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The matter of collective responsibility is very much in the news these days, as it was in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Can all Germans be held responsible for the crimes of Nazism? Can all Russians be held responsible for the crimes of Bolshevism and Putinism?

The issue is multifarious. On the one hand, since it’s individuals and not groups that are moral agents, only individuals can be morally culpable. On the other hand, when people act within and as a group, they create a new quasi-homogeneous entity, whose characteristics may have little in common with those of the individual members.   

Those interested in the problem could do worse than read Karl Jaspers’s 1947 book The Question of German Guilt. Jaspers identifies four categories of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical. He then analyses each and pronounces his verdict on the eponymous question.

Meanwhile, I’d like to touch on a related issue. To what extent does the national culture, as a constituent of the national character, precipitate the savagery of modern totalitarian regimes?

Unfortunately, most of you will be unable to watch a Russian-language lecture on this subject by Andrei Baumeister, brilliant young professor of philosophy at Kiev University. (When a man in his early 50s looks young to you, you know the clock is running down).

I’ve listened to many of his YouTube streams, and, as a former lecturer myself, I can testify that he is one of the best I’ve seen. Baumeister’s presentation is lucid, erudite, well-argued, free of rancour and as simple to follow as the subjects allow.

What caught my eye the other day was Baumeister’s position on the role of culture, especially philosophy, in nudging a nation towards criminal behaviour. Understandably, he relies mostly on Germany and Russia for illustrations.

Speaking of the former, many commentators draw a direct line of descent from German philosophy all the way to Hitler. Nietzsche and Wagner are usually the first names to come up in this context, but Baumeister correctly mentions a few others, such as Fichte and Schopenhauer.

For once, his conclusion leaves me unconvinced. Without the thinkers who dominated the Romantic period of German culture, says Baumeister, Hitler wouldn’t have happened. Yet it’s wrong to say that Hitler happened because of them.

The nuance escapes me. I suppose Baumeister is arguing against historical determinism, the fallacy that says that, if things happen, they were bound to happen. In other words, the German philosophy of that period did eventually produce Hitler, but, had the cards fallen in a different way, it could have produced something entirely different.

The subjunctive mood makes me uncomfortable. If German philosophy indeed produced, or largely contributed to, Nazism, that’s a fact. What else, if anything, it could have produced is speculation. Such conjecture can be most entertaining, but facts are more reliable.

I’m interested in a different causality, one between philosophy (or culture in general) and the national character. Which produced which? Which is the chicken and which is the egg?

The earliest commentary on the German, or rather Germanic, character I’ve read came in Caesar’s Gallic War. After a major battle, Caesar walked through a Gaul field strewn with corpses. He noticed that the faces of the dead Germanic warriors were contorted by savage, defiant scowls, so different from the peaceful expressions of the other dead.

So half a century before Christ, the ancestors of today’s Germans already displayed the martial qualities that later were to make the country so belligerent. This goes to show yet again that national character develops over millennia, a process that can’t be profitably attributed to just a handful of events.

German mythology, full as it is of sylvan goblins like the murderous elf Erlking, is different from its counterparts in other European cultures, such as French or English. It doesn’t take X-ray vision to discern its dark pagan mysticism in, say, the Nuremberg rallies so poetically filmed by Leni Riefenstahl.

The culture of German exceptionalism is ever-present in German philosophy, though Kant and Hegel weren’t afflicted by it. Thus Hegel saw the 1806 Battle of Jena as one fought between culture and intellect, as personified by Napoleon, and spiritless barbarism as embodied in the Germans.

Yet one can hear the intimations of Nietzsche’s coming Superman in Hegel’s adoration of Napoleon: “…I saw the Emperor Napoleon, the World Soul, riding through the town… It’s a marvellous feeling to see such a personality dominating the entire world… He is capable of doing anything. How wonderful he is!”

Add this deification of a fallible man to Fichte’s German (and incidentally socialist) chauvinism and Nietzsche’s Superman, and you can see the ingredients of Nazism coming together. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was also rooted in German philosophical idealism.

Mainstream German thought was barely touched by Christianity, and the Reformation represented not so much a Christian reaction to clerical corruption as a pagan reaction to Christian discipline. The strict monotheism of the Jews also went against the grain of pagan self-deification implicit in Protestantism.

That partly explains the rabid anti-Semitism of leading Protestants, starting with Luther. Jews were to him “devil’s children” whose synagogue was a “defiled bride… an incorrigible whore and an evil slut”. Jews were full of the “devil’s faeces… in which they wallow like swine.”

He didn’t sit on the fence, did he? From Luther, anti-Semitism eventually drifted into German idealist philosophy, either implicitly, as in Kant and Hegel, or explicitly, as in Fichte, Nietzsche and Wagner.

Curiously, many commentators ascribe the rift between the last two to Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagner’s virulent anti-Semitism. They should read Nietzsche’s essay Antichrist, the most anti-Semitic tract I’ve ever read this side of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The German cultural soil was amply sown with seeds of Nazism. And, though Baumeister is right in saying that they didn’t have to sprout to such awful maturity, it was always likely that they would.

A similar argument applies to Russia, different though she is to Germany in so many respects. Russian supremacism has always been vaguely Christian and messianic, ever since the monk Philotheus of Pskov (d. 1542) pronounced Russia to be the sole heir to Byzantium and the Third Rome (“and there will not be a fourth”).

That was odd, considering that the Russian peasantry has always been deeply pagan in its outlook, using Christianity as merely a vessel containing their wild superstitions. But culture in Russia was always more divorced from the masses than in Germany.

If in Germany most people never read Fichte and Nietzsche, in Russia most people never read, full stop. Even at the beginning of the 20^th century, when literacy in Germany was practically 100 per cent, some 80 per cent of Russians remained illiterate.

Yet that didn’t mean that culture had nothing to do with Russian imperial expansionism, so much on show at present. It’s just that the illiterate masses have never had any input into the country’s behaviour. This was determined and mandated by the cultured élite, whose ideas were largely formed by Pushkin, Dostoyevsky et al. – and I am mentioning only the most benign influences.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a piece about this (It Didn’t Start with Putin), so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice it to say now that all those founders of Russian culture assumed and preached the innate superiority of saintly Russia over the decadent, materialistic West.

Yet Baumeister lets Russian culture off the hook much too easily. He acknowledges that, say, both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky produced some jingoistic works full of aggressive hatred. But, he says correctly, these formed only a small part of their output.

Yes, Pushkin might have written his chauvinistic poems Stances and To Slanderers of Russia, but he also wrote Eugene Onegin. And Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, not just anti-Semitic, supremacist rants.

That’s a curious line of argument. For example, a naturally violent man usually doesn’t commit violent acts every day of his life. He may spend years and years never even getting a parking ticket. However, when that fateful midnight comes, there he is, plunging a knife into a lonely passer-by.

True, says Baumeister, Dostoyevsky was an anti-Semite, and true, he did write A Writer’s Diary, a book spewing hatred at Jews, Catholics, Westerners in general and everyone else within reach. But he, Baumeister, could show you reams of things written by the Germans that were much worse.

So could I. But, much as I despise clichés, since when do two wrongs make a right?

Great writers and philosophers exert an immediate influence only on those who read them, which in Russia has always been a small group. But those readers then act as lightning rods, transmitting the electric charge of a great culture into the social earth of the population at large.

Writers and thinkers of genius thus shape, if only at several removes, the country’s ethos. And the ethos shapes them in return, for such men are endowed not only with unusually fecund minds but also with uncannily sensitive noses. They sense the unspoken cravings of the people, put them into words and reinject them into the masses.

Putin’s missiles raining on Ukrainian targets in 2022 are an expression of Russian culture by other means – just as Hitler’s bombs falling on the same targets in 1941 expressed German culture. Baumeister is right in saying that this link is neither total nor predetermined. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

The stand on the Enlightenment is the principal battleground in the war between those on the right and those in the wrong. And people fighting a war will search for friends wherever they can find them – just look at the wartime alliance of Britain and America with Stalin.

In that spirit, I open my arms wide to the woke chiefs of Nottingham Trent University who have placed trigger warnings on the works of Enlightenment philosophers.

A bunch of racists, the lot of them, as it turns out. Students must be spared the trauma bound to result from their exposure to the “appalling views on race” promulgated by Locke (d. 1704), Hume (d. 1776), Kant (d. 1804) and Hegel (d. 1831).

I’m actually surprised the uni chiefs didn’t ban the offending works altogether. There’s still time: the trigger warnings have to be merely a first palliative step.

Now, those four philosophers, along with their French epigones, are the founders of liberalism, both in its classical form and its modern perversion. Far be it from me to claim that racism is a natural by-product of liberalism, and I’m sure those Nottingham chaps don’t think so.

Yet anyone scanning the works in question to support that view will be richly rewarded. In a moment you’ll be able to judge for yourself.

But first, a disclaimer is an order. It wasn’t the zeitgeist that spoke through those thinkers. They did their own talking.

The quotations I’m about to cite didn’t reflect the unchallenged received wisdom of the time. English Tories, to name one group, routinely mocked those liberal thinkers for their illiberal views.

Thus Dr Johnson, David Hume’s contemporary, sneered: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

He meant American colonists, for whom John Locke was the principal inspiration. They must indeed have been inspired by Locke’s essay The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.

It pains me to quote from it, but duty calls: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves.”

In the good tradition of selective quoting, we should disregard a conflicting sentiment expressed in Locke’s First Treatise on Government: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man … that ’tis hardly to be conceived.”

Let’s just say that at the time American colonists found the second sentiment less inspiring than the first. Still, scholarly integrity demands the acknowledgement that Locke repented his verbal crime.

That’s more than can be said for David Hume. If he lived today, he’d be imprisoned, not merely cancelled. Here, in no particular order, is a brief selection that would be cited in the indictment.

“I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.”

“There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences… On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as the ancient GERMANS, the present TARTARS, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular.”

“Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men.”

“Not to mention our colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; tho’ low people, without education will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession.”

“In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ’tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.”

Did I say cancelled and imprisoned? Lynched, more likely. However, hamstrung as he was by the dearth of mass media, Hume missed an interesting example closer to home.

There lived in Vienna at the time a black man named Angelo Soliman (original name Mmadi Make), who was born in what today is Nigeria, brought to Europe as a child and raised in princely Viennese households. Soliman grew up a cultured and cultivated man, whose academic attainment was much respected by his contemporaries.

He was a tutor to many young princes and a friend to Emperor Joseph II. Soliman also belonged to the same Masonic lodge, Zur Wahren Eintracht, as Mozart, and pushed it in a more scholarly direction. Mozart used Soliman as the prototype for the character of Bassa Selim in The Abduction from the Seraglio.

Nevertheless, when Soliman died in 1796, his body was stuffed and exhibited in a natural history museum. I don’t know how the exhibit was labelled taxonomically, but I bet it wasn’t Homo sapiens.

Lest you accuse me of prejudice against the Anglophone racists, the Germans were no better. For example, Hegel believed that Africans were a “race of children that remain immersed in a state of naiveté” and living in “a condition of savagery and unfreedom”.

I’m sure if he visited Africa today, he’d change his mind faster than you could say ‘necklacing’. Nor would he stick to his belief in the “right of heroes” to colonise and civilise those savages.

Hegel must have taken his cue from Kant in the previous generation, who wrote that: “Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, [they] serve only as slaves.” (I hasten to reassure my American readers that, by Americans, Kant meant American Indians, who, he wrote “are incapable of culture”.)

He graciously acknowledged that “the inhabitants of India can be educated”. Alas, “this does not extend to the use of abstract concepts, and hence they are incapable of being magistrates.”

Meanwhile, black people “have by nature no feeling that rises above the Ridiculous.” Actually, Kant didn’t limit himself to theoretical postulates. He also offered practical advice: “One gets the Negroes by having them catch each other, and one has to seize them with force.”

I could quote many such passages, but I’m sure you get the picture already. Those Nottingham academics certainly do, and I’m sure all our universities will soon follow in their footsteps.

My heart goes out to them though. They may have to burn gallons of environmentally unfriendly midnight oil, looking for quotations that would disqualify philosophers and writers of the past from holding academic positions at present.

Since most of them are culpable, our academics have their work cut out: Hercules with his Augean stables would look positively idle by comparison. But I propose a solution that will make their lives infinitely simpler, while sparing students the pain of having their innermost feelings offended.

All thinkers and writers (with a few individually stipulated exceptions) from the centuries before ours must be summarily cancelled, with their books expunged from the curricula and, ideally, burned in university quads. As a side benefit, this would provide a cheap, if not necessarily renewable, source of heat for the upcoming winter months.

Alas, our favourite philosopher, Karl Marx, will have to go too, what with his views being even more racist than those quoted above. But we must take the rough with the smooth – any real principle demands sacrifices.

Amazing what a single letter can do. Change just one vowel in Caitlin Moran’s surname, and you get an aptronym, a name that suits its owner perfectly.

The Times columnist invites such a misspelling with every word she writes. This time, in her article Duh! Of Course I Am Woke, she set out first to define such terms as ‘woke’ and ‘liberal’, and then to announce how proud she is to be both.

Thus a liberal is to her someone who is “willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas”.

Words these days mean whatever we want them to mean – Humpty Dumpty’s approach to lexicology has triumphed. And few words are as open to falsification as ‘liberal’ and all its cognates.

For example, Miss Moran’s liberalism and that of “the metropolitan liberal elite”, to which she is proud to belong, is exactly, diametrically opposite to the definition she puts forth. This she proves by providing a synonym of ‘liberal’, which is ‘woke’, and also suggesting a few antonyms.

To begin with, she enlists the help of “national treasure Kathy Burke”, some kind of actress, who “put it succinctly on Twitter, ‘I love being woke. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant f***ing twat’.”

Having thus established a solid, if borrowed, base of operations, Miss Moran mounted her own foray into pseudo-nominalism. The only alternative to wokery is to her being “a raging racist, homophobic, transphobic, woman-hating antisemite”.

So much for willingness “to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own”. So much also for basic decency, intelligence and education.

Rather than accepting the expression ‘metropolitan liberal elite’ as pejorative, Miss Moran sees it as a term of praise, something to be proud of: “And as for ‘elite’? Well, cheers! I graciously accept the compliment! I worked my knackers off on the journey from a council estate to The Times, so thank you for noticing.”

She may have joined the elite, as it’s defined today, professionally and financially. But culturally and intellectually, she is still mired in the council estate of the mind, or rather the gutter running through it.

“How could any of this be an insult? You might as well start shouting about a ‘City-dwelling reasonable success person’.”

‘Liberal elite’ is an ironic term, used by sensible people to describe a small group of trend-setters in our rapidly degenerating world. We tend to look for words that define and elucidate, not just demonise.

Yet the likes of Miss Moran refuse, perhaps are unable, to understand irony. In fact, they are unable to understand just about anything, and certainly not anyone who despises them and every fake virtue they proclaim as real.

This illiterate hack has figured us out: “Most ‘anti-woke’ warriors tend to be slightly scared, ageing people who don’t like young people changing all the words all the time – because it makes them feel out of touch – and who are playing to a gallery of similarly confused and tetchy people for viewing figures and/or votes.”

Slightly scared? I am terrified of the wanton destruction of everything sublime, beautiful and graceful perpetrated by fascisoid ignoramuses out to annihilate things they can’t understand. Each of them is a naked savage who turns a Stradivarius violin this way and that, only to decide that the best use for it is to kindle a pyre around which he could perform his ritual gyrations.

Savages like Moran look at history’s greatest civilisation and see nothing in it except racism, colonialism, oppression and a commitment to destroying ‘our planet’. These sins are to them irredeemable, and they are certainly not offset by any achievements.

They then take those awful things and use them to define their own world, with the minus sign attached to each. They are anti-racist, anti-colonialist, anti-this, anti-that.

Real virtues are thus ousted by fake ones, based on all these antis. That leaves no one in doubt of what they hate, but real virtue proceeds from love, not hate.

What is it that they love then? Well, themselves of course, what else. They “work their knackers off” to turn everything good, like the formerly great newspaper The Times, into the sort of thing that sticks to your shoe sole, making it stink on a hot day. And they are proud of it.

Rather than being open to ideas and respecting other people’s opinions, they indulge their powerlust by stamping into the same substance everybody and everything that contradicts their hare-brained notions.

Their woke ‘liberalism’ begets cancel culture, the cudgel with which they bust recalcitrant heads. Miss Moran’s scurrilous piece represents another swing of that weapon, but it misses its target. Instead it turns into a boomerang, smashing her own smug face.

She is right about one thing though, inadvertently letting the cat out of the bag. The cudgel is, for the time being, verbal. The stormtroopers of the fascisoid world created by the likes of her are indeed “changing all the words all the time”.

That’s Humpty-Dumpty all over again, a tyrant putting his foot down:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, along with many great thinkers, knew that whoever gains control of language will become a master of minds as well. And the best way to control words is to deprive them of any real meaning.

This realisation lies at the root of every modern, fascistic tyranny. And when one such vanquishes, the victors no longer have to conceal their true aims and ways of achieving them. That’s a telltale sign: when they start to speak frankly, you know they have won.

Thus Miss Moran’s piece is indeed a triumphant ritual dance around the fire consuming a great civilisation. Except that she may be too moronic to realise this.

First, the facts. On 11 July, Putin stopped the gas flow to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, claiming routine maintenance.

That started a panic in the EU, especially in countries like Germany that are almost totally dependent on Russian gas. What if Putin stops it for ever? The thought was too frightening to contemplate, especially since “Putin’s best woman” Merkel had done all she could to destroy all realistic alternatives to Putin’s hydrocarbons.

Routine maintenance on that pipeline normally takes 2-3 days. This time it took 10, and only yesterday did Putin magnanimously agree to continue taking his billion euros a day, a payment for gas that makes his bandit raid on the Ukraine self-financing.

Meanwhile, though Russian troops are taking a breather (an operational pause, in technical parlance), Putin has stepped up genocidal raids on cities. The other day Russian missiles struck the centre of Vinnytsia, killing over 20 people, including children.

Vinnytsia is a city in west-central Ukraine, far from the frontline. It’s a hub for the flow of humanitarian aid, something that interferes with Putin’s genocidal designs.

At the same time, Foreign Minister Lavrov announced that, now that Nato was supplying long-range weapons to the Ukraine, Russia was no longer going to be satisfied with just Donbas. She was now going to claim other chunks of Ukrainian territory as well. That statement of intent sounded sinister even though it lacked novelty appeal, what with the Russians having tried to take Kiev in the first days of the war.

Summing up, Russia again uses her gas as a blackmail weapon. In parallel, Putin continues the indiscriminate murder of civilians as a terrorist tactic designed to break the spirit of the Ukraine and her friends.

All that unfolds against the backdrop of greedier territorial claims that remain open-ended. The implication is that Putin’s thirst may have to be slaked not only by the Dnieper, but also possibly the Vistula or even the Rhine.

Before I tell you what the West’s response was, I’d like to suggest what it should have been. First, most Western governments have a policy of never negotiating with blackmailers and terrorists. That principle should have pertained in this case.

Hence, when Nord Stream stopped pumping, EU leaders should have told Putin in no uncertain terms exactly where he could stick that pipeline and whatever flows through it. Don’t bother reopening it, Vlad, the message should have been.

A new package of stiff sanctions should have been brought on stream, showing Putin that the West was ready to stand fast, whatever it takes. Yes, some economic hardship would have ensued, but this has traditionally been accepted as a fair price to pay for freedom.

In reality, having doubtless considered such options, the West has gone for their exact opposite, demonstrating yet again its craven spinelessness.

Rather than telling the Russians to eat their gas and drink their oil, the EU heaved a collective sigh of relief and thanked Putin, so far only inwardly, for renewing his tender hydrocarbon mercies. In addition, Putin’s Hungarian stooge Orbán continued to undermine Western unity by striking his own private deal for discounted Russian gas.

While Nord Stream was down, Canada returned to Russia the sanctioned Siemens turbine. The EU also broke its own sanctions by restoring Russia’s ability to transport sanctioned goods from the mainland to the Kaliningrad enclave.

At the same time, the US has removed the ban on Russian trade in fertilisers, food and medicine. Not to be outdone, the EU has introduced the seventh package of sanctions, whose principal function seems to be mitigating the effect of the previous six.

The Council of Europe issued a statement, saying that: “We are also extending the exemption of transactions for agricultural products and transfer of oil to third countries. Because the EU is doing its part to ensure we can overcome the looming global food crisis.”

Like prison sentences, sanctions are designed to punish past crimes and deter future ones. Yet, rather than deterring Putin, this geopolitical travesty is likely to encourage him.

If the West refuses to accept any economic discomfort for the sake of stopping Putin’s aggression with a united front, his criminal instincts will slip into a higher gear. He may well decide that the West is so weak that it’ll put up only token resistance should Vlad’s bands sweep into, say, Lithuania – or start exterminating Ukrainians with nuclear weapons.

The awful machine that passes for Putin’s brain has no reverse gear. Having spent his youth running with street gangs, he still thinks in the same terms: if you retreat, you lose face. And if you lose face, you lose your life.

The gravest error Western politicians can make is believing that Putin’s thought follows a normal rational path. His logic isn’t that of a human being, but that of a jungle beast. That’s why residually civilised Western leaders can’t make heads or tails of it.

Just look at Russia’s relations with Israel, the only Western country that maintains friendly, or at least not overtly hostile, relations with Putin. Since Israel has so far refused to join many Western sanctions, it remains the only narrow conduit through which sensitive Western technology can trickle into Russia.

In spite of that, Russia has announced that the offices of Sohnut, the Israeli organisation set up 100 years ago to facilitate Jewish migration to the Promised Land, will be shut. This though Sohnut has operated in Russia since 1989, helping thousands to emigrate without having to jump through too many bureaucratic hoops.

That announcement coincided with Putin’s return from Iran, where he tried to enlist that country as a member of his anti-Western coalition. Obviously, the ayatollahs’ participation is contingent on Russia’s support of their militants fanning the fire of terror in Syria. Since Israel is methodically wiping those thugs out, Putin had to show willing.

If the Russians still had some mental faculties uninfected by Putin’s stupefying propaganda, they’d be asking how an alliance with a fundamentalist Islamic regime tallies with Putin’s professed commitment to Christian values.

Alas, people capable of asking such questions are few in Russia, and are getting fewer. Rather than merely dominating the media, such propaganda now owns them outright. And thinking people are fleeing Russia in droves, many never to return.

Good riddance, as far as Putin is concerned. An aggressive, fascist Russia has no need for thinkers. All she needs is murderous, thieving sadists created in their leader’s image — along with a supine West unwilling to stop Putin’s juggernaut in its tracks, and unable even to understand its evil driving force.

We are practically begging him to carry on.

Summing up the research conducted on thousands of patients over decades, Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at University College London, didn’t equivocate.

“We can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades,” she said, “there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities.”

The response came in the shape of triumphant yelps of ‘I told you so’ from many scribes who, well, told you so.

The issue attracted their attention in the first place because pharmaceutical companies have built a mighty industry on the theory that low levels of serotonin in the brain cause depression. Medical schools went along, churning out psychiatrists trained to treat depression with, among other drugs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

The most popular of them is Prozac. In the first 15 years after it was licensed to treat depression in the US, Prozac was prescribed to 40 million patients worldwide, generating sales of $22 billion. Now, another 20 years later, SSRIs keep many a pharmaceutical company in lucrative business.

This was bound to attract criticism that the industry is feathering its own nest at the expense of patients’ health. The critics had a point, and now they have every reason to feel vindicated. Yet they tend to oversimplify the issue, which does nobody any good.

It’s true that doctors have been dispensing SSRIs and other antidepressants like Smarties, but the question is why. Why do they continue to prescribe Prozac if they suspect, as many have for years, that it’s no more effective than a placebo?

First, placebo effect is still an effect, and doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe a placebo. When a patient presents with depression, doctors, who seldom have more than a few minutes to spend on each appointment, feel they have to prescribe something, especially if the patient was already used to Prozac.

In many cases, the patients report a positive effect, so neither they nor the doctors feel like delving too deeply into the pharmacological nuances. Especially since no one seems to be able to define the phenomenon of depression with scientific precision.

Regulating authorities divide depression into three stages, mild, moderate and severe. This is dubious, and not just for purely medical reasons.

For mild and moderate depression is often indistinguishable from unhappiness, a word that has largely disappeared from our everyday lexicon. Modern people insist on medicalising everything that displeases them, and certainly lousy moods.

They have been brainwashed to expect happiness as an inalienable right, a natural state of life. That is, of course, a fallacy. Suffering is an essential part of the human condition and, in Christendom, the formative part.

Yet most people these days don’t recognise this because they don’t believe in life everlasting. They believe in a paradise on earth, where suffering is something abnormal – an illness, in other words. And illnesses, except the terminal ones, ought to be treatable with drugs.

In parallel, people have been immersed into a sea of psychobabble, courtesy of Freudian quackery. Deprived of anything supernatural, they try to find something superpersonal within themselves, which is a logical impossibility.

Thus they step on a never-ending path leading to assorted therapeutic charlatans and then on to doctors, who can do everything the charlatans do. But they can also prescribe drugs, and most of them feel it’s churlish to refuse. After all, they too have eaten the poisoned fruits of the same tree.

None of this means that genuine, clinical, depression doesn’t exist. It always has, and in the past this condition was called ‘melancholia’, from the Greek for ‘black bile’ (that’s another extinct word, by the way, outshouted by psychobabble).

Patients presenting with melancholia, which would now be called clinical depression, would be hospitalised for several weeks, with their condition studied from every possible angle. They would then be treated with a combination of therapy, drugs, in the old days mostly those boosting the level of noradrenalin, and, in extreme cases, electric shocks.

The critical thing to keep in mind is that, after all the billions spent on assorted genome projects and decades of the brain, we still know next to nothing about the human brain, hardly more than Greek physicians did in the old days.

One thing we don’t know is what causes depression. But we do know that it can be either exogenous or endogenous. The first is caused by external factors, such as bereavement, loss of a job, Joe Biden as the leader of the free world. The second has no such cause. It’s purely internal. It just is.

Exogenous depression has every chance of being mitigated by that great therapist, time, or else disappear altogether when its cause is no longer there.

Endogenous depression, on the other hand, is definitely a medical condition, and it can be extremely serious – made even more so by our ignorance of its cause. Hence it must be treated, not dismissed as a case of self-indulgence.

If SSRIs work, then it doesn’t matter if they are no more effective than a placebo. If they are effective at all and reasonably well tolerated, few doctors will begrudge a prescription to a stricken patient.

Moreover, though melancholia has always been rare, it’s now rarer still, and mainly because doctors reach out for their prescription pads with nonchalant ease. When patients are treated with SSRIs or other antidepressants the moment the first symptoms appear, the progression of the disease may well be slowed down.

Some 16 per cent of the people in such Western countries as the US, France and Britain are regular users of antidepressants. Somewhere within that inordinately large group are those few whose disease would have become severe had they not started popping those pills, placebo effect or no.

Exogenous depression, however, especially when it falls into the mild-to-moderate area for which SSRIs are indicated, isn’t readily distinguishable from that ever-present scourge of the human condition, unhappiness.

A priest, a friend or simply a stiff drink (Laphroaig is my chosen tipple) ought to provide sufficient therapy in most cases, along with some mental fortitude, good taste and refusal to succumb to perverse modern fads.

Yet it’s true that some people genuinely can’t cope with their unhappiness, and if SSRIs help, then few doctors would – or should – refuse to prescribe them on philosophical or moral grounds.

The problem isn’t with prescribing SSRIs, but with overprescribing. And the critics are absolutely right: mountains of Prozac moved on demand, often without the slightest medical justification, add up to an existential catastrophe – and often to a medical one.

For while the beneficial effects of SSRIs are up for debate, the side effects aren’t. Dr David Healy has been writing about them for years, and his book Let Them Eat Prozac (2006) describes the dangers exhaustively.

One such is that an excessive dose of SSRIs can turn depression into a mania. In fact, SSRI users are disproportionately represented in the ranks of American mass murderers, those who shoot up schools or shopping malls just for the hell of it. And some SSRI patients may become not homicidal but suicidal.

If a drug has any effects, it has side effects, and those of SSRIs can be horrendous. That’s why they should be reserved for genuine medical conditions, not to treat bored housewives who fear that hubby-wubby is playing away from home.

However, dogmatic denunciation of all SSRI scripts is as ill-advised as any extremism. Commentators inclined to this failing grossly oversimplify the issue, as all extremists tend to do. Most of the points they make about SSRIs are valid – but their wholesale conclusions aren’t.

Considering Diana’s history of amorous generosity, it’s to be expected that Harry’s paternity would be up for gossipy debates.

Rumour has it, for example, that she graced King Juan Carlos with her favours during an official royal visit to Spain. Since Diana also met Mandela, whom she worshipped with the fervour of a teenage groupie, could it be that…?

Admittedly, Harry bears a greater facial resemblance to some other putative daddies, such as Captain Hewitt. But, judging by his keynote speech at the UN General Assembly, he is a true heir to Mandela’s spiritual legacy – and far be it from me to put biology before spirituality.

Actually, there was nothing Harry said about that legacy that isn’t repeated every day on the pages of The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and other similar publications. Such papers form a lay church empowered to canonise secular saints.

Once canonised, a saint is exempt from not only criticism but even honest study. Worshipping genuflection is the only acceptable stance.

Though Harry remained physically upright throughout his speech, he was genuflecting inwardly. He started by sharing an insight into how horrible Mandela must have felt during his 27 years in solitary confinement. The impression Harry conveyed was that St Nelson had suffered a racist injustice.

In fact, the African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a terrorist Marxist organisation. As such, it was armed and otherwise supported by communist countries, especially Cuba and East Germany.

East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered. Many were ‘necklaced’, with a tyre filled with petrol, placed over their necks and set on fire.

In the same spirit of international cooperation, the ANC also received assistance from our own dear IRA. In an arrangement allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, thereby greatly improving their efficiency.

It was murderous activities that landed Mandela in prison, not his abstract love of justice and freedom. But any mainstream media would be as likely to mention such facts as Al Jazeera would be to announce that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammad isn’t his prophet.

Harry then mentioned how intimately his work is intertwined with the plight of Africa, presumably referring to his deals with Netflix and Spotify. One wonders how many of the millions he earns there he’ll share with the starving Africans so close to Harry’s heart.

Having thus established a solid base of ANC credentials, Harry struck out globally. Ours, he said, is a “painful year in a painful decade”. The pain comes from a “global assault on democracy and freedom.”

The assailers were identified as Putin’s war in the Ukraine, the US Supreme Court that had “rolled back constitutional rights” and global warming.

In some places, Harry informed us, “water is quite literally rising”. While I tried to figure out the difference between water rising literally and figuratively, Harry pressed on.

“Our world is on fire”, he said, citing the heat wave in Europe as unassailable proof. By the same logic, snow covering parts of Provence this April was proof of an Ice Age. Harry, God bless him, doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate, but he doesn’t let such incidentals hold him back.

Lest we feel despondent and hopeless, Harry then struck an optimistic note: there is an organisation that can save the planet from hellfire and literally rising water: “We must count on the UN”. That “is not up for debate and neither is the science.”

Since global warming is history’s first scientific discovery made not by scientists but by the organisation so dear to Harry’s heart (I mean the UN, not the ANC), he is right to delegate the solution to the same people. They got us into this mess, they should get us out of it.

As to the science not being “up for debate”, I wonder how deeply Harry has studied the issue. Judging by his general education, I suspect everything he knows about science could fit into Meghan’s powder compact, with enough room left for a few grams of coke (considering where they live, I assume they use it).

Yet that’s not a licence to mouth arrant nonsense. Serious scientists not only argue against global warming but debunk it outright for the hoax it is. Over 30,000 American scientists have issued a paper to that effect, which has been kept away from the public by the kind of papers Harry reads.

Instead, he should read the two books on this subject by the Australian climatologist Ian Plimer. Harry probably wouldn’t understand a word of it, but he may at least get the general idea that the science is indeed up for debate.

Little as he appears to know about science, he knows next to nothing about American constitutional history and understands even less. Otherwise he’d know that the Supreme Court’s decision Meghan hates actually affirms constitutional rights, rather than rolling them back.

SCOTUS delegated some of the federal power to the state level, thereby acting in the spirit explained in, among other sources, the Federalist Papers. Before running off at the mouth on such issues, Harry should make a modicum of effort to learn something about them… Oh well, forget it.

Actually, Harry reinforces my belief in heredity, at the same time dispelling rumours about the side of the blanket he was born on. For at exactly the same time, his legal father, Prince Charles, was boasting he had been right all along: a couple of hot days prove climate has been warming up steadily for centuries.

Hence Charles may well be the tree that Harry didn’t fall far from; one can detect faulty genes at work. And of course Harry has his mother’s mind. Diana thought with the organ not originally designed for that purpose, and Harry uses the male equivalent with the same élan.

I shudder at the thought of this man being sixth in the line of accession. Americans are welcome to him, hope they keep Harry there in eternity.

Any conceivable answer to this question will be arbitrary – even one provided by Erik von Kuehnelt-Liddihn (d. 1999), one of the most astute political thinkers in my lifetime.

“For the average person,” wrote the great man, “all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

Kuehnelt-Liddihn’s books and articles took my intellectual virginity when I found myself in the West as a 25-year-old neophyte. Thus it’s with a sense of loving trepidation that I dare embellish his thought with my own arbitrary offerings.

To that end I crank up the time machine I always keep handy for such eventualities. That device instantly transports me to Paris, circa 1793, and deposits me on a different vehicle, a creaky cart trundling to the Place de la Révolution (Place Louis XV to me then, Place de la Concorde to you now).

There, in the shadow of the guillotine, I am greeted by Charles-Henri Sanson, a professional executioner who decapitated some 3,000 people in a career spanning 40 years. Another minute, and my head too will roll into the red-stained wicker basket.

However, while I still retain the use of it, the same question crosses my mind: When did the rot set in? How could this civilisational calamity become possible? (In reality, my thoughts would have probably turned towards more personal problems, but this is a hypothetical situation.) The question would have been legitimate even though I wouldn’t have had any advance knowledge of either World War.

The trip has been instructive. Having now come back to 2022, my head still topping my neck for the time being, I realise the decay didn’t start with the French Revolution. That event violently pushed the rot to the surface, making it visible to the multitudes. But the rot was already there, eating away at history’s greatest civilisation.

Any social explosion is preceded by social erosion. Revolutions may triumph within a few days, just as Vasily Rozanov described it in 1917 (“Russia faded away in two days, three at the most”). But for a storm to bring a house down, it has to be rickety in the first place.

Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom, was built on the foundations of another revolution, one that started in the outskirts of the Roman Empire during the reign of Tiberius. Unlike all other revolutions, it burst out in people’s minds, not in city squares.

Yet like all revolutions, it proved divisive. Some people joyously marched to the new tune, others plugged up their ears with their index fingers.

This isn’t hard to understand, for most people found the demands of Christianity too onerous. The morality of the Beatitudes sounded like an unreachable ideal, so unreachable that they even refused to try. And most rejected the freedom offered by Christ because, like any other freedom, it came packaged with concomitant responsibility.

This, many felt, was a yoke around their necks. Anyhow, it wasn’t the freedom to pursue salvation they craved but the licence to pursue bread. That’s why, as Chesterton once put it, “The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult – and left untried.”

As a result, many people, and their number grew constantly, cast themselves in the role of resentful pariahs. By the time Christendom reached its peak in the 13^th century, anticlericalism had built up enough capital for the masses to start collecting the interest.

Their seething resentment was ready to strike out, armed with either the broadsword of violence or the rapier of mockery. Both weapons saw the light of day, if not in that order.

Thus the personage of a corrupt, lustful, crooked monk, priest or nun was ever-present in Southern European literature, from Rabelais and Boccaccio to Diderot and Voltaire. The Zeitgeist demanded witty denunciations, and even writers who were themselves devout, such as Boccaccio, had to comply.

Christendom was eventually caught in the two-pronged pincer thrust of post-Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. If the former did its subversive work slowly and by stealth, the latter was fuelled by a febrile revolutionary zeal similar to that of the subsequent French upheaval.

Luther and Calvin should have thought twice before throwing out the baby of ecclesiastical, apostolic Christianity together with the bath water of clerical corruption, graven images, indulgences and the rest. They should have sensed that the West wasn’t strong enough to withstand such a deafening explosion, that the shock waves would never become properly attenuated.

Yet revolutionaries are always driven men, blinkered to everything on the periphery of their tunnel-vision zealotry. Balanced thought, sagacity, foresight, an ability to see how nuances can undermine any idea, regardless of its intrinsic worth – such qualities are alien to revolutionaries of any kind.

By the time the French beheaders were ready to take a wrecking ball to the structure of Christendom, it was already tottering. Its foundations had been eaten away by the termites of Renaissance humanism and Reformation fanaticism, its walls shaken by the American Revolution.

Kuehnelt-Liddihn spent much of his life in the US, where for 35 years he was a columnist at National Review, then the bastion of American conservatism. Perhaps partly for that reason he followed Edmund Burke by denying the American Revolution a place in this subversive continuum.

At the risk of being smitten by a thunderbolt from the conservative heaven, I disagree with both of them. Obviously, the American Revolution was different from its French successor, although it produced a comparable number of victims if we legitimately regard the Civil War as its second act.

But the same strains of civilisational malaise came to the fore there as in France: post-Renaissance humanism, Reformational resentment of ecclesiastical and aristocratic tradition, Enlightenment secularism underpinned by exaggerated faith in human goodness.

Unlike, say, the Bolshevik revolution, the American one appealed not only to the nihilist in man, but also to the philistine. The two types dominate modernity, but neither had any role to play in forming Western civilisation. Both are hostile to it, consciously or otherwise.

The prominence of the philistine in US history made it a prosperous country and, in a world ruled by the philistine, prosperity redeems all sins. But the nihilist isn’t dead there; he is merely dormant.

The signs are he is beginning to rise from his slumber, perhaps to remind Americans that all revolutions are delayed-action bombs. The charges may stay buried in the ground for centuries, but expect a big bang sooner or later.

All this is offered with humble apologies to the spirits of Burke and Kuehnelt-Liddihn. I hope they realise that my disagreements with them in no way diminish the veneration I feel for them both.

London losing its theatres is like Paris losing its Michelin-star restaurants, Venice losing its canals or Amsterdam losing its opium dens (aka coffee shops).

For centuries, people from all over the world have been forming a beeline for the West End, pursing their lips in anticipation of yet another theatrical tour de force. Great English actors of the past, such as Burbage, Garrick and Keene, are still venerated as if they were our contemporaries.

English theatre produced history’s greatest playwright, but Shakespeare didn’t just waft in from thin air. Tall trees don’t grow in the desert – they grow in large forests of shorter trees. Artists are the same: they grow to sublime heights only if the cultural soil is gloriously fertile, with lesser talents sprouting luxuriantly to prop up a genius.

Now that soil has been strewn with coarse-grained salt to destroy the crops and make sure nothing will ever grow there again. The tactic was first used by victorious Roman soldiers thus punishing vanquished Carthage.

For Carthage, read London theatres. And for Roman soldiers, read fascism.

In this context I’m using the word broadly, in the sense of boundless powerlust expressed through wanton destruction driven by conscious innovation. Objectionable here isn’t the noun but the adjective.

That art doesn’t stand still is axiomatic. Today’s composers couldn’t possibly write like Bach, today’s novelists like Fielding, today’s painters would look like silly epigones if they adopted Duccio’s style. The ineluctable logic of art demands innovation.

Any great art represents an organic accumulation of innovations over centuries, if not millennia. Yet not all development is organic. Some was imposed by evildoers whose conscious objective was to destroy, not to create.

Modernism, though not ipso facto wicked, can be easily used to such wicked ends, in politics as well as in art. Fascism is as good a term as any to describe this tendency, with art in this instance imitating politics.

The Italian poet and painter Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (d. 1944) illustrates this point perfectly. For the founder of Futurism merged within his person both artistic and political fascism, thereby emphasising their natural affinity.

A prolific essayist as well as a poet, Marinetti wrote the bible of artistic vandalism, the Futurist Manifesto (1909), and co-authored the Fascist Manifesto 10 years later. A true polymath, he left no artistic turn unstoned, including theatre.

His main idea was to replace traditional playhouses with variety theatres, the better to mock theatrical tradition into oblivion. When it came to laying down his ideas, Marinetti didn’t mince words:

“Variety theatre is to destroy everything solemn, sacred, serious in art. It promotes the impending annihilation of immortal works by altering and mocking them, by producing them as if they were nothing special…

“It’s essential that all logic in Variety productions be eliminated, that they be made excessively bizarre, with every contrast amplified so much that everything bizarre dominates…

“Interrupt the singer. Accompany the aria with swearwords and insults… Force the audience in the stalls, gallery and boxes to take part in the action…

“Systematically defile classical art on stage, by, for example, producing Greek, French and Italian tragedies in one evening, abbreviated and comically merged together…”

The disembodied spirit of Marinetti is hovering over the West End, making sure the formerly great theatres there follow his prescriptions to the letter. And they don’t disappoint.

Some of the greatest heights of man’s genius are being brought down to earth and stamped into the manure of woke vandalism. Destroying “everything solemn, sacred, serious in art”? Will do, Tommaso. “Systematically defile classical art”? Not a problem. “Producing great plays as if they were nothing special?” Just say the word. “Altering and mocking immortal works”? Nothing to it.

Thus the grim, fearless warrior Agrippa appears on London’s premier stage as a flighty girl wearing a short dress and high heels. Ophelia, dressed in torn jeans, gyrates on a bed to the sound of the ghetto blaster she is holding to her ear. White men are routinely portrayed by black women (doing it the other way around would cancel the director faster than he could say ‘cultural appropriation’). Claudius slaps Hamlet around, with Nazi-clad guards pointing their Schmeissers at the audience. Buckets of red paint are emptied on Richard II’s head.

As if committed to proving that real art can’t thrive in fascist settings designed to destroy it, fewer and fewer actors are any longer able to enunciate the lines properly or even intelligibly. Or perhaps they just sense how incongruous Elizabethan prose sounds in the mouths of youngsters dressed for a drug-fuelled rave in a seedy Soho club.

There are only so many female Agrippas and black Cleopatras that people can take without running a simple cost-benefit analysis through their heads. The cost is the best part of £100 per ticket (much more for musicals). And the benefit is complicity in the fascist takeover of a great English institution.

More and more people are saying thanks, but no thanks. As a result, many West End theatres, where in the past it was next to impossible to get a ticket, are now playing to empty houses. Some are shutting their doors for ever.

Fascism of any kind pretends its body is healthy, but a close look will always reveal signs of cadaverous decomposition. In the good, if in this case still metaphorical, tradition, the great London theatre is forced to dig its own grave.

Before long it too will start rotting and decomposing, its soul ripped out in line with Marinetti’s diktats.

One of the dominant features of modern political discourse is passing appetites as rights.

Thus, for example, instead of saying “I’d like to have paternity leave”, a modern man is likely to say “I have a right to a paternity leave”.

We are reaping the poisoned Enlightenment harvest. Billed as the Age of Reason, that period and its aftermath debauched reason like no other. The concept of ‘rights’, natural, inalienable or otherwise, reflects the crepuscular thinking of those self-proclaimed enlighteners.

A real, otherwise known as natural or inalienable, right presupposes no concomitant obligation on anyone else’s part. The rights mentioned in the American Declaration of Independence, those to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, score two out of three on that test.

The pursuit of happiness was understood in the Lockean sense of the pursuit of estate, which is to say wealth and property. This right, if exercised legally, doesn’t impose an obligation on anyone else and thus qualifies as legitimate.

So does the right to life. Your life isn’t contingent on anyone else’s consent to grant it (let’s leave God out of it). Hence your right to it is indeed inalienable.

By contrast, the right to liberty is problematic. First, unlike life and the pursuit of estate, liberty is hard to define. One man’s liberty is another man’s licence and a third man’s anarchy.

However defined, liberty is a matter of an intricate multi-lateral consensus. Claiming it usually involves limiting the liberty of others, something to which they may or may not agree. Had the framers of the Declaration used the word ‘freedom’ instead of ‘liberty’, they would have been on a safer intellectual ground.

For, unlike liberty, freedom exists within, not without. Our right to it is natural and inalienable because freedom comes from our relation to God (I know I promised to leave Him out of it, but you know better than to believe me), not other men.

Even when a right is indisputable, it leaves room for casuistic abuse. Is the death penalty a violation of the natural right to life? Is abortion? How is it that the proponents of the latter are almost always opponents of the former and vice versa, with this right invoked in each case?

In general, the term ‘rights’ is at best useless in any serious inquiry, and at worst harmful. It certainly flings the door wide open for wicked ideologies to barge in.

Today we are served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, orgasms, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, sex change, abortion on demand and so forth.

These ‘rights’ are all bogus since they fail the test of not presupposing a concomitant obligation on somebody else’s part.

Thus one’s right to employment would mean something real only if there were someone out there who consents or is obligated by law to give one a job. One’s right to a developed personality presupposes an obligation on somebody else’s part to assist such development. My right to free education entails your obligation to pay for it.

Far from being natural, all these rights become tangible only if they are granted by others; and anything given can be taken away, so there go all those pseudo-rights alienated right out of the window.  

The subversive potential of rights is best illustrated by the US, where this concept was codified in the founding documents. Now the country is tearing its social fabric to shreds, with various groups slashing it with the jagged knife of rights.

One instantly apparent problem is that most of these ‘rights’ clash with one another. It doesn’t even matter whether the rights are real or bogus.

For example, a group claiming its right to be equally represented in the workplace denies the owner’s rights to the pursuit of estate (aka happiness) and, arguably, to liberty as well. How do we solve this conflict? Who wins?

Why, whoever screams more loudly, practises name-calling with more febrile passion, threatens violence most credibly. The language of rights, if used with abandon, replaces thought with hysterics, debate with swearing, civility with savagery.

Everything becomes a matter of political rough-and-tumble, including matters that logically should be outside politics. Law is one such, and that too has been thoroughly politicised, meaning, inter alia, dumbed-down.

Take the on-going, raging debate about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its 1973 ruling on Roe vs Wade. This issue touches on various disciplines: constitutional law, philosophy, biology, theology, morality – and it can be argued on any or all of these grounds.

Yet the debate has been solely reduced to the matter of rights, with the predictable result. It has descended into name-calling, spasmodic fits, verbal and often physical violence. The matrix is simple: If you are [for, against], then you are [choose an appropriate term of abuse, shout it at the top of your lungs].

In reality, the decision to overturn Roe vs Wade corrected a flagrant constitutional wrong. Supreme Court judges ruled in 1973 that the US Constitution conferred the federal right to have an abortion, thus striking down any number of local laws.

Anyone scrutinising that document, along with volumes upon volumes of commentary, will be hard-pressed to find a single mention of abortion or the right thereto. Nor is it immediately clear how anything indeed mentioned there can be interpreted as a licence to abortion on demand.

But the shrill yelps of rights rendered Their Honours deaf to the demands of their day job: judging the constitutionality of legislation. Roe vs Wade was an exercise in political activism, not constitutional law.

The judges established their impeccable modern credentials by arguing the toss on medical grounds. Nowadays everything that can’t be politicised must be medicalised. If the two can be brought together, so much the better.

A woman, argued Their Honours, is more likely to die as a result of childbirth than an abortion. Statistically, they were right, although in 1973 the incidence of either procedure causing death was low to the point of being negligible.

One way or the other, the Constitution doesn’t say that Supreme Court judges should assume personal responsibility for maternal health. If Their Honours felt morally obligated to fight for that cause, they should have done so in their spare time, while staying within their remit during office hours.

That constitutional folly was corrected on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. Rather than getting bogged down in dubious medical data and succumbing to political pressures, today’s judges did their proper job.

They ruled that the right to abortion wasn’t “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition” and was unknown in US law until Roe vs Wade. It thus should leave the domain of the federal constitution to become a matter for individual states to decide.

Hence their ruling was purely judicial, having nothing to do with either asserting or denying the right to abortion, nor, for that matter, the right to life. Yet that’s not how it has been taken.

The issue hasn’t been put to rational, civilised debate. It’s being argued in the streets. The debating parties aren’t academics with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, but shrieking, violent fanatics ready to do murder for their ‘rights’.

Ideas Have Consequences, wrote Richard Weaver in 1948. They certainly do, and the feebler the ideas, the deadlier the consequences.

Therefore, in the spirit of the cancel culture so dear to my heart, I suggest the word ‘right’ in the sense of entitlement be expurgated from all dictionaries. Anyone using it in any context other than indicating direction, should be fined for speaking under the influence of ideology.

When Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the EU, had one of his few sober moments, he came up with a brilliant aphorism nailing all modern politics to the wall.

“We all know what to do,” he said. “We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

In other words, a real statesman can never get a job in politics. Yet last night’s debate of Tory PM hopefuls proved him wrong.

Do you think there were five contestants on that Channel 4 stage? Yes, that’s what everyone thinks.

But there also was a ghostly presence there, visible and audible only to the chosen few. If you aren’t one of the elect, I’ll be happy to share with you what that ghost of a statesman communicated.

When asked “Can any politicians be trusted?”, the ghost laughed. “Trust a modern politician,” he said, “to act as one. That’s all.

“He’ll make any promise to appeal to the electorate his focus groups identify as the best hunting ground. Can he be trusted to keep any of his promises? Don’t be silly.”

The second question was related to the first: “Is Boris Johnson an honest man”. The ghost replied with a question: “He’s a politician, isn’t he? Say no more.”

From the general to the specific: “What about trans rights?”

The ghost was unequivocal: “As British subjects, transsexuals must enjoy all the same rights won by the people over the two millennia of their history. Yet neither they nor any other minority group should be entitled to any bespoke rights custom-made for them.

“Gender dysphoria is a real, if extremely rare, medical disorder. It must be treated and, in the most extreme of cases, the treatment may require surgery.

“Yet biologically, morally and legally, the afflicted person retains his sex at birth. A man may identify as a woman, a dog or a tree – but as far as I am concerned, he remains a man.

“If he can’t come to grips with his genetic makeup, he deserves sympathy, compassion and psychiatric help. But he doesn’t deserve any special rights. All in all, this is a non-issue, and any sane society would see it as such.”

All that was by way of starters. The questions then got into the area of meat and potatoes. “How will you approach the burning economic matters, such as taxes, cost of living, inflation and public spending?”

“You said matters, plural,” replied the ghost. “But the problem is singular, one. Our economy has been used as a political plaything, a top that politicians can spin around for one purpose only: to gain and keep power.

“To that end they have been bribing the people with their own money, so that they’ll vote the right way. No serious economic management has been in evidence since the war, although at least Margaret Thatcher tried.

“Promiscuous government spending is corrupt and corrupting on many different levels, economic, social, intellectual and moral. Its unstated but true purpose is to increase the power of the central state, meaning that of a self-serving elite.

“That has created a vast underclass, nourished and kept afloat by our unaffordable, morally defunct welfare state. Every premise on which it’s based is socialist and egalitarian, which is to say wicked.

“In the service of this wicked idea, the state extorts, when you add up all the taxes, duties and levies, at least half of what the people earn. This is sold to the public by bien pensant virtue-signalling, which is in fact an evil perversion of Christian charity.

“The people have been brainwashed into accepting the notion of helping the less fortunate. They fail to discern the real meaning of the welfare state: expropriating the more fortunate, that is anyone who works for a living – while shifting even more power to the growing central state.

“We must have welfare, helping those who genuinely can’t help themselves: orphans, the ill and the indigent old. Civilised countries can’t have their citizens dying of want or lack of care.

“But that’s a far cry from a rapacious welfare state, with the government effectively acting as the provider father making the real, what modern savages call biological, father redundant.

“Real welfare is the second most essential function of the state. The most essential one is security, protecting the people from foreign enemies and domestic criminals. To perform those functions effectively, it should be sufficient to finance the public sector to the tune of 20 to 25 per cent of GDP – maximum.

“That effectively means cutting taxes by half. And I mean all taxes, starting with corporate ones. That would stimulate both domestic and international investment, helping Britain compete against all other countries.

“A corresponding drop in taxes on income and consumption would drive up consumer demand, making the British economy grow healthy and robust.”

The moderator gasped: “But how can we reduce taxes when the inflation rate is heading towards double digits?”

“This is an economically illiterate question,” smirked the ghost. “Inflation is caused by high government spending, which can only ever be funded by endlessly increasing the money supply.

“The way to reduce inflation is to do exactly what I proposed: cutting in half the state’s share of GDP. Tax reduction is a way of achieving that, a benefit such a fiscal measure would offer the people.”

“But wouldn’t that destroy public services, including the NHS?”

The ghost wouldn’t allow his train of thought to be derailed. “The only thing that would destroy is public disservices, including the NHS,” he said. “Britain is the only major Western European country with a fully nationalised medical service. Alas, rather than being the envy of Europe, the NHS is its laughingstock.

“The good British people have been brainwashed into believing the NHS is free. Yet it’s as free as the slab of cheese in a mousetrap.

“The NHS is a system of financing medicine, and it’s more wasteful and less effective than just about any other. Its problems can only be solved by changing the system.

“An alternative system must resemble the combined European system of public and private participation, financed by massive tax incentives, rather than massive tax extortion. I’ll be happy to submit a detailed proposal in another medium, one more conducive to serious discussion than to swapping meaningless bytes.”

“Are you at least committed to the net-zero undertaking of the Tory Manifesto?” asked the visibly shaken moderator.

“I’m committed to tearing up and binning that economic suicide note,” replied the ghost.

“First, the whole notion of climate change is unscientific and anti-historical. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the Earth has been hotter than it is now for over 80 per cent of its lifetime.

“Romans, for example, neither powered their chariots with fossil fuels nor freshened their air with aerosols. However, at the time they ruled England, in the 1^st century AD, vineyards thrived in Scotland, meaning it was considerably warmer then.

“Moreover, since carbon enables plants to grow more abundantly, the most prosperous periods in history coincided with the highest levels of carbon emissions, and vice versa.

“I bet none of the other contestants in this beauty pageant has read a single serious scientific study of the subject, especially an omnibus one. If they had, they’d be less eager to kowtow to the vociferous group of neo-Luddites venting their resentment of our civilisation.

“Serving that ignoble cause, they are prepared to destroy the British economy, for make no mistake about it: a modern industry can’t survive if powered by windmills.

“We must build our nuclear industry, half-destroyed by the very reprobates who are now screaming climate change. We must become self-sufficient in energy, and if it takes fracking to achieve that, then so be it.”

The moderator was speechless, but I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “How do you expect to get elected on this kind of platform?” I shouted at the screen.

“I don’t,” smiled the ghost. “I’m a ghost, a figment of your imagination…” And then he vanished in front of my very eyes.

My sense of reality restored, I poured myself a drink and toasted Jean-Claude Juncker. A useless politician, but he did have a way with words.