Category: Blog

If a democracy can elect a Marxist government, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with the democracy.

This conclusion may sound uncomfortable and politically suspect, but it has more to do with logic than with politics.

The very essence of Marxism is transferring power to the ‘people’, which is the Marxist jargon for a small group of bureaucrats running a tyrannical, omnipotent state.

However, grudgingly allowing that modern democracy has veered a long way away from the word’s etymological origin, even in its manipulated form it’s still rather different from Marxism.

Democracy isn’t exactly bondage, whereas, if Marxism is different from slavery at all, it’s only in legalistic technicalities.

We are therefore looking at a difficult paradox: democratic people may democratically vote for de facto putting an end to democracy. In other words, free people may opt for slavery and rape the spirit of the law without breaking its single letter.

It’s impossible to argue against such a possibility without also arguing against democracy, as it now is.

Note that so far I haven’t made a single political or indeed moral argument. I’m simply staying in the domain of logic, where it’s irrelevant whether we think Marxism is virtuous or evil.

What is relevant is that no viable system can have a self-destruct button to be pushed by majority decision. If it has such a button, and within easy reach, it’s no longer viable.

Hence the shelf of democracy must come with bookends, demarcating the allowable extension in either direction. Should such restraints be firmly planted, the electorate could still go wrong, at times terribly wrong. But it won’t be allowed to commit political suicide.

Such bookends, usually called checks and balances, can take different shapes. It doesn’t really matter which as long as the public’s ability to self-harm is securely kept within reasonable limits.

History provides ample empirical proof that, no matter how much we adore democracy of any type, it’ll ultimately fail in the absence of a clearly defined limit on its power.

Thus the perfectly democratic Athenian constitution of Solon didn’t last as long as the rather authoritarian Spartan constitution of Lycurgus, wherein the king was separated from his subjects by an aristocratic council. According to Plutarch, that council added stability to the commonwealth like the ballast in a ship.

In post-Hellenic Europe, it’s England’s constitution, developed over centuries from its medieval precursor the Witenagemot, that has provided the best balance among various mechanisms of government.

The royal power of the crown at one end, the elected power of the Commons at the other and the unelected power of the Lords as the mediator in between created by far the oldest and most successful constitution in the world.

England sometimes went tragically wrong, but there was enough margin of error built in for the commonwealth still to survive without abandoning too many of its basic principles. Democracy functioned because it wasn’t dogmatically democratic.

The very real danger that we’re likely to have a Marxist government within months, possibly weeks, is a tell-tale sign that the system has become irreparably flawed: its inner logic no longer works.

If we realise that the system is sputtering to a grinding halt, diagnosing the problem isn’t unduly hard. Obviously whatever kept the system ticking along come what may is no longer there.

Our democracy is no longer balanced. The bookends have been removed; the books have fallen down on the floor.

What we’re observing now is a result of the systematic constitutional vandalism perpetrated by successive governments, most prominently, though far from exclusively, by that led by Blair.

The House of Lords has been debauched to a point where it doesn’t, nor indeed is able to, counterbalance the elected power of the Commons, whereas the crown lost all executive power long ago.

Though Blair’s government is especially culpable in this perversion of the country’s entire political history, sniping at the hereditary chamber has been a popular sport for at least my rather long lifetime. (The temptation to say ‘for 200 years’ is strong, but I’ll desist for fear of sounding too controversial.)

The House is Lords is unelected and undemocratic, scream democracy hounds. Of course it is, should have been the proper reply. That’s its whole point, for unelected means immune to political pressures. The upper House is there to prevent the commonwealth from committing inadvertent suicide.

Alas, we’re no longer brave enough to proffer this reply. Hence, rather than empowering the people, democracy has become a deadly weapon in the hands of those who wish to empower a wicked elite, relying inter alia on an endless expansion of the franchise and systematic dumbing down of the populace.

The larcenous syllogism hammered into the increasingly ignorant heads of the electorate seems unassailable: democracy is uniquely good; democracy means one vote for every man, woman and increasingly child; ergo, any other mechanism of government is bad even if it’s only a part of the political mix.

One can remain unbiased and dispassionate only for so long, and at this point I’ll go so far as to say that the notion of a Marxist government ruling Britain isn’t just illogical but evil.

I hope there’s enough residual spunk and sagacity left among the British to prevent this catastrophe from happening. However, the destiny of a nation shouldn’t hinge on the tenuous hope that the electorate will stop just short of suicide.

There should be sufficient safety mechanisms built into the system to be activated automatically when self-destruction beckons. Yet such cut-off valves are manifestly missing in our democracy-run-riot.

If they still existed, we wouldn’t be anxiously checking the current standing of what has the rich potential of becoming the most evil government elected in a European country since 1933.

For someone who knows Russia, no news about, or especially from, that country is really news.

Yet one understands our media milliners’ need to flog old hats as scoops – same old, same old isn’t an approach likely to sell many newspapers.

However, sexing news up shouldn’t mean misleading the public, which line is alas overstepped much too often. Witness the title and opening paragraph of today’s Times article Russia Rewrites Nuclear Rule Book to Fire First.

And then: “President Putin would have the power to launch nuclear first strikes under plans approved by the Russian parliament.”

Amazing how many flagrant falsehoods a mere two sentences can contain.

A virginal reader coming to this item cold would be within his right to form at least two conclusions. First, that first strikes hadn’t been part of Russia’s strategic doctrine until this momentous decision. Second, that without the parliament’s approval Putin wouldn’t be able to launch one.

In the reverse order, Russia has no parliament in the sense in which a virginal Times reader understands the term, a sovereign legislative body passing all laws and holding the executive to account.

The Duma is neither sovereign nor legislative; it neither passes any laws nor holds anyone to account. Just like the Supreme Soviet was in the USSR, it’s a rubberstamping body created to dupe the uninitiated into believing that Russia is ruled by law.

Unlike the Supreme Soviet, it has the additional function of providing parliamentary immunity for international criminals, such as Alexei Lugovoi who murdered Alexander Litvinenko in what may be described as a nuclear first strike on Britain.

To eliminate that falsehood, the headline should have simply said “Putin may launch nuclear first strikes if he feels like it.”

That would have been a move in the right direction, but the other falsehood would still have remained. For the Soviet, and then Russian, military doctrine has always been based on an offensive first strike, with nuclear weapons if necessary.

And renouncing that possibility within the framework of various treaties has always been nothing but an exercise in deception, what the Russians call disinformation.

Every disarmament treaty either the USSR or its successor has ever signed has been a ruse designed to gain strategic advantage. The entire resources of that evil regime have always been dedicated to cheating on every such agreement, from SALT I and II to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in the halcyon days of perestroika.

To its credit, the Trump administration didn’t get intoxicated on the heady brew of disinformation. Where the previous administrations were too cowardly to point at the ace sticking out of the cardsharp’s sleeve, the Trump lot did just that by announcing their decision to pull out of the INF.

They correctly stated that the Russians were deploying the very weapons banned by the agreement, which logically rendered it null and void.

Like the thief who screams “Stop thief!” louder than anyone else, the Russians upped the volume of their nuclear threats which already was deafening. An American withdrawal “wouldn’t be left without an answer from our side”, threatened the Botox Boy.

He then narrowed his fish eyes and gave the Russians the good news. In case of a nuclear holocaust they’d go straight to heaven, presumably bypassing purgatory.

The Botox Boy didn’t specify the number of virgins gagging for the righteous up there, but he did say that Russia’s enemies would go to hell without even enough time to repent their sins.

Having thus taken a page out of Islam’s book, Putin then explained under what conditions he’d push the button for a nuclear first strike. Russia, he said, would retaliate with nuclear weapons if attacked with “hypersonic and non-nuclear strategic weapons”.

Allow me to translate from disinformation into English. If NATO resists Russia’s aggression against Eastern Europe, specifically the Baltics, the Botox Boy will unleash hell.

For an F-22 fighter-bomber firing an air-to-ground missile at a Russian tank column advancing on Estonia may be construed to fall under the Botox Boy’s description of strategic weapons.

In case the meaning got lost in translation, the Russian government confirmed that the announcement should be taken as a warning to Eastern European countries hosting NATO bases.

“These countries should understand that we won’t simply look at that through our fingers – we will react,” said the Russian defence spokesman.

But the existence of those bases is in itself a reaction – to a growing Russian threat. All NATO installations in that region are strictly defensive, including that particular burr under Russia’s blanket, the nuclear shield in Romania.

Russia’s announcement is tantamount to a demand for the unilateral disarmament of Eastern Europe, starting with the three Baltic members of NATO.

Should NATO accede, it would have only two possible responses to a Russian aggression: an all-out strategic nuclear strike or surrender. Both would be catastrophic; neither is acceptable.

The Russians are screaming that NATO bases in Eastern Europe present a threat to them. I’d say they’re no more threatening than the shotgun I might keep under my bed. It’ll only ever get fired if my family is under attack. My good neighbours have nothing to fear from either barrel.

By his own admission, in his youth the Botox Boy was a “common street thug”. That he remains, in every word he utters and every action he takes.

Take it from someone who had to grow up surrounded by Russian street thugs: overwhelming force is the only language they understand. One  either outbullies the bully or falls victim to him.

I do hope NATO follows the first course, preparing, should the need arise, to thwart the thug with a punch on the nose. As part of such preparations, let’s abandon the silly pretence that we’re dealing with a legitimate country complete with parliaments, courts and generally good intentions.

Putin’s Russia is a criminal organisation functioning according to the laws of the mean streets. It should be dealt with as such.

An arsonist in charge of a fire brigade? A paedophile running an orphanage? A kleptomaniac managing a jewellery shop?

This may be preposterous conjecture. But these days reality outpaces fantasy by a wide margin.

To wit, Alexander Prokopchuk of Russia’s Interior Ministry is about to become president of Interpol.

Interpol boasts 192 countries as members, which by my calculations makes all of them. Its function is to pursue criminals who choose to widen their reach beyond one country, either to target pastures new or else to seek refuge.

When Interpol decides that a fugitive has a case to answer in his home country, it issues a ‘red notice’, which is a sort of arrest warrant that the host country may or may not wish to execute. Yet even in the absence of a red notice, the host country may honour a warrant issued by another Interpol member.

The organisation thus has a lot of power, which may be used, but as easily misused or abused. That’s why the selection of a president becomes a sensitive task, to be approached with much caution.

One must observe with some chagrin that Interpol bosses haven’t always been blessed with the high moral probity the post requires.

Thus from 1940 to 1942 that august organisation was led by SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, who was out to eliminate not so much all crime as all Jews.

When his tenure was prematurely ended by a British grenade, Interpol was taken over by SS Gruppenführer Artur Nebe, whose approach to the Final Solution was hands on. As head of Einsatzgruppe B in Byelorussia, Nebe had supervised the murder of 45,000 in just two months of 1941.

He was still regarded as too lightweight for the post, and in 1943 the presidency of Interpol passed over to Gruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s successor as head of the SD. Three years later this law enforcer was hanged at Nuremberg.

Fast-forward some 70 years, and the post of Interpol president is now vacant. Meng Hongwei, the latest holder, disappeared after being charged with bribery in his native China and is assumed to have resigned in absentia.

This isn’t to say that Gen. Prokopchuk’s career was as illustrious as Messrs Heydrich’s, Nebe’s, Kaltenbrunner’s or even Meng’s. It wasn’t. But he’s as unsuitable for the post as they were.

Gen. Prokopchuk began his career as part of the komsomol (Young Communist League) nomenklatura. The YCL was nominally under the Party aegis, but in reality it served as a hatchery of cadres for Soviet security services.

(The same system existed in Soviet satellites, which raises interesting questions about Angie Merkel, who held a nomenklatura YCL position in Leipzig at the same time a Major Putin was the KGB resident in Dresden, just 90 miles away. Alas, such interesting questions are never answered nor indeed asked, and I have to guess why the two are so pally, addressing each other by their first names and the familiar du pronoun.)

Three YCL apparatchiks, Shelepin, Semitchasny and Andropov, became KGB bosses, and many others also filled the offices of that sinister organisation or the Interior Ministry (MVD).

The KGB and the MVD always were communicating vessels, with personnel freely flowing from one to the other. Sometimes the KGB was institutionally part of the MVD, sometimes the other way around, and sometimes they were nominally separate. Yet, structural gerrymandering aside, Prokopchuk and Putin have much mutual affinity.

That any Russian official occupying an international post will do Putin’s bidding is axiomatic. Thus Prokopchuk’s presidency will effectively turn Interpol into an aspect of Russia’s hybrid war on the West.

The potential of using Interpol for nefarious purposes has been realised many times, not least, though not only, by Russia. This can be done by protecting those fugitives whom tyrannies wish to protect and especially by pursuing those whom tyrannies wish to pursue.

If the host country decides that the fugitive is being pursued for political reasons, the red notice may be ignored or even removed. Yet Interpol has been known to ignore political motives, and wicked regimes to disguise them.

Venezuela has form in pulling that confidence trick, along with Iran, Cambodia, Turkey, the Arab Emirates – and of course Russia, which has issued red notices on several dissidents and even managed to get Bill ‘Magnitsky’ Browder detained in Spain.

Putin’s men brazenly refuse to adopt even a thin veneer of political disinterest in hunting enemies of the regime and of the Botox Boy personally. In fact, their effrontery is so blatant that some US senators have demanded that Russia be banned from issuing red notices altogether.

Russia is at the moment the biggest international criminal. Not only has it elevated money laundering to its principal economic activity, but it also commits acts of terrorism all over the world, using even chemical and nuclear weapons.

As a backdrop to that, the Russians are waging a full-blown cyber war against the West, including inter alia the credible threat of sabotaging the UK’s grid, as they already sabotaged the NHS a couple of years ago.

Considering that Western countries contribute 74 per cent of Interpol’s budget, they could easily stop Putin’s accomplice from heading the organisation whose charter is to stop exactly the kind of crimes that are Russia’s stock in trade.

But I doubt they will. We in the West no longer have the testicular fortitude to face up to tyrants, even those who threaten us directly. Where there is no will, there is no way, if you’ll pardon the paraphrase.

P.S. Even conservative papers are now branding as extremists those who wish to regain Britain’s sovereignty. I’m surprised they haven’t yet coined the portmanteau neologism ‘Brextremists’. Missing a trick there, chaps.

Actually, you don’t have to choose. As Max Hastings’s article We’ll Pay for the EU Obsession of the Right demonstrates, one can be both.

Those Remainers who aren’t knaves are fools, a group defined in this case by its building impassioned views on a rickety intellectual foundation. I’ve never heard a single intelligent reply to the question of why we should remain in the EU.

French and German fans of that awful contrivance also display a deficit of intellectual rigour, and they too come up with spurious arguments.

But the aetiology of their malaise is different: they bear the scars of wounds cut into their psyche by two world wars, especially the second one. Still, I know some intelligent continentals who should know better than to let their lacerated hearts rule their otherwise functional heads.

Their British equivalents, such as Hastings, haven’t got even such a flimsy excuse for sounding silly on this issue – and especially for interweaving foolishness with mendacity.

The American writer Mary McCarthy once said about her colleague Lillian Hellmann that every word she ever wrote was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘but’. Allowing myself the same soupçon of artistic licence, I can say the same about Hastings.

The payment for “the EU obsession of the Right” will, according to him, come in the shape of PM Corbyn. Considering that Hastings himself alternates his support between the Tories and Labour, he won’t find the charge unduly exorbitant, but he laudably rises above personal idiosyncrasies.

One can infer that, while the Right is in the grips of a mania, the Left (I include wet Tories under that rubric) are rationally dispassionate.

Yet, had Major’s mock-Tory government not dragged us into the EU and, earlier, Heath’s mock-Tory government into the EEC, the crazed Right would have to look for some other obsessions to pursue.

Anyone with an IQ even in high double digits would see a clear cause-effect here. Not being smart enough to realise that he’s signing his own intellectual death warrant, Hastings readily admits he himself was part of the cause:

“As an editor, I made a big mistake about Europe… . John Major… and the Foreign Office’s mandarins convinced us that our EU partners were not serious about pursuing political integration. Their insouciance about the Jacques Delors, Jean-Claude Juncker school of Europeanism was grievously mistaken, as was Britain’s brief adherence to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, which some of us were also foolish enough to support.”

‘Some of us’ is a demure version of ‘I’. But the whole paragraph is staggering. For that ‘school of Europeanism’ is the only one, certainly the only one that matters.

Hastings claims he didn’t realise that the EU’s aim was to create a superstate. If he’s lying, which is likely, this is an exemplar of mendacity liberally laced with cynicism. If he’s telling the truth, he’s ignorant to the point of idiocy.

One can understand a leftie social worker saying something like that. But Hastings was at the time editor-in-chief of The Telegraph and had all its vast information resources at his disposal.

Hence he should have known that the single superstate had been inscribed on the EU banners since it had been but a twinkle in the eye of its founders, all those Monnets, Schumans, Gasperis and Spinellis.

My friends and I could cite those chaps’ writings chapter and verse back in 1992. And we all knew in 1990 that joining the ERM would spell an instant economic disaster. How come Hastings didn’t?

He describes those with more nous than he has as “a faction of fanatics” who came from the same group that had earlier supported “white Rhodesia’s rebel leader Ian Smith, a crusader for ‘civilised values’.”

This is written with the benefit of hindsight, which optic instrument should have prevented Hastings from putting ‘civilised values’ in quotation marks. For Smith’s values were indeed civilised compared to Mugabe’s – and I suspect most Zimbabweans would share this view.

Then comes real cloud-cuckoo-land stuff. According to Hastings those despicable fanatics duped the British public by lying that Brexit would solve every conceivable problem because they were all caused by EU membership.

Hastings’s outlook is much more panoramic: “This country cannot again have an effective and creative government until we restore a consensus that politics is rightfully about many things, on most of which compromise is indispensable, rather than about one thing, deemed by true believers to be an absolute.”

Fair enough, some people I know do hang much of their political life on the single peg of Brexit.

It’s even true that compromise is indeed indispensable on many things. Yet Hastings doesn’t seem to realise that national sovereignty isn’t one of them. Either we’re governed by laws passed by our own parliament or we aren’t. It’s as stark as that.

Yes, the issue that should have been simple has been encumbered with all sorts of superfluous addenda, most of them economic.

But those who refuse to compromise the uncompromisable do some of the encumbering only in response to those like Hastings who try to torpedo Brexit in every possible way.

It’s they who, from the moment the referendum was announced, have been screaming that the Leave vote is tantamount to an economic disaster the likes of which Britain has never known.

Leave the loving care of the EU and we’ll starve in the dark, with no medicines to treat us, no transport to take us places, no fuel to heat our houses. We’ll become worse off than the Zimbabweans, and our wives will leave us for swarthy foreigners with vowels at the end of their names.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, said Newton. People who really only want to restore our ancient – and historically the world’s most successful – constitution have been forced out of the main battlefield and into skirmishes at street corners.

“Yet the principled issue of sovereignty would never have sufficed to enable the right to seize the reins: immigration, and immigration alone, could do that. The indulgence displayed by the liberal elite towards a vast influx of newcomers licensed by Tony Blair transformed a manic faction into a mass movement,” is Hastings’s take on the events.

Yes, after decades of socialist propaganda masquerading as ‘comprehensive education’, many Britons tend to regard things like freedom and sovereignty as abstractions having little to do with real life.

And yes, the easiest way to offset the subversive sabotage perpetrated by the likes of Hastings was to invoke the damage done to British identity by an influx of alien, mostly Muslim, colonisers.

But “the vast influx… licensed by Tony Blair” (for whom Hastings voted) was made possible by the EU with its free movement of people, most of them in the direction of the British social services.

“If this story ends in a tragedy [of Corbyn’s victory] which blights the lives of our children, as seems not unlikely, the career nostalgics of the Tory right will bear much of the responsibility,” concludes Hastings.

No, they won’t. All of the responsibility will be borne by Hastings et al, who first dragged Britain into that corrupt, mendacious arrangement and then have been trying to subvert every effort at getting out.

It may, if you believe the report issued by The United States Institute of Peace.

The US, says the report by this federal outfit, “might… lose a war against China or Russia. The United States is particularly at risk of being overwhelmed should its military be forced to fight on two or more fronts simultaneously.”

The document outlines several possible scenarios. First, there’s China attacking Taiwan. And Russia goes China one better: it can hurt America in two ways.

It could invade the Baltics, NATO members all three of them. Or it could paralyse the US infrastructure with cyber attacks, which may or may not be followed by an assault on the Baltics.

Then there’s North Korea, which may attack its South neighbours, threatening to launch nuclear ICBMs on American cities should the US interfere.

And let’s not forget Iran that’s about to develop a nuclear capability, if it hasn’t already, which it may use for aggressive purposes.

Any of these scenarios have a whiff of doomsday about them, and some or all of them happening at the same time considerably more than just a whiff.

Yet I don’t think the danger is as imminent as all that.

This isn’t to say the fears are unfounded. Far from it: every possible flashpoint the USIP identified is real and smouldering. It would be irresponsible of the US and NATO not to prepare for any eventuality both physically and morally.

Moreover, either China or especially Russia definitely may play out one of those scenarios and drag the US into a war. But I think they’d lose.

Si vis pacem para bellum, said Vegetius – if you want peace, prepare for war. And prepare we must, reversing two decades of demob happiness following the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union.

That euphoria was encouraged by frivolous commentators, mostly of the neocon persuasion. A particularly inane academic actually declared that history had ended: liberal democracy had triumphed, the forces of evil had capitulated. End of story, end of debate – end of history.

Well, history has restarted since then, as it did when Hegel made a similarly empty boast after Napoleon’s victory at Jena – as history always does. The forces of evil, correctly identified by the USIP, are back and more menacing than ever.

Hence there’s little doubt that America’s military capability must be built up to the Cold War level at least, relative to the strength of any potential adversaries.

There’s even less doubt that Trump is right: other NATO members must match American military spending as a proportion of GDP.

However, provided we aren’t irresponsibly complacent, I don’t think either Russia or China, or even both of them together, could defeat NATO.

It’s not that I question the statistics presented by the USIP. Even though America’s military expenditure is greater than Russia’s and China’s put together, the combined might of those two evil empires does look formidable on paper.

However, wars aren’t fought on paper. Even in our time of sci-fi Star Wars, they’re fought by people killing other people. And the West does it better than the East.

One example illustrates this point. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941, calculations similar to those produced by the USIP would have suggested that the Wehrmacht would be instantly routed.

The Soviets had a threefold advantage in tanks in the immediate theatre, and a sevenfold one overall. Moreover, the quality of those tanks was incomparably better in every category – and the categories represented by Soviet T-34s and KVs didn’t even exist in the German panzer force.

Soviet artillery was a generation newer than German. The Soviet air force of 10,000 warplanes was bigger than the Luftwaffe, and held its own in quality. And of course the numerical strength of the Soviet army was unmatched.

Moreover, the Soviets had practically endless reserves of both manpower and materiel. Their tank factories in particular were churning out monsters faster than the rest of the world combined.

And logistically the Soviets enjoyed the benefit of fighting on familiar terrain and without the need to stretch their supply lines.

In short, rather than enjoying a three-to-one superiority recommended by military science for a successful offensive, the Wehrmacht was severely outgunned and heading for perdition – or so the proto-USIP would have maintained.

What followed instead was history’s greatest military debacle. The Soviet regular army was wiped out within days, with the Germans taking 4.5 million POWs in the next six months and getting to admire the Kremlin through their field glasses.

The most important reason for that was that the German army was Western and the Soviet one wasn’t.

Stalin’s hordes were made up of reluctant slaves driven by murderous and incompetent slave masters. They were treated as a herd, fought like one and ran like one.

Hitler’s army, on the other hand, was an army of citizens, who happened to live under a despotism at the time, but who nevertheless retained the Western military tradition of citizen-warriors.

Their rank-and-file and NCOs, to say nothing of officers, were encouraged to display initiative and improvise under pressure. By contrast, even Soviet generals couldn’t on pain of firing squad react to a rapidly changing situation without a direct order.

The Germans were commanded by generals like Rundstedt, educated at two academies, who had commanded a corps during the Great War.

Facing him at Kiev was a two-million-strong Soviet army group led by the barely literate Gen. Kirponos, who had been an orderly during the Great War and then a political commissar under the Bolsheviks.

That clash could have had only one outcome. The Germans took 600,000 prisoners (one of them my father) in that battle, and that’s by the official Soviet estimate.

One would have expected that Soviet soldiers, who were defending their country against a foreign invader, would display the sturdier morale. Yet the reverse was true.

The slaves didn’t want to fight for their masters and surrendered en masse, often fully armed and to the sound of regimental bands. Furthermore, over a million of them ended up fighting on Hitler’s side – a unique event in Russian, or any other, military history.

The Soviets were eventually made to fight by extreme violence. “There are no Soviet POWs,” declared Stalin. “There are only Soviet traitors.” Their families, explained Stalin’s henchman Zhukov, would be either shot or starved to death.

In the first days of the war, Soviet planes, rather than fighting the Luftwaffe, routinely strafed columns of Soviet POWs trundling into German captivity. And frontline troops were driven into battle by another uniquely Soviet feature of warfare: ‘blocking units’ of security troops machine-gunning retreating soldiers from the back.

God only knows how many were killed that way, but the official count of Soviet soldiers executed ‘judicially’ stands at 154,000 (the Nazis executed merely 8,000 of their own). Add to that number those shot out of hand, and we’ll realise that the Soviets inflicted on their own troops greater casualties than the US army suffered altogether.

This is here to stress the fundamental difference in military doctrine – in the very concept of war as an extension of civic ethos – between East and West. This explains why the West has ultimately won every conflict with the East, reversing any temporary setbacks.

The gap in the quality of human material between NATO and Russia is probably narrower now than it was between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

The West has grown softer, and the Russians en masse don’t hate Putin as much as the Soviets hated Stalin. But a gap still remains – as it certainly does between NATO and China.

When push comes to shove, I don’t think the impoverished Russian masses (75 per cent of Russians are poor or destitute) will want to die in apocalyptic numbers for the yachts and palaces of the Putin gang – and the Chinese will feel the same way about Xi.

Barring an all-out nuclear holocaust whose consequences no one can predict, I’m convinced that the West will repel any aggression by Eastern powers. Yet I hope this won’t be necessary.

War can be prevented by arming the West to the teeth – even at some cost to our welfare hand-outs and foreign aid to assorted tyrannies, including those that threaten us.

Even more important, the West must demonstrate firmness and resolve, for anything less may indeed spell disaster.

Mrs May should paraphrase Louis XIV’s famous pronouncement and declare “le cabinet, c’est moi”.

In her case it wouldn’t be an affirmation of autocracy, but simply a statement of arithmetic fact. Two cabinet minsters have resigned this morning, followed by a school of small fry.

Another day of this, and Mrs May will have no one but herself to talk to at cabinet meetings. That, I suppose, will be the only understanding and sympathetic audience she’ll be able to find anywhere this side of Mr May.

Since I don’t think our constitution provides for such a solitary experience, Mrs May is politically on her last legs – because her Brexit deal doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

The resignations of Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and Works and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey suggest that the PM just may have been too hasty when she announced yesterday that the cabinet was behind her.

By the looks of it, the cabinet is way ahead of her in the rush to the door. Or perhaps ‘way ahead’ is wrong: I can’t see how Mrs May can possibly hang on. The requisite letters from Tory MPs to Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 Committee, are streaming in, and a vote of no confidence beckons.

As a veteran of political rough-and-tumble, the PM may hang on to power for a week or two, but not for much longer.

Pragmatic Tories among as, such as Stephen Glover, the sage of The Daily Mail, who voted Leave, and Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, who voted wrong, defend Mrs May by saying that, yes, the deal she negotiated is flawed.

But, they sigh, it’s the best deal on the table, and anything else would be much worse. So let’s support the Prime Minister who’s doing her best.

Pragmatism is indeed an essential characteristic for a Tory, but not when it comes in conflict with fundamental principles. Marshal Pétain, for example, was another conservative guided by pragmatism.

Collaborating (the term he first introduced) with the conquering Nazis was doubtless the pragmatic thing to do. Alas, it clashed with enough basic presuppositions to earn the good marshal a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment.

This despite his reputation as the heroic victor at Verdun and the nation’s saviour in the Great War. Unlike Pétain, Mrs May hasn’t won any major battles I can think of, so her position is even shakier.

However, the risks are smaller: we have no death penalty on the books and, even if we did, Mrs May wouldn’t deserve it. Her only crime is finding herself catastrophically out of her depth.

However, I may agree with Mr Glover and Lord Finkelstein that the supine surrender negotiated by Mrs May is indeed the best deal anyone could get.

For there are no good deals to be had when what’s being negotiated should be non-negotiable: the nation’s freedom and sovereignty.

The two gentlemen I mentioned both seem to think that a no-deal exit would be catastrophic for Britain. I disagree.

Yes, we might suffer some economic discomfort for a while, and I personally would suffer more than most, what with my spending half my time (and money) in the eurozone and constantly travelling back and forth.

But our economic losses would be minor compared to those Britain suffered defending her freedom and sovereignty during Germany’s previous attempt to unite Europe.

It’s guaranteed that 700,000 won’t die fighting, nor will our cities be devastated by the Luftwaffe, nor will we have to beggar ourselves in exchange for American largesse. We won’t have rations based on dry milk and swedes. Our supplies won’t end up on the bottom of the oceans courtesy of U-boats.

No deal is the only good deal. Nothing else will regain Britain’s full sovereignty – and this is what the issue is all about, or should be.

Once we’re well and truly out, then by all means let’s talk deals. For now let’s not get too gloomy with our predictions.

Of course, the eurospivs will do all they can to make our life a misery in the aftermath of a no-deal exit. But there’s only so much they can do.

International trade is governed by WTO rules, and I doubt the EU would want to leave that organisation just to spite Britain.

And their threats of closing the Channel ports, barring British planes from landing in the EU and blocking British exports ring hollow.

Put together, such measures are tantamount to an economic blockade, which since time immemorial has been treated as a casus belli. And if those EU chaps don’t believe me, they should ask the shadow of Napoleon. See you at St Helena, gentlemen.

But I’m running ahead of myself. First things first. Let’s get rid of Mrs May and the other cabinet Quislings, and replace them with politicians more attuned to our ancient constitution.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Mr Raab and Miss McVey. Resigning on a matter of principle isn’t something I thought our politicians were capable of.

Of course, it’s possible they only acted out of a realistic assessment of the way the political cookie crumbles, which ability is perhaps the second best thing. One way or the other, my hat’s off. And I never even wear a hat.

Complacent philistines, c.1914, shrugged their shoulders insouciantly.

“Surely mass slaughter can’t happen in Europe.” But it did.

Russian intelligentsia did the same, c. 1917.

“Exterminating whole classes, instigating a bloody civil war and enslaving the entire population? Can’t happen in the land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.” But it did.

German social democrats, conservatives and Jews, c. 1933, smiled knowingly.

“Yes, we know Hitler wrote about exterminating Jews in Mein Kampf. Now let’s be serious: it can’t happen in the land of Bach and Goethe.” But it did.

Now the British read about all those cannibalistic Trotskyist rants by Labour politicians and dismiss as alarmists those who say that this lot mean what they say.

A communist takeover of Britain with her oldest and most stable constitution? “We’re British, old boy. Can’t happen here, what?” But it can. And if we don’t do something about it, it will.

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.” This aphorism is attributed to Burke and, though the attribution is doubtful, the underlying thought isn’t.

The evil scowling through the red flags of today’s Labour presents by far the greatest danger to our survival as a free nation. Greater than the EU, though God knows it’s dangerous enough. Greater than Muslim colonisation, though that too is a major threat.

For some policies being proposed for the Labour manifesto can’t be realised without turning Britain into a giant concentration camp, complete with arbitrary imprisonments and summary executions.

For example, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell promised yesterday to transfer property from private to public hands should he ever get the power to do so.

He finds it terribly unfair that a small proportion of Britons own a large proportion of land. Clearly nationalisation is the only way to right that wrong.

You must understand that communists don’t use the word ‘unfair’ in its normal sense of not getting one’s due. To this lot ‘unfair’ means anything that curbs their power and promotes individual liberty.

When Western civilisation was still embryonic, in Greece c. 500 BC, people already knew that secure private property is the foundation of freedom.

Not only does it encourage citizens to guard their liberty from domestic tyranny, but it also makes them resolute in defending it from foreign despots.

Because the Greeks were fighting for their freedom, their homes and their families, they were able to rout Xerxes’s hordes in, say, the naval Battle of Salamis (in the numbers involved and casualties suffered, the greatest naval engagement in history).

The Greeks were outnumbered three to one, but they were free men fighting against slaves. It was no contest: the Persians fled, leaving at least 50,000 corpses behind them.

Remove secure property, and slavery beckons. That is, of course, exactly what this evil lot are after. Why, they even paraphrase the prescription of that great socialist Benito Mussolini: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.

This is how the phrase was transformed by McDonnell, who lacks Il Duce’s gift of the gab: “It’s the development of the ideas of ‘in and against the state’ at the local level.”

One thing I can say for socialist cannibals, national or international, actual or aspiring, is that they’re always frank about their intentions. The problem is that decent people refuse to take them at their word.

Having thus borrowed his idea of property ownership from The Communist Manifesto and his phraseology from Mussolini, McDonnell then nicked his tactical prescriptions from Lenin’s What Is to Be Done.

Having boasted about Labour reaching 50,000 members, he then put his own spin on Lenin’s cherished concept of a cadre of professional revolutionaries: “We’ve got to convert ordinary members and supporters into real cadres who understand and analyse society and who are continually building the ideas”.

If you wonder about the physical shape of nationalised British towns and villages this lot see on their mind’s eye, McDonnell’s acolyte, Russell-Moyle, helpfully obliged.

We’ll tear up planning laws, he explained, and encourage local authorities to build tower blocks in the middle of pastoral villages and leafy suburbs. Thus Britain will within a few years acquire that charming shape for which Romania, c. 1960, was so justly famous.

As far as Russell-Moyle was concerned, one of the first things to do would be to reverse Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy: “Let’s just talk about council houses – let’s get those bloody private houses back into our hands [my emphasis].”

Collective ownership of land, promised McDonnell, would shake up society. That it certainly would, just the way their ideological brethren shook up Russian society, c. 1917. And those ‘noxious insects’, in Lenin’s phrase, who’d rather not be shaken up were exterminated in their millions.

Once that sledgehammer is first swung, it’ll go on swinging. Acting in the capacity of that tool, McDonnell also announced plans to nationalise, well, everything in the long run, but starting with utilities.

And of course the House of Lords will be replaced by an elected senate. Here McDonnell must be rebuked for resorting to palliatives. Comrade Trotsky would be ashamed of him.

Why not go all the way and replace the House of Lords with a Supreme Soviet, the Queen and PM together with a Secretary General of the Party, and the police with the KGB?

This sounds preposterous, I know. NIMBY, I hear people say. That sort of thing can happen in Russia, North Korea or perhaps Venezuela. Not in Old Blighty.

Well, those people ought to tune their ears to the echoes of 1914, 1917 and 1933, when McDonnell’s and Corbyn’s typological ancestors shattered such hopeful illusions.

What with our electorate thoroughly corrupted by 100 years of leftie propaganda, this sort of thing can indeed happen here. And, if we do nothing, it will.

Yet another black person has fallen victim to a heinous racial crime. As I write, spasms constrict my throat, tears blur my vision, and fury paralyses my mind.

I can’t find words to express my disgust at racial hatred in general and this incident in particular. So I’ll just tell you what happened, and you can express your own indignation.

Jane Savidge, 69, later described by the local police commissioner as a “pillar of the community” for her devotion to charitable works, was waiting to have her car filled up at a pump.

The car in front of her had already been filled up and still wouldn’t budge, blocking Miss Savidge’s way, “taking ages” in the latter’s description.

Nobody’s patience is endless under such circumstances, and eventually Miss Savidge tooted her horn and waited for a reaction. When none came, she honked again.

I don’t know how the police got involved, but involved they got. An annoyed woman tooting her horn obviously took priority over pursuing burglars or trying to prevent knife crime.

Miss Savidge was arrested and interrogated – but not for tooting her horn. She was suspected of a racially aggravated hate crime. You see, the inconsiderate driver in front of her was a black woman.

Of course Miss Savidge had no way of knowing this because the race and sex of the other driver were impossible to identify through the tinted rear window. But ignorance is no excuse, as far as the Thames Valley police are concerned.

Had she fired a gun out of her window, killed somebody and later claimed she didn’t know there were people in the street, she would have been charged with murder wouldn’t she? In the eyes of our law enforcement, this is a watertight analogy.

To her credit, the black woman in question told the cops it wasn’t a hate crime, but that had no effect. Once a crime has been committed, personal feelings no longer apply. The law takes over.

As a result, Miss Savidge had sleepless nights and could no longer do her charitable work because she was worried that a background check would identify her as someone investigated for a racial hate crime.

Anthony Stansfeld, the police commissioner for Thames Valley, sympathised with her plight. He realised the whole thing was ridiculous, but his hands were tied. The existing law left him no room for manoeuvre.

Seeking justice, Miss Savidge enlisted the help of her local MP, Dominic Grieve. After his intercession her misdeed was reclassified as a ‘hate-related incident’, rather than crime.

As Mr Grieve explained, “The current position is that she has been told by Thames Valley police that as long as she does not come to the attention of the police in future it is most unlikely that any reference would be made to this record even if an enhanced check were carried out into her.”

‘Most unlikely’ is a nebulous phrase. It could mean all sorts of things, such as ‘possible’, ‘probable’ and even ‘almost guaranteed’. But Miss Savidge should thank God and Mr Grieve for small favours: at least she’s unlikely to do time.

Do you sometimes feel as if the sane people of the world fought a war against an army of madmen and lost?

Do you sometimes realise that the idiotic and destructive law about so-called hate crimes effectively criminalises us all?

If honking at a car that happens to belong to a black woman is a hate crime, then what about saying ‘Excuse me’ to a black man blocking your way in a supermarket aisle? Saying ‘watch it’ to a homosexual who accidentally steps on your foot? Smiling at a Muslim woman who then thinks you’re mocking her?

It’s a safe bet that in the course of a busy week, most of us commit hate crimes galore. We’re all criminals, in other words.

Now a state that criminalises everybody is itself criminal. For it issues itself a mandate to expand its own domain indefinitely, while shrinking that of the individual.

In the process, it debauches the very notion of legality: when patently insane laws swell the books, all laws will be despised. And public order depends on respect for the law because fear alone isn’t a sufficient inducement to compliance.

Every travesty of justice committed by our governing spivs puts justice in disrepute and us all in danger. Something must be done immediately, and I have a suggestion on how to avoid situations like the one Miss Savidge found herself in.

All members of vulnerable minorities, such as women, Muslims, blacks, homosexuals, cripples and especially crippled black homosexual Muslim women should be obligated to display a Protected Minority Onboard sticker.

That way we’ll steer clear of hate crimes by treating such cars with the deference due their owners. And if you like this idea, I have many similar ones in store.

As we bow our heads to commemorate the millions killed in the First World War, we should also contemplate why they had to die.

For that wasn’t a war between two countries, nor even between two alliances.

It was a war waged by modernity against the last vestiges of Western civilisation and, for that matter, civility.

The following are excerpts from my book How the West Was Lost, in which I argued that modernity was championed by a whole new species I called Modman, whose inner imperative was to destroy Christendom and replace it with a new soulless, philistine, godless civilisation.

Neither side was averse to going from the general to the specific in its claims. They were both fighting to save civilisation in a broad sense, but at the same time they were making the world safe not just for democracy (the marasmatic Wilson was welcome to that one) but also for true faith, world commerce, family, security, children, church and prosperity.

Almost instantly the war acquired a character that went beyond any national grievances or indeed economic interests. The world was rife with proposals for unifying the control of global raw materials in a single body that could also administer international taxes aimed at levelling inequalities among nations.

The air was dense with phrases like ‘World Organisation’, ‘The United States of the Earth’, ‘The Confederation of the World’, ‘A World Union of Free Peoples’ and finally ‘The League of Nations’.

Both sides saw themselves as defenders of international law. The British, for example, eschewed self-interest as the reason for joining the conflict, opting instead for depicting the war as a holy crusade for the law of the nations.

Not to be outdone, the French organised a Committee for the Defence of International Law. The Germans were at first taken aback by this sudden outburst of affection for global legality, but they quickly recovered to fight back.

Belgium, according to them, wasn’t neutral in the international-law sense of the word. It was conducting secret military negotiations with the British aimed against Germany.

The British weren’t squeaky-clean either. They were systematically violating the trading rights of neutrals on the high seas.

So Germany was really fighting for the freedom of the seas and the rights of smaller nations to engage in peaceful trade without being harassed by the dastardly Royal Navy.

However, the Entente wouldn’t allow Germany to claim exclusive rights to defending the small and weak. It was the allies who were after liberating the oppressed nations, and not just Alsace and Lorraine.

They also meant the oppressed minorities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Polish minority in Germany (not to be confused with the German minority in Poland, whose plight was a casus belli for Germany’s next war).

Funny you should mention oppressed minorities, replied the Germans who hated to be outdone by anybody, and especially the British. It was they, the Germans, who were fighting to liberate the small nations of the world. More specifically, such small nations as India, Ireland, Egypt and the entire African continent.

But never mind puny nations. Both sides had broader aims: they were out to save civilisation. Both carried on their broad shoulders an equivalent of the white man’s burden, ignoring the obvious chromatic incidental of both of them being equally white.

A week after the war began The London Evening Standard was already carrying headlines screaming “Civilisation at Issue”. France was fighting a “Guerre contre les barbares”, while Germany was laying about her for her Kultur.

Germany, the nation of composers and philosophers, had established a spiritual ascendancy over the world thanks to her industry, fecundity, wisdom and morality. She was waging war against the degenerate Latins, barbaric Russians and mercantile British in whose assessment Napoleon would have been correct had he not been French.

The British were usurers (a role they were to cede to the Jews before long); the Germans were Teutonic heirs to Arminius and Alaric.

While the British were unable to see beyond their utilitarian little noses, the Germans had the sagacity to penetrate the meaning of life, as proved by their philosophers. The war was fought for heroic, self-sacrificing Bildung and against the greedy British.

Speak for yourself, sale Boche, objected the French. The war was waged by one (good) race against another (bad). The Gauls of France and Belgium were fighting the Hun, and never mind Bildung.

That argument appealed to the Germans who had been beaten to the racial punch that time but decided to store it for future use.

Race more or less equalled God, as far as the French glossocrats were concerned. While every belligerent country claimed that God was on her side, La Croix in France made the case with a forthrightness not normally associated with the French: “The story of France is the story of God. Long live Christ who loves the Franks.”

“La Guerre Sainte”, screamed L’Echo, and La Croix agreed in principle but wanted to expand: yes, it was “a war of Catholic France against Protestant Germany”. But it was more than just that. It was a “duel between the Germans and the Latins and the Slavs”, a contest of “public morals and international law”.

Hold on a minute, the British begged to differ. The French, while on the side of the angels in this one, couldn’t claim exclusive possession of God.

The Bishop of Hereford explained this succinctly: “Such a heavy price to pay for our progress towards the realisation of the Christianity of Christ, but duty calls… Amidst all the burden of gloom and sorrow which this dreadful war lays upon us we can at least thank God that it brings that better day a long step nearer for the generations in front of us.”

(Which generations were to lose, conservatively, 300 million in assorted wars and purges, but then, to be fair, the good bishop had no way of knowing this.)

Never mind God, or in the case of the Germans the Gods of their Valhalla. As a British musical promoter wrote at the time, this was really a war between different types of music: “The future belongs to the young hero who will have the courage to exclude from his library all the works of Handel, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms and Richard Strauss…, who will… find the vigorous rhythms that will tell of the dauntless spirit of those who go to death singing ‘Tipperary’.”

At the risk of sounding like a Hun lover, I’d still argue that the Hunnish music of a Bach cantata is a long, long way from ‘Tipperary’, even though my preference doesn’t come into this.

The gentleman displayed a great deal of prescience, however. His future, and our present, indeed belong to the young hero who courageously excludes Handel and Brahms, while including, with equal courage, Sex Pistols and Band Aid. The impresario inadvertently displayed much insight: the underlying aims of the war weren’t geopolitical but cultural.

The role played by America in the First World War is instructive. On the surface, this wasn’t America’s fight: her geopolitical or economic interests would not have been unduly threatened by any possible outcome.

Wilson’s sloganeering about “making the world safe for democracy” would have sounded ludicrous to any other than a modern audience. Such an aim presupposed that the Great War was waged against democracy, and only Gen. Pershing in shining armour was there to save it.

That simply wasn’t the case. All major combatants were already either democracies or constitutional monarchies – or else were moving in that direction with no outside help necessary.

So the big slogan would be a big lie, but only if we insist on using words in their real meaning. Of course by then Modman glossocracy had taken over, so the word ‘democracy’ didn’t really mean political pluralism. It meant Modman’s rule.

By the time the United States entered the war, Russia had already been paralysed by the pacifist propaganda waged by the Bolsheviks and paid for by the Germans. She had been almost knocked out of the conflict and, with her armies deserting en masse, was months away from falling to the worst tyranny the world had ever known.

And on the Western front supposedly civilised people were no longer fighting a war; they were engaged in mass murder for its own sake.

Under such circumstances, it didn’t take a crystal ball to predict that any possible conclusion to the massacre would come at a cost to traditional institutions. As Western holdouts were being mowed down, so was the habitat in which the West could possibly stagger back to life.

Woodrow Wilson didn’t need fortune-telling appliances to predict such an outcome. And this was precisely what he craved.

Alone among the wartime leaders, Wilson had clear-cut objectives that went beyond simply winning the war. He had heard the clarion call of modernity not as a distant echo but in every tonal detail, and responded by employing every technique at his disposal.

Shortly after the war began, and two years before America’s entry, Wilson set up the greatest advertising agency ever seen, the Committee on Public Information. It included America’s leading propagandists, and was headed by George Creel whose own political sympathies lay far on the left.

Their task was clearly defined: America had a mission to convert the world to her way of life. The President had come to the conclusion that this mission could be fulfilled only by entering the war. Ergo, the American people who, in their ignorance, opposed such a move had to be made to see the light.

Anyway, the American people hardly mattered: Wilson had in mind a programme for all mankind, not just parochial interests, and if the programme could be put into action only at a cost to American lives, then so be it.

Having won the 1916 re-election on the glossocratic slogan “He kept us out of the war”, Wilson went on to demonstrate that every means was suitable for dragging America into the meat grinder.

Technically neutral until April 1917, she had begun to violate the provisions of neutrality from the start. The House of Morgan, for example, floated war loans for Britain and France in 1915, while supplies were flowing from America across the Atlantic in an uninterrupted stream.

The Germans were thus provoked into unrestricted U-boat warfare (not that they needed much provoking), which in turn helped Wilson to build a slender pro-war margin in the Congress.

Wilson viscerally knew exactly what he was after: the destruction of the Western world and its replacement with a world of Modman led by the philistine American sub-species.

That’s why the propaganda spewed out by the Creel Committee went beyond amateurish attacks on the bloodthirsty Hun. Every leaflet put out by Creel, every speech by Wilson, was an incitement to revolution, both political and social, across Europe.

Thus America had no quarrel with the industrious people of Germany; it was the oppressive Junkers class that was the enemy. No sacrifice was too great to liberate the Germans from their own domestic tyrants.

No peace, no armistice was possible until the existing social order and political arrangement were destroyed – in other words, until a revolution took place.

Likewise, Wilson had no quarrel with the quirky people inhabiting the British Empire; it was the Empire itself that he abhorred.

Even though for tactical reasons that particular message couldn’t yet be enunciated in so many words, dismantling the offending institution was clearly one of Wilson’s key objectives.

A fanatic of a single world government, Wilson was at the same time a great champion of national self-determination. There was no contradiction there at all, at least not to a glossocratic mind. The first was the end; the second, the means.

The marginal peoples of the empires, all those Czechs, Serbs and Finns couldn’t make good any promise of self-determination without a prior destruction of all traditional governments. QED.

It was no concern of Wilson that the demise of, say, a rather senile but still workable Austro-Hungarian empire would lead to the creation of artificial and ultimately untenable states. For example, fashioning a federation out of the culturally and religiously hostile peoples of Yugoslavia was tantamount to pushing the countdown button on a time bomb.

But such concerns were never a factor in glossocratic calculations. Nor did it matter to Wilson on which side a traditional government fought.

He was as hostile to the British and Russian empires as he was to the Central European ones. So it stood to reason that he would welcome the destruction of those institutions, even at the cost of reversal in the fortunes of war.

Thus, when the Tsarist regime collapsed, Wilson was ecstatic. Here was another democracy hatched out of the dark recesses of absolutism.

That the new ‘democracy’ was so weak that it couldn’t keep her troops at the front mattered little. For Wilson this wasn’t about winning a world war but about winning the war for the world.

This is the time to pray for the dead – and rage about the vile new world that killed them to advance its own ignoble cause. RIP.