mendicant monasticism? If not, one can combine advocacy of the Enlightenment with love of lucre. In fact, the two go together hand in glove.

Then we get to the meat of the argument: “He burned with zeal for France but left his country poorer, weaker and scarred by war. And for all his talk of liberty, fraternity and equality, his legacy across Europe was fire and slaughter on a colossal scale, with millions of lives sacrificed to satisfy his vanity.”

The implication is that Napoleon initiated all those wars to stroke his ego and promote his expansionist ambitions. Such indeed is the common perception, but it doesn’t tally with facts. All the Napoleonic wars were either declared on France by enemies of the French Revolution or, like the 1812 war with Russia, provoked by them.

All in all, European countries formed six anti-French coalitions, the first one in 1792, when Napoleon was a lowly captain trying to survive on miserly pay. All six coalitions were inspired and to a large extent financed by Britain, and Napoleon had nothing to do with that.

It’s just that Britain, along with much of the rest of Europe, gasped in horror observing the French Revolution, whose ideals are so beloved of Sandbrook. It wasn’t just moral support and finance, for Britain also waged a seven-year Peninsular War, in which Wellington thrashed Napoleon’s marshals before finishing off the great man himself at Waterloo.

And of course two resounding victories by Nelson, first in the Battle on the Nile and then at Trafalgar, curtailed whatever plans Napoleon might have hatched for striking at the core of the coalitions by invading the British Isles.

For sure, Britain pursued cold-blooded strategic self-interest. The country’s foreign policy was always focused on preventing the emergence of a dominant continental superpower, and France had traditionally tried to cast herself in that role.

Yet the best British thinkers also perceived, correctly, that the French Revolution posed a deadly threat to Western civilisation as it had developed over three millennia. Radical, atheistic republicanism was the enemy of everything Britain held dear, an attitude Burke expressed so powerfully in his Reflections.

That book came out in 1789, before the Revolution belched out by the Enlightenment committed its worst excesses, including regicide. But it wasn’t just Britain – all European states sensed that the Revolution was adumbrating perverse modernity, something they wished to nip in the bud.

Napoleon, on the other hand, using (or, in my view, misusing) his genius for both war and civilian administration, paved the way for the advent of post-Enlightenment modernity. Following a post-Waterloo interlude of a couple of ineffectual Bourbons, Bonaparte’s nephew, Napoleon III, ushered in a modern republic underpinned by the Napoleonic Code.

In short, rather than betraying the Enlightenment, as Sandbrook believes, Napoleon made it triumphant in the long term – much to the detriment of our civilisation. But young Dominic isn’t out of platitudes yet. It’s Russia’s turn.

Both Paul I and his son Alexander I sent troops across the continent to take on French armies from 1798 onwards. France managed to hold her own. When her armies eventually got to be led by Napoleon, the Russians and their allies were routed in every battle, most decisively at Austerlitz in 1805.

Once again, it wasn’t Napoleon attacking Russia and her allies, but the other way around. Eventually, after Napoleon defeated the allies yet again at Friedland in 1807, Alexander was forced to sign the Treaty of Tilsit, whose terms he had no intention of keeping.

The tsar was openly boasting to his courtiers and foreign ambassadors that Tilsit was merely a breather. Russia had gained valuable time to regroup, rebuild her army and strike again.

Alexander was as good as his word. By mid-1812, the Russians amassed a huge army on the border of the Duchy of Warsaw (Poland) that by then had become part of Napoleon’s empire. Bonaparte either had to wait for that juggernaut to roll or launch a pre-emptive strike. The second option was better.

He had no desire to conquer Russia or to march on Moscow. All Napoleon wanted was to win a decisive battle not far from the Polish border (by then the Russian army was led by Kutuzov, the beaten commander at Austerlitz), enforce the terms of Tilsit, neutralise Russia and then take on his real enemy, Britain.

The only reason Napoleon advanced deep into the Russian territory was that Kutuzov wouldn’t engage him, choosing instead to flee chaotically in the direction of Moscow. As the Russian troops retreated, they used a scorched earth stratagem by burning their own towns and villages – often together with their own wounded left behind.

Some 10,000 died that horrific death in Smolensk, another 25,000-30,000 in Moscow, set on fire by the Russians after Napoleon beat Kutuzov yet again at Borodino and advanced on Russia’s second capital. He expected that Alexander would sue for peace, but, after that didn’t happen, Napoleon had to lead his army back to France, leaving the cinders of Moscow behind.    

This is how Sandbrook describes that campaign: “Of about 615,000 men who had marched on Moscow with their Emperor, just 110,000 were still alive when they returned to France, traumatised, emaciated and frost-bitten.”

The 615,000 number is a mendacious product of Russia’s propaganda dating back to the 19^th century. It was important to overestimate the strength of Napoleon’s troops by way of explaining the cowardly flight of the Russian army and its subsequent defeats in every battle.

In fact, a 150,000-strong corps was left behind in Prussia, and Napoleon crossed the Nieman with some 450,000 men. By the time he reached Borodino, his troops numbered only 130,000. Others had been lost to hunger and disease, or else left behind to garrison the captured cities.

Yet Russian, Soviet and again Russian propagandists have bandied about the false number of 600,000 ever since, and some ignorant Western historians have followed suit. Had Sandbrook done elementary research, he’d come across as someone who knows what he is writing about.

As it is, he comes across as an ideologised, not especially bright ignoramus. A typical modern lumpen intellectual, in other words.   

I caught but a glimpse of yesterday’s Republican debates in Milwaukee, but it was a scary glimpse.

The eight candidates were asked whether they’d still support Donald Trump if he were convicted of subverting the Constitution.

Seven out of eight right hands shot up, and one, Vivek Ramaswamy’s, stayed in that position long after the others went down.

Let me see if I get this right. Those magnificent seven, one of whom may well end up swearing tautologically to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, in fact despise it.

Hypothetically, they see nothing wrong with a convicted felon running the country. And not just any old felon, but one specifically guilty of stomping the Constitution into the dirt.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying Trump is guilty of the charges against him. Neither am I saying he is innocent. For my purposes today, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. Either possibility is equally bad; both represent a triumph of politics over the law.

It’s to prevent such a Pyrrhic victory that England and, following her lead, America produced constitutions whose lynchpin is independent judiciary. The rule of law thus becomes absolute: it’s immune to political pressures or passions.

Such is the theory – in the past also the practice – of Western constitutional polity. When the practice gets divorced from the theory, the constitution becomes for all practical purposes null and void.

If Trump is indeed found – and is – guilty, continuing to support him as a presidential candidate will betoken utter contempt for the law. Political expediency will rule.

Yet even if Trump is found – and is – not guilty, the law will still have suffered a shattering blow. That would probably mean that the charges were spurious, brought by the governing political party for purely political reasons. The exculpatory verdict would be good news for Trump, but the trial would be rotten news for the rule of law.

By declaring their support for Trump whatever the outcome, the seven Republican candidates showed they knew all that and didn’t care. Since Trump is still the likeliest Republican nominee, they didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by putting the law above politics. After all, any one of them could end up as Trump’s running mate – and tomorrow the world.

Unlike the former president of the United States, the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has already been tried on similar charges on two separate occasions and found guilty.

Sarkozy’s first conviction in 2021 earned him a sentence of three years, two of them suspended and one in prison. His appeal is still pending, but meanwhile he was convicted at a second trial, receiving a sentence of one year under home confinement.

One would think a former president convicted of breaking the constitutional law of the land would be dead and buried as a factor in the country’s politics. That’s how it would be if France were indeed ruled by law rather than by political vicissitudes.

But in fact Sarkozy retains much of his influence on France’s Republican (Gaullist) Party. Specifically, he tries to persuade it that his old friend Vlad Putin is France’s friend as well. Hence France should stop supporting the “belligerent” Ukraine and force her to cede some of her territory.

As he writes in his recently released memoirs, “Ukraine must pledge to remain neutral… Nato could at the same time affirm its willingness to respect and take into account Russia’s historic fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbours.”

This is the idiom used by every Putinversteher and indeed by Putin himself. It doesn’t matter to any of them whether or not such fears are founded. They exist, and because they do we shouldn’t try to contain Russia’s imperial ambitions.

Interestingly, this view is shared by the victor in yesterday’s debate, Vivek Ramaswamy, who proved his ability to keep his right hand up longer than his rivals. Trump’s own position on this issue isn’t a million miles away either – but this isn’t my subject today.

My theme today is the diminishing respect for the law throughout the West, with the US and France as only two illustrations of a dominant trend. Neither domestic nor international law is untouched by palpable contempt; both are held hostage to politics.

Thus the leaders, past, present and possibly future, of what used to be the free world don’t see anything unacceptable in Russia’s flagrant violation of international law – just as they are ready to dismiss violations of domestic law as irrelevant.

They thereby show their ignorance of what it was that made the West synonymous with the free world. That world wasn’t free because it practised some form of democracy, as is widely believed. No method of governance is a guarantor of freedom, as any commentator on today’s cancel culture will acknowledge.

People are equally capable of voting for a Churchill or for a Hitler, with democracy served in either case. Yet in one of the outcomes, under some conditions perhaps even in both, freedom would be abused if the law suffers even the slightest attrition.

Only the supremacy of just law over politics guarantees freedom and social tranquillity. This immutable observation applies both domestically and internationally.

Allowing politics to rule the roost at the expense of the law is a recipe for civil war at home and even world war abroad. Whatever our political tastes and passions, we should subjugate them to our unwavering respect for justice.

This understanding used to be shared universally, certainly within the political class of the West. As the Republican candidates showed yesterday, it no longer is, certainly not to the same extent.

The situation is fraught. If politics trumps justice, a country can find itself at the mercy of any charismatic demagogue good at rabble-rousing. That would test the sturdiness of the braces holding the country together, and they may not hold.

Hobbesian war of all against all may well follow, and no country in the world is immune to such a disaster. I do hope our leaders will sort out their priorities and arrange them in the right descending order.

“I told you so” aren’t my favourite four words in the English language. Yet, on hearing the news that Yevgeny Prigozhin died in an air crash, I couldn’t resist uttering them.

Almost exactly two months ago, immediately after Prigozhin called off his march on Moscow, I published a piece titled Dead Man Walking.

I didn’t know how Putin would kill him, but I knew he would. Now that little prophesy came true, I still can’t claim being a seer.

That prediction didn’t take any supernatural powers. All it took was some knowledge of Russia and some understanding of human nature. Still, I can’t help feeling smug. This is what I wrote on 27 June:

No matter how high the premiums, no insurance company would agree to sell a life policy to Yevgeny Prigozhin. The risk would be unacceptable.

Now those Wagnerian Valkyries stopped their march within swearing distance of Moscow, Prigozhin’s life isn’t worth that proverbial brass farthing. The same goes for all his officers and men.

The whole scenario seems to vindicate Hegel’s saying, later repeated by Marx, that “history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. In that spirit, Wagner’s exploits quickly turned from opera to operetta.

Start with Prigozhin’s putative reason for turning around: I have moved within 100 km of Moscow, he said, without spilling any Russian blood. If I go any farther, that precious blood will be spilled, and that’s unacceptable.

First, Wagnerians shot down eight Russian aircraft, killing at least 15 flyers, possibly more. By Russian standards that may not count as spilled blood – I believe they start counting only at five digits, possibly not even then. Still, the claim of “no Russian blood” was farcical — especially coming from a man who had had his own stragglers publicly killed with a sledgehammer.

Most military experts agree that Prigozhin could have taken Moscow had he not stopped. The capital was denuded: the battle-worthy units in its garrison had been shipped to the Ukrainian front.

What was left was the so-called National Guard and security forces, armed only to disperse peaceful demonstrations. They still greatly outnumbered Wagner’s vanguard of some 5,000 advancing on Moscow, but one Wagner cutthroat is worth 10 such truncheon-wielders.

I was especially moved watching videos of the defensive measures taken by Putin’s men as the Wagner column advanced on the main highway linking Russia’s south with Moscow. Putin’s men brought in excavators, tore up the tarmac in several places and dug trenches across the roadway.

That wouldn’t have slowed down Prigozhin’s armour for no longer than an hour or two, but I confidently predict it’ll take the Russians many years to repair the highway. When it comes to such infrastructure projects, they move even more slowly than their British counterparts, which is saying a lot.

For all that, Prigozhin’s only hope was that the Russian army would switch sides and, buoyed by enthusiastic popular support, install Prigozhin in the Kremlin. Yet no such mass desertions took place, and the popular support was rather low-key. To be fair, one didn’t see any crowds waving Putin’s portraits either.

Even assuming that Prigozhin could have ridden his white steed into the Kremlin, he wouldn’t have lasted there. “Losing Moscow doesn’t mean losing Russia,” as Field Marshal Kutuzov said in 1812. He then let Napoleon take the ancient capital, whatever was left of it after Kutuzov and Governor General Rostopchin had burned Moscow to cinders (along with some 26,000 Russian wounded no one had bothered to evacuate).

I’m not suggesting Putin would have done a Rostopchin, but Prigozhin had no military, political or administrative resources to turn his putsch into a successful revolution. That meant the mutiny, if that’s what it was, was doomed. And so now is Prigozhin, along with his whole Wagner group. (I’ll mention another possibility later.)

The conclusion to the march was farcical. Putin, who just a few hours earlier had been describing Prigozhin’s foray as treason, promised to dismiss all charges and allow the Wagner men to return to their “positions of prior deployment”. The deal was mediated by Lukashenko, who generously offered Prigozhin asylum.

First, who on earth is Lukashenko? He is the figurehead leader of a country occupied by Russian troops. Thus he has no more say in such matters than, say, Pierre Laval had in the politics of Nazi-occupied France.

And, considering that Belarus is indeed controlled by Putin’s army and FSB, how safe do you suppose Prigozhin feels there? One word from the Kremlin, and there comes a cup of polonium tea or a spray of novichok aftershave.

Those who may think that Putin will abide by his promise of safe passage misread Russia and her politics woefully. Russia has no state and hence no politics in any accepted sense of the word. The country is run by a gangster family, along the lines explored in The Godfather.

Remember the attempt to assassinate Vito Corleone? The Godfather then went on to prove the old adage that if you merely wound the king, beware. If you don’t kill him, he’ll kill you. As Vito was recovering from his wounds, his enemies, the whole Tattaglia family, were wiped out, along with Corleone’s turncoats.

A mafia boss can neither forgive nor forget. If he does, he shows weakness, loses face. And losing face will inexorably lead to losing his life – such is the law of the criminal underworld.

Sure enough, yesterday Putin finally graced the TV audience with his appearance. Talking to the officers of his enforcement forces, he said that, despite reports to the contrary, the criminal case against the mutiny leaders hadn’t been dropped. The rank and file, he added, can either sign contracts with the Russian army or – listen carefully – join Prigozhin in Belarus.

In any case, the Wagner group seems to have been disbanded. All its officers are under a mafia death sentence and, logically, so is Prigozhin, even though Putin didn’t mention him by name. If any of them or their men choose to join Prigozhin in Belarus, that only means they’ll be killed there rather than elsewhere.

Those deciding to enlist in the Russian army will also be killed, in the Ukraine. There is no doubt they’ll be used as readily dispensable cannon fodder sent on suicide missions.

Such is the scenario lying on the surface. Yet there exists another one, more macabre if less likely.

At first, when Prigozhin’s exile to Belarus was announced, everyone was led to believe he’d be there by himself, a general without an army and therefore not a general any longer. Yet yesterday, Putin gave Wagner fighters the option of joining their caporegime.

Now, assuming that Lukashenko still retains a modicum of power in his land, he must be quaking in his boots at the prospect of several thousand armed bandits inundating his country. The most immediate prospect is that they’ll do to Belorussian towns what they’ve already done to Ukrainian ones, going on a blood-soaked rampage of murder, torture, rape and looting.

Then, of course, the same men who almost took Moscow within a couple of days could probably take Minsk within a couple of hours. Prigozhin has so far failed to oust Putin, but he could easily oust Lukashenko.

The latter understands this perfectly well, which is why he would never have accepted such an arrangement unless pressured by Putin. But why would Putin want to see a Wagner contingent in Belarus? After all, he is already in de facto control of that country.

So here’s some nourishing food for conspiracist thought: Prigozhin’s mutiny occurred within days of the announcement that Russian nuclear weapons had been deployed in Belarus.

Some analysts mulled over the possibility that Putin was going to deliver a nuclear strike on, say, Poland from Belarussian territory and then disclaim any responsibility. It’s all Lukashenko’s fault, he could have said. So, Mr Nato, if you want to retaliate, hit Minsk, not Moscow.

That would have been a transparent lie, but the West would have been predisposed to accept it for fear of an all-out nuclear holocaust. Still, some forces within Nato could have refused to be so credulous. That would have created unpredictable consequences for Putin, and he might not have liked his odds.

But the West could digest the same claim more easily if the nuclear strike were delivered not by a technically sovereign Belorussian state, but by a terrorist gang seizing control of those weapons. Enter Prigozhin and his merry men.

As I mentioned earlier, this scenario is unlikely. But unlikely doesn’t mean impossible – nothing is, with gangsters operating outside any moral constraints.

Come what may, Prigozhin would be well-advised not to make far-reaching plans for the future. He won’t survive any scenario, including the unlikely sinister one I’ve outlined.

Whether he is held responsible for a mutiny against Putin or a nuclear strike against the West, “Putin’s chef” won’t be allowed to live. His goose is cooked.

These days a director who casts a white actor to play Othello will be hauled over the woke coals faster than you can say ‘cultural appropriation’.

However, a black actor (or even actress) playing Hamlet would draw no such opprobrium. Neither would a woman (I’m sure that’s what the late Glenda Jackson was) playing King Lear.

Such is the crazy end of theatrical toing and froing. Yet, as far as I know, no one has so far insisted that any actor playing Hamlet must be Danish, any actress playing Hedda Gabler, Norwegian, or any actor playing Astrov, Russian.

Casting directors are allowed that much leeway, for the time being. But there are limits, certainly in cinema.

Thus the same jolly band of Italian actors migrate from one gangster film or TV series to another, and even such a good actor as Robert De Niro seldom plays non-Italian roles. Again, to the best of my knowledge, such typecasting hasn’t drawn too much criticism – and neither is De Niro charged with cultural appropriation on the rare occasions when he plays non-Italians.

All this makes the brouhaha about three gentile actors playing Jews in current films so much more intriguing. The culprits in question are Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir in the biopic Golda, Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein in the biopic Maestro, and Cillian Murphy playing the eponymous role in Oppenheimer.

All three goyim are cast as well-known historical personages who happen to be Jewish. Somehow that incongruity is supposed to be offensive, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t. Most things can be deemed offensive these days.

Specifically, I’d expect a straightforward charge of cultural appropriation. Or else a lament that those gentiles are stealing bread from the starving children of Jewish actors, such as Natalie Portman, Ben Stiller and Woody Allen.

Yet expecting something as simple as that would be denying just credit to the woke brigade. In fact, only the casting of Murphy suffers such obvious condemnation and nothing but. How dare they cast a gentile British actor to play a Jewish American?

According to the comedian turned writer David Baddiel, this is “complacent” and constitutes “doubling down” on “Jewish erasure”. He then complains that: “over a period of extreme intensification of the progressive conversation about representation and inclusion and microaggression and what is and isn’t offensive to minorities, one minority – Jews – has been routinely neglected”.

A piece of friendly advice to David: on the evidence of this passage, writing isn’t your thing, mate. Stick to the day job, will you? Yet the involute style of his remarks apart, their content signposts one line of attack against all three transgressors. The other two each add their own aspects.

Since Dame Helen Mirren herself is quite woke, one can say she has drawn friendly fire for her portrayal of Israel’s prime minister. Underlying her own woke credentials, she ruefully admits that such criticism is “utterly legitimate”. Though she was happy to accept the challenge, that role should have gone to a Jewish actress, and Dame Helen is genuinely sorry to have caused offense.

That isn’t the half of it, Helen. It’s not just about acting something you aren’t, which hardnosed reactionaries would insist is a useful definition of an actor’s trade. It’s not just about a gentile actress playing a Jewish woman. It’s also about her playing an Israeli Jewish woman.

It’s not just about Mirren playing Meir. It’s about anyone playing that role. Here is a brief selection of Tweeted attacks Dame Helen must regard as “utterly legitimate”:

“How sick making a biopic on criminal Golda Meir and yes no surprise Helen Mirren the racist is happy to portray the pure distorted version of a disgusting individual.”

“Helen Mirren doing a film about the first female prime minister of Israel is a slap in the face to all the people of Palestine, they are literally celebrating taking over Palestine and taking families out of their homes, murdering children, families! Tasteless film!”

“Hugely disappointing that Helen Mirren is volunteering for this role.”

“More fascism to show how ‘wonderful’ Israel is.”

I commiserate with Dame Helen. She has spent a lifetime promoting every woke cause going, and there she is, accused of racism. That would be like my readers complaining of my being a bleeding-heart leftie.

Now Bradley Cooper’s problem is different. He is accused of anti-Semitism for making Leonard Bernstein look like, well, Leonard Bernstein.

One would think it should go without saying that anyone playing a well-known figure in a biopic should strive for facial resemblance to the original. Thus Helen Mirren was pasted with all sorts of prosthetics to make her look like Golda Meir, who unlike Helen, wasn’t known for a physique conducive to frontal-nudity photography.

And Cooper sported a prosthetic nose to make himself look like a dead ringer for Bernstein. That, according to the critics, puts him side by side with Julius Streicher, whose Nazi magazine Der Stürmer published caricatures of sinister big-nosed Jews.

Neither Leonard Bernstein’s children nor the Anti-Defamation League nor the American Jewish Committee agrees. They all praise Cooper’s performance and assure the sensitive public that it’s not at all anti-Semitic.

Yet the sensitive public won’t be mollified. Its members reserve the right to be offended by anything they choose, most emphatically including ethnic stereotypes. If they say any attempt to look like Bernstein is anti-Semitic, then it is – and all those Jewish groups that disagree must themselves be anti-Semitic.

The role of Bernstein, they shout, should have gone to Jake Gyllenhaal, who half-qualified for being half-Jewish. Keeping him out was thus half-discriminatory, and casting Cooper was discriminatory full strength.

Chaps, I have a solution. Any thespian proposed for the role of a historical Jewish figure should have his cranial measurements taken and his genetic makeup tested.

Phrenology in particular is hugely promising. The Nazis used it to determine who was and who wasn’t Aryan; today’s woke fanatics can rely on it to measure Jewishness. And biochemical tests can show every input, no matter how minute, into an actor’s genetic makeup.

If according to the Nuremberg Laws anyone with one quarter of Jewish blood was Jewish, then the same standard could be used by casting directors. Or perhaps a laxer one: shall we agree on one-eighth?

To save their lives, German Jews often tried to falsify their birth certificates – perhaps today’s actors can do the same thing to save their careers. For example, I’m sure Bradley Cooper could bribe a friendly researcher to produce a certificate of some Jewish blood in his family barrel.

I bet Messrs Badiel et al. don’t even realise that their insistence on racial purity smacks of Nazism. There is no such thing as cultural appropriation: having the gentile Bradley Cooper play a Jew is no more offensive than having the Jewish Paul Newman play Butch Cassidy, which is to say not offensive at all.

What is offensive, in fact borderline fascistic, is woke fanaticism. It doesn’t matter whether it’s anti-Israeli or pro-Palestinian or anti-anti-Semitic. Like classic fascism, it pretends to be inspired by sympathy and love, whereas in fact it’s driven by anomie and hatred.

A few days ago, the Russians launched the robotic Luna-25 spacecraft that was supposed to land on the Moon yesterday. The spacecraft shot up from Blagoveshchensk’s Vostochny cosmodrome and headed for our satellite.

This was Russia first launch to the Moon surface since the ‘70s, and it was more, infinitely more than just another phase of space exploration. The Russians have always used their space programme the way they’ve used their sports victories – as proof positive of their superiority over the West.

I still remember Khrushchev bellowing from Red Square’s Mausoleum that Gagarin showed those bloody capitalists what was @$£&&*@ what. That was 1961, the last time the Soviets could claim being ahead of the US in the space race with any credibility.

After Neil Armstrong made his “giant leap” that kind of talk didn’t stop, but it began to sound like empty bluster with a touch of hysteria to it. By 1974, when I got a job in Houston, as translator for the Apollo-Soyuz programme, the space gap between America and Russia was already too vast ever to be bridgeable.

Much thunderous publicity surrounded that “peaceful cooperation” in space, but in fact the project was rather one-sided. All the Russians did was get their spacecraft up into orbit, after which the Americans performed every complicated manoeuvre, including the ultimate docking.

I remember drinking with Soviet engineers and cosmonauts and listening to their wistful comments on American knowhow. The cosmonauts in particular, especially the late Alexei Leonov, the Soyuz mission commander, were quite unrestrained in their thinly veiled criticism of the Soviet programme and, implicitly, everything behind it.

(In case you are wondering, the drinking stopped exactly six months before the flight. That is, the engineers and I still drank, but neither the Soviet cosmonauts nor the American astronauts did any longer: “at least six months between the bottle and the throttle”, as Tom Stafford, the Apollo mission commander, told me with audible regret in his voice.)

As time went by, any Soviet successes in space became rare, while the failures multiplied. One spacecraft after another exploded, veered off course, splashed down in the Pacific. But the need for the propaganda noise hasn’t abated – in fact, with Putin’s arrival it became ever more urgent.

Thus the work on Luna-25 started in 2005, 18 years ago. It took Americans much less time to put a man on the moon, but then NASA is no Roscosmos. That government space agency is even more corrupt and inefficient than the Russian armament industry, which is saying a lot.

That’s why the Luna-25 launch, originally planned for 2014, had to wait another seven years before the button was pushed. Then again, Putin got new priorities at roughly that time.

Yet finally the Luna-25 took off, to the accompaniment of jingoistic clamour putting Khrushchev to shame. You see, Russia has suffered a rather bad press lately, and now it’s not only those bloody capitalists but even some Russians who have second thoughts about the innate superiority of their nation, with its “world’s second army”.

The wider such doubts spread, the louder are the screams of Putin’s propagandists. These are as similar to the yelps of their Soviet ancestors typologically as they are different ideologically.

The Soviets were all about Marx, Lenin, the proletariat being “the gravedigger of capitalism”, and Khrushchev screaming: “We’ll bury you!”. Today’s lot are unvarnished Nazis: they proclaim the innate spiritual superiority of Russians over everyone else, to the point of claiming that the Russians have an extra spirituality gene in their physiological makeup. Hence they are destined to lead the world.

All this is liberally laced with appeals to the Christian purity of the Russian Orthodox Church, so inspiringly led by Patriarch Kirill, a career KGB operative. That incongruous cocktail of Nazism and Christianity is to the best of my knowledge unique in history, and this is the only area in which the Russians lead the world by a wide margin.

Words like ‘Nazism’ and ‘fascism’ are emotionally charged, and you may accuse me of unfair bias. In fact, I tend to use such terms in a purely descriptive fashion, but if you think the description doesn’t quite apply to Russia, here’s a little taste for you to savour.

This comment on the Luna-25 was issued by the writer Alexander Prokhanov, who, along with Alexander Dugin, can claim pride of place as the formulator and enunciator of Putin’s Nazi-Orthodox ideology. I can’t tell you whether it’s Prokhanov who is Putin’s mouthpiece or the other way around. Suffice it to say they speak in one voice. So here is Prokhanov’s poetic prose:

“Russia’s roadmap now has a new route: Blagoveshchensk to the Moon. Launched on that route from the Vostochny cosmodrome has been a large rocket carrying a lander to the Moon. While battles rage on the Kupyansk front, while Russian troops at Kherson repulse ten attack a day, while shells fill the Earth’s firmament with craters and smoke, we are taking our civilisation to the Moon.

“This Blagoveshchensk launch is testimony to Russia’s miraculous ability to rise from the dead… Yet again Russia raises a space dome above herself… Clearly heard behind the roar of the launch engine at the Vostochny cosmodrome was the sound of the teeth gnashed by NATO strategists, for whom this Russian spacecraft punches a hole in their Russia containment strategy.

“The space rocket launched from the Vostochny cosmodrome soared over Lake Svetloyar, stirred its majestic expanse and, with the splendour of onion domes, glittering golden crosses and chiming bells, rushed up into the Russian sky, the home of the Russian dream.”

Now we must take the rough with the smooth. If the Luna-25 launch was, as Prokhanov claims so transparently, the vindication of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, then the spacecraft’s successful landing ought to have had those “NATO strategists” not just gnashing their teeth but running for cover. Their attempt to contain Russia has failed.

Conversely though, if the landing wasn’t a success, then those dastardly reprobates have every right to snigger. All those golden crosses, onion domes and Russia’s unrivalled spirituality would have come to nothing. The bandit raid would remain unvindicated.

That’s exactly what happened. The Luna-25 lander did land, but rather too fast. It veered off the calculated orbit, its engines didn’t turn off in time, and the lander disintegrated against the lunar surface (“ceased its existence”, in Roskosmos’s announcement). Considering that the gravitational pull on the Moon is six times weaker than on Earth, that might have been a pretty rapid landing indeed.

Muscovites wouldn’t be Muscovites if they didn’t come up with caustic comments. One such says: “The spacecraft was supposed to get samples of the lunar soil. Instead, the lunar soil got samples of the spacecraft.”

No one is unduly surprised. A klepto-Nazi regime is incapable of maintaining its scientific progress – or indeed keeping its scientists. Hundreds of thousands have left Russia in the past few years, and the brain drain is beginning to look like a torrent.

Add to this universal pilfering raised to an accepted way of doing business, and it’s clear that something as involved as a space programme has no chance of succeeding. Thieves, murderers and rapists don’t fly – they creepy-crawl on the ground.  

It’s about an hour before the kick-off of the Women’s World Cup final. And, as I write this, I’m doing my best to fight nausea.

I know it’s infra dig to admit affection for footie, but we are all allowed one common touch. This is mine, and I never miss a good match. Which, alas, women can’t play.

That’s why I’m not going to watch our Lionesses, who are really pussycats. The England women’s team is regularly thrashed by English schoolboys, and not the most senior ones.

Yet even if the women were able to raise their standards to the level of 15-year-old boys, I still wouldn’t watch them for fear of throwing up. Such an onset of emesis wouldn’t be caused by their ineptitude – God knows I’ve sat through many bad men’s matches without rushing to the loo with a hand pressed to my mouth.

What is truly emetic is the political hysteria artificially whipped up around women’s football in general and this World Cup in particular. An inordinate amount of newspaper space and TV time is devoted to this second-rate sport, and I’m being generous with that adjective.

Once woke politics moves in, reason walks out. More and more one hears frankly idiotic demands that women players be paid as much as men because they are every bit as good.

This reminds me of John McEnroe’s interview a few years ago, when he said that Serena Williams was the best women’s tennis player of all time. Why such qualifiers, asked the interviewer. Why not say she is the best player, full stop?

Now Mac is on the woke side in general, but that was too much even for him. “Whoa,” he said. “If Serena competed against men, she’d be ranked 700 in the world.” He was a bit PC there – any fulltime male player, including veterans and college stars, would beat any female pro. Serena wouldn’t have made it into the top 1,000 and she knew it.

When asked if she’d like to play Andy Murray, she honestly said that was a ridiculous question: “Andy would beat me love and love in 10 minutes.” Women’s and men’s tennis, she added, are two different things.

True. However, a massive political campaign waged over decades has forced the organisers of Grand Slam tournaments to give the same prize money to men and women. The sports are different; only the pay packets are the same.

Now the same kind of deafening campaign for equal pay is monopolising public discourse on women’s football. There’s a minor hitch though: it’s easier to lean on Grand Slam organisers than on football club owners.

The former have to work hand in glove with their federations and therefore governments. However, the latter are private – and in Britain usually foreign – individuals who treat their clubs as strictly commercial propositions.

They’ll be happy to pay women players the same astronomical amounts they pay the men if their game attracted as many viewers and sponsors. But it doesn’t and, for all the woke politicking, never will.

Yet one important member of the England team is indeed paid by the Federation: its manager, the Dutch woman Sarina Wiegman. Our eagle-eyed campaigners have espied that she is paid a meagre £400,000 a year, whereas her male counterpart, Gareth Southgate, is on three million.

A gross injustice, or what? The clamour for Miss Wiegman’s salary to be bumped up to Gareth’s level is getting shriller and shriller, with its rational component not so much low as non-existent.

You see, Gareth could walk away from the England job tomorrow and instantly find a club that would pay him as much or more (by an order of magnitude if he chose to move to Saudi Arabia). Miss Wiegman’s options are rather more limited. However, the former midfielder turned pundit Danny Murphy doesn’t think they should be.

“The fundamentals of football are the same, for men or women,” he writes, “so there is no reason a woman couldn’t do the England men’s job…”.

Now, I played for my university team back in Russia, and “the fundamentals of football” were exactly the same there as well. Would I be able to manage England then, Danny? If I asked that question, he’d laugh. That’s a different game, he’d explain. Quite. But this goes for the women’s game as well, same fundamentals and all.

“It doesn’t have to be compared to the men’s game,” continues Mr Murphy. “It’s a terrific event in its own right. I can’t wait for the final.”

The first sentence is God’s own truth. I can’t say anything about the second one because I haven’t been watching the “terrific event”. But I agree with the third sentence wholeheartedly, but with a small addition at the end: “…to be over.”

However, while our gushing commentators share the sentiment of Murphy’s last two sentences, they clearly disagree with him on the first. For they do compare women’s football to the men’s game.

Jacquie Beltrao, Sky News correspondent, was on the verge of orgasm this morning as she shouted that this is the first time since 1966 that England is in a World Cup final. It isn’t, Jacquie. Not the same team, not the same game, not even close to the same achievement.

Both Rishi Sunak, our prime minister, and Prince William, heir to the throne and chairman of the Football Association (affectionately known as “sweet FA” in some circles) implicitly recognise this. Both decided not to attend the event, instead sending recorded messages of encouragement.

That piqued the ire of AN Wilson, a columnist who looks as if he has never kicked a football in anger: “What a shameful – and sad – reflection this is of officialdom’s attitude to such a joyous and important national occasion.”

Obviously, the two gentlemen didn’t expect to derive much joy out of watching 22 mannish girls (“English Sheilas”, as the locals call them) run around in shorts and kick the ball with all the mastery of pre-teen boys. Neither do they see the occasion as important enough to justify an endless flight to Sydney.

Actually, Mr Wilson (AN are his initials, not his first name) hasn’t made the trip either, preferring to keep his air miles for something really “joyous and important”. He can whip up the hysteria without leaving his study, which is a smart choice. The same can’t be said for his championship of this political cause.  

Gloating at other people’s problems is morally wrong, and it’s certainly not Christian.

But I can’t help myself: whenever two woke orthodoxies turn out to be mutually exclusive, I experience a most delicious, nerve-ending stroking feeling of schadenfreude. I’ll have to talk to Fr Michael about this, see what he says.

I do hope he’ll absolve this sin (he has let me get away with much worse ones). So it’s with a sense of expected impunity that I smile like the Cheshire Cat observing the scandal engulfing the world of chess.

The International Chess Federation (FIDE) has passed a rule stating that any player who has transitioned from male to female “has no right to participate in official FIDE events for women.”

This has created a mighty outburst of indignation in all sorts of quarters, and I can see why. Hell, I can even sympathise with their predicament, although not too much.

The received view has been laconically worded by the Tory (!) minister Penny Mordaunt: “Trans women are women.” Agreed. But if that’s the case, why can’t they participate in women’s athletic events? Such as tennis, the only game other than chess that I know quite well.

In fact, it was tennis that opened that door ajar. In 1975 a good amateur player Richard Ruskind became Renée Richards. It took him/her two years to force his/her way into professional women’s tennis. In another two years, at age 45 (!), Richards got to the semi-finals of the US Open and achieved a ranking in the top 20, thus proving it’s possible to play tennis without balls.

That focused many minds, including those that didn’t object to that abomination on principle. If a male amateur well past his sell-by date could become a top female pro, there was a flaw there somewhere.

Yes, Renée was undeniably a woman, all progressive people agreed on that. But because she used to be a man she wasn’t quite, well, quite. Obviously her former sex conferred certain physical advantages, such as greater strength, faster speed around the court and more stamina. Hence such undeniable women should be barred from women’s tournaments.

That was almost half a century ago, but I remember having my sense of logic offended. Either a trans woman is a woman or she isn’t. If she isn’t, let’s shout that from the rooftops. But if she is, keeping her out of women’s tennis is unfair and, which is worse, illogical.

Since then, what started out as a weird eccentricity has grown into a collective mental illness. Penny Mordaunt’s pronouncement is an orthodoxy that brooks no argument. Trans rights have now superseded all others, including the time-honoured right to maintain one’s sanity.

Trans women are women, and if you disagree you aren’t just someone who has a different view. You are an enemy to be hounded to the ends of the earth. Our laws are still too wishy-washy to throw you in jail, but you’ll be subjected to a career-ending ostracism.

Yet even against that febrile background trans women are still kept out of women’s sports requiring intense physical activity. Even if those sideshows pump themselves full of oestrogen and bring their testosterone level down into the female range, sports authorities still believe their male past gives them unfair advantages.

So it does. For example, in a 100-metre sprint, the men’s world record is almost a full second under the women’s. That means that a decent male college sprinter would win every race, including the Olympics, with room to spare.

But what about chess? Surely a chess player doesn’t derive any particular benefit from being able to run faster or lift greater weights than his rival? So what’s wrong with trans women playing against what Ricky Gervais calls “old-fashioned women, those with a womb”?

After all, chess is a mental, not physical game. It requires no muscular strength beyond what it takes to push pieces on the board.

What it does require is spatial imagination (similar to what’s involved in geometry), prodigious memory, a sense of structure (which explains why so many musicians are good at chess) and a calculating ability better than a modern accountant’s (who cheats by using calculators and computers, which chess players don’t do, at least in theory).

All these are intellectual qualities, aren’t they? And even if we begrudgingly admit that men are faster and stronger than women, we’d denounce to the thought police anyone who claims that men are smarter.

Anything men can do, women can do as well, if not better – you get that, you reactionary troglodyte you? I do, I really do, please don’t hurt me. But FIDE evidently doesn’t.

By denying trans women access to women’s tournaments, that august organisation as good as says out loud that men are intellectually superior to women. And the skies haven’t yet opened, and a lightning hasn’t struck to smite those infidels, those heretics, those apostates – those enemies!

Now I’d better come clean. I don’t think men are inherently smarter than women – if anything, I’m inclined to believe it’s the opposite. Penelope, for example, is definitely smarter than me, and whenever I can’t cope with a simple task I catch her surreptitious derisory glances.

Without getting into an argument about which sex thinks better, let’s just accept the blindingly obvious fact that they think differently. Women are better at some tasks and men at some others – that’s how God (or Darwin if such is your wont) made us.

And even the briefest of glances at the history of chess ought to convince anyone that one task men are better at is playing chess. Only one woman, Judith Polgar, has ever played against top male players on even terms.

Even a hack like me could back in my chess-playing youth hold his own against top female players. Specifically one such player, a former USSR champion, who was my girlfriend for a while. We never played a serious game, but we had an almost even score in blitz matches.

FIDE has taken a realistic approach to the problem, rising above ideology for the time being. That clearly couldn’t assuage the wounded sensibilities of those who live and breathe ideology.

Predictably, both biologically female feminists and trans female extremists have their knickers in a twist, now that the second group are entitled to wear that garment. The feminists are screaming bloody discrimination, the trans fanatics resent the implication that somehow they aren’t real women.

Me, I stay on the side lines, gloating quietly and enjoying myself. I hope both sides lose.

You probably don’t know this, and I must admit neither did I. But then a friend sent me a Telegraph article by Jenny Hjul, and those proverbial scales fell off my eyes.

Miss Hjul, she of the unlikely surname, is rightly indignant about the latest developments at Edinburgh Fringe. Two venues at that festival, known in the past for its no-holds-barred freedom (called licence in some quarters), have cancelled performances by Graham Linehan, stand-up comedian and creator of the popular TV series Father Ted.

(I’ve never seen a single episode but, taking a stab in the dark and going by the title only, I suspect the series is full of anti-Catholic jibes. I hope worldlier readers will correct me if I am wrong.)

The reason for the cancellations is Mr Linehan’s opposition to trans extremism, which he correctly identifies as “evil”. His basic view is that women can’t have penises, and anyone who insists they can is an extremist. Since the comedian hasn’t exactly kept his light under a bushel, those scorned fanatics have done their best to destroy his life.

Not only has his career suffered, but a torrent of vile threats against his wife and children have led to a breakup of his family. Yet Mr Linehan sticks to his guns, which these days takes much courage.

Having once been exposed to similar treatment, if on a smaller scale, I sympathise with his ordeal. And I commend Miss Hjul for being enraged by it.

However, much as I applaud her sentiments, her article is awful. She makes all the obvious, by now clichéd, points about freedom of speech, and how those trans fanatics stamp it into the dirt. Fair enough, but any conservative writer can make such points in his sleep, with his mind disengaged.

A proper analysis of the situation, however, requires some thought, and that’s where Miss Hjul falls woefully short.

She sets her stall in the very first paragraph: “Mary Whitehouse would have been impressed. The unofficial censor-in-chief of the 1960s and 70s only tried to shut down the BBC and take on permissive society, largely failing. Today’s morality police have descended on Edinburgh in an effort to unpick the entire Scottish Enlightenment, so far with some success.”

For those of you who are too young or too foreign, Mary Whitehouse campaigned against the use of obscenities on television. The issue came to the fore in 1965, when the critic Kenneth Tynan became the first person to say “fuck” on television.

The left praised him for that pioneering effort, whereas conservative commentators, taking their cue from Mrs Whitehouse, presciently warned that before long the floodgates would be flung open. So it has proved.

All standards of decorum, propriety and decency have since fallen by the wayside, and even a generally foul-mouthed chap like me winces when watching some TV programmes. To be honest, I don’t watch many, but most people do.

That’s why one routinely hears even primary schoolchildren use the kind of language that suggests familiarity with most sex variants. Few people, and still fewer conservatives, will hail this development as a step in the right direction. In retrospect, they agree with Mrs Whitehouse who valiantly tried to keep modernity at bay.

Miss Hjul is implicitly critical of Mrs Whitehouse’s effort, but there is nothing implicit about her ignorant remark about unpicking “the entire Scottish Enlightenment”.

“From being an exporter of tolerance and reason,” she writes, “Scotland has come to represent the dawn of a new Dark Age,… the Enlightenment in reverse.”

Let me see if I can follow the runaway train of her thought. Fascistic trans fanatics are jumping backwards to leapfrog “the entire Scottish Enlightenment” and land smack in the midst of “a new Dark Age”. If you aren’t fluent in ignoramus, modern people like Miss Hjul use the terms ‘Dark Age’ and ‘Middle Ages’ interchangeably.

The inference is unavoidable: those objectionable periods championed wokery, including transsexual cancel culture, and it took the hallowed David Hume and Adam Smith to reverse that licentious trend.

Conversely, the venue Leith Archers reverted to medieval sensibilities by cancelling Mr Linehan because his views didn’t “align with our overall values” and hence would not be allowed to “violate our space”.

Perhaps I am being too literal. Even though Miss Hjul’s sloppy statements can be interpreted the way I did, she didn’t really mean that the Enlightenment stopped medieval trans activism. She meant, more generally, that the Middle Ages were characterised by “ideological intransigence”, as she put it, while the Enlightenment adumbrated unfettered freedom.

This may be truer to her meaning, but not truer to life. In fact, both the word ‘ideology’ and the concept behind it were Enlightenment constructs. The term was coined by the Enlightenment philosophe Destutt de Tracy and turned into common currency by Marx.

This stands to reason because the Enlightenment was all about replacing faith with ideology, and the latter was indeed much more “intransigent”. Millions of resisters who were slow to see the light were murdered within a few years following the French Revolution (170,000 in the Vendée alone).

That notorious bogeyman of modernity, the Spanish Inquisition, was responsible for about 10,000 death sentences carried out during the 400 years of its existence. That number doesn’t even register on the scale of the cannibalistic violence perpetrated by Enlightenment ideologues, from Robespierre onwards.

The Enlightenment replaced freedom with liberty and eventually licence. The distinction is vital. Freedom is an internal exercise of free will enabled by God. Liberty is a set of rights demanded by the people and granted by the state. Freedom is spiritual; liberty is political.

The former comes from God, the latter from ideology. The former is constrained by God’s commandments, the latter by ideological demands. Whereas freedom is boundless, liberty provides unlimited leeway only within strict ideological limits.

God’s commandments are immutable but ideological demands constantly change, typically by new ones being added to the existing ones. What doesn’t change is the unwavering severity of enforcement.

This may vary from millions of lives taken to Mr Linehan’s professional and family life destroyed, but this is a difference of degree, not principle. A series of post-Enlightenment begets have formed an ideological chain strangulating all free expression outside the received ideology.

Anyone who understands causality will know that the current orgy of depraved cancel culture is happening not in spite of the Enlightenment but because of it. It’s a result of the Enlightenment snowball rolling down the hill and gathering mass as it goes.

The problem with clichés is that a mind weaned on them can’t distinguish the good ones from the bad ones. Miss Hjul treated us to some good ones about freedom of speech, but then got mired in the lazy ones about the Enlightenment and the Middle Ages.

If this is conservative journalism, I wonder what the lefties are writing. Much of a muchness, I suspect, if with a different slant.

Dr Richard Levine was in his mid-50s when he decided to get castrated and become Rachel.

As a lifelong champion of inclusion and chairman of the Charles Martel Society for Multi-Culturalism (of which, you’ll be happy to know, I’m no longer the sole member), I salute Richard/Rachel for his/her courage.

After all, Richard had to explain the transition to his wife and two children, which must have confused them no end. “So, Daddy, are you now our Mummy?” “No, silly, I’m still your Daddy, but if I have any more children, I’ll be their Mummy.”

Richard’s little metamorphosis didn’t hurt his spectacular career. A paediatrician by profession, he served in the US Navy, which raises interesting questions about its recruitment policy. After all, a paediatrician treats children, and one would like to think a modern Navy doesn’t use many of them.

Does the US Navy pressgang children into its ranks? I must investigate. One way or another, Richard/Rachel reached four-star rank, the first transsexual to climb so high on the career ladder. And that wasn’t the only first that sea she-wolf has attained.

In 2021, Joe Biden appointed him/her Assistant Health Secretary, making Dr Levine the highest-ranking transsexual in the administration and the first such holder of a post requiring Senate confirmation. That duly arrived, but by a razor-thin majority of 52 to 48.

Frankly, I’m surprised it wasn’t unanimous. Clearly, some work still needs to be done to make sure American legislators march in step with progress. As it was, 48 senators, all of them Republicans, tried to stall that march.

Now Dr Levine is in a position to enlarge my vocabulary, which he did obligingly if inadvertently. He/she visited Identity Alaska, a centre looking after the ‘LGBTQIA2S+’ community which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual, and two spirit. The term is new to me, and I wouldn’t have learned it without Dr Levine’s initiative.

The care provided by Identity Alaska is essential and, says Dr Levine, even more than that. According to him/her: “These inspiring people work tirelessly to create a more equitable future, where all those living in the U.S. have equal access to lifesaving medical care.”

Lifesaving, no less. Who wouldn’t want to support an organisation that saves human lives? No one – except those dyed-in-the-wool reprobates who want to know exactly how IA goes about its noble task.

If you are one of those disagreeable individuals, you ought to know that IA promotes ‘gender-inclusive biology’ (another term new to me) by teaching children that doctors assign gender to babies by making a wild guess.

The guesswork is based on the crude technique of checking out what babies have between their legs. Amazing how simplistic some people can get, how hopelessly mired in the past.

IA has also made invaluable contributions to English, specifically mine. For example, they recommend that the word ‘mother’ be replaced with ‘egg producer’.

Now, much as I abhor gender-specific language, this particular term needs work. In most people’s minds an egg producer is associated with a hen, which has vaguely pejorative overtones. Even worse, when a prospective egg producer still hasn’t produced any, she might be called a ‘chick’ – and you don’t need me to know how misogynistic this term is.

Perhaps aware of such pitfalls, IA propose an alternative: ‘gestational parent’. This is much better, but the term doesn’t really roll off the tongue, especially in combinations. For instance, I can’t see Ravel’s Gestational Parent Goose Suite on too many concert programmes. Still, even though some refinements may be needed, this is a step in the right direction.

To keep things in balance, IA extends its life-saving work to censor the word ‘men’ as well. Their proposal, ‘XY individuals’, does get around gender specificity, but it’s not without its own problems.

Dr Levine’s own example proves that not all XY individuals are men, as far as modern nomenclature goes. Moreover, one detects a suggestion that an XX individual can’t become a man, and surely that’s unthinkable.

I don’t even know what to suggest. The first idea I thought of was ‘an individual with male reproductive organs’, but the word ‘male’ puts paid to that suggestion. According to IA, and presumably Dr Levine, children must be taught to call such organs ‘penis and testicles’, which at least has the advantage of descriptive simplicity.

IA, with Dr Levine’s blessing (which is to say with the blessing of the US administration), then veered away from simplicity by taking issue with the term ‘gender reveal party’. I didn’t quite understand what sort of revelry that was, and I still don’t. But, much as I love long words, I still don’t think many people will like, or indeed understand, ‘embryogenesis parties’. 

“The treatment options for gender-affirming care for transgender youth really are evidence-based,” Levine said, making me wonder how renouncing one’s own sex can be seen as affirmation. But I bow to the experts.

But then he/she said something that jarred. Dr Levine, while professing boundless love for his/her own children, says that kiddies should start ‘gender-affirming’ treatment as teenagers – even if that means they won’t be able to have children.

What kind of evidence-based statement is that? Doesn’t the good admiral know that medical science has advanced so much that men can now get pregnant?

So fine, such men didn’t start life as XY individuals, but I have every confidence that before long Dr Levine’s colleagues will find a way of implanting female reproductive organs into the bodies of bearded men born with a penis and testicles.

All that advance will take is more state funding, and I’m reassured to know that, according to Dr Levine, gender-affirmative care for children has the “highest support” of the Biden administration. Yes, but what if the Biden administration doesn’t come back after next year’s elections? That doesn’t bear thinking about.

But seriously now. Gender dysphoria is a mental illness, and psychiatric disorders used to be seen as a disqualifying condition for any holder of a government post.

Hence I’m happy to know that medical care in the US is so superlative that it isn’t affected by the second-highest health official in the country being – to use a technical term – unhinged. Or rather I would be happy if the situation were indeed sunny.

But it isn’t. Every time I talk to my American friends, they tell me horror stories about medical care in their country. While stopping just short of fully imitating our own dear NHS, Americans have still imported its worse features.

Under such circumstances, one would think someone in Dr Levine’s position would have more important things to worry about than gender-affirmative care for children. Yes, that would be the case if we lived in a sane world. But we don’t, so it isn’t.

Franz Kafka, where are you when we need you? It takes someone of that genius to give justice to today’s world. As it is, you are stuck with me.