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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.

I don’t mean Alaric and his merry men, circa 410 AD. The vandals in question are Western tourists, circa 2023 AD – our contemporaries.

One such gentleman (see photo) recently used a key to scratch his name on the masonry of the Colosseum, and you’d think the ancient structure has suffered enough damage since it was built by the Flavian emperors in the first century.

Vespasian (who ruled in 69-79, going down in history as the victor in the Judaean War and – for lovers of trivia – the only perfectly straight Roman emperor) started the construction, his elder son Titus (79-81, known for destroying the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD at his father’s behest) completed it, his younger son Domitian (81-96, known for his persecution of Christians) modified it.

Earthquakes and fires inflicted much damage on the Colosseum that the subsequent generations of Italians haven’t bothered to repair. And now modernity is adding its own unmistakable touches.

Nor is it just in Rome. The vandals, otherwise known as mass tourists, are befouling what’s left of our civilisation with gusto, turning formerly elegant and civilised places into giant pastures for grazing herds.

Tourism has become not just affordable but cheap, and our huddled masses are taking full advantage of it. They have to tick off all the places they look at without seeing anything, and understanding even less.

We used to go to Florence quite often, where we made friends with a Scotsman who owned an English-language bookshop. He told us that some Anglophone, mostly American, tourists would drop in every day asking for directions.

They wanted to know how to get to the Bridge of Sighs (“It’s in Venice.” “And where are we?”), the Colosseum (“It’s 160 miles south of here.” “Gee, that’s a long way) or even the Parthenon. With that kind of cultural baggage it’s no wonder they don’t think twice before vandalising a structure built two thousand years ago.

Not far from where we are in France there is a 12^th century Abbey at Pontigny, what’s left of it. That’s where Thomas Becket found refuge when he was on the run from Henry II.

Only the Romanesque church has survived the previous swarms of vandals. The rest of the Abbey buildings were destroyed first by the 16^th century Huguenots, then by the 18^th century revolutionaries. Thus spoke nascent modernity, but it didn’t quite say the last word.

That privilege has fallen to the tourist masses yearning for cheap travel. They don’t quite go so far as to take the surviving church apart stone by stone, but they do their level best to disfigure the snow-white nave walls with crude graffiti.

Some only sign their name or that of their current love interest, but others also gratify future historians by helpfully dating their contributions. None predate the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, when herds of vandals began to pollute ancient places en masse.

These days it’s impossible to go to great European highlights in season, and some have been turned into a contiguous stampede even during the off-season. Venice, for example, has become a theme park for the culturally disadvantaged all year round. Anyone going there even in winter must be prepared to shoulder his way through noisy, gawping, selfie-snapping throngs.

“How revolting,” I thought the last time I was there, as I was spray-painting my name on the wall of the Doge’s Palace… Just kidding: I did no such thing. But some people did, vindicating my heart-felt belief that modern masses have a Midas touch in reverse: everything they touch turns to muck.

A useful parallel can be drawn with fruit and vegetables over the past half-century. Victorious modernity has decreed that most produce should be available to most people throughout the year, regardless of seasons. And so it is, except that to achieve that goal we’ve had to sacrifice everything that used to make produce worth eating: taste, fragrance, texture, nutritive value.

Such a fate has befallen our culture as well, including the part expressed in the stones of great ancient cities. Vandalism is the founding animus of modernity, and these days it’s enabled and encouraged.

Given half the chance, today’s heirs to the Visigoth vandals, Huguenots and revolutionaries will vaporise those sublime places, using the latest technological achievements of which they are so proud.

For the time being they merely have to content themselves with using their house keys to etch their names into ancient masonry. Thank God for small favours.

P.S. An à propos headline in today’s Mail: “Le hangover! Two US tourists are found asleep near top of the Eiffel Tower after getting stuck inside Paris landmark overnight ‘because of how drunk they were’.” And I thought only Britons did that sort of thing.

Every coin has the other side. Every action produces a reaction. If a drug has clinical effects, it also has side effects. There’s a cloud behind every silver lining.

And these are just simple things. Something as complex as a civilisation serves up dichotomies and trichotomies galore – nothing is unequivocal, straightforward, clear-cut.

If asked to name the two most salient features of the modern West, most people would probably mention political democracy and scientific progress. Moreover, the same hypothetical respondents are likely to opine that both features are without a downside.

If someone told them that, for all their virtue, democracy and progress may well destroy our civilisation culturally, intellectually and possibly even physically, they’d decide they are talking to a madman. Yet there would be method in his madness, and truth in his assertion.

Both Plato and Aristotle were wary of democracy, especially when it isn’t balanced by other forms of government. (In fact, they favoured mixed regimes and warned against any unalloyed political system, be it democracy, oligarchy or monarchy.)

Aristotle referred to democracy as a “deviant constitution”, and he didn’t just mean it was flawed politically. He feared that democracy would produce a wounding ricochet on society because, if people are equal in one respect, they’ll deem themselves equal in all respects.

That would destroy the hierarchical spine of society, without which neither culture nor social stability would be possible. It was mainly in this sense that first Tocqueville and then Mill feared that democracy would bring about the “tyranny of the majority”.

In a representative democracy, the majority exercises political power only nominally. It delegates real power to a rather small elite that steadily moves away from the electorate while fostering the illusion that the people govern themselves. Such an elite can indeed become bossy or even despotic, and modernity serves up many illustrations of that.

But the real danger is different. For, when democracy is elevated to the status of absolute good, it vindicates Aristotle by spilling out into domains other than just political ones. Because everyone has an equal vote on political candidates, people eventually get to assume that the same horizontal arrangement applies everywhere.

Every opinion is as valid as any other, every taste as impeccable, every judgement as infallible – democracy breaks political banks and floods every walk of life with toxic effluvia. The effect is devastating and instantly observable.

Since commerce is also egalitarian in essence and, nowadays, all-pervasive, people acquire boundless power to vote for intellectual and aesthetic products with a show of hands, each clutching a wad of banknotes.

As a result, opinions that would never even be voiced in any other system become dominant. Abominable tastes marginalise beauty. Ignoramuses mould orthodoxies and set trends. Depravity trumps normality. Discernment bites the dust.

This directly affects the other claim that modernity has to civilisational ascendancy: scientific and technological progress. However, for all its usefulness, it exacerbates the downside of democracy.

Just because people can fly around the world in less time than it took to travel from London to Newcastle a couple of centuries ago, they develop such a deep attachment to progress that they assume it’s ubiquitous.

Science, in the shape of Darwinism, reinforces this view of life. People transpose their belief in Darwin’s slapdash theory of predetermined meliorative evolution into the conviction that political, social, economic and cultural trends are similarly vectored. But they aren’t.

People begin to see society as a machine that can be easily finetuned or redesigned, or else as a biological mechanism functioning according to predetermined rules. Yet it is neither. Society is a fragile and complex construct susceptible to all sorts of dangers.

One danger is the growing chasm between scientific progress and human regress. Prometheus might have given people the gift of fire, but he also gave them ways of turning that fire against themselves.

I’ll steer clear of dystopic, yet realistic, scenarios of mankind destroying itself with its advances in nuclear physics or artificial intelligence. Suffice it to say that sophisticated tools require sophisticated operators. When this condition isn’t met, trouble ensues.

What’s worth mentioning is that scientific progress can act as the sand in which mankind can bury its head and ignore unfolding social catastrophes. Take something as mundane as crime – specifically murder – rate.

About 400 homicides a year were committed in Victorian England. Today, the corresponding number is 600, give or take. Considering that the population has grown to double the size, we may flash a smug smile and rejoice: if anything, today’s situation is better and it’s certainly not worse. So what’s that about the moral decline of modernity?

In fact, we are looking at a catastrophe hiding behind scientific progress. Our surgical techniques, pharmacology and life-saving equipment have improved so much since the 19^th century that thousands of wounds that would have proved fatal then are today regarded as mere scratches.

This is good news for victims who’d otherwise be dead, but catastrophic news for the moral health of society. If today’s victims of assaults were treated with 19^th century techniques, our murder rate statistics would surge upwards exponentially.

Some experts estimate that today’s murder rate would be at least 100 times higher than in Victorian England. That means we have a much higher proportion of individuals ready to inflict grievous wounds on their neighbours. Hence our pride in modern scientific advances should be leavened with horror at the moral and social catastrophe those advances mask.

There used to be a stock joke in the Soviet army. A sergeant would ask a recruit: “What’s the most important part of a rifle?” Having heard the answer, he’d say: “Wrong. The most important part of a rifle is the soldier’s head.”

Far be it from me to offer Soviet NCOs as paragons of intellectual attainment. But you can see how that crude exchange could be extrapolated to Western modernity, with its unshakable belief in democracy and progress. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that.

Francis Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites tells the story of 16 eponymous nuns guillotined in 1794 by the forces of progressive modernity.

Poulenc depicts this tragic event with poignant power. His nuns go to their fate chanting Salve regina, after which the sound of the falling blade is heard repeatedly over the orchestra. However, the same progressive modernity that popularised that sound so widely has now added another one, by way of counterpoint: crunching popcorn.

Some American tourists contributed that musical insight to the performance of the opera at the Proms the other day. Those sitting next to them failed to appreciate the subtle dissonance, and the two groups almost came to blows.

One concert-goer raised obvious concerns in a language harmonised with the Proms philosophy: “WTF is the Royal Albert Hall doing selling POPCORN during the Proms? Involved in a near fight at one tonight. Ruined the first half of a superlative evening.”

Allow me to explain WTF. The Proms were designed to carry real music to the masses, and the words ‘pearls’ and ‘swine’ never occurred to anyone at the time.

Since the masses, populus in the language of the Carmelites, only want popular entertainment (circenses), the Proms have developed along a certain vector pointing towards popular entertainment crystallised, which is to say a football match.

The organisers of the Proms have sought from the very beginning to eradicate every reminder of real music’s genesis in church liturgy. People are encouraged to go walkabout during the performance, talk to their friends, stamp their feet on the floor while applauding.

This process has been gradual, with new touches added year on year. Punk, pop and rap concerts are supplementing the usual musical diet, and of course popcorn the customary culinary one. The Carmelites can now go to their death to the accompaniment of sweets being unwrapped, crisps being crunched and popcorn being munched.

It’s not long before football-style chants will be allowed or even encouraged. “The conductor is a wanker!” and “You are shit and you know you are!” would be a good start.

I’d also recommend “Get your trills out for the lads!” when Yuju Wang is on the platform, or perhaps “Wang me rigid!” and “There’s only one Wang!”. A stock chant could also greet the appearance of any Korean performer: “He will play the whole score, then he’ll eat your Labrador!”

James Ainscough, Chief Executive of the Royal Albert Hall, can’t understand WTF the problem is: “We’ve sold small packets of popcorn, along with crisps and sweets, in our bars since 2014 without protest… Different people enjoy different shows in different ways, so we always hope audience members will be considerate of those around them, and polite when they speak to each other.” 

Allow me to translate: Vox populi has spoken, and all our concert organisers can do is hang on to every word and comply with every wish. If the people want to barrack the performer or, conversely, loudly cheer every fast passage, then by all means they should do so. That’s what carrying music to the masses really means.

Mr Ainscough didn’t even moot the possibility that, whatever refreshments are sold in the foyer, they may still be banned in the actual hall. That despotic infringement of the masses’ free self-expression isn’t unknown: many concerts halls display signs saying “No food or drink allowed beyond this point”.

However, any such restrictions would defeat the implicit purpose of the Proms: to lower music to the aesthetic level prevalent in stadium terraces. People like Mr Ainscough aren’t yet empowered to exclude real music from the Promenade Concerts. So they do the next best thing by slowly vulgarising it into oblivion.

Real music can only be fulfilled by a tripartite collaboration between the composer, the performer and the listener.

It goes without saying that the middle link in that chain, the musician, has to display prodigious powers of concentration when going about his task. What does need to be said is that the listener must concentrate just as hard, to make sure he stays in harmony with composer and performer.

Some of the composer’s intent is bound to be lost in the performance. Real music represents the acme of the human spirit, and any performer can only approach that summit without quite reaching it. The greater a musician he is, the smaller the shortfall, but some gap will always remain.

Similarly, even a listener with perfectly trained and attuned senses is bound to miss some of the musical nuances conveyed by the performer (I’m talking about real musicians, not anti-musical showmen like Lang Lang or aspiring pole dancers like Yuja Wang). It’s the task of every musician and every listener to make sure such unavoidable losses don’t distort the sublime meaning of music too much.

That’s why it’s critical that all extraneous distractions be eliminated from the concert hall. Even the slightest rustling noise can break the listener’s concentration, hurting not just his enjoyment (dread word) but the music being played. For a few moments his ability to participate in the collaboration is destroyed, meaning that so is the music.

Allowing any food, especially the noisy variety, into a concert hall is like allowing weapons into a stadium: the whole purpose of the event will be undermined. Yet I realise that the Ainscoughs of this world and I define the purpose of a concert differently.

All they want is to put more bums on seats, and the Royal Albert Hall has over 5,000 seats to fill with willing bums. If many of them go empty, that’s all the organisers’ job is worth, and they’ll do anything to stay in gainful employment.

That singlemindedness of purpose is shared by food franchises and also so-called music critics banging out equally gushing reviews of every performance, no matter how inept. Suggesting that a performance enjoyed (dread word) by so many was indeed inept would be tantamount to taking issue with the paying public’s taste, and that’s clearly not on.

Thus, the collaboration I mentioned earlier is replaced by a collusion of cynical organisers, playing nonentities, various commercial interests and uneducated audiences. They all gain whatever it is they are after. It’s the defaced music that loses.

This photograph was taken an hour before the two girls, Svetlana (19) and Kristina (21), were killed by a Russian missile strike on Zaporozhe.

Their death represents a significant strategic advance for Putin. After all, as he claims and Hitchens confirms, Russia is really fighting NATO, not the Ukraine. Hence the two girls who loved to sing had to be the lynchpins of NATO’s war effort.

Alternatively, they are merely two more victims of Russia’s evil aggression that pursues genocidal, no longer military, objectives. The idea is to break the Ukraine’s spirit or to force NATO to lose interest.

The first option isn’t going to happen; the second one may, if the current polls are anything to go by.

The latest CNN survey shows that 55 per cent of Americans are opposed to providing any more aid for the Ukraine. Even more worrying is the fact that 71 per cent of Republican voters feel that way.

Thus any Republican candidate, most likely Trump, can canter to the nomination on an anti-war promise and then make an appeasement stance a key plank of his national platform. Trump, a Putin admirer of long standing, won’t let that opportunity go begging.

Similar tendencies are noticeable all over the world, from China and Turkey to Western Europe, where the Zelensky government is being urged to exercise ‘common sense’. The choice of recipient of such entreaties is baffling.

After all, only someone who started the war can end it. And no one this side of Hitchens and his ilk identifies NATO or the Ukraine as the aggressor.

It’s Russia that’s murdering tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians like Svetlana and Kristina. It’s Russia that’s levelling Ukrainian cities and destroying their infrastructure. It’s Russia that tortures, rapes, loots and kills Ukrainians, kidnapping their children into the bargain. It’s Russia that’s threatening the world with nuclear annihilation.

How come no one is appealing to Putin’s common sense then? Why does everyone want Zelensky to sue for peace and beg for negotiations?

Actually, Zelensky has never opposed the idea of negotiations. He has a few preconditions though: first, Russia withdraws from every inch of the Ukrainian territory occupied since 2014; second, the Ukraine gets ironclad security guarantees, not the Mickey Mouse variety exemplified by the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk accords.

Putin, on the other hand, may agree to a ceasefire along the current demarcation line, but he’ll never accept any guarantees of lasting peace. On-going imperial expansion is a precondition for his staying in power, or indeed alive.

That’s why, having failed to defeat the Ukraine on the battlefield, Russia is stepping up her propaganda efforts, activating both her own troll factories and her Western stooges.

For example, Hitchens wrote a lengthy piece last week, explaining that Russia was severely provoked by the Ukraine’s 2014 “putsch”, otherwise known as a popular uprising to unseat Yanukovych’s puppet government.

Yanukovych, a career criminal, did win an election on a quasi-patriotic programme. He then pledged allegiance, de facto if not yet de jure, to Putin, making a mockery of the Ukraine’s cherished and hard-won independence.

Having realised their electoral mistake, the people kicked him out, which offended Hitchens’s worship of democratic propriety. That noble feeling is selective: he never seemed to mind the openly stiffed ballot boxes in Russia. That was all right, especially considering that Hitchens had been writing gushing articles about Putin ever since the start of his blood-stained tenure.

He and his likeminded Putin fans never tire of bemoaning Ukrainian corruption and yes, fair cop, the Ukrainian government is indeed corrupt. It’s not the only one: every post-Soviet republic, emphatically including Russia, has been warped by decades of communism. The Ukraine is no worse than most of them and better than some.

Yet all such considerations miss the point by a mile. Corrupt or pristine, governed by democratically elected officials or otherwise, the Ukraine is an independent country. Her internal affairs are her own business.

The implication that her practices disapproved by Hitchens somehow legitimise Russian aggression is more criminal than any transgressions ever committed by the Ukraine. Implying that, or blaming NATO for the war, is enemy propaganda at its purest, something not seen in Britain since Lord Haw-Haw.

Only one country, Russia, is guilty of unspeakable crimes against humanity. And only one, the same, criminal country harbours far-reaching plans that go beyond the Ukraine. That’s why it’s so upsetting to see so many Americans (and others) falling for Kremlin propaganda.

What do they think is going to happen should the US government listen to vox populi and cut the Ukraine off? Do they seriously believe Putin will be happy to negotiate an equitable peace? Do they expect him to be satisfied with a piece of the Ukraine his missiles have turned into wasteland?

If so, they should stop listening to Putin’s propagandists and exercise real common sense, not the spirit of surrender going by that misnomer.

Once the Ukraine starts running out of ammunition, Putin will launch a new offensive on Kiev – and this time he may well succeed. New pictures of tortured and mutilated corpses will flood the Internet, with the sound accompaniment of lies about the Ukraine and NATO. The Ukrainian army will go guerrilla, and in the 1950s their ancestors managed to carry on for years against much more formidable odds.

Meanwhile, Putin will see the West’s ‘commonsensical’ surrender for exactly what it is. He’ll get another confirmation of NATO living in fear of any direct confrontation with Russian bandits.

Those who wish to know what will happen next ought to read up on European history circa 1939. That would remind them of what happens when the West practises ‘common sense’ when dealing with an evil aggressor.

Svetlana Semeikina and Kristina Spitsyna, RIP

Umberto Eco defined fascism as, inter alia, “essentially rejecting the spirit of 1789, the spirit of the Enlightenment. Fascism sees the Age of Reason as the beginning of modern decadence.”

I would have been tempted to add another redolent spirit to the list, that of the Vendée. Following the 1793 regicide, the revolutionary government slaughtered 170,000 inhabitants of that province (about 20 per cent of its population) who had risen in protest against the closure and robbery of churches. The spirit of the guillotine wouldn’t go amiss either.

Thinkers like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre instantly saw the link between “the spirit of the Enlightenment” and revolutionary violence, leading to a frontal assault on Western civilisation. Let’s describe them, along with the Vendée martyrs, as proto-fascists and move on, keeping in mind that people like Eco use the words ‘fascist’ and ‘conservative’ interchangeably.

Having read his definition, I realised it fit me like a glove. I then looked at myself in the mirror, expecting to see the scowling mug of a fascist. Instead, I saw, well, me – a rather rotund gentleman not in the first flush of youth whom I happen to know rather well.

This chap has many foibles and he has committed many sins. Nevertheless I am absolutely certain he doesn’t have a fascist bone in his body.

So, I thought, fearful that a lightning from the sky will smite me, Eco must be wrong. One may see a direct link between “the spirit of 1789, the spirit of the Enlightenment” and today’s decadence, and still be something other than a fascist.

Yet even people who wouldn’t dream of taking issue with all those spirits can’t help noticing certain unpleasant things about modernity. These fall in the broad range between decadence and degeneracy morally, bossiness and tyranny politically, uniformity and freedom socially.

Name your own bugbear, and you’ll find it in today’s life. Children as young as seven encouraged by their teachers to undergo castration. Education that doesn’t educate. Policing that doesn’t police. Justice that isn’t just. The law that fails to protect property and life. Madcap permissiveness combined with systematic suppression of free speech. The state meddling in every aspect of private life. Idolatrous worship of flora and fauna…

You can extend this list or compile your own. One way or another, it takes a singularly unobservant person not to see that something is rotten in our modern world. Yet being observant doesn’t make one a fascist. What does then, Mr Eco?

Obviously, it’s regarding those enormities as a natural consequence of the Enlightenment, rather than its unfortunate malfunctioning. A fascist, according to Eco, is someone who detects congenital defects in the Age of Reason and shows how they ineluctably lead to moral degeneracy and political tyranny.

Back in the late 90s I wrote a book titled How the West Was Lost, in which I argued that all the regimes of modernity, such as liberal democracy, socialism, communism, fascism and Nazism, have much in common. Moreover, that commonality is directly traceable to “the spirit of the Enlightenment”.

Talking specifically about liberal democracy, the dominant method of government in the West, I pointed out many features it shares with communism. That line of thought drew on my personal experience of both regimes, and my personal sadness at seeing the gap between them getting narrower.

The Enlightenment was all about the wholesale repudiation of the old and replacing it with the new. The entire history of the preceding 1,500 years was declared to be nothing but a sustained practice of superstition, obscurantism, oppression and ignorance.

The lyrics of the communist anthem, the Internationale, capture that sentiment perfectly: “No more tradition’s chains shall bind us/ Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall;/ The earth shall rise on new foundations,/ We have been naught we shall be all.”

Rousseau opened his Social Contract with the words “Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.” The spirit so dear to Eco was supposed to blow away those tethers by changing not only the existing methods of government but the very nature of man. Man was supposed to recover his primordial beauty destroyed by Western civilisation.

Western, which is to say Christian, Man was to be replaced with a new sociocultural type, Modern, which is to say liberal-democratic, Man. He would have no use for such anachronisms as God, autocracy, social stratification or hierarchies of any kind. Instead he would marshal his own unlimited resources to conquer nature (including human nature) and create a new world.

Alas, that type didn’t exist yet. It was an ideal to strive for, and society was to strain every sinew to make sure its march towards that ideal would be unstoppable. Every snag in its way was to be eliminated – man finally saw the truth, and it was to make him perfect eventually, if not in one fell swoop.

Does this sound at all familiar? It should, because this is where liberal democracy converges with communism, socialism and fascism. They all see life as a steady evolutionary development away from an unsatisfactory past towards a shining secular ideal. Life to them is a linear and teleological evolution towards paradise in this world, for there is no other.

This teleology is chiliastic: once the ideal has been reached, man will no longer have to travel anywhere – he will have arrived.

People (including me) mocked Francis Fukuyama who responded to the 1991 ‘collapse of communism’ in Russia by declaring the end of history. Yet he merely expressed the fundamental liberal-democratic tenet: liberal democracy had triumphed even over its erstwhile formidable adversary.

Hence, history in the sense of evolution towards a pre-set goal had indeed ended. Fukuyama knew the odd twist and turn would still occur, but by and large stasis had arrived. The ultimate goal of progress is to stop progressing.

Liberal democracy seems to differ from communism and fascism because it sets great store by liberty as a hoist raising common man to hitherto unreachable heights. However, this concept of liberty has caveats built in by definition. It presupposes severe limitations on the liberty of those who dislike the declared ideal and see it as appallingly destructive.

Liberty is allowed only within the narrow channel through which society inexorably moves towards its ideal. Any step outside that channel is variously treated as treason, heresy or apostasy. This must be discouraged by any means necessary, and that’s where liberal democracy still differs from other products of the Enlightenment.

Communism and fascism rely on propaganda and, should it fail to achieve the desired result, unrestrained violence. Liberal democracy also practises total, not to say totalitarian, propaganda, but its use of violence is so far limited – mainly because it’s unnecessary.

Ostracism, demonisation, exclusion from meaningful careers, damning and shaming seem to be adequate as a means of hushing up people who are better able than Eco to see historical trends in their dynamic development from inception. But if at some point those he calls fascists and I call conservatives refuse to be silenced, violence will be used more widely.

Some people rejoice to see that liberal democracy is still different from communism and fascism. That jubilant emotion, however, shouldn’t interfere with the ability to see their common origin and weep over the increasing similarity between liberal democracy and its Enlightenment cousins.

They all innately have more in common with one another than any of them have with the traditional Western societies and governments. They all set out to stamp tradition into the dirt and realise an ideologically contrived eudaemonic ideal. The first part has proved easier.

“What’s in a word?” asked Shakespeare, who then answered himself along the lines of not very much. The great man thus predated by four centuries Jacques Derrida with his silly deconstructionism.

I disagree, most respectfully. Not wishing to step on the toes of either our national poet or France’s faux-philosopher, I still maintain that in our prosaic life words are crucially significant.

Take the term ‘illegal migrants’, which is always in the news these days. Most people who use it in the media tend to slide over the adjective and stress the noun, evoking horrific images and appealing to our charitable instincts.

True enough, vast areas of Africa, the Middle East and, these days, Eastern Europe are suffering horrific wars, genocide and famines. That compels thousands, or rather millions, of people to save themselves and their families by fleeing.

The safest harbours they identify are all in the West, emphatically including Britain known for her munificence. And it’s also true that whatever is left of Christian charity (or, barring that, basic decency) should make us welcome those poor people and do as much as we can for as many as we can.

Yes, politics tends to be based not on Christian charity or even basic decency, but on cold-blooded pragmatism (however misconstrued). Yet there have to be exceptions. Shrugging our shoulders when proverbial women and children are being slaughtered means betraying everything good in our civilisation.

That’s why we have generous immigration quotas, and it could be argued that they should be made even more generous in some situations, with extra provisions for cases of genocide. Agreed? Good. We’ve now milked the noun part of ‘illegal migrants’ for all it’s worth.

Now let’s talk about the adjective. My trusted dictionary defines ‘illegal’ as “contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.” That’s where the word game comes in, called ‘transformation’ in linguistics.

This means replacing lexical or grammatical structures with their full equivalents that clarify their meaning without distorting it. Thus, using the above definition as the starting point, we can transform ‘illegal migrants’ into ‘criminal migrants’. Rather than relying on our generous immigration quotas, they choose to break the law.

People who cross the Channel in small boats and then seek asylum in Britain aren’t legitimate migrants or refugees. They are law-breakers, otherwise known as criminals. And their numbers, though still short of the D-Day force going in the opposite direction, are still significant.   

In 2020, 8,466 crossed over in small boats, which number increased to 28,526 in 2021 and more than 40,000 in 2022. This year it’s estimated to grow to 56,000, creating an unmanageable backlog in asylum applications.

That’s a lot of criminals to swell the ranks of the rapidly expanding homegrown variety. This raises the question of what to do with them.

The most obvious stratagem would be to prevent them from landing in Britain in the first place, and the Royal Navy has a fair amount of relevant experience. At different times in our history, it prevented the invasion of such formidable adversaries as Philip II, Napoleon and Hitler.

While admitting that firing broadsides at those small boats would be ill-advised, one still likes to hope that the Royal Navy could do something to turn those boats around. After all, they aren’t shooting at our ships either.

That hope seems to be forlorn. The Royal Navy lacks either the incentive or orders or capacity to stop the influx of small boats carrying criminals to our shores. So what happens next?

The government started out by spending millions to accommodate the arrivals at hotels boasting a various number of stars (up to four). Alternatively, they are housed in abandoned military bases – due to Britain’s lackadaisical approach to defence, there exist many of those.

This creates all sorts of problems, and funding is the least of it. You see, many, I’d even dare say most, of the new arrivals are – what would be an inoffensive term? – differently civilised. Their hygienic, amorous and acquisitive practices are often at odds with the local mores, which creates conflicts.

The locals sign petitions, demonstrate outside migrant centres and sometimes even resort to violence. So far no deaths have been reported, but that situation is likely to change.

I don’t think people in the Home Counties are blood-thirsty Little Englanders, but they do have legitimate concerns about their tranquil neighbourhoods turning into hellholes. They feel their home is where charity should begin.

The most obvious solution is to remove those criminals from Britain, send them somewhere where their habits would be less jarring to the ambient mores and ban them from ever applying for asylum in Britain. Rwanda was mooted as a possible destination first.

That sounds like a good idea to me, but not to those who accentuate the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ at the expense of the adjective. Thus possible deportation to Rwanda was tied up in legal challenges. And in June the Court of Appeal ruled it unlawful because the Rwanda asylum system wasn’t deemed to be up to scratch.

Ascension Island is the current candidate, which also strikes me as appropriate. After all, if St Helena was good enough for Napoleon, Ascension Island in the same part of the South Atlantic should be good enough for those criminal migrants. And if they find that not being the case, then many others could well be deterred from entering Britain illegally.

Yet I fear that any deportation scheme, to Ascension Island or elsewhere, will suffer the same fate. After all, it goes against the grain of the dominant ethos declared and enforced by our lumpen intelligentsia.

This group spouts humanitarian slogans with the best of them, but in fact it’s driven by neither Christian charity nor even basic decency.

As one of their intellectual leaders, Peter Mandelson, once explained with refreshing candour, importing large groups of cultural aliens expands the electoral base of the leftmost parties. Thus, what his boss Blair described as “the forces of conservatism” would be neutralised.

Neither Blair nor Mandelson nor their current followers have bothered to put any upper limit on their generosity. That’s a serious oversight, considering that billions of people worldwide would rather live in Britain than in their own countries. The size of our island suggests that some sort of limit is necessary.

The seminal difference between legitimate and criminal migrants also seems to be moot. Thwarting the forces of conservatism is vital; upholding the law isn’t. Those gentlemen are, however, adept at camouflaging their cynicism with bien pensant jargon.  

Thus Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, is appalled by the Ascension Island scheme: “This is more shameful demonisation of men, women and children fleeing from countries such as Afghanistan, the bloodshed in Syria and Sudan and persecution in Iran.

“It is time for the government to stop its obsession with unworkable and inhumane schemes that treat people like human cargo and address the shocking mismanagement of the asylum system with seriousness and accountability.”

In other words, let’s fling our doors wide open and admit them all, legal or otherwise. Never mind legality, feel the empathy.

The causal relationship between crime and punishment immortalised by Dostoyevsky has fallen by the wayside – the noun in ‘illegal migrants’ has trumped the adjective. That’s like arresting a man who has stolen £10,000 and, instead of sending him down, awarding him the same sum by court order.

If you think this is a spurious simile, I suggest you look up the meaning of ‘illegal’ in any dictionary you trust.

Generally speaking, the BBC deserves every plaudit for keeping a vigilant eye on any possible affront to diversity.

As a life-long champion of letting it all hang out, I applaud the corporation for its comprehensive diversity training programme. All staffers must attend and thus learn to be on the lookout for “170 different forms of unconscious bias”.

I wish I could attend that course because I can’t count so many on my own. I happen to know that one form of unconscious bias identified for BBC employees is based on their colleagues’ hobbies.

Not being privy to the specifics, I can only make a general admission that I too display a bias, both conscious and unconscious, against certain hobbies, such as putting live kittens into the microwave. However, if I were able to attend that course, I’m sure I’d be cured of my propensity to discriminate.

One way or another, when it comes to diversity, no amount of vigilance is excessive. For any lapse can have catastrophic consequences, scarring affected individuals for life.  

That’s why the Corporation deserves a light rap on the knuckles for the diversity survey recently circulated to its staff. It was a multiple-choice questionnaire, yet some of the important choices were left out.

Specifically, the question “What is your sexual orientation?” featured some omissions that many BBC staffers may find inexplicable, if not deliberately offensive. The answer options included only “bi/bisexual”, “lesbian/gay woman”, “gay man”, “other sexual orientation” and “prefer not to say”.

The questionnaire drew thunderous criticism for its wilful omissions, and quite right too. Only three of the 101 known sexes… sorry, I mean genders, were listed. The remaining 98 were unceremoniously lumped together under the rubric ‘other’, which reduced those valid options to a marginal status.

What about BBC employees who are proud of being, say, endosex, cisgender or demi-flux? They are fully justified in feeling slighted at best, mortally offended at worst. And you know what happens to cisgender people who feel slighted or, God forbid, offended?

Well, neither do I. But it’s a safe bet they may go to pieces, thereby jeopardising the quality of the BBC’s output, of which all Britons are rightly proud. And don’t get me started on the hurt feelings of fa’afafine and bissu Beebers. They’d be within their rights to demand that the Board answer the question bursting out of their wounded hearts: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

I think the BBC should either not list any options, instead just offering an empty space to be filled by the recipients, or, better, list all 101 of them. That would make the document bulkier, but at least the danger of offending a member of a respected minority would be averted.

Let’s remind ourselves, and keep reminding, that the whole purpose of diversity training is to avoid even the slightest possibility of causing offence. My proposal would serve this purpose, whereas the BBC questionnaire, while definitely making a step in the right direction, falls just short of the destination.

That’s why so many people subjected our national institution to just criticism. I’m sure the critics singled out such neglected but valid options as FTM, hijra, kathoey…

Wait a minute, Penelope has just looked over my shoulder and told me to read the papers more diligently. Turns out I’ve got it woefully wrong (“yet again”, as she put it). The BBC indeed came under fire for omitting a certain option, but it was none of those I’ve mentioned.

The option left out was “heterosexual”, aka “straight”. Apparently, some BBC staffers still identify themselves in that quaint, anachronistic and decidedly uncool fashion. And they are the ones who have complained.

I for one don’t see what their problem is. The questionnaire did include the “other sexual orientation” rubric, didn’t it? All they had to do was scribble “straight” in and go back to sweeping the floor, or whatever such sticks-in-the-mud do at the BBC.

How long before straight people start lying about their ‘orientation’ to have any chance of getting a job at the BBC? This is a multiple-choice question, and the answer options are “soon”, “in the immediate future” and “faster than you can say Jack Robinson”.

These words, I would have thought, were as likely to cross my lips as “Perhaps Hitler was on to something”. Yet here I am, defending the Corporation against slander.

Don’t get me wrong: the BBC violates its Charter not just every day but in practically every programme, including Match of the Day. That document commits Beeb to impartiality, which it delivers only when talking about two woke causes at the same time.

Most of its employees vote for the leftmost parties, and those few who don’t are typically technical personnel: cameramen, grips, technicians and so on. On-camera Beepers are consistently, impeccably and – which is worse – openly left-wing in everything they say, or rather preach.

Hence I am generally sympathetic to the idea of defunding the BBC by scrapping its annual licence fee. Definitely, let’s do it – but not for the wrong reasons.

These thoughts have been inspired by the mighty storm breaking out in the teacup of a single word. The offensive word was uttered by Sally Nugent, BBC Breakfast hostess.

The word was ‘infamous’, which Miss Nugent used in what many irate individuals and organisations saw as an offensive context. This is what she actually said: “Eighty years after 19 Lancaster bombers took part in the infamous Dambusters Raid, tonight a special anniversary flypast will take place over Lincolnshire.”

She was referring to Operation Chastise, a 1943 attack on German dams with so-called ‘bouncing bombs’. The attack breached two dams and destroyed two hydroelectric power stations, causing widespread flooding in the Ruhr valley. Some 1,600 civilians died, along with 53 RAF flyers.

Because of the large civilian losses, the raid isn’t without its critics. But the canonical consensus in Britain is that it was heroic, self-sacrificial and strategically justified. Hence calling it ‘infamous’ is like calling Nelson a libertine pirate or Wellington a Francophobe bandit.

Predictably, all hell broke loose, with the Defund the BBC Campaign leading the way. The BBC hastily issued an apology, saying it had been just a slip of the tongue, but Campaign director Rebecca Ryan would have none of it:

“If this awful error, which tarnished the memory of a heroic military operation that helped boost British morale during World War 2, was ‘a stumble’ it should have been immediately corrected on air.”

She concluded by succinctly stating the mission of her organisation: “The broadcaster must be cut loose and made to stand on its own feet financially.”

I second the sentiment, but not for this reason. In fact, I’d like to defend both the BBC and, chivalrously, Miss Nugent against this attack. However, if you feel my defence will be tantamount to damning with faint praise, who am I to argue?

I strongly suspect that all Miss Nugent knows about Operation Chastise comes from the 1955 film The Dam Busters, if that. I looked into her educational credentials and found no compelling reason to believe she is especially erudite.

Miss Nugent graduated from University of Huddersfield. Several websites claim she did so in 1971, which, considering that was the year she was born, strikes me as unlikely. Dismissing the possibility that this venerable institution issues degrees to neonates, one has to assume it’s a typo, and her real graduation year was 1991.

If that’s the case, then Huddersfield wasn’t a university at the time. It was still a polytechnic, only upgrading its status in 1992, following the Higher Education Act.

That was an exercise in egalitarian legerdemain, enabling the downtrodden to claim they have gone to university instead of a lowly polytechnic. Thus, if Britain had 22 universities in 1960, today she has 160 – supposedly. In reality, we still have 22, or even fewer, since upgrading the status of polytechnics has produced a growing inflation in the value of a university degree.

Why do I go into this in such detail? Because I believe the BBC’s apology that Miss Nugent made a slip of the tongue. She meant to say ‘famous’, which inadvertently came out as ‘infamous’.

It’s not only possible but likely that an alumna of Huddersfield ‘University’ may genuinely not know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’. She may well think that ‘infamous’ is the more refined way of saying the same thing.

This is widespread: I’ve heard many people say ‘simplistic’ when they mean ‘simple’ or ‘risqué’ when they mean ‘risky’. This is what linguists call ‘genteelism’, a verbal attempt to sound more educated (or, in Britain, higher class) than one is.

This is a predictable outcome of egalitarian education: people feel entitled to the higher status they have done little to attain. Treating a university degree as a licence to kill the real meaning of words, they believe, along with Humpty Dumpty, that words mean what they want them to mean.

Thus they say ‘peruse’ instead of ‘scan’, ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, ‘disinterested’ instead of ‘uninterested’, ‘electrocuted’ instead of ‘got a shock’, ‘momentarily’ instead of ‘shortly’, ‘enormity’ instead of ‘immensity’, ‘refute’ instead of ‘deny’ – and these, along with many others, are the solecisms one hears regularly from all and sundry, including TV journalists.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not trying to be snobbish here, rating people’s education on the basis of their CVs. In fact, I’ve seen total ignoramuses boasting Oxbridge degrees and highly educated people who have gone to lowly universities or none at all.

In fact, I believe that, when all is said and done, there is no education other than self-education. Someone who has spent a lifetime perusing (rather than scanning) by the yard books written by great stylists will know the difference between ‘famous’ and ‘infamous’.

Yet simple observation suggests that most people tend to devote their valuable time to pursuits promising a more immediate payoff. Thus English is being mangled so widely and consistently that one begins to suspect lifelong self-education isn’t in the forefront of most people’s minds.

In fact, many people hardly ever increase their erudition beyond the level they attained at school or university. That being the case, the better schools and universities they attend, the less likely they will be to say ‘infamous’ when they mean ‘famous’.

Miss Nugent’s excuse may or may not be truthful. Yet I for one find it perfectly plausible.

As to defunding the BBC, by all means let’s. But for all the right reasons.

Many commentators are asking this question, and not out of idle curiosity.

Some are convinced that from the start the Russians saw the conquest of Ukraine as the first stage of their invasion of Poland, and only the courage of the Ukrainian army has made them suspend their plan.

But suspend doesn’t mean abandon. There are signs, and their number is growing, that Putin is about to launch a false-flag operation against that Nato member. The false flag will show the colours of either Belarus or the Wagner Group, with the Kremlin claiming innocence.

The same strategy was given a trial run in 2014, when the occupation of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine was supposedly carried out by the ‘little green men’, who had nothing to do with the Kremlin. That stratagem could have duped only those wishing to be duped, such as Nato governments scared witless of any direct confrontation with Putin.

Shortly after the Wagner Group staged its mutiny in June, at least 4,000 of its militants were transferred to Belarus, setting up camp near Mogilev. Apparently they are armed only with infantry weapons, having left their armour and artillery behind. Yet even infantry weapons could be sufficient to stage a deadly provocation.

The SS troops in Polish uniforms that on 31 August, 1939, attacked the Gleiwitz radio station didn’t have tanks and cannon either, which didn’t prevent them from providing a pretext for the Nazi invasion of Poland the next day.

One would think that the Belarussian dictator, Putin’s stooge Lukashenko, would feel uneasy about the presence on his territory of thousands of armed bandits who recently almost succeeded in taking Moscow. He has to realise that taking Minsk would be an easier proposition, but Lukashenko doesn’t have a choice in this matter.

According to him, the Wagnerians are chomping at the bit and looking westwards. This is how he describes the situation: “I said, ‘Why do you want to go west?’ So they say, ‘We control what happens: let’s go on an excursion to Warsaw and Rzeszow.”

The former is of course the Polish capital, whereas the latter is a key military hub through which supplies are flowing into the Ukraine. Rather than being a sightseeing trip, that ‘excursion’ would constitute an invasion of Poland.

At the same time the Russians deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus. This violates every known non-proliferation treaty, but Putin assured the world that Russia remained in control of those weapons.

However, Lukashenko then spoke out of turn, claiming the decision of when to go nuclear, and against whom, was his to make. It isn’t. But should the Russians support Wagner with a tactical nuclear strike, they could cite that pronouncement as proof of their innocence. It’s all that ghastly Lukashenko’s fault.

If Nato decided to retaliate, it would have an excuse to accept Putin’s lies and strike at Belarus instead. Russia would then see it her moral duty to come to the aid of her loyal ally, screaming all over the world about Nato’s dastardly aggression.

Americans are trying to preempt that ploy by telling Putin they can see right through it. Asked about the presence of Wagner mercenaries on the Polish border and whether she sees it as a real threat to Nato, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Ambassador to the UN, said: “We certainly worry that this group… is a threat to all of us.”

She then added that “any attack by the Wagner Group will be seen as an attack by the Russian government.”

These are fighting words, but so far they have been uttered only by a relatively minor official of one Nato member. Though we don’t know what sort of messages are being sent through unofficial channels, so far we haven’t heard a statement to that effect from Nato at large, all for one and one for all.

However, the messages sent by deeds rather than words are unequivocal: the West is willing to do all it can, and possibly even more, to avoid a military conflict with Russia come what may. Drip-feeding just enough aid for the Ukraine to fight but not enough for her to win is about as far as Nato seems willing to go.

Now, I have always assumed that Article 5 of the Nato Charter says it all loud and clear: an attack on one member is an attack on them all. I – and I am sure some of you – saw that as a sort of tripwire arrangement. One shot fired at any Nato member pushes the button for cruise missiles flying in the opposite direction.

Then a friend of mine, who is more meticulous in such matters, suggested I read the actual text of the Article rather than relying on generally accepted inference. And what do you know: no tripwire is anywhere in evidence.

Not to bore you with its turgid prose, I’ll put the full text in the post-scriptum. But the upshot is that the use of armed force is only one option, and each member will decide whether to exercise it either individually or in concert with other members. What they unequivocally undertake to do is to report the situation to the UN Security Council, of which Russia is one of the five permanent members with veto power.

In other words, Article 5 doesn’t warn any potential aggressor that any ‘excursion’ on his part will bring about an instant violent response. In fact, one struggles to see how the existence of that provision changes the current situation, one involving the Ukraine.

Nato has always had the option to interfere militarily, but has chosen not to do so because it has no appetite, nor any obligation, to fight Russia. Fine. But the way I read it, Article 5 neither obliges Nato to stop Russian aggression by force nor boosts its appetite for such a confrontation.

Hence Putin, unable to make much headway against the Ukraine, may feel he has little to fear if he decided to test Nato’s resolve by an ‘excursion’ into Poland, false flag or otherwise. The situation is fraught with lethal danger, and the West’s vacillation makes it more so.

P.S. The full text of Article 5, as promised. See what you make of it: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

“Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.”