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Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, was how Roger Bacon paraphrased Aristotle (… but truth is a bigger friend). It’s in that spirit that I’ll comment on Jordan Peterson, for whom I have that warm feeling I reserve for people who say the same things I could have said.

In fact, I did say most of them, and long before Prof. Peterson became a household name (as any reader of my book How the West Was Lost, written 25 years ago, will confirm).

Hence, when he did become a household name, I watched a few of his lectures, with the joy of recognising a kindred spirit. I instantly developed boundless respect for Prof. Peterson. But I never really trusted him.

Call it petty snobbery, but I can’t fully trust a man who wears any jewellery other than a watch and cufflinks – and, almost as bad, brown shoes with dark suits. Le style, after all, c’est l’homme même.

His delivery, ranging from histrionic to hysterical, was another factor, for Prof. Peterson made me uncomfortable. He seemed to be all a single pulsating nerve ready to snap at any moment. His oratory could be described in musical terms, what with its constant modulations, crescendos, diminuendos and dynamic shifts.

Or perhaps the terms borrowed from his core discipline, clinical psychology, are more appropriate. For I sensed something was wrong with Prof. Peterson even before he revealed his struggle against clinical depression.

This disease calls for much sympathy, but the treatment he prescribed for himself was bizarre. He started to eat nothing but beef, claiming a curative effect for that diet. My psychiatrist friend whirled his finger at his temple when I told him about it.

Long story short, I stopped watching Prof. Peterson’s lectures, quoting to myself the apocryphal saying attributed to Caliph Umar who supposedly burned the Great Library of Alexandria: “If those books say all the same things as the Koran, they are redundant.”

That self-imposed moratorium ended yesterday, when the New York host of the podcast on which I appear every Tuesday mentioned that Prof. Peterson is one of Putin’s useful idiots. Now useful he may be, but Prof Peterson is as far from an idiot as it’s possible to be without being, well, Aristotle.

That’s why I made a point of viewing his lecture of three months ago, only to have my confirmation bias richly rewarded. For Prof. Peterson has finally gone off the rails.

He seems to be hellbent on vindicating Laurence J. Peter’s famous principle: everyone rises to the level of his incompetence. If that was his aim, he succeeded.

His whole argument rests on the flimsy foundation of a non sequitur: the West is decadent to the point of being degenerate. Therefore, Putin is richly justified in his manifest intention to reduce the Ukraine to rubble.

About half of the hour-long lecture is devoted to supporting his premise of the West’s cultural catastrophe. There Prof. Peterson is his usual brilliant self, diagnosing precisely, arguing convincingly, concluding irrefutably.

However, when he gets to the ‘therefore’ part, his compatriot Laurence J. Peter must be smiling from his grave. For Prof. Peterson demonstrably knows next to nothing about Russia and understands even less.

Unfortunately, his well-deserved fame must have gone to his head and he began to believe his press notices. That sort of thing has happened to even better men than Prof. Peterson, so no surprises there. He must see himself as an oracle whose pronouncements elucidate any subject, including those outside his expertise.

In this case, his pronouncements aren’t even his own. For Prof. Peterson regurgitates – self-admittedly and proudly – the lies spread by Putin’s propagandists and Putin himself.

He feels Putin’s and Russia’s pain caused by the Ukraine edging towards Europe. After all, “Europe” twice tried to conquer Russia in the past, in 1812 and 1941.

That’s adding inanity to ignorance. It wasn’t “Europe” that attacked Russia, but Napoleon’s France and Hitler’s Germany. While they were at it, the same countries occupied most of Europe, and both were at war with the very same dastardly Anglo-Saxons who personify the West for Putin.

In fact, Peterson could have expanded his argument without, however, strengthening it. He could have mentioned, for example, the 16^th-century Livonian War, when “Europe”, then represented by Norway, Sweden, Poland and Lithuania fought Ivan the Terrible tooth and nail. Or the Northern War of the next century, when Peter I defeated Sweden’s Charles XII, who was undeniably European. And don’t get me started on the 19^th-century Crimean War.

Hence, when the Ukraine gained her independence by ousting Russia’s stooge Yanukovych, explains the Putinversteher, the images of European, in this case Nato, invaders flashed through Putin’s mind.

He simply had to do something about it, to thwart the Nato invasion by proxy. And you know what? While the West desperately wants to “humiliate” Putin, it really “doesn’t give a damn about Ukraine. It never did” – not even during “the Holomodor”.

It took me a few seconds to realise that Prof. Peterson was referring to the Holodomor, the mass murder by artificial famine the Ukraine suffered at Russia’s hands in the early 1930s. He obviously never studied Russian history, for the term is common currency.

Yet the neophyte oracle he seems to feel he has become won’t be held back by such incidentals. Russia isn’t fighting the Ukraine as such, explains Prof. Peterson. She is waging culture war on the West, with Putin seeking to protect his country from Western degeneracy.

Russia, he vouchsafes to his audience in the weighty manner of a recent autodidact, is neither Catholic nor Protestant. She is Orthodox, and deeply devout. Putin himself is “a practising Christian”, so he doesn’t care how many children he’ll have to kill to protect his country’s spiritual purity.

Prof. Peterson knows even less about Russian religious history than about her history in general. I could recommend a small library of books by Russian religious thinkers, such as Solovyov, Merezkovsky and Rozanov, who treated the beliefs of most Russians as being closer to superstition than religion.

This the Russians proved after the revolution, when they started murdering priests and their parishioners with unquenchable bloodlust. The murders were spearheaded by the typological predecessor to Putin’s own KGB, an organisation to which he has pledged undying loyalty.

When he decided to vindicate his criminal regime by an appeal to the traditional values of Mother Russia, Putin began to profess faith. However, it took him quite some time to realise that the Orthodox don’t cross themselves the way he saw actors do in Hollywood films. As for Putin’s actions both before and after his Damascene experience, they don’t seem to have been mainly informed by the Sermon on the Mount.

But Prof. Peterson doesn’t refer to Solovyov and Merezkovsky. He refers to Alexander Dugin, whom he describes as a “genuine philosopher” and a major influence on Putin. This shows Prof. Peterson’s grasp of philosophy is as uncertain as his knowledge of history.

(If rhetoric is part of philosophy, he is on shaky grounds there as well: he misuses “beg the question”. Any rhetorician knows this doesn’t mean “raise the question”, which is what Prof. Peterson was trying to say. He ought to look up petitio principii.)

Dugin is a rabid Russian jingoist with strong fascist tendencies. That’s all he is, as anyone who has ever opened a single book of real philosophy would know. If we put this in the German context, Dugin is much closer to Julius Streicher than to Immanuel Kant.

Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn also merit a mention, both Russian chauvinists by the way. I don’t know how much Dostoyevsky Prof. Peterson has read, but he mentions only Crime and Punishment, The Possessed and Brothers Karamazov.

If he looks for cultural influences on Putin, he’d be better off focusing on A Writer’s Diary, which Dostoyevsky himself rated higher than his great novels. Every volume of that tract is jampacked with rants spewing hatred of the West and the glorification of the saintly Russian peasant. Hatred of Jews also drips from most pages, and this is the only vice Putin so far hasn’t exhibited.

Everything Prof. Peterson says comes right out of the Kremlin’s press briefings, as do Putin’s apocalyptic threats Prof. Peterson is happy to share with us. Russia is an energy superpower that can destroy our economy. She’s also a nuclear superpower that can destroy us, full stop. “One Russian Sarmat missile,” intones Prof. Peterson in a stage half-whisper, “can annihilate Britain once and for all”.

He then parrots Putin’s oft-repeated anecdote of a cornered rat that lashed out at young Vova when he tried to prod it with a stick. Putin, explains Prof. Peterson hastily, is no rat. But that’s exactly what he’ll do if cornered.

Somehow Prof. Peterson uses this possibility as proof that Putin’s regime is neither authoritarian nor aggressive. Putin is a cultural warrior, who is prepared to level all Ukrainian cities and kill millions of Ukrainians (and Westerners, if it comes to that) in defence of Russia’s matchless spirituality. And the Russian language, let’s not forget that:

“Zelensky, the current president and supporter of all things Western, was and is supported by the Ukrainian speakers who live in the northeast. Add to that as well the fact that the Ukrainian speaking supported government has placed increasingly draconian restrictions on the language rights of the Russian speakers in the northwest… All this to say that Putin and the Russians have their reasons for concern over the situation in Ukraine.”

Every word in that diatribe is a lie, including, to quote Mary McCarthy, “and” and “the”. Prof. Peterson should get a copy of the Ukraine’s language atlas and put it next to the country’s map. He’ll find out where Ukrainian and Russian are mostly spoken, so next time he might desist from ignoring most of the country altogether.

He should also study the “draconian restrictions” and how they were applied. He may find that Zelensky and most members of his government are native Russian speakers, whose “language rights” were in no way impinged. All the Ukrainian spokesmen I follow speak a Russian that’s not only grammatical, but also accentless.

Putin’s “reasons for concern” are clear enough, and they have nothing to do with matters cultural or linguistic. Prof. Peterson’s reasons for repeating Kremlin propaganda word for word are less obvious, and my podcast host suggested he is in Putin’s pay. I doubt it.

Prof. Peterson understands better than most the cultural abyss into which the West is falling. And hard as he tries, he can’t find a home-made safety net that could arrest the plunge. Hence he, in common with many other Right-leaning Western intellectuals, is looking for an external saviour who could lead the West out of the wilderness.    

Thus Putin’s rhetoric appeals to him. Prof. Peterson hears all the right noises, and he doesn’t bother to study the subject deeply enough to understand their source — and the evil lurking behind.

At least, I’d rather ascribe his drivel to a lapse of understanding than to bad faith. But that’s me, always looking for the good side of any man.

You’re no better than a dog, a skunk or a hyena.

Why, even a tree or a river is in no sense inferior to you. And I do mean in no sense: moral, social, intellectual, you name it.

In spite of that, you have perfidiously usurped human and legal rights, while denying them to plants, animals and minerals. That’s a gross miscarriage of justice, insist experts in jurisprudence, who are evolutionally superior to you and me.

Nor is it just empty theorising. The legal experts in question banged their heads together and came up with practical legislative proposals. These were laid down in a Law Society report, titled Law in the Emerging Bio Age and written by Dr Wendy Schultz and Dr Trish O’Flynn.

The report is long, but its conclusion can be summed up in a few words: human and legal rights must be extended to animals, trees and rivers, to start with. Otherwise climate change and diminishing biodiversity will put paid to ‘our planet’.

One would think that the case for this overdue measure would be difficult to construct in a single document. After all, its implications touch not only on law as such, but also on biology (micro- or otherwise), philosophy, history, anthropology, religion and all sorts of other disciplines that add up to our civilisation.

A daunting task, one would think, but it’s nothing The Law Society can’t handle. “We sometimes see ourselves as outside nature, that nature is something that we can manipulate,” says Dr O’Flynn. “But actually we are of nature, we are in nature, we are just another species.”

Fair enough, no modern person can argue with that. This is the canonised principle of equality, as applied to biology. Despite the self-serving claims made by some inveterate reactionaries, all species are equal. Hence they must all have equal rights, what’s not to like there?

That way a pig, a tree or a river will be “allowed to reach its full cognitive, emotional, social potential,” explains Dr Flynn. Here I must stop to think.

Granted, my neighbour’s spaniel Jack has a cognitive potential to develop. He can learn to perform increasingly difficult tasks: sit, lie down, fetch, get off the bloody sofa, and for heaven’s sake not on the floor.

Jack’s emotional potential is also beyond doubt. He wags his tail when he is excited, jumps up high in the air when my neighbour comes through the door and is vociferously enraged when anyone else does.

One can’t gainsay Jack’s social potential either. After all, ‘social’ derives from the Latin socius, which means friend. And we all know who a man’s best friend is, so no problem there.

Problems start when we extrapolate all the same thinking to your average tree or, for that matter, the Thames. True, willows can weep, but I’ve always thought that’s just a figure of speech.

‘Thought’ is the key word there. My thought is hopelessly mired in Judaeo-Christian misconceptions, which The Law Society has set out to correct.

Dr Schultz is aware of my limitations (even if she’s unaware of my existence) and she is ready to tackle them head on:  

“Granting something that is culturally numinous rights just so you can preserve it gets us to a kind of valuation that, among other things, is a cultural shift away from the Judaeo-Christian great chain of being – dominion over nature. This is reconfiguring it to place us where we have always been and where we should be thinking of ourselves as belonging, as just a node in this greater web of life on the planet.

“If that worldview can be enshrined in law, essentially granting personhood rights to the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees or the spirit of the elephant, you’re talking about enshrining a kind of neo-pantheism into 21^st-century legal frameworks.”

While in no way wishing to trespass on the legal territory where my footing is uncertain, I’d still like to signpost the area where I’m more comfortable. Thus, what the authors are describing has little to do with any kind of pantheism.

That doctrine starts from the premise of God, but then postulates that He is identical with nature. This goes back to the ancient Hindus, and in Europe pantheism is mostly associated with the 17^th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. However, though it has been a while since I cracked his Ethics, I don’t recall reading any statement equating man with a spaniel, both being equal parts of the natural continuum.

“Granting personhood rights to the spirit of the river, the spirit of the trees or the spirit of the elephant” takes us much further back, all the way to a world of hirsute humans running away from similarly hirsute mammoths and ducking giant flying reptiles.

The reactionary in me would be happy to backtrack to the thought of the 13^th century AD or, if you held a gun to my temple, perhaps of the 4^th century BC. But going back to Jurassic times is a bit too far for my taste. And there I was, hanging on to my wobbly faith in steadily meliorative progress.

Arguing against this sort of thing is both tedious and futile. It’s like trying to convince a madman that he isn’t Napoleon. In the psychic world he inhabits, that’s precisely who he is, even if it’s not something any outsider can grasp.

However, I’d sleep better at night if I thought that our top legal minds realise that any kind of rights presuppose the existence of moral agency. Hence they are dialectically inalienable from responsibilities: a man has a right to legal and moral sovereignty only if he accepts the responsibility of exercising it in a legal and moral way.

Since trees and rivers can’t tell right from wrong, applying the concept of rights to them is a basic category error. They, along with that spaniel Jack, have their whole lifespan predetermined by their physical or biological makeup. In that sense, Jack is infinitely closer to the turd he left on my neighbour’s carpet than he is to the neighbour himself.

That’s me done. I told you arguing against lunatics is tedious, although one could be justified in thinking that lunacy describes not just those two academic ladies, but modernity as a whole.

After all, The Law Society of England and Wales isn’t your local loony bin or methadone clinic. It’s a highly respectable professional association that since 1825 has been the driving force of law reform.

Yet the reform it’s driving now does smack of your local asylum run by its inmates. One has to think that our sanity can survive for only as long as we stubbornly cling on to what’s left of the Judaeo-Christian worldview.

You know, the sort of thing The Law Society wishes to leapfrog, jumping back to the good old primordial times.   

In the space of a few days, Elon Musk has advocated, if not in so many words, two surrenders 5,000 miles apart.

The Ukraine, he declared last week, should sue for peace, which is another way of saying she should agree to be incorporated into Russia within a couple of years if not straight away.

And yesterday Musk insisted that Taiwan should become a special administrative region of China, which means getting instantly gobbled up by that communist dictatorship.

Both pronouncements have caused an outburst of indignation in all the predictable quarters, and Musk’s statements are indeed beneath contempt. Yet others suggested his proposals must be assessed against the backdrop of his medical condition.

For Musk self-admittedly suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, known to produce what is commonly referred to as a one-track mind.

In Elon’s case, that one track is lightning fast, having enabled him to race to the world’s greatest wealth (although Putin may have something to say about that ranking). He is unquestionably one of the sharpest business operators I’ve ever observed in action, if only from afar.

As someone who has had to contend with serious illnesses all my life, I tip my hat to Elon for refusing to succumb to his condition. Yet his detractors still insist he’d be better off sticking to what he knows.

True enough, instead of simply continuing to pile up billions on top of one another, Musk forces himself to veer – actually career – off that single, beaten track into seemingly unrelated areas.

Climatology, space travel, colonising other planets, artificial intelligence, economics, domestic and international politics have all been graced with Elon’s pronouncements, ranging from dubious to mutually exclusive to frankly insane.

Yet he isn’t short of an audience. Since Elon is very much in the news all the time, the star-gazing public issues him an unlimited line of intellectual credit.

This is typical: anyone often seen on TV is accepted as an expert on every subject, not just the one that got him on TV in the first place. Thus people from Peoria to Musk’s native Pretoria take seriously the very same views that would get a lesser man sectioned.

The world, insists Musk, will soon be devastated by artificial intelligence. And if that doesn’t get it, declining population and global warming will.

The saving steps Musk proposes seem hard to reconcile with his professed libertarian views, but let’s not forget that Asperger’s. The lad doesn’t seem able to tie all the loose ends together, if none has to do with making billions.

Thus, according to him, humanity may delay the catastrophe by controlling AI and introducing a carbon tax, but these exercises in bare-knuckled statism are only palliatives. Much as we try to prevent such a gruesome end, our planet will soon become a scorched wasteland where only robots roam.

But not to worry. What do you do when termites, dry rot, bad neighbours or a subsiding foundation make your house uninhabitable? That’s right, you move.

Following this irrefutable observation, explains Elon, mankind should become a “multiplanetary species”. The first step would be to colonise Mars, creating a polity there based on direct democracy. All Tesla-driving people will have an equal say in every piece of legislation, and never mind outdated parliamentary institutions.

While his other political views are marginally less eccentric, on close examination they seem just as insane for being at odds with one another. I’ve already mentioned that Musk’s proposed carbon tax doesn’t quite jibe with his staunch libertarianism.

But he also advocates a universal basic income, which, whatever you may think of it, is as anti-libertarian as one can get this side of the Soviet economy, circa 1938.

Then in the last two elections, Musk voted for Clinton and Biden, who are to libertarianism what Fido is to a lamppost. In between, he endorsed the rapper Kanye West for president, presumably with the ticket also including Eminem as VP candidate.

Now he wants to strengthen two evil dictatorships by letting them swallow two smaller countries courageously defending their freedom. I don’t know what Asperger’s does to one’s moral sense, but on this evidence it can’t be anything healthy.

You might accuse me of trying to medicalise words and actions I find objectionable, and you’d have a point. But in fact, by ascribing Musk’s off-the-wall pronouncements to Asperger’s, I may well be too kind to him.

Could it be that his mind only pretends to be off-track, while remaining firmly on it?

For example, his politics have been described as too omnivorous for integrity, what with Musk contributing to both main parties in the US. However, a closer look will reveal that he invariably supports candidates in the states where he has vested business interests.

Or consider his proposed carbon tax. If introduced, what would it do to the sales of electric cars, such as the Tesla, to take one random example? Quite.

By the same token, Musk’s attachment to the idea of space travel is inseparable from his company SpaceX that earlier this year launched its first spacecraft. Though I doubt this will lead to the colonisation of Mars, the former adman in me admires the publicity rewards doubtless reaped by the Tesla.

Yet the economic effect of those measures would be small potatoes compared to Russia and especially China opening their markets to the Tesla. And the quickest, possibly only, way of opening those markets is to curry favour with Putin and Xi. Considering how many Teslas are already made in China, Musk must be doing something right.

One detects the cold calculating mind of a businessman behind Asperger Elon’s crazy ideas, and that worries me more than any red-hot insanity would. I’ll take irrational madness over rational amorality any day.

The title of the 1989 film wasn’t grammatical, but then it didn’t have to be.

I strongly suspect the script writers knew that the past tense of ‘shrink’ is ‘shrank’, not ‘shrunk’, but they used the solecism for stylistic effect. (Not having seen the picture, I can’t tell you what the effect was.)

However, when similar and worse atrocities are perpetrated on English out of ignorance, and when such abuse is pandemic, the problem goes beyond just recondite conventions of grammar and usage.

Language, after all, shapes and communicates thought. The two are closely interconnected, although I don’t know the exact mechanism involved. Neither does anyone else though – this in spite of the billions pumped into assorted Decades of the Brain and Genome Projects.

Yet such gaps in our knowledge don’t negate purely empirical observations. The relevant one is that language and thought are married and, like all couples, affect each other – either positively or negatively.

Hence, those who express themselves in elegant, well-shaped sentences may or may not be great intellects, but then neither can they be stupid. When God gives people an ability to play language like a musical instrument, He also tends to give them good tunes to play.

Conversely, imprecise language usually betokens woolly thinking, especially when it comes out of the mouths of educated people who ought to know better.

Thus, I didn’t have to analyse the thought of Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in any detail to know that he is far from being the intellectual giant he is often depicted to be. All I needed was this one sentence he wrote:

“In a church that accepts the legitimacy of contraception, the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous biblical texts, or on a problematic and nonscriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures.”

Show me a man capable of writing this sentence and I’ll show you a man who is – what’s the polite term? – intellectually challenged. But my lament isn’t about any specific personalities.

Though linguistic failings are bad enough in each individual case, they point to an individual problem only. The problem, however, becomes a collective, civilisational calamity when it is widespread and – even worse – when most people dismiss it as an irrelevance. A society that neglects language ends up neglecting thought, and this is a grave matter.

One hears assorted ignoramuses justifying bad usage by saying that language develops. That’s true to the point of being a truism. However, the underlying assumption, common to modern barbarians, that all development is meliorative, is patently false.

Things that can get better can also get worse, and the second tendency is more common – so there go Darwin’s key assumptions, along with the fix they provide for progress junkies. And if the past couple of centuries are anything to go by, when it comes to matters of the mind the second tendency isn’t just more common but prevalent.

The key point is that, a huge influx of computer terms notwithstanding, the on-going changes to English are reductive. Rather than expanding, the language is shrinking.

English is blessed with the biggest vocabulary of all Indo-European languages, three times as big as the Russian lexicon, for example. That creates a glorious opportunity for precision – not just in language qua language, but also in underlying thought.

Alas, English doesn’t just offer endless opportunities for precision. It also lays traps and imposes tests. And anyone who ignores the vital distinctions among words that sound synonymous but aren’t will fall into the traps and fail the tests.

A case in point is the current problem experienced by Associated Newspapers, the publisher of The Mail. Several celebrities (dread word), including Elton John and Prince Harry Markle, are charging it with hacking.

Responding to the accusations, the company issued a statement, saying: “We utterly and unambiguously refute these preposterous smears…”

They do nothing of the kind. They don’t refute the “smears” – they deny them. To deny something means saying it’s untrue. To refute something means proving it’s untrue.

Disregarding this distinction isn’t just ignorance of the difference between two words. It’s ignorance of the difference between two concepts, and this failing is now commonplace.

“I refute what you are saying” is these days heard everywhere, and nowhere is it followed by an actual refutation. When a successful print medium blithely ignores the problem, it perpetuates not only bad usage, but also crude thought.

A personal example, if I may. Once a lovely young lady disagreed with something I said at a dinner party, which didn’t upset me: I am prepared to brook any disagreement from lovely young ladies.

Later that night I heard the girl’s mother recount the exchange to her father, who asked if the lovely young lady had argued with me. “She did,” said the mother. “She said she disagreed.”

This is a closely related problem. Saying one disagrees doesn’t amount to an argument: I can say I disagree with the heliocentric view of the universe, but I can’t argue against it.

An argument is the enunciation of a judgement, which in turn is an opinion rationalised. These days failure to distinguish among the three italicised words is endemic, as is saying “I feel” instead of “I think”. We used to have thinkers; now we have feelers.

In other words, an argument becomes one when it contains valid reasons for rejecting a statement. If no valid counterarguments are then presented by the utterer of the original statement, it stands not only rejected but also refuted.

If one word multi-tasks (another dread word) too much, it takes on jobs hitherto done by other words, thereby making them redundant. English shrinks as a result, and the thought it expresses follows suit.

Another factor of shrinkage is blind faith in synonyms. If two words mean the same thing, what’s the difference? There’s the rub: no two words, however close in meaning, mean exactly the same thing. There’s no such thing as complete synonyms: a distinguishing nuance always exists.

Faith in synonyms is aggravated by faith in cognates. For example, one never hears the word ‘masterly’ any longer; it has been ousted by ‘masterful’. But, though the two words are etymological siblings, they mean entirely different things. ‘Masterly’ means displaying mastery; ‘masterful’, being forceful, domineering.

This is one of many examples refuting, not just denying, the oft-heard claim that modern usage is all about everyday communication, not showing off one’s vocabulary. First, if language were all about everyday communication, we’d have neither Shakespeare nor the King James Version.

Second, our shrinking language undermines the very communication it’s supposed to foster. Hence a musical performance may be masterly without being masterful and vice versa. Therefore when it’s described as ‘masterful’, I don’t know what the reviewer means. The communication chain is broken by a shrinking language.

Our ancestors left us an immense wealth of capital, arguably the richest language on God’s green earth, and certainly the most precise. This is the capital we are busily frittering away, hoping there will still be enough left to last us our lifetime. Therein lies the danger, nay certainty, of linguistic, and therefore intellectual, bankruptcy.

Does this mean we aren’t as smart as we think we are?

There’s no point letting dogs lie if they’ve never been asleep. Everywhere one looks in Spain, one hears the howling, or at least growling, barks of the Civil War.

It ended in 1939. One would think the ensuing 83 years should be enough time to find reconciliation. But the reservoir of posthumous hatred of Franco never seems to be depleted.

The other day the Spanish parliament, dominated by socialists of various hues, passed a law that ought to raise serious concerns about the MPs’ mental health. They removed the amnesty for Franco-era atrocities and declared the 40 years of Franco’s rule illegal.

Let’s see. No veteran of the Civil War would be under 100 years of age. I don’t know how many are still around, but I doubt they’d add up to even a platoon. I also suspect that those few crumblies have more important things to worry about than an amnesty or lack thereof.

The post-war martial law lasted until 1948, after which few atrocities were committed. Again, I don’t know how many nonagenarian veterans of Franco’s 1940s secret police still survive, but I do know they’d have to be in their 90s at least.

So the gesture is strictly symbolic, but far be it from me to downplay the importance of symbolism. Symbols are concrete messages, not just abstract representations. And Spain’s socialist government is sending them to do what socialists do everywhere: falsify history to score political points du jour.

This isn’t to say that no atrocities were committed by Franco’s men. They were, and they were horrendous. But in any internecine war it takes two to paso doble.

Franco landed on the Spanish mainland to save the country from the blood-soaked mayhem into which it had been thrown by the extreme Left government of Largo Caballero, nicknamed the ‘Spanish Lenin’. The Spanish Lenin fell short of the original’s systematic monstrosity, but he was getting there.

The Spanish Left enjoyed the support of Stalin’s Comintern, a global cabal of communist subversion run and financed out of the Kremlin. And Stalin clearly saw the disintegration of public order in Spain as the troubled waters in which he could fish.

The Loyalist side of the war was quickly turned into a Stalin proxy. Thousands of Soviet ‘advisers’, pilots, tankers and of course NKVD officers poured into Spain. The latter instantly kicked off Stalinist purges, drowning Spain in blood. Franco had no option but to seek help from Hitler and Mussolini.

But, although Franco was happy to trade salutes with them, he wouldn’t trade favours. Thus Spain never entered the Second World War, and Franco even refused the Germans right of passage to Gibraltar. Talking to Franco is worse than having one’s teeth pulled, complained a frustrated Hitler.

Today’s ‘liberal’ historians like to portray Franco as a fascist. In fact, he was anything but.

Il Caudillo was a traditional God, king and country conservative, and the fascist Falange was only one element in his army. Apart from the Moroccan troops, the bulk of it was made up of the monarchist Carlists, traditional conservatives, Catholic radicals and just regular Catholics who were aghast at the on-going butchery of their coreligionists.

Communists hate religion more than they hate even Marx’s bogeymen, capitalists. Thus every Spanish Catholic was seen as an enemy. That was the theory.

The practice was the Loyalists destroying churches, murdering priests and monks, raping and eviscerating nuns (not always in that order) – and committing wide-ranging atrocities against all other groups communists loathe with spittle-spewing passion: aristocrats, conservatives, businessmen, non-communist intellectuals and politicians.

Had Stalin been allowed to have his way, Spain would have looked forward to decades of, well… If you want to know what it would have looked forward to decades of, just consider the fate of any country that fell into Stalin’s hands. Romania? Bulgaria? Albania?

Instead Spain got four decades of Franco’s rule, of which the last three were relatively vegetarian. Franco gradually rebuilt Spain, while managing to keep the worst aspects of modernity at bay. Moreover, he provided for a lawful transition of power to parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy.

This reminds me of the American admiral Ernest J. King. Before Pearl Harbour, his truculent nature had kept him from the highest command. Yet when the war started, King was immediately appointed Commander-in-Chief of the US Fleet. “When the shooting starts,” snarled the admiral, “they send for the sons of bitches.”

That’s what happened in Spain, 1936, and the son of a bitch the country sent for was Franco. He doubtless merited that sobriquet, for Franco was no angel. Yet the other side weren’t angels either. They were demons, of the worst kind so far known to man, although that may soon change.

The people running Spain now are heirs to those demons, capitalising on every part of their legacy except, for the time being, unbridled violence. They have a vested interest in depicting the Civil War as a struggle between good and evil, with their kind representing the former. And they don’t care how illiterate and disingenuous their rewrite of history is.

What about the amnesty for all those murderers of priests and rapists of nuns, chaps? Do they even need one, or are they seen as heroes?

Both sides murdered roughly the same number of people during the Civil War, about 50,000 each. At the risk of sounding biased, I’d even dare suggest that the Loyalists murdered better people, on average, than the rebels did. But I’m prepared to accept parity.

So what about Loyalist murderers? Why, they are allowed to live out their days in peace, of course. They were on the side of the leftist angels.

Three years ago, Franco’s remains were exhumed and taken out of the moving memorial in the Valley of the Fallen. Heirs to Caballero and Comintern thus won the battle against Franco dead, avenging the battle lost by their typological ancestors to Franco alive. The law they just pushed through is another battle won – against truth, knowledge and decency.

I use the Spanish Civil War as a litmus test consisting of just one question: “Which side would you have supported?” I once put this question to a good friend, a prominent Catholic academic.

Since his politics aren’t exactly stridently conservative, the question caused him some discomfort. After much inner turmoil he had to admit that, for all his reservations and against the better side of his nature, he would have been with Franco. “The other side were murdering Catholics,” he said ruefully.

No such compunctions for the Suarez government.

Dear Vlad,

You know how it is: you get caught up in the daily grind and let even historical landmarks slip out of your mind.

That’s me, today. I desperately wanted to be the first to wish you a happy 70^th, but then I remembered I had an appointment to have my toenails clipped. By the time I got home, that sycophant Kim had beaten me to it.

So here are my belated good wishes, Vlad. Many happy returns – certainly enough for you not to miss that first case hearing at the Hague. You like to be the star of the show, don’t you? That’ll be your golden moment.

I know the stories of your ill health have been concocted at the FSB headquarters. That’s what I call an op, and a stroke of genius it is too. Cancer, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia – all to scare those Western paedos, homos and transsexuals out of their wits.

Now the paedos are all writing that Putin is dying and he doesn’t mind taking the whole world with him. Meanwhile, you are in rude health, which should last long enough for that Hague event.

Vlad, travel restrictions being what they are, I can’t pop over to give you a hug in person. But, if I may, as an old adman I’d like to offer some friendly advice on your image. Your KGB colleagues are expert at bumping people off, but their PR skills aren’t up to scratch.

If they were better at it, you’d be coming across as, well, perhaps not a Mahatma Gandhi, but at least as a Simon Bolivar, the great liberator. As it is, your detractors, all those homo transsexuals, have a free hand in comparing you to, well, you-know-whom – and not in his heyday either.

Yes, I know you can have anyone who calls you ‘Putler’ whacked. But that’s inside Russia, where your detractors no longer are. Thousands of them have fled for their lives and now they are spreading their venom all over Europe. You must rip their sting out by paying more attention to PR.

Take your living quarters, for example. You want to live in a bunker, which is your privilege. But must the whole world know about this?

By all means, stay in that concrete hole, but have your lads bang out press releases, complete with photographs of you at your desk in the Kremlin, toiling away like what you call a “galley slave”. They know how to use Photoshop, don’t they?

Then there’s this stuff with the “Russian world”, bringing under Moscow’s aegis everyone who has ever uttered a Russian word in his life. (Let’s not forget the million Russian speakers in the US, half of them in New York — they are all gagging for it.) Again, good idea, rotten execution.

Replace ‘Russian’ with ‘German’, and you-know-who said exactly the same things. German speakers being persecuted in Poland and Czechoslovakia, which amounts to genocide; traditional German territories occupied by infidels; German culture outlawed – that sort of thing.

No one can argue against your claims, and certainly not I (you know where I live). It’s the wording that leaves a hole that your enemies can drive an Abrams tank through. And oh, by the way, if you must talk about the Russian Word, don’t quote the fascist philosopher Ilyin — that leaves an opening. Quote Solzhenitsyn instead. He said all the same things late in life, but at least he was a Nobel winner.

Speaking of wording, tell your lads not to scream publicly “One country, one leader, one victory!”. It’s too close for comfort to Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. May I suggest “One Russia, one Vlad”? Or, “They take out, we Putin”? Anything, other than that slogan.

And speaking of them, those evil Anglo-Saxons. Do you realise that a similar replacement exercise gives even more ammunition to Russophobe vermin? Where you say “Anglo-Saxons”, you-know-who said “Jews”. Everything else is the same, word for word. Let’s try to phrase more subtly, shall we?

The same goes for your frequent references to the innate superiority of the Russians over everyone else. No problem with the idea itself – anyone who has ever been anywhere near a Russian block of communal flats and its local boozer will know you are right.

It’s just that, next time you want to say something like that, replace the word “Russian” with “Aryan” and see if it sounds exactly like something you-know-who used to say. If it does, change the wording.

Also, you really want to downplay the parallels between the Anschluss and your Special Military Operation. Actually, you are moving in the right direction already.

When the Austrians tried to call a referendum on independence, you-know-who first demanded they desist and, after they refused, sent his troops in. You did it much better: troops first, referendum second.

But those videos of AK-toting Russian soldiers taking ballot boxes to people’s flats and then making sure they voted correctly are bad PR. A much better move would have been to dispense with voting altogether and then announce it had taken place, with you scoring the requisite 99 per cent.

Now we are on the subject of your soldiers, you’ve missed a PR trick there. You see, you-know-who’s troops occupied the same territory in 1941, and the locals heard all sorts of horror stories from their parents and grandparents.

Then your lads arrive, and they do all the same things: indiscriminate bombing, mass executions, looting, rape, torture, mass graves filled with trussed up corpses. Hey, war is war, and boys will be boys, we all know that. But you know what those Anglo-Saxon paedos are making of the pictures coming out of the Ukraine.

You-know-who had it easy, there was no Internet at the time. Now any Russophobe with a smartphone can cast aspersion on the Special Military Operation – and draw all the same disgusting parallels. Tell your lads to do all the same things, but discreetly. I’d start by knocking out all the mobile phone masts – surely your bombers can manage that.

I do apologise about sounding critical. You know it’s only because I have your best interests at heart. If your friends don’t point out your resemblance to you-know-whom, you know your enemies will. Throw the first punch, as you once described your philosophy of life.

Anyway, Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! – oops, sorry. I mean “all best wishes on your birthday”. And if you see old Adolf before I do, tell him I said hello.

Yours as ever,

Alex

Those old enough to remember this TV show (1974-1981) know that its real title included an offensive word. No, not the one legitimised on TV by Kenneth Tynan in 1965.

By 1974 the world had become progressive enough to relegate Tynan’s pioneering effort to the status of common parlance – but not yet progressive enough to ban the word that did appear in the title: ‘Mum’.

That oversight has now been corrected by a new language guide issued by the Local Government Association. This prescriptive document mandates the elegant locution “birthing parent”, explaining to council chiefs that the role of language is to embed “equality, equity, diversity, and inclusion”.

To that end, the words ‘mum’, ‘dad’, ‘ladies and gentlemen’ and so on are henceforth off limits. After all, “Experiences of trauma, racial trauma and ­exclusion are already experienced at disproportionately higher rates by LGBTQ+, black and neurodivergent people in the workplace.”

Experiencing such experiences upsets the experienced authors of the guide who set out to protect the experiencers from traumatic experiences – while teaching others how to use English.  

They don’t specify ways in which they propose to enforce their oligophrenic fiats, but these can be inferred from parallel developments. One such involves Caroline Farrow, a devout Catholic journalist who let the side down by marrying an Anglican vicar.

That minor glitch aside, Mrs Farrow has the power of her convictions by refusing to recognise as legitimate the mutilation of both language and children’s bodies. As a result, she has had her collar felt twice.

The first time was in 2019, when she had a verbal TV joust with the transgender campaigner Susie Green. To her credit, the latter practised what she preached by having encouraged her son to become her daughter, which made him/her/it the world’s youngest person to undergo sex change surgery.

Yet Mrs Farrow not only referred to the child as ‘him’, not ‘her’, but later also tweeted: “What she did to her own son is illegal. She mutilated him by having him castrated and rendered sterile while still a child.”

Upholding the inchoate tradition of snitching, Miss Green went to the police. That led to Mrs Farrow’s arrest and a four-month investigation that eventually had to be dropped.

But that was three years ago. That’s a long time, considering that everything about modernity is progressive, including its schizophrenia. This time around she may not get off so lightly.

The other day two police officers forced their way into Mrs Farrow’s house without a warrant, dragged her outside and body-searched her for having violated the rules of progressive usage. Having had all her electronic devices confiscated, she was then taken to a police station where she was kept under lock and key for several hours.

Apparently, the police attributed to Mrs Farrow a series of “harassing” and “malicious” posts that appeared anonymously at a time when she was playing the organ at mass in her husband’s church.

Yet DCI Bentley evidently still hasn’t been instructed to disregard the presumption of innocence in such cases (another oversight doubtless to be soon corrected). The police, he said, have confiscated the electronic devices to “gather further evidence and carry out an investigation to prove or disprove the allegation”.

If Mrs Farrow is indeed found to have advocated the subversive idea that women can’t have penises, nor men vaginas, she can get up to two years under the Malicious Communications Act. Since she has previous, the maximum sentences will be practically guaranteed.

As DCI Bentley explained, the police have a duty to investigate every “grossly offensive message” – in preference, he might have added truthfully, to investigating burglaries, muggings, assaults and other things perceived as less offensive than using old-style pronouns.

A problem may arise, you might think, with a precise definition of “grossly offensive”. In fact, some sticklers for casuistic detail may even argue that no definition would ever be precise enough to take to court. After all, what’s grossly offensive to some may be casually dismissed by others – and vice versa.

For example, I’m grossly offended by having pop music played in a restaurant. However, realising that others may feel differently, rather than reporting the owner to the police I simply walk out and look for a quieter eating environment .

It takes cross-checking Mrs Farrow’s case and its relevant laws with others to arrive at a working definition. Here it is: Any statement is “grossly offensive” if perceived as such by a member of a minority group, no matter how tiny, seen as useful in promoting the destruction of our civilisation.

Having written this, I’ve realised that I myself was a serial offender some 30 years ago. At that time I worked with a chap, let’s call him Fred, who suddenly dropped out of sight to come back a few months later as Fiona.

Yet every time I bumped into him at industry functions I automatically said, “Hi, Fred”. It was merely a habit, not a conscious expression of opprobrium.

In Fred’s case, the habit was reinforced by his hint of five o’clock shadow, proving that electrolysis has its limitations. Nor could he get the walk quite right, hampered as Fred was by the difference in the pelvic architecture of men and women.

I shudder to think what would happen if I committed the same indiscretion, nay crime, today. Instead of writing seditious articles, I’d be writing letters of grovelling contrition to judges and prison warders.  

It has taken me years of tortuous self-training to develop the skill, and I’m still not quite finished. But at least I’ve got the basics down pat.

The skill is recognising the sovereignty of an idea, its independence from the enunciator. Once an idea breaks out into the open, it either stands on its own legs or falls down on its own face.

The enunciator has made it public property, he has relinquished private ownership. The idea must be judged on its own merits, not on its author’s merits, or lack thereof.

That’s why argumentum ad hominem is among the worst rhetorical fallacies. Remembering that, I always dismiss out of hand any disagreement starting with the words “You’re only saying this because you…” At this point I invariably forget my manners and interrupt: “Never mind me, feel the idea.”

Sounds perfectly logical, doesn’t it? It does. But that’s where the problems start.

For the corollary to this preamble is often hard to stomach. We must suspend our admiration of a great man and argue against an idea of his that we find wrong. And, alas, the reverse applies as well. We must forget our contempt for a revolting man and agree with an idea of his that we find right.

Rummaging through the bulging bag of examples from my own experience, I find plenty to illustrate both extremes.

Thus I’m second to none in my admiration of Edmund Burke, whom I regard as one of history’s greatest political thinkers. And yet I’ve always argued against his assessment of the American Revolution. In fact, my whole book Democracy as a Neocon Trick is one protracted argument against that one idea.

Conversely, few people detest Putin more than I do. He is the epitome of modernity’s central figure: an important nonentity. Except that this nonentity comes packaged with unmitigated evil, a combination seldom absent from Russia’s political history.

However, when this energumen pronounces, for example, that water is wet and stone isn’t, we must overcome the gagging instinct and, unable to speak to that apparition, nod our agreement. What can you say, the bastard is right.

This brings me to one passage in his puke-making… sorry, I mean epoch-making speech the other day. You know, the one about those satanic Anglo-Saxons whose whole history can be reduced to their sole aspiration to dismember Russia and enslave her people.

This is the passage in question: “Do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, parent number one, number two, number three instead of mummy and daddy? Are they completely off their rocker out there? Do we really want perversions that lead to degradation and extinction to be imposed on our school children from the primary grades? To be drummed into them that there are various supposed genders besides women and men, and to be offered a sex change operation?”

I’m sure most Russians answered those rhetorical questions with a resounding no. But now let’s replace the phrase “…, in Russia,…” with the name of our own country and ask all the same questions. Do we want any of that?

Any sane person’s reply will be as resounding: absolutely not. And yet we have it, the bastard is right about that.

The requisite exercise I mentioned earlier, separating the thought from its source, is particularly difficult in this case. Here’s a global thug prepared to blow up the world to assuage personal resentments and a richly merited sense of inadequacy. And he has the gall to criticise us, a force for the good – on balance, that is, for all our imperfections.

Who the hell does he think he is… And so forth, in the same vein. You know the drill.

All that is true. But, as I am trying to argue, it’s irrelevant. We aren’t talking about Putin’s personality – that issue was settled even before he moved to Moscow 25 years ago. Nor are we talking about his obsessive hatred of everything Western, apart from offshore accounts, yachts and other luxury goods.

We’ve blanked it all out, concentrating instead on that one bit of criticism. And, much as we hate to admit it, the bastard is right.

The issue he highlighted is a symptom of self-destructive madness afflicting a civilisation bent on self-harm. Like a neurotic girl who cuts herself with a razor blade to release the tension mounting inside, we slash not just the flesh of our society but its very soul.

Could it be because we’ve forgotten the soul and focused too much on the flesh? Or even worse, replaced the soul with some nebulous ‘psyche’? My hypothetical girl may self-harm because she has been indoctrinated to regard herself as the highest, self-contained and self-sufficient stage of life.

When life throws challenges at her, as life is wont to do, she looks inside herself for answers – and finds only herself there. She feels cornered, and then the razor blade sees the light of day.

Extrapolating to our society as a whole, it too seems unable to come to terms with its little demons without breaking out of the confines of its own body. Like that wayward girl, it begins to attach undue importance to little quirks, missing the forest of transcendence for the trees of petty neuroses.

And then it lays itself bare to valid criticism from even evil nonentities like Putin. If you look at the litany of his attacks on the West, you can prove each of them to be nothing but vile drivel. But not this one. Here the bastard is right.

However, there’s always the danger that we can’t help considering the source. We may succumb to the natural impulse of thinking that everything Putin says is wrong because it’s Putin who says it.

Perhaps the impulse is so natural that it’s insuppressible. Well, in that case, forget this particular source. Think of the good, sane, intelligent people who have been railing against the same thing for years – think of conservative thinkers and commentators, or simply of your conservative friends.

Suddenly, the bothersome dichotomy between idea and source vanishes. We no longer have to take rhetorical liberties — for it’s not just the bastard who is right on this score. It’s everyone in his right mind.

If you still think conservatism has a chance of ever becoming a political force again, just read the reports of the on-going Tory conference – and then extrapolate them to your own country if it isn’t Britain.

The conference is in an uproar. Delegates are trying to outshout one another with their scurrilous invective against Kwasi Kwarteng’s quasi-conservative budget.

Dozens of Tory MPs have announced they’d vote with Labour to defeat the plan of scrapping the top rate of 45 per cent for the fat cats making over £150,000 a year. Even the supposedly conservative papers describe the measure as benefiting only the “super-rich”.

That lumps together the billionaire Richard Branson and anyone making a decent middle-class income, a legerdemain one doesn’t normally expect this side of a communist cell. (For the record, a mortgaged Londoner on, say, £170,000 a year would find it hard to send two children to a good public school, and may even struggle with one – something anyone middle class could do without much trouble in the previous generation.)

Evidently the requisite hatred of the upper classes is now aiming downwards in search of targets. That’s good knockabout fun, but not of the kind that used to be associated with the Tories. Let me tell you, those tempora do mutantur, and always for the worse.

As for Labour MPs and their house-trained press, they are positively frothing at the mouth. As a measure of their skill at corrupting the public, Labour has jumped 33 per cent ahead of the Tories in the polls. If the elections were held today, the Conservative Party would have three MPs, and neither Miss Truss nor Mr Kwarteng would be among them.

The Tory rebellion was led by former cabinet minister Michael “Mike the Knife” Gove, who can’t see a dagger without wishing to stick it into the back of any Tory who dares put forth Tory policies. Now his wife has left him (allegedly over his affair with another man), Gove can concentrate all his boundless energy on obliterating any distinctions between the two main parties.

Chris Philp, Kwarteng’s deputy, who just two days ago was effusive about the policy, is now trying to exculpate himself, along the lines of “It ain’t me, Guv’nor, it’s Kwasi what done it.” Another senior Tory, Grant Shapps, has pirouetted even more daringly. An enthusiastic champion of the cut before the conference, he now describes it as “politically tin-eared”.

Faced with such a barrage, Truss and Kwarteng issued a grovelling apology and swore to keep the top rate intact. However, if they hoped to quell the rebellion by making that concession, their reading of modern life is borderline illiterate.

Gove has already said he’ll vote against any budget that includes even a marginal reduction in benefits. And another former minister, Esther McVey, has demanded that benefits go up in line with inflation.

Ay, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare would comment if he were still with us. It’s not about the top tax rate. It’s about the perceived attack on the status quo of the welfare state.

Those of you who read my comments on the Truss-Kwarteng tax-cutting budget a few days ago know that I have severe misgivings. Not about cutting taxes, mind you: if it were up to me, I’d cut them by half.

It’s just that tax-cutting doesn’t work without a parallel reduction in public spending. And funding it by increased borrowing is like treating a running nose with an injection of the Covid virus – especially at a time when both interest and inflation rates are shooting up.

I know it; David Stockman, who tried that sort of thing under Reagan, knows it – and I bet Truss and Kwarteng know it. The latter has a PhD in economic history, and he must have gone over Reaganomics with a fine-toothed comb.

The general tenor of their pronouncements, if not yet the content of all their policies, suggests that Truss and Kwarteng have in their sights not just the taxes, which they want to make lower and flatter. They want to shake, if not necessarily bring down, the whole rickety structure of the welfare state.

I suspect, though can’t prove, that their plan was to lower taxes first and suffer the ensuing economic and political pain for a while. Then they would tell the country that, though they personally were committed to “levelling up” (driving welfare commitments up to a suicidal level), that’s not how the chips had fallen.

Much as it makes their hearts bleed to complete exsanguination, they now have to lower benefits, reduce the NHS budget and in general bring down the aforementioned rickety structure or at least truncate it at the top. Fait accompli, chaps — or sorted, in more democratic language.

If that was their cunning plot, their fellow MPs have seen right through it with the precision of an MRI scanner. Redundancy notes floating before their mind’s eye, they jumped on the PM and Chancellor like so many dogs baiting a bear. Except that in this case the bear himself is more canine than ursine.

They realise something that must have escaped Truss and Kwarteng. The ship of economic status quo has sailed and it’s unstoppably running aground full speed ahead, with the zeitgeist bulging its sails.

In the 2020s neither Liz Truss nor anyone else can get away with what Margaret Thatcher got away with in the 1980s. In the intervening decades the project of corrupting the British public has been completed – with similar developments equally rife on the Continent, or even more so.

Had Truss and Kwarteng been a bit less ham-fisted, they could have made some gradual gains by stealth. But with the general election less than two years away, they had no time for stealth. They had to show their hand straight away, only to have it bitten off by their ‘Tory’ colleagues.

All this vindicates my recurrent lament. Conservatism of any kind, including economic, is dead, and nothing short of a catastrophe (military or economic) could help it do a Phoenix. Or perhaps not even that.

Because cannabis is just as harmful as crack and cocaine, warn our police chiefs, it should be put into the same Class A category – with its use and distribution punished accordingly.

I find the rational case for this argument to be weak. But since we aren’t always, and never merely, rational, I agree with our top cops.

Hence this is a case of rational rejection and intuitive acceptance – yet again semantics and semiotics find themselves at odds. Let’s get reason out of the way first.

The use of psychotropic drugs is coextensive with recorded history. The Therapeutic Papyrus of Thebes of 1552 B.C. lists opium among other recommended drugs. Even further back, Sumerian ideograms of about 4000 B.C. describe poppy as the “plant of joy”. Helen passed illegal substances on to Telemachus and Menelaus and, if she lived today, would have been nicked faster than you can say “let’s see what’s in your amphora, sunshine”.

Having thus passed the test of history, drugs do well on the political test too: not all users are left-wing. For example, though Byron and Shelley were a bit red, Coleridge, who popped opium and drank laudanum, was as conservative as one can get. Freud, who snorted cocaine, was indeed politically unsavoury, but surely Queen Victoria was no subversive, and yet laudanum figured prominently on her diet.

What about the moral argument? Are mind-altering drugs sinful in se? Every time we pour ourselves a cup of strong coffee to start the day or a glass of stiff Laphroaig to end it, we forfeit the right to argue against drugs on that basis.

And if our right foot ever gets heavy on a motorway, we aren’t entitled to say drugs are wrong simply because they are illegal. In any event, drug use in Britain was unrestricted until the 1868 Pharmacy Act and uncriminalised until the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act. So we can’t seriously believe that what was moral in 1919 all of a sudden became a sin in 1920.

One would be on equally shaky grounds with a utilitarian argument. Taken in moderation, drugs are no more harmful than alcohol. Taken in excess, most drugs can indeed have undesirable social consequences, but anyone who has ever been attacked by a drunk will agree that drugs aren’t unique in that respect.

Of course, drugs have some medically undesirable effects as well, including schizophrenia, but we can’t build a rational argument on such a shaky foundation. Again, there is no proof that moderate use of drugs is medically harmful. And there is much evidence that immoderate use of anything, from tap water to Puy lentils, can kill you.

There exists a powerful empirical argument against drug bans. After all, while every government in the world pays lip service to the drug ‘problem’, none has solved it.

The experience of countries like Thailand, where even the speedily enforced death penalty has failed to stem the flow of drugs, shows that policing can’t do the job even in conditions of dubious liberty. And the inability of Western governments to stop drugs in prisons demonstrates that even absolute unfreedom enforced by the state is no panacea.

The history of Britain and especially the US, where every post-war president has waged “war on drugs”, suggests that a relatively free country can’t stop drugs no matter how much it desires such an outcome. That at least six of those presidential warriors were drug users themselves proves the point further.

According to the old wisdom, what can’t be forbidden ought to be allowed. Do we seriously believe that any state can remedy the drug problem, if it’s indeed a problem to anyone but the addict himself?

Thirteen years between 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution put Prohibition into effect, and 1933, when the Twenty-First Amendment repealed the Eighteenth, ought to have been enough time to hammer the point home: large-scale state interference doesn’t solve problems. It either makes them worse or creates new ones (in that case, organised crime).

A war on poverty makes more people poor; an attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it; an overhaul of education promotes ignorance; an all-out effort to end all wars leads to more and bloodier wars. At the end of all that bungling nothing beckons but an even greater expansion of the state, a further reduction of liberty.

It’s undeniable that drugs are a factor in crime. Without digging up any statistics, I’m sure that drug users are disproportionately represented among felons. However, the same argument can be made against alcohol, and yet it can be scored at every corner without any risk of prosecution.

Talking specifically about cannabis, it can even be construed as being better than alcohol. The latter is physiologically addictive; the former isn’t. Quitting cannabis cold turkey causes no withdrawal symptoms typical of barbiturates, opiates and indeed booze.

Our police chiefs call it a “gateway drug”, the first step on the slippery slope leading to heroin and crystal meth. However, you can say exactly the same thing not only about booze but even about coffee.

Young lawyers and stock brokers drink gallons of the stuff to fuel 100-hour work weeks. Before long they start seeking stronger stimulants, usually cocaine or speed. Should we then label Lavazza as a Class A drug?

The argument I find not only unconvincing but actually pernicious is one based on the damage that drug use does to public finances. Since our healthcare is nationalised, it’s the taxpayer who has to fund methadone clinics, the argument goes.

This, to me, is an argument not against drug use, but against nationalised healthcare. Like everything else nationalised, it can – and does – function as an instrument of increased state control over every aspect of our lives. The adverse effects of such runaway statism are worse than the odd acid head going bonkers.

To sum it all up, the rational case against drugs is weak. So why do conservatives override reason and, unless we are out-and-out libertarians, keep insisting that drugs, including cannabis, should be banned?

Yet again, intuition goes beyond reason, aesthetics beyond ethics and semiotics beyond semantics. It’s not drugs as such that we find objectionable, but what they transmit: the signals of the sex-drugs-and-rock ‘n roll modernity. And in doing so, they reflect many other dynamics of the collapse of our civilisation.

Instead of St John’s Passion, today’s youngsters are exposed to the soundbites of psychobabble harmonised with the mind-numbing beat of pop in the background. Their inner resources depleted, their senses rivalling their minds for hopeless ignorance, they feel not happy but high, not sad but depressed – so why not use drugs?

Somewhere in their viscera, they feel they are thereby taking a courageous stand against ‘the establishment’, but in fact they are stamping into the dirt the scattered fragments of an imploded Western world.

Unskilled in semantics, they have to use semiotics to scream defiance, to spit in the face of the moribund beauty they despise. It is the dead face of Christendom that they are spitting in.

Drugs have not always had this particular semiotic agenda. But semiotics change with ages. What was good enough for Messrs Coleridge, de Quincey, Collins or Conan Doyle can’t be good enough for the few conservative holdouts still kicking.

Hence, while my reason sneers at our police chiefs’ proposal to treat cannabis as a Class A drug, my intuition screams: “Lock’em up and throw away the key!” A schizophrenic experience, that – and I’ve never even tried cannabis.  

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