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The actress Anne Heche, 53, has died after driving her car into somebody else’s house at 90 mph.

I’m mildly upset because I liked watching her on screen. That had little to do with Heche’s thespian excellence, for I found her performances rather mannered and histrionic.

But my aesthetic standards leave room for compromise wherever good-looking actresses are concerned, and yes, I know how sexist this sounds. Moreover, moving right along from sexist to troglodyte, every time I admired Heche’s gamin pulchritude, I thought, “What a waste.”

For the actress was a lesbian, although she seems to have been versatile enough in her affections. Her omnivorous sexuality was only objectionable because everyone knew about it, and please don’t accuse me of moral relativism. All I’m saying is that even the strictest moralist couldn’t have objected to Heche’s lesbianism had she kept it under wraps.

But she didn’t. In fact, Heche turned it into a cause célèbre, much to the detriment of her career.

In 1997, when Heche was at her nubile best, she insisted on attending the premier of her film Volcano with her lover, Ellen DeGeneres. She had informed her Hollywood bosses of that intention beforehand, and they were furious.

You do that, they said, and you can kiss your Fox contract good-bye. Millions of dollars were at stake, but Heche valued her principles more. Even DeGeneres tried to talk her out of that attempt at career suicide, but Heche stuck to her guns.

As a result, she lost her contract and didn’t make another studio picture for the next 10 years. She managed to hold on to her role in the 1998 comedy Six Days, Seven Nights, but only because the studio was desperate.

The film had been intended as a vehicle for Julia Roberts, but she had walked off the set. Heche was brought in as a last-minute replacement, and the shooting couldn’t be delayed any longer, lesbianism or no. And Heche’s co-star, Harrison Ford, interceded on her behalf.

All those events unfolded 25 years ago, not an especially long time. But time can be measured not only chronologically, but also historically, culturally and socially. By those standards, 1997 wasn’t just a quarter-century ago. It was a different era, an age when even generally amoral Hollywood still had to take a bow towards conventional decency.

The obituaries praise Heche’s self-sacrificial heroism in her fight for LGBT+ causes. Obviously, had she taken the same stance in 2022, rather than 1997, she wouldn’t have to die to rate gasping plaudits.

If anything, today her career would suffer if she tried to stay in the closet. She’d be roundly castigated for cowardice, careerism and letting the side down. As it is, she is showered with posthumous accolades for courage in the face of reactionary forces.

However, those forces were never as reactionary as all that. Provided people’s private parts remained private, no one cared one way or the other (or both).

Staying with Hollywood, it was widely known that some of the top stars were open to unorthodox amorous options. Greta Garbo, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Lawrence Olivier, Marlon Brando were all homosexual to various extents – at a time when homosexuality was still against the law in many American states.

But those stars lived according to the maxim by that great aphorist, De La Rochefoucauld (d. 1680): “Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.” They didn’t just play roles; they also played the game.

Hypocrisy has a bad name these days. However, not just civility but indeed civilisation would be impossible without it. Hypocrisy is inevitable when society lives by certain norms of public behaviour (and if it doesn’t, it’s not a society but an aggregate of atomised egoists).

Whatever such norms are, they will always seem too lax to some people and too stringent to others. But as long as they all agree to live by those norms or at least to pay lip service to them, not to flout them too vehemently or openly, society will remain stable.

Amazingly, the shock waves of the sexual revolution still hadn’t quite destroyed civilised hypocrisy by 1997, 30-odd years after the explosion. Now they have, and transmorality has been added to transvestism and transsexuality.

Yesterday’s virtues have become today’s sins, yesterday’s sins today’s virtues. That’s how it has always been with revolutions: the saints of the old regime become the demons of the new one and vice versa. And the accelerating moral and cultural decline of modernity is nothing if not revolutionary.

Hence it’s not surprising that the moral about-face happened. What’s surprising is that it happened so fast, and the story of Anne Heche provides a useful speedometer of the metamorphosis.

Anne Heche, RIP.  

Pounding, blaring din pumped through giant speakers. Youngsters twisting their bodies in a choreographic equivalent of an orgy neatly harmonised with a Nuremberg rally.

Blazing strobe lights that would kill an average epileptic. Inflatable balls being tossed up in the air. Booze everywhere.

Does this look like a Catholic mass to you? No, not to me either. However, Pope Francis is ecstatic – his confession has found new ways to attract teenagers.

The pioneering effort, called Rave4Christ, was undertaken by the Naples priest Don Michele Madonna, who took up the cloth after a successful career as DJ at his father’s disco.

Having found himself working in a poor area of Naples, Don Michele noticed that most of the local youngsters preferred crime to any productive activity. They could only be saved by Jesus, he decided, which conclusion was par for the course in his new profession.

But how could he bring them into the church, where Jesus could do his salvaging job? The task seemed impossible at first, but then Don Michele experienced a Damascene epiphany. I don’t know if he, like Paul, fainted and fell off his horse, but the effect was as revelatory.

Don Michele realised he had to blend the objectives of his new calling with the tricks of the old one. Once that overarching idea formed in his mind, the rest was a matter of mere technicalities.

A mass must be turned into a rave, but what could it be called? Clearly, the Italian language couldn’t accommodate such a daunting challenge – English, especially its Twitter variety, had to pick up the slack. Hence Rave4Christ, which makes the adman in me crack an avuncular smile.

A promotional leaflet flew off the press and into the shanty areas of Naples: “An evening in which we want to enjoy ourselves, dance, sing and stay together. And all for free, including the consumption (sandwich and drinks).”

What, no weed, no E, no meth, no oxy, no coke? Oh well, give Don Michele time to develop every potential of his brilliant idea. And develop it he will, considering the encouragement he has received from up high.

No, not quite from Christ himself, but from His Vicar, Pope Francis. His Holiness found time in his busy schedule to pick up the phone and congratulate Don Michele personally. The specifics of the conversation haven’t been divulged, but I wonder if the Pope had a few practical suggestions to make.

He could have stolen my thunder and reiterated the idea of dispensing free drugs. Or else turning the whole affair nudist – that too might put more bums, or in this case bare feet, on pews. Flagellation, body paint, perhaps even simulated human sacrifice (the police might have something to say about the real thing) – all these may herd even more of those criminalised youngsters into Don Michele’s church.

However, they would be unlikely to undergo a catharsis once there, at least not a Christian kind. The fact that deafening dance beats may accompany remixed Christian songs is meaningless.

Those feral teenagers won’t respond to the message even if they can discern it behind the incoherent electronic cacophony to which they gyrate. Can you make out the lyrics of pop songs at a rave or in a disco? I bet you can’t. I know I wouldn’t be able to, if I ever patronised such entertainment.

Don Michele and, judging by his response, Pope Francis refuse to understand that it’s not enough to draw youngsters into a Christian church. It must be done by Christian methods and to a Christian end.

The apostles didn’t convert people by bribing them with handouts and cheap, vaguely satanic entertainment. They did so by fiery sermons that ignited souls, inspired minds and changed lives. The task was hard, and they didn’t succeed every time. Often they ended up beaten, imprisoned, killed.

But they never renounced the dignity of their faith, never demeaned its grandeur, never resorted to vulgar tricks. They realised something that escapes today’s lot: neither persecution nor limited appeal will bring the Church down.

Persecution comes and goes, appeal ebbs and flows, but the Church survives come what may. Neither cruelty nor apathy can destroy it. But vulgarity can.

Our Anglican priestesses insist on wearing tight vestments accentuating their charms, claiming that would increase turnouts. (Looking at most of them, I can confidently predict exactly the opposite effect, but that’s beside the point.) Raves are routinely held in our great churches – we once fled from Winchester Cathedral when one was about to kick off.

Now the Catholic Church has begun to follow suit. The holy fathers ought to remind themselves that their job is to raise people to Christ, not lower Him to the basement level where vulgarity reigns.

Only church music belongs in churches. A Byrd motet, a Bach cantata or a MacMillan chorale do provide the requisite spiritual hoist, whereas pop din is bound to stamp the spirit into the dirt liberally mixed with vomit.

The deafening monotonous beat hinting unsubtly at coital gymnastics bypasses the mind and spirit altogether, appealing directly to the putrid swamp of dark cravings sloshing about in underdeveloped souls. The souls of those Naples louts are as underdeveloped as any, and they are guaranteed to turn Rave4Christ into Rave4Rave.

They’ll be leaving Don Michele’s church with the nihilistic beat imploding their heads, not with the words of Christ ringing in their hearts. My guess is they’ll be committing more crimes, not fewer.

Perhaps Don Michele ought to do some soul-searching and reconsider his career change. He may be happier back in a disco – once in, never out. I’d suggest the Church would be happier too, should he revert to his old trade.

I’ve always thought that referring to literary criticism as lacerating is a figure of speech. Yet a young Muslim, Hadi Matar, added a literal meaning to it by stabbing Salman Rushdie 15 times.

That tragic event happened on stage, where Rushdie was about to make a speech commending America for being a safe haven for exiled writers. In that context, Matar’s crime may be seen as an illustration.

I watched Sky News coverage of the aftermath and was both shocked and amused. The shock came when an eyewitness referred to the stabbed writer as ‘Mr Rushdie’.

The writer can be addressed as ‘Salman’, ‘Rushdie’ or ‘Salman Rushdie’. However, since he was knighted by his friend Tony Blair in 2007, the only thing he can’t possibly be is Mr Rushdie. Sir Salman will do nicely, thank you very much.

Then there was a state trooper presenting the law-enforcement aspect of the ‘alleged’ crime. We are, he said, trying to establish the motives behind the murder attempt.

That I found amusing. Surely any sentient postpubescent human being must have heard of Ayatollah Khomeini who declared a fatwa on Rushdie in 1989. This means that any pious Muslim is supposed to kill Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses. A large cash reward is also on offer, thereby appealing to people’s piety and greed at the same time.

Since then, unsuccessful attempts have been made on Rushdie’s life, and half a dozen successful ones on the lives of his publishers and translators in various countries. I doubt the state trooper in question possesses a keen interest in post-modern literature, but even in its absence it shouldn’t have been hard to figure out Matar’s motive.

When interviewed for background interest, Matar’s classmate put it in a nutshell, if unwittingly: “He was a very devout Muslim and one of the few things that I remember talking to him about was kindness.” The young man didn’t say how Matar felt about kindness, but it doesn’t seem he extended that virtue to cover writers whose work he found offensive.

As for his being a devout Muslim, say no more. Such piety presupposes blind obedience to Koranic prescriptions, and that book contains at least 300 verses obligating Muslims to kill infidels and apostates.

Offending Mohammed is also a capital crime in Islam, but someone has failed to explain to Muslims living in the West that their canon law has no legal force in their adopted countries. In general, it’s fair to say that efforts at assimilation haven’t been a uniform success among Western Muslims. 

That’s hardly surprising. The only approach likely to solve the problem would be telling Muslims in no uncertain terms that they should either abide by Western values or get out.

Yet such an uncompromising statement can only come from certain premises. The overarching one is that Western values aren’t just different, but better. Moreover, these are the only values by which a Western society will live. Everything else is and must remain a strictly private matter, reserved for one’s sitting room or perhaps some sort of community centre or prayer house.

Yet the ‘culture’ or, more appropriately, dictatorship of diversity precludes such premises, especially when it’s married to an unwavering commitment to equality. All religions, with their resulting cultures, are deemed worthy of equal respect and an equal share of voice.

That’s why Lefties can’t possibly object to Muslims marching through our streets with posters saying, “Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom to insult”. But of course it does, dears. One can’t think offhand of any constitutional document anywhere in the civilised world mandating freedom of only nice speech.

Yet flags with similar superimposed slogans have been toted throughout the West by all and sundry, such as feminists or LGBTQ and trans activists. They have succeeded in creating a subversive cancel culture whose very essence is denying free speech.

And Rushdie, the guiding light of the Occupy movement and a good friend of both Blair and Obama, has done his fair share of subversion. No doubt those two gentlemen will now make the usual speeches about their thoughts and prayers going to the stricken writer. They – and their likeminded comrades – won’t be put off by the incongruity of defending Rushdie’s right to free speech, while denying that right to those whose speech they find unpleasant.

I don’t mean that Rushdie has reaped what he sowed, and neither do I wish to gloat about his misfortune. I do despise most things he stands for, but I don’t see a knife as a valid way of expressing disagreement. So I do hope he recovers from his wounds.

Whether the wounds visited on our society by those who share Rushdie’s philosophy of life will heal as easily, if at all, is a different matter. As doctors in upstate New York are trying to save Rushdie’s life, I wish similar efforts were made to nurture the West back to health.

The other day I complimented the French on lagging slightly behind the British on the road to cultural perdition. But perhaps they aren’t as far behind as all that.

On 10 August we always go out to lunch because that day marks a sort of special occasion (made less special every year, if you ask me). Our area is really the back of beyond, so the choice of restaurants is limited.

But France being France, the four places within easy reach of us are all good. One in particular is our default restaurant for 10 August. We’ve had excellent meals there several years running, of the kind that would cost twice as much in London.

That’s where we booked. However, when we looked at the menu, we had to check to make sure we were at the same place. Gone was the scrumptious, inventive fare we knew so well. The few things on offer were basic stuff, the sort of food I could whip up at home in 15 minutes. I like steak frites as much as the next man, but that’s hardly a treat for a special occasion, is it?

When we asked what was going on, the waitress explained they couldn’t keep up their standards because of staff shortages. Considering that most of the locals subsist on benefits, one would have thought there would be no such shortages, but that’s a subject for another day.

Anyway, we walked out, and I did a Lewis Hamilton trying to get to another restaurant we knew before it stopped serving.

Alas, since last year that formerly nice place has been turned into a tapas bar with youthful proletarian music blaring as loud as the speakers allow, which is way too loud for our eardrums. Being neither youthful nor proletarian, we rang two other places, only to find out that they were closed on that day due to, well, staff shortages.

We drove home, where my claim of being able to cook such meals within 15 minutes was put to a test. However, Penelope isn’t the type to accept defeat. The next day she insisted we extend the special occasion and still go out.

Since our gastronomic expectations had been lowered, we went for the atmosphere, and a local restaurant set up in a converted mill is hard to beat. Its terrace overlooks a picturesque weir, surrounded by trees and flower beds. Good for the soul, that, even if the tastebuds are less happy.

The restaurant is popular with our friends, and we always bump into some of them when we go there. Yet on this occasion we recognised neither the customers nor the proprietors.

None of our fellow diners were what Penelope describes as PLUs (People Like Us). Oh well, vive la différence and all that. We aren’t snobs, are we? And even if we are, we shouldn’t be put off by the prospect of having one meal in the company of, to quote Penelope again, the salt of the earth. (I don’t think she uses the expression the way Jesus used it.)

Fair enough. Except that some of the salt of the earth, and all our waitresses, were heavily tattooed. Ankles, arms, wrists, necks, behind the ear – and that’s just the places I could see, leaving my imagination running wild.

Now, that presented a problem, one that had nothing to do with social awareness. You see, I physically can’t look at tattooed flesh, even if shaped as nicely as our waitress’s ankle. The revulsion is purely instinctive, not something I could successfully submit to forensic scrutiny.

One young tattooed woman was obese, square yards of bluish rumpled flesh spilling out of her XXXL tank top and short skirt. That gave her a lot of epidermal canvas to paint on, and she hadn’t wasted the opportunity.

The young lady was directly in my line of vision, slightly ahead of me and to the left. If I looked at Penelope across the table, the corner of my left eye had to feast on the body art, turning me off my food.

Searching for visual relief, I turned my torso slightly to the right, losing sight of the fat girl but still staying in visual contact with the left side of Penelope’s face. Alas, that wasn’t the only visual contact.

Now I could see a middle-aged couple to my right. They were holding hands, a nice romantic gesture so rare in our unromantic times. I would have been deeply moved, except that the man’s muscular forearm had a tattooed ring around it, about three inches wide.

To make eating at all possible, I let my eyes slide above the tattoo, all the way to the chap’s angular face topped by a buzzcut. That optical movement didn’t work out as well as expected, because I realised that the chap wasn’t a chap at all. He, or rather she (or whatever French pronouns she was using) was a woman. The romantic couple were lesbians, and they didn’t care who knew it.

I shared that discovery with Penelope, and at first she didn’t believe me. Finally, she squinted to her left discreetly, performed her own examination and wondered what the world was coming to.

Our quiet rural area has become unrecognisable in the 20-odd years that we’ve been spending half our time here. The ubiquitous tattoos, for example, are a distinctly recent phenomenon.

The local urban centre, Auxerre, is one of the loveliest medieval towns I know. When we first got to know it, it didn’t have a single tattoo parlour. Now it boasts half a dozen and, by the looks of it, their business is thriving.

The demographics of Auxerre, one of the five provincial capitals of Burgundy, have also changed visibly, in the direction of most commendable diversity. As a result, our fishmonger had to flee the area, leaving us at a loose piscatorial end.

His young wife could no longer walk through the city centre in the evening without being pinched, felt up or lewdly propositioned. And his children were taught at school that they ought to be ashamed of being white.

The man didn’t leave a forwarding address, so I don’t know where he went. I hope he’ll find the peace he’s looking for, but somehow I doubt it.

An observation I’ve made everywhere I’ve ever lived clearly holds true for this corner of Burgundy as well. When cultural deterioration starts, it has an accelerator built in. It’s like a snowball rolling down the hill faster and faster, and getting bigger and bigger until it falls off the edge and shatters to pieces in the abyss below.

The edge hasn’t quite been reached yet, not here anyway. But as Her Majesty’s subject, I’m proud to see how British culture makes inroads in France. All the Auxerre tattooing and piercing parlours have their signs in English.

Courtesy of Putin, debates about the origin and nature of evil regimes have perked up.

Political scientists, both in Russia and elsewhere, are arguing about Putinism. Is it fascism? Nazism? National Bolshevism? (I’m strictly mentioning plausible versions, not the panegyrics peddled by Putin’s trolls.)

Alas, when it comes to political terminology, confusion reigns. Words are used imprecisely, with their core meaning muted by emotional overtones. Connotation wipes out denotation. Subtext dominates text.

Even founders of political movements often don’t understand their true nature. That’s because political convictions aren’t always, and never merely, rational. As often as not they come from the viscera, whose miasmic emanations are impossible to put into words.

Those who attempt to simplify such devilishly intricate phenomena often end up with a product that isn’t so much simple as simplistic. But people who think along such lines deserve sympathy. For no simple explanations exist. Every polity is bound with such an entangled ganglion of synapses that even first-rate philosophers are routinely stymied.

However, politicians striving for popular appeal can’t afford the luxury of philosophising. They have to get their message across in short, punchy slogans that inspire decisive action, not nuanced thought.

Thus Hitler once defined Nazism as a “wholesale repudiation of 1789”. Shallow political thinkers of various hues got hold of that claim and began to portray both Nazism and fascism as some sort of archaic throwbacks to the pre-Enlightenment times.

The underlying thought is based on their unshakeable commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment, belief in its axiomatic goodness. Hence the implicit syllogism: everything produced by the Enlightenment is good and modern – Nazism isn’t good – ergo, Nazism isn’t modern.

It’s true that all totalitarian regimes reject Western liberalism as the basis of modern polity. But liberalism is only a product of the Enlightenment, not its essence.

Its essence was revolt against Christendom, starting with the founding religion and proceeding to all its social, cultural and political manifestations. And every modern totalitarian regime mans the barricades of that revolt, continuing by various methods the gruesome work of the sans-culottes.

They are all godless in deed and typically also in word, with the pseudo-Christian rhetoric of Putin’s regime perhaps the only exception. Mussolini tempered his anti-Christian pronouncements because the Vatican still held sway over much of the Italian population, but that didn’t make his fascism any less atheist.

Hitler, along with Lenin and Stalin, didn’t even bother to lower the temperature of their atheist diatribes. They replaced Christ with a muscular human demiurge holding up either the hammer and sickle or the swastika, it didn’t really matter which.

The cultish aspects of modern totalitarian regimes aren’t pre-Enlightenment but pre-Christendom. They are pagan, with the nation acting as the bull’s head sitting on the totem pole.

Even when a totalitarian regime starts out by worshipping other idols, the nation eventually ousts them. Thus, although Bolshevism began as an internationalist cabal denying nationalism, it quickly evolved into a sort of National Bolshevism.

Mussolini noticed and approved. “Bolshevism,” he wrote in the early 1930s, “has developed into a sort of Slavic fascism.” His own regime insisted on tracing its spiritual origins back to the glorious pre-Christian days of the Roman Empire.

Yet nationalism, that ubiquitous, some will say defining, feature of all totalitarian regimes, didn’t exist in Rome and Athens. Nationalism didn’t exist at all until the Enlightenment ushered it in, along with the very concept of a consanguine nation.

People are by nature gregarious and divisive. They seek membership in a clearly defined group that both unites them and separates them from outsiders. When Christianity was removed as the spiritual glue, other adhesives were needed, and nationalism filled the gap.

The Enlightenment neatly blended it with liberalism by producing the concept of national self-determination, meaning that any consanguine ethnic group was entitled to statehood as of right. That elevated the state to the lofty plateau previously occupied by Christianity. Aspects of worship were bound to follow.

Thus the Enlightenment begat not only nationalism but also statism. That too, in its most virulent form, is a ubiquitous feature of all totalitarian states.

However, following the Ariadne’s thread of commonality, one may lose sight of equally valid diversity. For every polity is sui generis, a product not only of universal trends, but also of indigenous character.

Overstressing the commonalities may well obfuscate rather than elucidate. Thus Putin’s Russia is as much of an Enlightenment construct as Mussolini’s fascism, Hitler’s Nazism or Stalin’s National Bolshevism. For that matter, liberal democracy is also an Enlightenment construct, different though it is from totalitarian regimes in some important details.

However, while all totalitarians are anti-liberal, they are also pro-other-things. Those form a more or less universal palette, but different regimes tend to use some lurid colours more than others.

For example, corporatism is a child of statism, the natural offspring of post-Enlightenment state worship. Thus all modern states are either corporatist already or moving towards that ideal relentlessly.

However, totalitarian regimes are more consistent and less apologetic in their pursuit of corporatist control over the economy. The Bolsheviks pushed it to the natural extreme of total nationalisation.

Putin’s economy is as corporatist as Mussolini’s and Hitler’s, but it also includes constituents of both anarchic and organised crime that existed in neither Italy nor Germany. This blend is unique because, unlike those two countries, Russia has never developed stable laws and institutions underpinning economic activity.

That’s why transition from Bolshevik nationalisation to mock-Western corporatism created a multitude of loose ends, each avidly grabbed by itchy fingers. Italian and German corporatism, on the other hand, was more orderly and less prone to violent convulsions.

Putin’s nationalism is also somewhat different from Hitler’s and Mussolini’s. The latter saw Italy as a modern reincarnation of the Roman Empire, with himself as a second coming of Augustus.

Hitler, on the other hand, stressed the mystical, cultish, sylvan aspects of German identity. Those he blended with the Nietzschean Superman to come up with an ideal defined in strictly monoracial terms.

Putin’s brand of nationalism, while sharing some aspects with Mussolini’s and Hitler’s, adds to them a hodgepodge derived from traditional Russian messianism, suitably perverted Orthodoxy and imperialist Bolshevik universalism.

This blend is unique, which means that anyone drawing parallels with other totalitarian regimes must exercise caution. Nor is it easy to find the philosophical antecedents of Putinism.

If there is one thinker Putin openly identifies with, it’s Ivan Illyin (d. 1954). Putin regularly quotes this émigré philosopher, who combined Russian supremacism with frank admiration of Hitler and Mussolini, an emotion that outlived them both.

Illyin has acquired an iconic status in Russia on Putin’s watch, with the first part of his heritage brought up all the time, and the second, fascist one, ignored. Putin clearly sees Russia the way Illyin saw it, as a saviour of the world.

“No one nation in the world,” wrote Illyin, “has had the same amount of burden and the same task as the Russian people. And no one nation has gained out of these trials and ordeals so much strength, so much uniqueness and so much spiritual depth. Our Cross is heavy”.

That Cross is to be not only borne, but also used to bash resisters on the head. “Politics is the art of identifying and neutralising the enemy,” explained Illyin, and the soil of Putin’s Russia has proved fertile for such seeds.

Hitler, on the other hand, had no ambition of letting other nations reach out tropistically for the light shining out of Germany. His aim was to conquer, not to save, others. They were to be turned into servants to the German nation, not its doppelgängers.

All in all, it’s difficult, nay next to impossible, to describe any totalitarian regime, including Putin’s Russia, in the terms borrowed from any one discipline, be it politics, history or philosophy – or even from a combination of many such disciplines.

Usually, when a system of thought fails to arrive at truth expressible in terse, precise definitions, the system is faulty. Describing Putin’s regime as Nazi, fascist or even National Bolshevik is valid, provided we don’t expect to ride such taxonomic horses all the way to truth.

That destination could be best reached by a moral rating, which would make fine semantic distinctions largely irrelevant. Putin’s regime is evil, in the same senses in which Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Soviet Union were evil, but also in its own way.

That should suffice for all practical purposes. Theoretical puposes can only be served by a long book, not a short article.

This penetrating insight is prompted by an incident at Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris. Or rather by the ensuing French news bulletins.

Two hours ago as I write, a man brandished a knife at Terminal 2F. When police officers asked him nicely to drop it, he rushed at them, only to be killed by a single shot for his trouble.

Now, my recurrent gripe about modernity is that it fosters uniformity – not only among individuals but also among countries. These days they all tend to speak woke in every language under the sun, pledging allegiance to any modern perversion on offer.

Yet, for all the efforts to expunge differences in that respect, they persist. It’s not that some Western countries refuse to go woke – heaven forbid. However, they tend to proceed at slightly different speeds.

Looking at the three countries I know from personal experience, I notice that Britain is some 5-10 years behind America in its embrace of political correctness, whereas France lags behind Britain by the same margin.

The news bulletin flashing across my screen is a case in point. Every French news service states that “a terrorist motive cannot be ruled out”. This is proper woke language under such circumstances, and it goes into English word for word without giving anyone a start.

Exactly the same words would be used if an Air France liner were blown to pieces by a bomb. Until some group claimed responsibility for the act, it wouldn’t be described as unquestionably terrorist. A possible terrorist motive would represent the outer limit of the claim.

A slight variation on the theme comes into play whenever a suicide bomber screams “Allahu akbar!” before self-detonating. In that case, reports tend to say that “a religious motive cannot be ruled out”.

That’s allowed, provided it’s kept nice and generic: ‘religious’, not specifically Muslim. That keeps the possibility open that the scream of “Allahu akbar” could have been issued by a Methodist, Mormon or Mennonite.

So far so good. Even though the words used by the news services are French, the spirit behind them is British, American, universally woke. But then the bulletins let the side down.

The knife-wielder is described as a “large homeless man of colour”. Excuse me? What does his race have to do with the price of gas?

Are they implying that a man of colour is more likely to pull a knife on policemen? Even if they are not, how is this information conducive to anything other than stoking ethnic hatred? Such unpardonable racism would be strictly off-limits in the lands of les anglo-saxons.

And don’t get chromatically pedantic on me, claiming that white is also a colour. Not in this context, it isn’t.

White is allowed to become a colour only to identify the perpetrators of colonialism, slavery and general oppression. When a news report talks about a man of colour, especially a large one “of no fixed abode”, it means a member of one of the historically oppressed non-white races.

Not all of them, mind you. Thus, I’ve never heard of a Chinese or Japanese described as a man of colour. Perhaps they haven’t been oppressed enough to qualify for that distinction, I don’t know.

No, a man of colour has to be black or Arab, possibly a black Arab. So let me tell you: no British report would be as brazen as the French one in question.

When the dead man’s identity, complete with photographs and neighbours’ acounts of his sterling character, has been released to the press the next day or the day after, then yes. Within minutes of the incident – absolutely not.

So I repeat: in this respect, the French aren’t quite British yet. Thank God.

However, the post-war Western history of dealing with evil regimes betokens faith in the opposite theory.

Following Henry Kissinger’s lead, our politicians believe, or at least often say, that, by drawing evil regimes into an intricate system of trade relations, we could help them see the light. They’ll abandon their wicked ways and become less evil. In due course, they’ll be just like us, mutatis mutandis.

That belief, which can only charitably be called naïve, has been thoroughly debunked every time it has been put into practice. When we trade with totalitarian regimes, they don’t become less evil. They just become richer – and stronger.

Russia and China are prime examples of this. A massive transfer of Western investment and technology has built up those enfeebled, possibly moribund, regimes into the monsters they’ve become, capable of threatening Western interests all over the globe.

Without the West, neither Russia nor China would be able to present a credible threat to world peace, indeed to the survival of the world. Russia in particular totally depends on Western high-tech equipment and information technology to keep her economy in general, and war machine in particular, rolling along.

The most basic fact: Russia doesn’t make her own computers (nor anything else worth having, other than weapons). Wherever she gets them from, the technology is Western.

Even the Russian oil and gas industry wouldn’t have become the weaponised giant it is today without Western, especially American, equipment: drilling, exploration and production systems, pumps and compressors, pipe-layers, monitoring gear – just about everything.

Trade is supposed to be bilateral, and so it is. The West has been procuring cheap energy from Russia and cheap labour from China. The feeling was that we were getting a good deal.

We weren’t. On the one hand, we have built up the military muscle of the only two powers capable of blowing up the world or, more likely, using that ability as a blackmail weapon. On the other hand, we have made ourselves largely dependent on evil regimes for our supply of strategic goods and commodities, putting those regimes in a strong bargaining, or rather blackmailing, position.

Even the financial ledger doesn’t show a good balance. Yes, we’ve made and saved billions. But it will now take trillions to counteract the evil powers we’ve nourished to healthy maturity. And that’s even if no nuclear mushrooms get to adorn our skies.

None of this is to suggest that we should only trade with countries we like. However, our trade policy should be guided not only by this quarter’s profits but also by long-term geopolitical considerations.

Russia in particular can’t survive without Western technology – she never could. Hence a transfer of such technology should have been made contingent on Russia’s good behaviour.

Each new tranche should have come packaged with a demand for verifiable concessions, be that a reduction in armaments, withdrawal from occupied territories or a better record on basic liberties. That way trade would have had an outside chance of making Russia (and China) less dangerous.

As it is, no such conditions were ever imposed. No bestial act on the part of wicked regimes has ever been punished beyond a gentle rap on the wrist. The rape of Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine by Russia – or for that matter Tibet and the Uighurs by China – never slowed down Western trade with those regimes.

Even now, when the West is making a show of some kind of unity in the face of Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, a billion euros flows into Putin’s war chest every day. Europe’s thirst for Russian energy makes his war self-financing.

At least this time around nobody even pretends that trading with that regime will make it less evil. It’s nothing but unadulterated greed, with a political dimension. After all, no current government will stay in power after the electorate spends a winter in unheated houses.

Yet the problem goes deeper than that. The West has lost the ability to think about anything in terms of evil. We are suffering from the typical intellectual malaise of philistines: certainty that everybody is, or desperately wants to be, like us. And when they demonstrably don’t act like us, there must be some hitch keeping them from the holy grail.

A man burns his wife alive not because he is evil, but because he suffers from ‘mental issues’. It’s his tough childhood, not evil nature, that makes another man drive a car through a crowd. And it’s not evil but a sense of historical injustice that makes Russia pounce on her neighbours like a rabid dog.

We have lost this basic concept because we have abandoned the only system of thought within which it makes sense, having replaced it with another within which nothing makes sense. That’s why we regularly fail exams on human nature and the nature of foreign regimes.

The price of failure is high, and it can climb much higher. The sky is the limit, with those mushrooms turning it into an inferno.

Speaking at the Lambeth Conference, the Archbishop of Canterbury reinforced his credentials – Marxist ones, that is.

His Grace views the world as a battleground for two implacable enemies. Given his occupation, you probably think the clash he sees in his mind’s eye is one between good and evil, or God and Satan if you’d rather.

You have another think coming. For the good archbishop doesn’t think in theological terms. The conceptual framework of his worldview is solidly Marxist.

Yes, good and evil are still the warring parties, but they are embodied in the poor and the rich. Every war the Archbishop declares, be it on climate change, mistreatment of refugees or oppression, is class war at base.

Perhaps ‘think’ is too generous a word, based as it is on the assumption that thought precedes speech. Yet His Grace treats this assumption with the contempt it doesn’t deserve:

“To be silent on the climate emergency and its implications for the economy, to be silent on the unethical treatment of migrants or on war and oppression, on the abuse of human rights, on persecution is to be one of the oppressors.”

This little statement goes beyond category error. It’s more like category demolition.

Leaving aside his acceptance of the subversive climate hoax on faith, lumping it together with “war”, “oppression” and “the abuse of human rights” shows that His Grace’s mouth is disengaged from his brain.

Following his logic, it’s “climate change, better called the climate crisis or better still the climate emergency” that’s directly responsible for, say, Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, with war, oppression and abuse of human rights aplenty.

And when the climate was warmer than it is now, in the first century BC, was it hot weather that fuelled Caesar’s conquests? I don’t think he showed a lot of respect for the Gauls’ human rights. Must have been too hot for that sort of thing.

Not only does His Grace diagnose the world’s malignant disease, but he also has no doubts whatsoever about its aetiology. It is “the result of the wealthier countries having declared war on God’s creation, unknowingly, unthinkingly starting from the 19^th century.”

Is the Archbishop nostalgic about windmills, hoes and horse-driven ploughs? If so, he must also miss high infant and natal mortality, life expectancy half of today’s, intolerable pain caused by dental and surgical procedures, regular murderous famines and whatnot.

The Industrial Revolution, which he sees as “war on God’s creation” made life infinitely better for the apex of that creation, man. Scientific and technological progress isn’t without its downsides, but describing it in such crude binary terms wouldn’t be out of place at a meeting of a clandestine Marxist cell.

“The symptoms of that war now are that the wealthy dump refuse in the oceans,” continued His Grace. And the poor don’t? It’s the underdeveloped nations that are by far the worst ecological abusers.

Asia, for example, is responsible for emitting 81 per cent of ocean plastics, compared to Europe’s 0.6 per cent and North America’s 4.5. Never mind. When a Marxist talks, facts run for cover.

Nor do poor countries take close to heart the Archbishop’s entreaty to cut carbon emissions. But hold on for a moment: climate emergency or no, the poor shouldn’t be told to cut down on their hydrocarbons. That’s assuming I can follow the rattling runaway train of His Grace’s thought:

“They [the rich] tell the poor not to use carbon-generating fuels and they say to the world, too often, not by their word but by their actions ‘we will keep our wealth and you, the poor, must discover new paths’.”

That’s not even apples and oranges. It’s apples and bicycles. For ‘the rich’, a group implicitly anathematised by the Archbishop, are cutting their economic throats by buying into the climate hoax, today’s surrogate religion.

Just yesterday Biden’s administration undertook to cut carbon emissions 40 per cent by 2050. Britain’s targets are even more ambitious, which is to say suicidal.

Does that qualify as actions or words? The former, I daresay. What’s definitely just words, empty ones at that, is vague, almost apologetic suggestions that perhaps third-world countries should also cut their emissions, if only by a smidgen.

And shouldn’t we be allowed to hold on to our wealth, what little is left of it? Jesus, after all, only said that man shouldn’t live by bread alone, not that he should live by no bread at all.

Having declared war on the rich who oppress, pollute and abuse, His Grace lamented that many churches, including his own, are cheek by jowl with state power. That reduces their crusading potential: “The history of the churches is too often tragically not one of challenging unjust structures.”

How can the Church of England, for example, fight the good fight when it’s “embedded in establishment”? Eh… well, yes. That’s why it’s called ‘established’, which is to say state, Church. And that’s why both the Church and the state have the same head, the Queen.

If His Grace is campaigning for disestablishment, he’ll find some sympathy in these quarters. But, he hastened to reassure the Conference, he isn’t. He isn’t really campaigning for anything much.

Archbishop Welby is simply making Marxist noises with woke overtones that have more to do with semiotics than semantics. That’s what passes for thought these days, and that problem is much worse than anything His Grace finds so vexing.

The journalist Graham Phillips, writes Putin’s useful idiot (or agent of influence, take your pick) at The Mail, is “the first UK citizen to be sanctioned by his own government, without any hearing or trial, and on the vaguest of charges.”

The subsequent 200 words made me wish that the chap himself be subjected to the same punishment, along with the newspaper that lends its pages to enemy propaganda.

For that scurrilous piece, one of many such contributions by the same author, lowers our journalistic standards to the rung previously occupied by such worthy publications as Der Stürmer, Pravda and Putin’s own RT.

It’s indeed propaganda, rather than an argument, for nowhere does the article mention what it was that Phillips was sanctioned for, nor what “the vaguest of charges” were.

That is a glaring omission that I’ll be happy to correct. For Phillips is a tireless propagandist of Putin’s fascism, complementing the Mail chap’s print efforts with even more malodorous effluvia in the broadcast media.

He began to report on Russia and the Ukraine in 2009, and in 2013 became a stringer for RT and Zvezda, a paper later incorporated into Pravda. When the two countries found themselves in conflict, you get no prizes for guessing which side Phillips took.

He has been covering Russia’s bandit raid on the Ukraine since 2014 and, unlike other RT propagandists, he wasn’t at first denied entry into the country. In due course, however, he was captured by the Ukrainian army and released only on the condition that he would leave the country immediately and not return for three years.

However, Phillips kept coming back like a bad penny, blowing the trumpet for the so-called ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk. In that capacity he routinely overstepped the boundaries of not only common decency, but also of international law.

In 2016 he published a video in which he taunted a Ukrainian POW who had lost his sight and both his arms. With the Russians’ blessing, Phillips also interviewed, or rather interrogated, a captured British soldier fighting in the Ukrainian army. The soldier, Aidin Aslin, wasn’t a willing participant – in fact, he was handcuffed throughout the interview.

That violated the terms of the Geneva Convention that bans coercive interrogation of POWs for propaganda purposes. Already at that time, plans were under way to charge Phillips with war crimes, which is a rare accolade for British journalists.

Lest he may be accused of being a one-track pony, Phillips also does Putin’s bidding outside the Ukraine, both geographically and thematically. Thus in 2018 he was arrested by the British police for disrupting an exhibition at the Georgian Embassy in London, dedicated to the 10^th anniversary of the Russian attack on Georgia.

Phillips was dragged away kicking and screaming that the event was “propaganda”, and everyone attending it was a “Nato zombie”. There was a man ready to take his lumps for a cause.

His masters rewarded Phillips’s loyal service as best they could. In 2015, the Russian Border Service, a branch of FSB, gave him its aptly named ‘Border Brotherhood’ Medal. And he has also received several medals from the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donbas and Lugansk, essentially bandit lands run by Putin’s paramilitaries.

However, I don’t think mere sanctions are a sufficient reward from Phillips’s own government. His colleague and a fellow enemy propagandist William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, was hanged for similar work in 1946.

The charge was high treason, but unfortunately the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 removed the death penalty as the maximum punishment, replacing it with life in prison. Since Britain isn’t officially at war with Russia, even that would, alas, be too harsh for Phillips.

The just punishment for him would be somewhere between the mere sanctions already imposed by HMG and life imprisonment. But his colleague from The Mail sees any punishment as a gross violation of liberty.

“I have not been overwhelmed,” he writes, “in the rush of liberty-loving public figures to defend the blogger Graham Phillips against government oppression.” I wonder how many “liberty-loving public figures” rushed to the defence of William Joyce in 1946. Not many, would be my guess.

It’s true that neither Britain nor any other residually civilised country is at war with Putin. Yet it’s equally true that he is at war with us.

I find it tedious to cite another list of declarations to that effect coming from Putin himself, the highest officials in his government (such as former PM and President Medvedev) and his propaganda channels, including those that have employed Phillips.

I can only ask that everybody willing to listen should take that fascist regime at its word. Unlike democratic politicians, totalitarians say what they mean and mean what they say.

The Ukraine is bearing the brunt of Putin’s expansionist ambitions, and calling for peace at a time when Russia occupies a quarter of the country’s territory is tantamount to touting capitulation – not only of the Ukraine herself but also of the West.

Yet this is exactly what Phillips’s friend at the Mail does: “It is time to end the Ukraine War before it sets the whole world on fire and wrecks what is left of our civilisation.” (Note the term ‘Ukraine War’. That sounds as if it was the Ukraine that started it. ‘Putin’s War’, anyone?)

His concern for our civilisation is touching – and it would be even more so had he not been extolling Putin and his fascist regime for 20 years. Putin’s Russia, according to him, is “the most Christian and conservative country in Europe”. This brings into question his understanding of both Christianity and conservatism – along with his professional integrity.

We are indeed at war, whether or not we acknowledge it. At such times, the standards of liberty have to tighten somewhat. I’d suggest that, to begin with, sanctioning an enemy propagandist like Phillips is par for the course.

You decide whether Putin’s shill at The Mail, along with the paper itself, should be subjected to a similar treatment. Don’t let me affect your judgement – but you know what I think.

That stern warning was issued by Matthew Parris, the guiding light of The Times.

Apparently, during the recent Lambeth Conference the Archbishop of Canterbury failed to issue a carte blanche to “the celebration of same-sex unions”, limiting himself instead to protestations of “sympathy, ‘compassion’, ‘listening’, ‘understanding’, emphasising how God loves you despite everything. Jesus did not stare at his shoes and tell people how he empathised.”

Though a self-acknowledged atheist, Mr Parris then shows familiarity with Scripture by reminding us that, rather than limiting himself to wishy-washy pronouncements, Jesus drove money-changers out of the Temple.

True. But I don’t think his problem with the usurers was that they didn’t let homosexuals marry.

One has to infer that, should the Second Coming happen today, Jesus would act in the same decisive spirit and force the recalcitrant archbishop to start pronouncing newlyweds man and man. I must admit the logic escapes me.

Jesus acted in such an aggressive fashion to enforce scriptural rectitude that he felt was being debauched by the brisk trade going on in the Temple. Yet the same scripture unequivocally refers to homosexuality as “abomination”.

St Paul then repeated the term in his Epistle to the Romans. And, though he had never met Jesus in the flesh, none of the men who had, including the four Evangelists, took exception to Paul’s intransigence.

That means that, for once, Archbishop Welby was doctrinally sound. He refused to countenance the ritual blessing of a practice explicitly and emphatically proscribed in both Testaments.

That, warns Mr Parris, “is an insult to the whole of England”. He then tugs at our heart strings by telling an anecdote for us to understand the egregious depth of that insult.

A young vicar at a church in west London, whom Mr Parris euphemistically calls a friend, concluded his homily with “a short prayer for those who had fought bravely for acceptance in the face of persecution”.

“To my friend’s surprise, some people among the congregation started crying. His prayer had broken open wounds. The church they loved had inflicted this hurt.”

I know quite a few homosexuals and used to sit on the same Anglican pews with them. Yet I’ve never seen one burst into tears because the Church doesn’t bless homomarriage.

I wonder where Mr Parris got his mandate to speak for large groups of people, be that “the whole of England”, all homosexuals or even residents of west London. That’s where I happen to live, and I’ve never seen crowds of weeping and self-flagellating people agonising about having no access to the altar.

To his credit, Mr Parris makes no pretence of disinterested objectivity. “We gays are done with all that ‘feeling your pain’ business. We feel no pain about being gay. We do feel pain about Welby’s evasion… There is nothing more to explain, nothing to discuss, nothing to ‘understand’ and no need for sympathy. Simple respect is what’s missing from the Church.”

There is respect aplenty, but that’s not what Mr Parris is demanding. He wants the Church to prostitute Christian doctrine for the noble purpose of indulging a small vociferous minority of politicised homosexuals like him.

And it must do it on pain of extinction. “The C of E is our established church, a national institution, and if it wants to remain so it must allow the rest of us an interest in how it engages with our wider society.”

I wonder if Archbishop Welby gets the message. I certainly do: unless he starts “celebrating same-sex unions”, Mr Parris will personally disestablish the Church of England. Seldom does one read, even in our neo-barbaric time, such ignorant, arrogant, unadulterated bilge.

The C of E is indeed a national institution, one of several. But it’s different from, say, the monarchy, parliament, the Old Bailey, the National Trust and David Beckham.

Unlike them, it engages with “our wider society” on a different, transcendent level. The Church serves a kingdom that is not of this world and, whenever it attempts to serve any other, it compromises its mission. For, in the eternal hierarchy of pecking orders, the kingdom it serves is higher than this world – and infinitely higher than “our wider society”.

Mr Parris self-admittedly has no use for Jesus’s love. Yet if he did, he’d want Jesus to love him not despite his sexual aberration, but because of it. That notion is so preposterous that even he must be aware of it.

Anyway, that’s not what he is after. Homosexual activists want to bend the Church to their will not because they need to be married at the altar but because they need to grab more power, to impose their views not just on “our wider society” (they’ve already done that), but on the bride of Christ.

Like other radicalised minorities, they crave total, which is to say totalitarian, power. And, unable to get all they want by frontal assault (no pun intended), they resort to guerrilla action. The more institutions they undermine, the less will “our wider society” be able to resist their powerlust.

It’s only against this backdrop that one can grasp the meaning of Mr Parris’s article. Otherwise one would have to conclude that The Times’s star columnist is off his rocker.