Category: Blog

The other day I argued that, in substance, Marxism and fascism largely converge.

The outward manifestations of the two cults may diverge slightly, but then so do those of different exponents of the same cult. For example, for all their substantive kinship, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy behaved differently, as did Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China.

One of the features that all Marxist and fascist states share is that they are all glossocracies. They control bodies by violence and minds by keeping a tight rein on the word.

Ideologies live or die not only by coercion but also by imposing their verbal content on everyone. That’s why they tend to punish seditious words more severely and surely than crimes against person or property.

That’s how one can recognise a Marxist or a fascist state. If people are thrown in prison for something they say, not something they do, the state is either Marxist or fascist.

There exist exceptions to this observation. For example, inciting murder is a crime in itself, even if no one gets killed. But then there are exceptions to everything. By and large, if a state punishes words, it’s either fascist or Marxist.

That brings me to Britain, specifically the case of Lucy Connolly who walked free yesterday after 10 months in prison.

Mrs Connolly, the wife of a Northampton Tory councillor, is living proof of my statement. His Majesty’s Government is definitely Marxist, and it isn’t averse to acting in the spirit of its ideology, where it converges with fascism.

To take matters in turn, last summer three little girls were stabbed to death at a dance party in Stockport. The media falsely reported that their teenaged murder, Axel Rudakubana, was an illegal migrant. That led to an outbreak of anti-immigrant riots, and tempers were running high.

In fact, Rudakubana was merely a cultural alien, not an illegal one. He was born in Wales to Rwandan parents and grew up enamoured of Al Qaida and everything it stood for. One way or the other, riots did ensue, crowds attacked a mosque and some hotels occupied by migrants, clashing with the police.

So did Mrs Connolly go along for the ride? Did she throw bricks at that mosque or at police officers? She didn’t. Had she done so, she could have got away with a mere slap on the wrist.

He crime was worse: she attacked the Marxist glossocracy, not any particular person or building. Specifically, Mrs Connolly posted this tweet:

“Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f***ing hotels full of the b******s for all that I care. While you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist then so be it.”

You’ll agree that the language is rather intemperate, and even some people – well, me – who share her sentiments may deplore the way they were expressed. This mode of self-expression would exclude Mrs Connolly from the list of the privileged few rating the honour of being invited to my house for dinner.

Still, should Mrs Connolly be considered for such an invitation, I’d have to take into account the mitigating circumstances: she was reacting emotionally on the spur of the moment to a vile, horrific crime.

Moreover, blunders committed by another state institution, the NHS, had recently taken the life of her son. She projected her own bereavement on the grief felt by the victims’ parents, which added a few degrees to the temperature of her remarks.

However, the court didn’t accept any mitigating circumstances. Mrs Connolly was arrested, charged and denied bail – this in spite of her being a first-time offender who presented no flight risk.

Sorry, did I say ‘offender’? This woke contagion must have rubbed off even on me. What exactly was her offence? Hard as I look, I can’t find any corpus delicti in that tweet.

Mrs Connolly didn’t incite violence. She didn’t write, you are cordially invited to such and such place at such and such time, Molotov cocktails will be served, we’ll have some fun. She only wrote that she wouldn’t shed any tears if those hotels were burned to the ground, not that she’d happily do so herself.

Then she expressed a rather uncomplimentary view of illegal immigrants, but, uncomplimentary or not, it’s shared so widely as to be practically universal. And even if the authorities find such opinions ill-advised, since when are Britons arrested for objectionable opinions?

Since Britain became a Marxist country, is the answer to that one.

A trial ensued, Mrs Connolly was convicted and received a draconian sentence of 31 months in prison. An article in today’s Mail helpfully provides a long list of real, heinous crimes that have recently been punished with shorter sentences or none at all.

However, the author seems to proceed from the assumption that Britain is still a civilised parliamentary democracy ruled by law. That assumption is way out of date: the country is governed by a Marxist cabal using glossocracy to bend the historically free people to its will.

It’s led by Keir Starmer who has promised Parliament he’ll “always support” the courts in such cases. What he means by ‘such cases’ is gross miscarriages of justice, where people suffer horrendous punishments for saying something Starmer et al. don’t like and expressing views they don’t condone.

Those scoundrels accuse Mrs Connolly of being a racist, than which it’s to them impossible to be anything worse. Since our Marxist lot actively foment racial strife as one line in their frontal attack on what’s left of Christendom, they demonise as a racist anyone daring to resist.

Mrs Connolly may or may not be a racist, someone who hates other races, but nothing she wrote in that tweet is prima facie proof one way or the other.

She clearly dislikes the fact that swarms of legal and illegal aliens are inundating Britain, but such sentiments are both valid and widespread. Ditto her statement about our “treacherous government and politicians”. This is neither racist nor wrong. Our governing cabal are indeed treacherous, in that they betray the fundamental tenets of our civilisation – such as the right to free speech.

It’s also clear that Mrs Connolly doesn’t regard herself as a racist: “If that makes me racist then so be it.” What this says to me, though obviously not to Starmer’s courts, is that she is only racist within the warped ideology our government preaches with criminal abandon and enforces with singular cruelty.

In the end, this victim of glossocratic injustice served a third of her sentence, one that no civilised country would have imposed. So what does it make Britain then? You tell me.  

When asked this question a few months ago by the host of a MAGA podcast, I replied with another question: “What’s wrong with extremism?”

For me, just about everything. Extremism is too much of something, and it’s a mental pathology regardless of what it is that extremism is too much of. This is the case with all sorts of things, not just politics.

A glass of wine with every dinner is delicious, but a bottle of whisky every day is toxic. Dieting to keep your weight down is advisable, but not to the point of developing anorexia. Driving fast is a pleasure, but driving too fast is a risk.

Nationalism is patriotism pushed to an extreme, turning one’s country from an object of love to a cult. That’s why patriotic, especially intelligent, conservatives wince at any display of nationalism. We detest it on aesthetic, religious, philosophical and historical grounds.

The latter is significant because any student of history will know how easily a political cardsharp can pull the ace of patriotism out of his sleeve. That’s what Dr Johnson meant in 1775, when he described patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel”.

He was talking not about patriotism as such, but about his political opponent, William Pitt, who Johnson felt was constantly invoking patriotism for nefarious political reasons. More recent examples of such misuse are too numerous and too widely known to cite.

Suffice it to say that every manner of scoundrel has been known to manipulate patriotism, turning it into nationalism and putting it to evil use.

And even when evil men start out as internationalists, they often turn to nationalism as their stratagem for controlling the masses. Stalin, for example, discovered in 1941 that his slaves wouldn’t fight for workers of the world as readily as they would for their slave master, Russia.

One key difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the former is a deep but usually silent feeling, whereas the latter is always loud-mouthed. Patriots love silently; nationalists screech, often to drown out voices of moderation and decency.

As the Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin (d. 1889) quipped, “If you hear someone shouting about patriotism, be sure that something has been stolen somewhere.”

It’s a curious phenomenon that an uxorious man who’d never dream of telling all and sundry how much he loves his wife may still be prepared to scream his nationalism off the rooftops. However, taking this juxtaposition a step farther, such a man may indeed begin to tell people how much he loves his wife when he realises that all his friends and relations dislike her.

A similar onset of defensive patriotic loquacity is reactive, and it can easily become overreactive, with nationalism beckoning at the end. Such nationalism may still be reprehensible, but it’s now understandable.

It’s instructive, I think, to compare British and American brands of patriotism. Both nations are patriotic, but Americans are more susceptible to nationalism.

Most Englishmen I know find American hand-on-heart patriotism a tad vulgar, but then parvenus usually are. By European standards, the US is a rich Johnny-come-lately, and such countries are similar to such people in their urge to self-assert.

Moreover, Americanism isn’t so much a national, much less ethnic, identity as an idea. And cultish loyalty to an idea demands frequent reiteration more than, say, does the quiet affection an Englishman feels for English things and character traits.

That’s why the US has more national flags per square yard, why American pupils start their day (or at least used to) by reciting the Oath Of Allegiance, why American politicians end every speech with a shout of “God save America”, why every American puts his hand over his heart when the national anthem is played.

Nations whose identity has been formed over millennia don’t require such visible tokens of patriotism. That’s partly why English patriotism is less likely to overstep the demarcation line beyond which healthy patriotism turns into malignant nationalism.

Englishmen are self-confident enough not to become defensive about their identity – unless they feel it’s under attack and in need of defending. When pushed, they’ll push back, and their patriotism can then indeed turn to nationalism.

That insipient tendency is observable now, and it can become rampant before long. For decades, schools, universities and politicians have been busily indoctrinating Englishmen to be ashamed of being English.

Any affection for England felt or especially expressed instantly got them branded as Little Englanders, parochial fanatics deaf to the delights of multi-culturalism. The glorious history of their country, which taught the world the meaning of just government, is depicted as nothing but a continuous chain of violent oppression, colonialism and racism. Their neighbourhoods are being turned into something they no longer recognise as England.

That creates a fertile soil for the sprouting of violent nationalistic demagogues like Tommy Robinson. They spread their poisonous seeds, but the earth is increasingly ready to receive them.

And even such traditional symbols of national identities as flags are becoming more ubiquitous – and not just when the England football team is involved in an international tournament. That’s an offence to our authorities, who are all complicit in indoctrinating public contempt for things English.

That’s why council officials in our two biggest cities have armed themselves with secateurs and started cutting down Union Jacks and St George’s Cross flags. And not just in those two cities: the same is going on in Newcastle, Bradford, Norwich, Swindon – all over the country.

Lest you think those officials suffer from an acute case of vexiphobia, put your concern to rest. It’s only British and English flags that they are averse to.

Thus, as they were taking down British flags, council officials in the East London area of Tower Hamlets and in Birmingham happily left Palestinian flags fluttering in the wind.

Now, Tower Hamlets has a Muslim population of 40 per cent, and all of Birmingham some 30 per cent. Still, the last time I looked, those places are still in England, not in Sinai, Gaza or the Arabian desert. If their streets are to be hung with any flags and bunting, these should be British or English, not Palestinian, Russian or North Korean.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s in nature. In politics, some actions produce an opposite but a much stronger reaction.

The action of stamping national pride in the dirt and, even worse, trying to offer an alien ideology as a replacement, may turn the quiet, deep-seated English patriotism into a thunderous, eventually violent nationalism.

When this happens, violent thugs like Tommy Robinson may end up sitting not in prison but in Parliament, and England will lose her admirable quality of moderation and a sense of balance. That means England will turn into something else, and whenever a nation suffers such metamorphoses, the result is never pleasant.

Why, before long a chap standing for a parliamentary seat in Fulham and Hammersmith will start ending every speech with “God bless the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!” And, what’s worse, no one will laugh.      

Everybody, his brother and second cousin thrice removed have been drawing historical parallels, comparing the current round of negotiations about the Ukraine with Munich or alternatively Yalta.

I understand the temptation, but I’m not going to succumb to it. As an innately lazy man, I’m not going to draw parallels, seek analogies or make comparisons. I’ll just let historical facts do all the work for me.

The following are excerpts from Hitler’s speeches delivered in the immediate runup to the Munich Agreement, signed on 30 September, 1938.

In those speeches, Hitler laid out the reasons for his claims on the Czech territory, specifically the ethnically German Sudetenland. The governments of Britain and France found the claims valid, or at least pretended they did.

They agreed to twist Czechoslovakia’s arm into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for ironclad security guarantees issued by Germany herself, and also by Britain, France and Italy.

You know what happened next, but I’ve said enough for the moment. Now it’s Adolf Hitler’s turn to have his say:

“The Czechs had never been an independent nation until peace treaties raised them to a position of unmerited, artificial superiority over minorities more numerous than they themselves are. In the Middle Ages, Bohemia was a German Duchy. The first German university was founded in Prague two hundred years before Queen Elizabeth.”

“The creation of a multi-national Czechoslovakian republic after the war was sheer madness. She had no characteristic of a nation, from neither an ethnological nor linguistic nor economic nor political standpoint.”

“For some twenty years, all Germans, and also other various ethnic groups in Czechoslovakia, have had to suffer the worst possible treatment, torments, economic annihilation. Above all, they have been denied any chance of self-fulfilment and also the right to national self-determination. Every attempt of the oppressed to improve their lot has failed in the face of the Czech crude urge to destroy. In my Reichstag speech, I declared that the German Reich is taking initiative in putting an end to any further persecution of Germans.”

Europe was at the time still reeling from the devastation of the First World War. That’s why Britain and France agreed to let Germany have the Sudetenland – the part of Czechoslovakia where impenetrable fortifications had been built, stronger by some evaluations than the Maginot Line.

But, Herr Reichskantzler, this stops at the Sudetenland, doesn’t it? But of course, swears Hitler: “These are my last territorial demands.” All he cares about is the fate of the Sudeten Germans. He isn’t a conqueror; he is a “liberator” who only wants to correct “the injustice of the Versailles Treaty” and unite all Germans in the same Reich. “I have no interest in the Czechs.”

Sighs of relief all around. The Czechs are unhappy, especially because all those ruinously expensive fortifications in the Sudetenland will fall into Hitler’s hands without any shots fired and without Germany suffering any casualties.

But they can’t take Hitler on by themselves. The support of Britain and France is vital – and it isn’t just offered. It’s solemnly guaranteed. Britain and France promise that they “will issue international security guarantees for the new borders of Czechoslovakia against an unprovoked aggression.”

The Czechs winced. The deal smelled foul, but at least they could take solace in the promise issued by two great powers to defend Czechoslovakia, what’s left of it.  

That ironclad security guarantee did its job – from 30 September, 1938, to 15 March, 1939, when the Nazis occupied the whole country. The Czech army, demoralised by Munich, didn’t put up any resistance. It could no longer count on the Sudeten fortifications to buy it enough time to set up a meaningful defence.

There’s no need for me to put in my penny’s worth, telling you, for example, that, mutatis mutandis, Putin says exactly the same things about the Ukraine as Hitler said about Czechoslovakia.

Nor do I have to remind you that Putin also claims he has no territorial designs on Europe; that the unoccupied part of Donbas the Russians demand is where Ukrainian fortifications are; that the US and Britain already issued security guarantees to the Ukraine in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in exchange for the country giving up her nuclear weapons.

All those parallel lines have already been drawn by bare facts. What I find both worrying and amusing is how reticent NATO countries are about their possible plans for enforcing such guarantees.

A lifetime spent in the world of Anglophone realities has heightened my interest in specifics, while increasing my distrust of generalities. Thus, after the Alaska fiasco, US spokesmen hinted at the possibility of using American army contingents as a peacekeeping force.

When I read about that, I burst out laughing and couldn’t stop until the next day, when Donald Trump said no such development was on the cards. For once, he was being completely honest.

For Putin to accept the presence of Western troops on the border is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with an automatic. One of the key mendacious pretexts he cites for the brutal attack on the Ukraine is NATO’s eastward expansion. The presence of Western troops on Russia’s border would spell the country’s crashing defeat – and Putin’s premature death ‘of natural causes’.

What else? Another mooted possibility is NATO’s planes enforcing a no-fly zone over the Ukraine. Lovely. But let’s imagine – all purely hypothetical of course – that several Russian bombers penetrate the Ukraine’s airspace and start firing missiles at Kiev.

Will NATO pilots be ordered to intercept the bombers and shoot them down? If you can believe that, you haven’t been keeping track of NATO’s cowardly response to every aggression committed by Putin’s Russia, specifically against the Ukraine from 2014 onwards.

Are we supposed to expect that, having refused to supply the Ukraine with enough weapons to repel the aggression, next time around NATO will start shooting Russian planes out of the sky? No? Then what do those guarantees mean, specifically? What – excuse my tautology – do they actually guarantee?

As I suggested before, I’m tempted to say it’s Munich all over again, but I don’t have to. The facts have said it for me.  

This is what I tried to explain to a French friend, but failed. It’s tempting to ascribe that failure to the inadequacy of my French, and God knows it’s inadequate enough.

However, my English is fairly competent, and yet I’ve been known to suffer similar defeats in an Anglophone environment. This encourages me to look for the problem elsewhere, starting with the observable fact that most people, including intelligent ones, don’t bother to ponder political concepts as deeply as it takes.

My French friend, a retired financier, is certainly nobody’s fool. Throughout his career, he always found some time away from fund management to read Le Figaro every day, and even a book or two every now and then.

Yet his interest in extraneous matters has always lacked the single-minded focus of unwavering concentration. Things like politics, philosophy, religion, art are merely hobbies to him, welcome diversions from debits, credits and market fluctuations.

That’s why, when I mentioned in two separate conversations that Starmer’s regime is at base Marxist and Putin’s fascist, all I got was an indulgent smile, a shaken head and a “mais non”. My interlocutor clearly thought I was an extremist devoid of the uniquely Gallic ability to appreciate nuances.

In fact, the difference between us is that I use ‘Marxist’ and ‘fascist’ as technical terms, while to him they are merely imprecise colloquial designations. ‘Marxist’ is fully synonymous with ‘Stalinist’, and ‘fascist’ with ‘Nazi’. (Thank God for small favours: at least he doesn’t describe conservatives as fascists.)

True, as my friend pointed out, Starmer isn’t guilty of mass murder, he hasn’t established a network of hard labour camps, he neither exterminates whole social classes nor imprisons his critics. Yes, he is a Left-leaning politician, but that doesn’t make him a Marxist. Calling him that, explained my friend, is emotive and unhelpful.

My interlocutor considers Putin a thoroughly nasty man, and he certainly doesn’t condone Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine. He is also aware of certain despotic tendencies in Russia’s domestic affairs, such as curbing free speech and imprisoning Putin’s critics.

Yet Putin boasts neither Treblinka nor Auschwitz, he neither gasses Jews nor castrates homosexuals, he doesn’t conduct experiments on people, he doesn’t even pour gallons of castor oil down the throats of dissidents. Yes, he is an aggressive, murderous authoritarian. But so were Russian tsars, and no one called them fascists.

We left it at that: a boozy dinner party isn’t an appropriate place to delve into philosophical depths. Yet this is a subject that can be elucidated by Thomistic metaphysics of substances and accidents.

Aquinas borrowed it from Aristotle because it explains the essential Catholic concept of transubstantiation. Since non-Catholics reject transubstantiation, they also reject St Thomas’s thoughts on this matter.

I’m not proposing to debate the intrinsic value of such metaphysics here. In this context, all I’m saying is that I find it a practically useful cognitive tool.

To sum up schematically, a species’ substance defines what it is. Substance is the unvarying, immutable property of a species, the key to its identity. Accidents, on the other hand, are various non-essential manifestations of the substance. They can come and go without the species losing its identity.

For example, a dog may be big or small, ferocious or cuddly, brown or black, fast or slow, with a loud bark or more of a yelp. All of these are accidents. The dog’s substance is that it’s a Canis lupus familiaris, and this is the essence of the very concept of dog.

All the characteristics my French friend ascribed to Marxism and fascism are accidents. For, in substance, Starmer is indeed a Marxist, and Putin is indeed a fascist. This will become clear once we’ve established the substance of Marxism and fascism, discarding in the process their self-vindicating rhetoric.

They are both secular cults preaching absolute, sacralised state power or its maximum approximation. Both seek to achieve it by fostering a revanchist hysteria of collective resentment against some alleged injustices committed over history to suppress the natural superiority of the controlled population.

The substantive difference between Marxism and fascism is that the former preaches resentment against allegedly oppressive classes, which have historically exploited the downtrodden but inherently superior masses. Fascism, on the other hand, defines the downtrodden yet superior masses in terms of a nation or race historically oppressed by other, inherently inferior, nations or races.

In substance, Marxism and fascism are close to each other. They are two different branches of the same tree, the mass rebellion against Christendom going by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Where they diverge, more or less, is in the derivative accidents.

Both are egalitarian, preaching universal equality before (and beneath) the state, as embodied in a small élite or sometimes a single leader.

But, while Marxism denies the formerly oppressive classes the otherwise equal status of all, fascism advocates the equality of every member of a nation or race, regardless of social class. Hence the two doctrines use different methods of imposing state control over the economy.

Marxism seeks to reduce the private sector to a minimum or, better still, to eliminate it altogether. Ideally, a Marxist state should own the entire economy, and this ideal is actively sought and sometimes closely approximated.

Fascism, on the other hand, tends to be corporatist. A fascist state controls the economy, but it doesn’t technically own it. In practical terms, while Marxists seek to dispossess private entrepreneurs (‘capitalists’), fascism effectively turns them into managers. Officially, they still own their businesses, but that status is contingent on their compliance with the state’s diktats.

Politically and culturally, both Marxism and fascism seek total control, or as much of it as is achievable within the limitations imposed by the current ethos. Marxism tends to restrict freedom of speech more than fascism. The former seeks to control self-expression in every area of life, whereas the latter allows its subjects some latitude – provided they don’t abuse it by criticising the state.

I hope you accept these attempts at precise yet unavoidably prolix definitions. If you do, I won’t have to go over Starmer’s and Putin’s regimes point by point, showing why the former is inherently Marxist and the latter fascist.

Putin operates in an ethos largely shaped by Marxism and hence conducive to fascism. All he had to do was re-direct public resentment away from alien classes and towards alien nations or blocs thereof.

Those Untermenschen have historically exploited saintly Russians, not letting them achieve the global supremacy to which their unmatched spirituality entitles them. And only the heroism of the Russian people has prevented those beasts from conquering and enslaving the country.

The collective passions are thus re-channelled into the conduit of racial superiority, demanding the nation’s historical due and seeking revenge against those who have kept the nation down.

The sacralisation of the supreme leader wasn’t especially difficult to impose either, what with several generations of Russians growing up accustomed to worship the mummified relics of another supreme leader. All the other accidents of the fascist substance followed naturally: brutal suppression of dissent, political murders, elimination of free media – and of course external aggression.

By contrast, Starmer operates in an environment not organically conducive to Marxism. Commitment to parliamentary democracy, free press and essential civic liberties are all obstacles in the way of Marxist purity. These can be systematically eroded, but they can’t be cast aside in one fell swoop.

But Starmer and his government get full marks for doing their best, given the limitations. If you read that bible of Marxism, The Communist Manifesto, you’ll see how much headway the Labour government is making towards the ideal outlined there.

Systematic debauchment of free speech and private wealth, education that indoctrinates rather than educating, the state extending its tentacles into every aspect of culture, politics and family life, increasingly subjugating the law to the state’s diktats, falsifying history by portraying it as nothing but continuous capitalist/colonial oppression, imposing economic policies that have little to do with the economy and much to do with revanchist Marxist levelling – all of these come straight out of that same playbook, The Manifesto.

In substance, Starmer’s government is as Marxist as Putin’s is fascist. These aren’t just any old words used pejoratively or otherwise. They are technical terms designating specific phenomena – and technical terms thrive on precise definitions, while dying a slow death when used loosely.

Now you see the problem I had with my French friend. It has taken me 1,400 words to make here the same point I tried to make in a maximum of 20 allowed by the etiquette of a noisy dinner party. Predictably, I failed, and it’s all my fault. I ought to have known better.  

When I left America in 1988, that was an idiomatic New York sneer at something worthless.

Since that time, most subway fares in New York have gone up to $2.90, which makes the idiom too unwieldy. I mean, who’s going to say “that and two-ninety will get you on the subway”? Too much of a mouthful, that.

Whatever the numeral in the expression, in those days it wasn’t often uttered in reference to American security guarantees. Europeans, especially those in NATO countries, were confident in the knowledge that, push come to shove, America will rush to their aid.

Many of those hopes were associated with the US nuclear umbrella. But not only that. Ever since the Cold War started, the US Army Court of Engineers had been busy turning West Germany into a terrain friendly to heavy American tanks.

New bridges and hundreds of miles of new roads were built, old roads were widened, old bridges fortified. Fulda Gap, the lowland corridor running from Thuringia to Frankfurt, was identified by Western strategists as a possible route for a Soviet invasion. Hence it was fortified to become a death trap for Soviet armour.

It wasn’t just America’s military might that helped the Europeans sleep peacefully, while making the Soviets toss and turn through the night. It was the certainty that, regardless of who was the US president, America would use her strength to repel a Soviet aggression.

However, while the subway fare in NYC has since been inflated almost three-fold, the value of the American security guarantee has gone down to a square root of sod-all. And it’s that New York native, Donald Trump, who is largely responsible for this crash.

I don’t know how many Ukrainians are familiar with the expression in the title above. But those who are must be uttering it to react against Trump’s latest bright idea of how to extinguish the Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Having had his emetic powwow with Putin, Trump has summoned Zelensky to the White House, where the Ukrainian will be given an offer he can’t accept. Perhaps ‘offer’ is the wrong word here.

Trump will issue an ultimatum to the Ukrainian president, and unlike his ultimatums to Russia, that one will be ironclad. The US will withdraw all support from the Ukraine and instead will form an economic alliance with Russia – unless Zelensky agrees to the peace terms on offer.

Russia will get all of Donbas, including the parts her troops have been unable to occupy despite suffering horrendous casualties. The Ukrainians have turned the unoccupied section of Eastern Ukraine into a fortified zone putting all those Maginot and Mannerheim Lines to shame.

If the Russians are ever able to take those areas, they’ll have to bury it under an avalanche of Russian corpses – tens if not hundreds of thousands of body bags travelling back east. And these are the fortifications that the Ukraine is supposed to cede without a shot. In exchange for what, exactly?

Here comes Trump’s lightbulb moment. Sign the deal, he’ll tell Zelensky, and the US – well, he, Donald Trump – will give the Ukraine NATO-style security guarantees. No, the Ukraine wouldn’t be able to join the alliance because that would upset Vlad too much. She’ll have to remain neutral in perpetuity.

But not to worry: the umbrella of Article 5 will cover the Ukraine as securely as it covers all full-fledged NATO members. Now, is that a great deal or what?

I hope Zelensky will be able to withstand the ensuing harangue delivered in the tones often heard on the NY subway and tell Trump in words of one syllable what he could do with his ‘deal’. For the umbrella in question is already leaking, and it may soon be folded altogether.

That is, if Trump’s earlier pronouncements on that subject are to be believed – and, when it comes to his denigration of America’s NATO allies, I find those statements utterly believable.

Trump has for years made his feelings about Article 5 known: as far as he is concerned, its application is strictly contingent on Europe’s behaviour. Unless America’s European allies “pay up” for their defence, that Article is null and void.

Moreover, if European NATO members fail to pay up, Trump will actually encourage Putin to attack them. As he put it in February 2024, Trump “would encourage the Russians to do whatever the hell they want.”

Encouraging the Russians to do “whatever the hell they want” goes beyond simply withdrawing American protection from NATO members. It means Trump would be prepared to form an alliance with an aggressive fascist regime threatening a global nuclear holocaust.

The US president is known for uttering incoherent and irresponsible phrases in the heat of the moment. It’s possible he didn’t mean that threat (and countless others in the same vein) the way it sounded. He might have merely tried to emphasise the need for Europe to take more of a hands-on approach to its defence. If so, the point is perfectly valid.

Europe has been criminally negligent for decades, relying on American protection rather than its own resources. Most European countries are belatedly coming to that realisation, largely because of Trump’s pressure. They are now prepared to commit up to five per cent of GDP to defence, which is higher than America’s own spend.

But translating that commitment into an actual defence capability will take years, especially if the US doesn’t go all out to help. If Trump refuses to recognise the provisions of Article 5 in the interim, that effectively gives Putin a carte blanche to pounce.

Thus, Zelensky has every reason to believe that the deal on the table means the Ukraine will have to cede much of her territory for nothing, or rather for a certainty that Russia will come back in force within a couple of years, possibly sooner. And America won’t lift a finger to help.

The Ukraine has tangible reasons to feel that Trump sees NATO as a yoke around America’s neck, something he’d happily shed to carve up Europe Yalta-style with Putin.

Commentators indulge in such historical analogies with abandon. Munich, Yalta, Tehran and Potsdam all get an airing, but this only goes to show how imprecise such parallels are.

Much closer to the current situation, both chronologically and substantively, is the 1973 Paris Peace Accord between the US and North Vietnam. That was supposed to end the Vietnam War, with South Vietnam keeping its sovereignty. In fact, that was America delivering South Vietnam to the communists on a platter, and the only surprise was that it took Hanoi two years to claim its prize.

Even closer and much more relevant to the Ukraine’s plight is another security guarantee that has turned out to be a sham. On 5 December 1994, the USA, Britain and Russia (!) signed the Budapest Memorandum, guaranteeing the Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for her relinquishing nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons were duly given up, and as for that security guarantee, the less said about it, the better. President Zelensky and all Ukrainians must be cursing the day on which their country tossed away her only real security blanket, agreeing to cover herself with nothing but a piece of paper worth even less than the New York subway fare.

Now, after 11 years of Russian aggression, escalating to a full-scale invasion on 24 February, 2022, the Ukraine is expected – let’s not mince words – to capitulate in exchange for another worthless security guarantee.

I don’t know how far Zelensky’s English goes, but I hope he’ll have the testicular fortitude to tell Trump exactly where to put his ‘deal’. That and a buck, okay, make it 2.9 bucks, will get you on the subway, Donald. You can scream till you’re blue in the face, but the Ukraine isn’t going to fall for another bogus ploy.

If, as I suspect, Zelensky’s English isn’t quite up to such idiomatic scratch, I’m hereby offering my services as ventriloquist. Free of charge.   

Some, however, will call it treason, and I may well join that chorus.

This morning, I had to look at the calendar to make sure I got the date right. Yes I did. It’s indeed 16 August. Eight days since the expiration of Trump’s latest ultimatum to Putin.

Trump proclaimed he was “pissed off” with Putin’s “bullshit”. He might have added a few of his favourite intensifiers, but these were omitted from the reports.

As a result, Trump issued an ultimatum. If Putin didn’t agree to a ceasefire by 2 September, no, make that 8 August, Trump would visit any number of Egyptian plagues on Russia and her trading partners.

The Ukraine would get a new batch of American weapons, implicitly including long-range cruise missiles. Russia would be hit with new sanctions from hell. And whoever keeps Russia’s economy afloat by buying her oil – are you listening, China and India? – would be thumped with secondary tariffs of 500 per cent. No make that 100 per cent. Whatever, high enough to hurt, was what Trump meant.

The U-Day came and went, but none of that happened. What did ensue was the bafflement of commentators who failed to see any rhyme or reason in Trump’s actions. The ultimatum sank into the Lethe, that river of oblivion. All the deadlines were forgotten too.

Instead of agreeing to stop his aggression, Putin accepted Trump’s invitation to lose his international pariah stigma, come in from the cold and be reinstated as a legitimate world statesman. He magnanimously agreed to fly to Alaska for a heart-to-heart with Trump.

The flight from Moscow to Anchorage took nine hours. The meeting itself, just three. And the subsequent press conference, 12 minutes. There wasn’t much to say, other than Putin repeating, and Trump pretending to believe, the same lies. Actually, Trump has met many world leaders, but he never sounded so servile as he did with Putin yesterday.

The meaningless noise was harmonised with the background of Russian missiles raining on Ukrainian cities. But the solo part was unmistakable: Putin was manipulating Trump like a spy master running a two-bit agent blackmailed with naughty off-focus photos.

I don’t know whether Trump has been coerced into doing Putin’s bidding. I’m sure the truth, one way or the other, will out eventually. However, even if Trump isn’t Putin’s agent, I can’t imagine what he’d be doing differently if he were.

Trump is manifestly accepting at face value Putin’s lies about the “root causes” of the war. The Russian chieftain was supposedly so worried about NATO’s eastward expansion that he simply had to lash out. As himself a man of his word, Putin couldn’t forgive America for breaking her promise not to draw Eastern Europe into the alliance.

It was in 1990 that US Secretary of State James Baker supposedly assured Gorbachev that the unification of Germany wouldn’t entail the expansion of NATO. Gorbachev’s subsequent accounts of that event differed. In some interviews he said the assurance had taken place; in some others, that it hadn’t.

One way or the other, no formal agreement was reached. It’s laughable that Russia, which has broken every treaty she has ever signed (full list available on request), would try to hold the West to an informal oral flourish that might or might not have taken place.

Everyone not doing Putin’s bidding for one reason or another knows that there exists only one “root cause” of the brutal Russian aggression: the Ukraine’s independence.

It’s not for nothing that Putin’s foreign minister Lavrov showed up at Anchorage with the letters CCCP on his T-shirt, the Russian for USSR. Amusingly, the outside two letters were covered by his gilet, with only CC visible, the Russian for the SS.

Some commentators had a good time with that, saying that the latter acronym was closer to the truth. Such fun can be had, but the actual reality is even worse: Putin is dead set on rebuilding the Soviet empire. This noble aim is impossible to achieve without the Ukraine returning to the fold as the bigger and more important version of Lukashenko’s Belarus.

It’s not about getting a part of the Ukraine’s territory. It’s about turning the Ukraine as a whole into Russia’s stooge, a sham ‘republic’ run by a quisling like Yanukovych or Medvedchuk.

Anyone who thinks Putin genuinely wants peace, especially at a time his troops are inching forward over piles of their comrades’ corpses, is sorely misguided. What he wants is Trump’s acquiescence in pursuing that objective. And the Alaska travesty showed yet again that this is exactly what Putin is getting.

“The war wouldn’t have happened had Trump been president in 2022,” lied Putin, and Trump beamed from ear to ear. That’s exactly what he has been saying for years.

Of course, he has also been saying he’ll end the war in 24 hours (three days, three months, six months and so on), but Putin never confirmed those deadlines. He did confirm that Don Trump could have prevented – and now can stop – the killing. What further proof of Trump’s genius can anyone, including the Nobel Committee, possibly want?

Putin was playing Trump’s ego like a violin virtuoso plying his trade. That favour was repaid: both the Ukraine and Europe were reduced to the role of extras floating in and out behind the two stars of the show.

The only tangible result of the meeting was that, courtesy of Trump, Putin shed the striped clothes of a war criminal under an international arrest warrant. Overnight, he regained the status of a world leader, equal partner to Trump if perhaps not quite yet to Xi.

That was his reason for going to Alaska, but Putin’s reason was Trump’s treason. He betrayed the Ukraine, NATO, the West in general. He allowed the fascist regime threatening Europe to gain time for continuing its aggression, with all ultimatums forgotten, all deadlines buried.

Now Trump will meet Zelensky, trying no doubt to bully him into surrender. He’ll then probably accept Putin’s invitation to have another pointless chinwag, in Moscow this time. There we’ll go, round and round, to and fro, while the Ukraine bleeds white.

Eventually, she’ll bleed out, with Putin claiming his spoils and Trump his Nobel Peace Prize. And the epigram by the Elizabethan poet John Harrington will be vindicated yet again: “Treason doth never prosper? What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

As Trump and Putin meet in Anchorage to carve up the Ukraine, I can’t help remembering the KGB myth involving Alaska.

As a career KGB officer of a certain age, Putin certainly remembers it, as I’m sure he remembers many others. His parent organisation was known for indulging in that genre on a vast scale.

One of the few words Russian contributed to English is ‘disinformation’. The components of the word are Latin in origin, but the concept is Russian, something to make that nation proud.

Much of KGB disinformation was meant for internal consumption, not just to dupe the West. I was a little boy when I was exposed to a KGB myth I still remember.

Soviet troops invaded Hungary in 1956 to drown the anti-Communist revolution in blood. As our schoolteachers, all of them willing conduits for KGB lies, explained to us, that action was in fact a pre-emptive strike. West German and American troops had been poised at the Hungarian border, ready to pounce on our fraternal regime, and only prompt action by our heroic army saved the day.

I don’t recall whether I believed that lie at my mature age of nine, but I probably did. I definitely believed some of the others.

They were assiduously spread to reassure the people that their abject poverty wasn’t as bad as all that. The West might have had a higher standard of living on average, but that level was made up of contrasts between a few fat cats and many paupers.  

And anyway, some, if not quite all, Soviet products were superior to any Western equivalents. For example, every Soviet citizen of my generation knew for sure, and was happy to repeat to all and sundry, that Soviet ice cream was the best in the world.

The KGB created that myth secure in the knowledge that no one would be able to disprove it by a comparison test.

Most Soviet citizens weren’t allowed to travel abroad. Those few who were deemed sufficiently trustworthy to be granted that privilege weren’t going to abuse it by contradicting the KGB. They knew which side their bread was buttered.

When I grew up, I no longer believed anything the authorities said on any important subject. But the unsurpassed excellence of Soviet ice cream was such a trivial point that I never bothered to question it. Then, in 1973, I found myself in Rome, and the first taste of gelato shattered that myth to smithereens.

Another one involved Armenian brandy, which, according to another myth, was superior to any alcoholic beverage available in the West. Supposedly, both Winston Churchill and the Queen wouldn’t even consider drinking anything else. They had to have crates of that rather revolting treacly beverage shipped to London, for otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to slake their thirst.

Again, that was a free hit for the KGB – drinks like French cognac and Scotch whisky were unavailable to common folk. The same went for Soviet sparkling wine, which they larcenously called ‘champagne’ (just as they called their brandy ‘cognac’).

Even when marked ‘dry’, it was nauseatingly sweet and had bubbles the size of peas. Typically, every sip would get stuck in one’s gullet and create an unpleasant reflux – at best.

Some 30 years ago, a friend gave me a bottle of Sovetskoye shampanskoye he had brought from Russia. Ever since, I’ve been using it as a meat mallet, trying not to pound too hard lest it explode in my face.

Yet another myth involved the Russian language, supposedly by far the richest in the world. Actually, the English vocabulary has roughly three times more words than Russian, but that fact wasn’t widely advertised. Something else was, and that myth actually had a kernel of truth to it.

It concerned swearwords, and there I can testify to the relative paucity of English. A Russian speaker can express most ideas, including some rather involved ones, using nothing but four-letter words in different combinations and with variable affixation.

You may think that isn’t much to be proud of, but every little bit helps. That’s why the KGB insisted on spreading the news about the superlative quality and variety of Russian obscenities.

That part of it was actually true, but they also said that Anglophone capitalists, frustrated by their own puny language, routinely swore in Russian. Having now lived in English-speaking countries for 52 years, I know that claim was false, as I actually knew it when I still lived in Moscow. But many of my former countrymen insisted on repeating that nonsense, and some still do.

The myth relevant to current events involved Alaska. The government of Alexander II sold it to the US in 1867, for today’s equivalent of $130 million. Nicholas II, Alexander’s grandson, lived to regret that transaction.

In 1896, local miners discovered gold in the Klondike, which started a major gold rush. The sum those Yankees paid for the largest peninsular in the Western Hemisphere began to feel like a slap in the Russian face. And the slap became a punch when vast deposits of oil were found in Alaska in the 1960s.

But not to worry, went another KGB myth, which everyone believed. Russia didn’t actually sell Alaska to the US. That risible sum paid not for a purchase but only for a 100-year lease. The lease was to run out in 1967, and as a child I often wondered whether the Soviet Union would reclaim Alaska when I turned 20.

Long before that age, I knew that Alaska gained statehood in 1959, which made it unlikely that the US government would honour the conditions of that lease. It was only closer to the supposed deadline that I found out that the mythical lease was indeed a sale.

I wonder if Putin will test Trump’s knowledge of such arcana by suggesting that Alaska rightfully belongs to Russia. He is certain to make that claim about the Ukraine, and – call me a pessimist – I doubt Trump will reject that myth outright.

P.S. Actually, Trump did say in his press conference that he was going to Russia to meet Putin. Was it a slip or a reflection of an agreement on the table?

People shouldn’t complain that police aren’t doing enough to combat rampant shoplifting and burglary. Unlike such naysayers, our police and the government they serve understand the inner logic of the modern state.

Treating shoplifting as an innocent prank and burglary as a minor offence is a faithful reflection of that logic, and there’s only one way our state could stop such crimes: making them legal, so they wouldn’t be considered crimes.

Today’s policing and crime tend to grow in parallel. Though England is being policed at a level that would make Robert Peel envious (the Met, for example, had 895 constables under him; today, it has 33,000), an Englishman’s person is increasingly unsafe in the streets, and his property is at the mercy of any derelict who can smash a window and shove his tattooed arms inside.

Contradiction? None whatsoever.

The modern state’s genetic code compels it to expand its power over individuals ad infinitum, regardless of such incidentals as the will of its subjects. That’s why, when it destroys the legal foundations of the West, the state is acting in character.

Governments are no longer there to protect society and individuals within it. They are out to protect the sacred cow of statism from whose udders they have sucked out what passes for their conscience.

For that reason, a crime committed by one individual against another is of little consequence to them, and yet petty crimes against the state, such as driving after a sip of wine too many or neglecting to pay customs duty on a watch, take on an almost religious significance, eliciting swift and sure punishment.

While failing to protect us, British laws also deny us the right to self-defence. If a burglar breaks in, we aren’t allowed to defend our property with anything other than our bare hands, useless against the murderous hammy palms of yet another ‘victim of social injustice’ who is unlikely to be overburdened with concerns about the sanctity of human life.

Yet a man has a God-given duty to protect himself, his family and his property against criminal intrusion. This always was an unshakeable certitude in Christendom, but old certitudes no longer apply. Western countries are now run not by statesmen but by glossocracies, wielding wokery like a club. The glossocratic logic they apply runs roughly as follows:

A criminal, say a serial shoplifter or a burglar, isn’t really to blame for his actions. He is plying his trade, like anybody else.

Of course, his trade is slightly naughty when compared with that of a butcher, a baker or a candlestick-maker. But the poor man isn’t to blame for plying it. He grew up needy and downtrodden, and it’s we, society at large, who are to blame for his plight.

The house or shop he robs belongs to a person who has amassed greater wealth because he was privileged. And anyway, though we shouldn’t talk about this out loud, the burglar is in the same business as the state: re-distributing wealth.

Burglary is a form of income tax, and the burglar merely collects the excess that has evaded the HMRC’s net. Because he hasn’t been authorised to act in this capacity, he deserves to have his wrists slapped. If he is caught, and we shouldn’t go out of our way to catch him, he may be tried, perhaps even convicted. But ideally he shouldn’t spend any time in prison, even if this isn’t his first offence.

The owner of the house doesn’t have much to complain about. His possessions are insured, so he can always buy another TV and replace the smashed window without suffering a great fiscal loss. Therefore, he shouldn’t resist the poor man breaking into his house. If he does, the burglar may have to defend himself, as he is entitled to do, and the whole thing may turn nasty.

If it’s the burglar who initiates violence, unlikely as it may sound, then the owner has the right to defend himself, too. But this right isn’t a licence to kill.

The force used by the owner must be exactly commensurate with the force he is trying to repel. Thus, if the burglar brandishes a baseball bat (shops selling those are doing brisk business in the UK, even though nobody plays baseball), the owner is allowed to use a baseball bat in self-defence. If the burglar pulls a knife, the owner is allowed to use a knife.

If the burglar brandishes a gun, the owner – well, let’s not get carried away. The owner still isn’t allowed to have a loaded gun handy, so he shouldn’t have provoked the poor young man into resorting to such egregious extremes.

If the owner does use a force that exceeds whatever he is threatened with, then he is the criminal and the burglar is the victim. If the owner, for example, panics and kills the burglar with a meat cleaver when none is found in the burglar’s possession, then the owner shall be convicted of manslaughter.

There goes another certitude, according to which a criminal violating a citizen’s property isn’t entitled to the benefit of the doubt. He may have broken in ‘just’ to steal a TV set, not to rape and murder. But the burden of proof should be on him.

However, a frightened, confused owner of the house, awakened in the middle of the night to find a gorilla-like stranger in his bedroom, has no time to grant the intruder to produce such proof. He has to assume the worst.

The owner’s duty to himself and his family is to assume that the intruder has come to do murder. Even if murderous intent is unlikely, the risk is always there, and that isn’t a risk a law-abiding man should be expected to take with his life.

This ancient certitude, however, flies in the face of modern times by negating the logic above. A man who takes a swing at a burglar or a shoplifter presents a greater threat to the state than the criminal does. The former assails the glossocratic premise of the modern state; the latter merely attacks individuals.

These observations apply to all our recent governments, regardless of which party formed them. But our government today is latently Marxist, which is why it’s also taking  profitable lessons from totalitarians.

Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks treated enemies of the state with murderous efficiency, while petty criminals often got away with no more than avuncular admonishment. The Soviets, for example, developed the concept of ‘the socially close’ to describe criminals of proletarian or peasant descent.

The concept was expounded in detail by Anton Makarenko, manager of the first Soviet colony for juvenile delinquents. The underlying assumption was that, because they were ‘socially close’ to the state, young criminals, many of them murderers, ought to be rehabilitated, not punished.

“It is only the intelligentsia, children of the upper classes, priests and landowners who are beyond redemption,” wrote Makarenko.

While today’s bureaucrats are unlikely to have read this, they proceed from similar assumptions. An illiterate criminal in no way jeopardises state power. The lout’s victim may.

Hence, every new law will favour the criminal over the victim. Even if an ancient law remains on the books, and an attempt at enforcement is made, the state will make sure that whenever possible an arrest won’t result in a conviction, or a conviction in imprisonment.  

Instead of protecting the ‘rights of Englishmen’, the law is becoming a weapon of mass destruction in the escalating class war. Except that only one side is fighting it.

There’s nothing more annoying than foreigners criticising Britain for exactly the same things as Britons do. Words like ‘glass houses’ and ‘stones’ come to mind as if by themselves.

American politicians especially like to adopt a hectoring tone when talking about Britain and to the British. Many Americans in general feel they’ve solved every little problem of life, which makes it not just their right but their duty to teach others how to do the same.

J.D. Vance in particular, a hillbilly bully from a place in Ohio no one has ever heard of, is deeply concerned about our deficit of free speech. So deeply, in fact, that one may think he has nothing else to worry about.

Mind your own business, Mr Vice President, which is far from being good. Of course, Britain suffers from an advanced case of wokery, which does put clamps on free speech. But the original contagion came from the US and its campuses, where the very term and concept of ‘political correctness’ originated.

In fact, I first heard the expression from my son, at that time a student at Berkeley. That was only putting a name to a phenomenon I myself observed in the early 1970s, when I moved to America. The US was already at that time a lot more woke than Britain was in the late 1980s, when I settled there.

For example, the war against masculine pronouns and the word ‘man’ was already raging in 1974, when I was working at NASA. I was told in no uncertain terms that there were no men and women working there, only ‘persons’, and all ‘persons’ with the same job description should be paid the same regardless of the quantity and quality of work they did.

By the time I moved to London in 1988, wokery had become stifling in America. I was amazed how freely Britons expressed themselves on such thin-ice subjects as sex and race. One could hear jokes on TV that would have been impossible in the US even a generation earlier.

Alas, Britons only ever borrow Americans’ vices, not their virtues. Step by step, that particular vice infected Britain, but there was a time lag, some 10 years or thereabouts. However, it wasn’t as if wokery had left American shores behind when it migrated to Britain.

Talking to my American friends, especially those in academe, I get a distinct impression that things are no better there than here, and could even be worse. It’s those glass houses again. I wish Vance just shut up.

Now the US State Department, having taken a break from paying lickspittle to such bastions of freedom as China and Saudi Arabia, has issued a statement citing “credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression” in Britain.

There are “specific areas of concern” involving curbs on “political speech deemed ‘hateful’ or ‘offensive’.” Whose concerns? The State Department’s? Surely they can’t imply that things in Britain have got so bad that she can no longer be seen as America’s ally?

The report singled out laws establishing ‘safe access zones’ around abortion clinics in England and Wales: “These restrictions on freedom of speech could include prohibitions on efforts to influence others when inside a restricted area, even through prayer or silent protests.”

They were referring to a specific case last year, when a praying Christian was arrested for breaching such a zone and refusing to move on. An outrageous case no doubt, but not one as straightforward as those Americans think.

My position on the issue is that abortion ought to be outlawed, and such clinics shouldn’t exist. I also think that heatwaves like the current one shouldn’t exist, and rain should only ever come down when it’s necessary for agriculture.

Alas, rain refuses to come when it’s needed and, when it does come, it sometimes floods vast areas. Also, heatwaves exist – and so, much to my regret, do abortion clinics. Unfortunately, abortion isn’t against the law, and neither are the places in which those offensive procedures are administered.

There have been many instances of activists harassing abortion clinics, threatening those who worked there with violence and vandalising their cars. Eventually, the police had to establish those quarantine zones, and anyone who breaches them breaks the law.

Some of such activists scream abuse at the personnel of those clinics, some – such as the gentleman the State Department had in mind – offer a prayer for the souls of abortionists and those they abort. But some others may well pack a firebomb, which has been known to happen in the US.

This isn’t a free-speech issue. For example, my right to oppose abortion has never been curtailed, even though over the years I must have written dozens of articles on the subject. A law exists and, as the Romans used to say, dura lex, sed lex. In a country ruled by law, my disagreement with a law doesn’t mean I’m free to break it.

Another touching concern expressed by the State Department is about violence “motivated by anti-Semitism”. This is indeed a problem, although again I fail to see how it is any of America’s official concern. Any American or, for that matter, anyone else, is welcome to express disgust at this appalling problem, but the State Department’s job is diplomacy, not moral outrage.

America is fortunate in that most migrants to her shores don’t espouse a religion preaching hostility to Jews. God knows there are many anti-Semites among Christians too, but when they express such feelings publicly and especially violently, they do so in spite of their religion. Muslims do it because of theirs.

Throughout Europe, the frequency of anti-Semitic incidents is directly proportional to the percentage of Muslims in the country. Consecutive British governments have been complicit in letting swarms of alien migrants into the country, but this is our problem, not America’s.

If Americans want to help, perhaps they should think a bit longer next time they feel like attacking a Muslim country than they did before their ill-advised invasion of Iraq in 2003. That created a tsunami-strength wave of Muslim migration to Europe and Britain, making one think that particular hornets’ nest should perhaps have been left unpoked.

Another popular complaint one hears from Americans is that major British cities are so crime-infested that God-fearing Americans are afraid to go out after dark. I wonder if they have similar fears in New York, where the murder rate is four times that of London.

Nor has His Majesty’s Government felt compelled to use the army as a crime-fighting force, as the US administration has done in Washington DC. Much as I’d love to watch the paras of the 82^nd Airborne dropping on the South Bronx, I’m not sure about using the army to do police work.

But it’s America’s business, not mine, and it’s tactless for outlanders to offer unsolicited advice to other countries. I wish those Americans extended the same courtesy to us, at least in their official communications on record.    

The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy describes Mill as “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century”.

That may well be true. Yet influence can be good or bad, and I find most of Mill’s ideas repugnant. But not all of them.

Mill’s works, especially his essay On Liberty, can be legitimately regarded as the scripture of modern liberalism, its New Testament building on, and deviating from, the legacy of the eighteenth-century Whigs.

Hence Mill’s advocacy of placing definite limits on state power, of free speech and even of private education, which he correctly judged as essential to fostering diversity of opinion. Yet all those good things aren’t philosophy but only some of its derivatives.

These particular derivatives of Mill’s philosophy are benign, but the philosophy itself was flawed. In fact, most perversions of today’s modernity can be traced back to Mill’s basic ideas.

For example, while critical of state interference in general, Mill argued that it was justified when it promoted and enforced Enlightenment egalitarianism.

Thus he was in favour of inheritance taxation because equality was to him a higher principle than property rights, and taxing inheritance prevented some people from getting a head start in life. But then Mill contradicted himself by opposing progressive taxation, partly redeeming himself in my eyes.

Progressive taxation, he argued, was “a mild form of robbery” because it penalised hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence. True. But exactly the same could be said about inheritance taxes, which penalise the same man’s family by not allowing them the full benefit of his hard work, enterprise and fiscal prudence.

The clue to understanding Mill is his statement that he regarded “utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions.” Actually, that idea was neither good nor original.

It was a development of utilitarianism, the trend championed by Jeremy Bentham in the generation previous to Mill’s. Mill’s thought was more nuanced than Bentham’s “greatest good of the greatest number”, but ultimately as capable of injecting toxins into subsequent ideas.

Utilitarianism severed every strand of the ganglion linking society to Christendom with its concept of natural law and absolute moral truths.

According to Mill, “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant… .”

Hence any individual must have “the freedom to pursue tastes (provided they do no harm to others), even if they are deemed ‘immoral’.” This sounds good, but it leaves a logical hole through which can creep in “the tyranny of the majority”, the term Mill borrowed from Tocqueville.

Define harm, as any conservative thinker would insist. If you can’t, who can? Since we no longer recognise religious authority, this has to leave the state as the arbiter of what constitutes “harm to others”. And the state is happy to oblige.

In a series of statutes, the British state has for all intents and purposes equated physical and psychological harm. This reminds me of the spoof of country and western songs my Yankee friends and I sang in Texas years ago: “Honey, you broke my heart, and I broke your jaw.”

A broken heart is becoming in Britain a moral and legal equivalent of a broken jaw. Hurting someone’s feelings may still be a lesser offence than hurting someone’s body, but it may be treated as a crime nevertheless.

Hence various statues, most of recent coinage, that penalise ‘hate speech’. Our laws now say that “something is a hate incident if the victim or anyone else think it was motivated by hostility or prejudice based on: disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation.”

We can ridicule this nonsense to our heart’s content. We could say, for example, that surely there ought to exist more objective criteria of criminality than the opinion of a passerby who overheard one man calling another ‘a fat bastard’.

But this illustrates the intellectual paucity of liberal thought, as exemplified in this case by Mill’s theory of harm. Loose lips may sink ships, but loose definitions sink laws – and ultimately justice.

Mill himself laid down the directional vector of his ideas. In his later work Socialism, he waxed downright Marxist.

The prevalence of poverty in contemporary capitalist societies was “a failure of the social arrangements”. This state of affairs couldn’t be condoned as being the result of individual failings. An attempt to do so represented a denial of “an irresistible claim upon every human being for protection against suffering.”

Subsequent history has shown that the liberal state is more likely to cause suffering than protect “every human being” from it. Loose definitions again: Mill neither defines suffering nor cites the source of that “irresistible claim”. That’s slapdash thought.

This champion of the individual ended up preaching collectivism at its most soaring, something I’d argue to be the only direction in which utilitarianism can go. Mill rejected the Christian view of morality as a matter of free will, with the Church doing its best to help the individual make the right moral choice conforming to its teaching.

That’s a losing proposition, according to Mill. Society should concentrate not on making individuals moral, but on ensuring that a generation is moral as a whole.

Translating this dictum into today’s realities, our generation is generally moral because it believes in animal rights (another one of Mill’s pet ideas, as it were), global warming, hate speech as a crime worse than theft – and so on, all the way down the list. Some individuals whose ideas of morality may be different and therefore inferior can’t spoil the otherwise serene moral landscape.

The same goes for Mill’s economic ideas, which didn’t start out as socialist but ineluctably moved in that direction. Bothered by inequality of wealth, Mill believed it was the state’s task to institute economic and social policies that promote equality of opportunity.

This has become the favourite shibboleth of modern egalitarians who develop Mill’s ideas. They acknowledge that equality of result is an indigestible pie in the sky. However, they insist that equality of opportunity is a goal that’s both laudable and achievable. In fact, it’s more or less the other way around.

The state can promote equality of result by enforced levelling downwards (the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level).

It’s possible to confiscate all property and pay citizens barely enough to keep them alive (this was more or less achieved in the country where I grew up). It’s possible to put in place the kind of dumbed-down schools that will make everybody equally ignorant (this has been more or less achieved in the country where I grew old).

What is absolutely impossible is to guarantee equality of opportunity. A child with two parents will have better opportunities to get on in life than a child raised by one parent. A boy who grew up surrounded by books will have a greater opportunity to get ahead intellectually than his coeval who grew up surrounded by discarded syringes and crushed beer cans.

A girl who goes to a good private school will have greater opportunities in life than one who attends a local comprehensive (closing private schools down, an idea Mill rejected but his heirs champion, wouldn’t redress this imbalance: middle-class parents will find a way of supplementing their daughter’s education either abroad or at home).

A child of two professional tennis players will have a better chance of becoming good at the game than a child of two chartered accountants. A young businessman who inherits a fortune will have a better opportunity of earning a greater fortune than someone who has to start from scratch (again, confiscatory inheritance laws, which Mill didn’t really mind, will fail: as with all unjust regulations, people will either find a way around them or flee).

The title above is jocular: I don’t really blame Mill for all our ills. Although a brilliant and erudite man, he was as much a product of wrong philosophies as their originator.

But the philosophies were fundamentally wrong, and we are all reaping the poisonous harvest of ideas planted by Enlightenment thinkers. Such as John Stuart Mill.