Category: Blog

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is cross with Netflix. His specific gripe is with the documentary series The Devil Next Door about John Demjanjuk, accused of being an infamous guard in a Nazi death camp.

According to Mr Morwiecki, the series features a map that “falsely places several German Nazi concentration camps within modern-day Poland’s borders… As my country did not even exist at that time as an independent state, and millions of Poles were murdered at these sites, this element of The Devil Next Door is nothing short of rewriting history.”

I sat down to pour some salt on Mr Morawiecki’s wounded national pride. But then by chance I stumbled on an article I wrote in January, 2018, where all my possible arguments were made.

Since they are as relevant today as they were then, and since I’m congenitally lazy, and since I believe in responsible recycling, I’m hereby republishing much of that piece:

The Soviets left Lwów on 29 June, 1941, and the Nazis occupied it a day later. During that interregnum, the Poles and Ukrainians inhabiting the city were left to their own devices – and vices.

One such vice was the almost universal hatred of their 200,000 Jewish neighbours. The glowing embers of that unenviable sentiment were fanned into a violent flame when the locals broke into the three NKVD prisons, only to find out that their 8,000 inmates had been massacred by the Soviets before their retreat.

The mob blamed the Jews, even though many of the victims were themselves Jewish. However, when the heart speaks, reason falls silent – especially when people renounce their individuality to join a herd.

That particular herd went on a stampede, and, when the Germans entered the city, they found out that much of their work had already been done. Some 10,000 Jews had been murdered by their gentile neighbours in ways that must have made the victims beg to be simply shot.

But the job wasn’t finished yet. Einsatzengruppen and the local collaborators began to round up and shoot Jews. Most of the firing squads didn’t include a single German – there was no shortage of local volunteers. By the end of the war, only a couple of hundred Lwów Jews were still alive.

Thus three times the number of Jews were killed in that one city than in the whole of occupied France, where local enthusiasm wasn’t exactly in short supply either. Why such disparity? What made Lwów so much more efficient?

Actually, it wasn’t just Lwów. Simply compare the numbers of massacred Jews relative to their overall numbers in a small sample of European countries.

Western Europe: Germany, 142,000 out of 565,000; Austria, 50,000 out of 185,000; Denmark, 60 out of 8,000; Finland, 7 out of 2,000; Italy, 7,500 out of 44,500; France, 77,000 out of 250,000.

Eastern Europe: Greece, 65,000 out of 75,000; Hungary, 550,000 out of 825,000; Latvia, 70,000 out of 91,500; Lithuania, 140,000 out of 168,000; Czechoslovakia, 78,000 out of 118,000; Poland, 3,000,000 out of 3,300,000.

You’ll notice that a much higher percentage of Jews were killed in Eastern Europe than even in Germany, which after all initiated the Holocaust and built the death camps.

Why? I can think of only one answer: Eastern Europeans didn’t mind the Holocaust as much, and were more than willing to lend the Germans a helping hand.

Another question: why did the Nazis set up all the extermination (as opposed to concentration) camps in Poland? Auschwitz, Belzec, Chełmno, Jasenovac, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor and Treblinka were all there.

To some extent, it must have been a matter of logistics: most of Europe’s Jewish population lived there or thereabouts, in what used to be the Pale of Settlement.

But it couldn’t have been just logistics. After all, the Nazis didn’t mind using hundreds of trains badly needed for military freight to transport Jews from, say, France all the way to Poland. It would have been more efficient to kill them in situ.

Also in the back of the Nazis’ mind must have been the issue of post-war deniability for the Germans. Had those crematorium chimneys been spewing clouds of black smoke in, say, Hamburg, it would have been hard for its denizens to claim they didn’t know.

As it was, such claims weren’t all that credible anyhow, as Daniel Goldhagen demonstrates convincingly in his instructive book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. But he also shows that the Nazis were wary of a potential backlash from the Germans had they had to watch mass murder committed on their own doorstep. No such fears in Poland.

This is the backdrop to the bill recently ratified by the Polish parliament that will outlaw any public association of “the Polish nation” with crimes committed by the Germans. In other words, had a Pole written the previous paragraphs, he could get three years in prison – the kind of literary prize that’s rapidly gaining popularity in the low-rent part of Europe.

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda navigated the perilous undercurrents with laudable celerity. Yes, he admitted magnanimously, some individual Poles did do “wicked” things to their Jewish neighbours (like burning them alive or hacking them to death with shovels, but the president didn’t go into such graphic detail). But there was no institutional Polish participation in the Holocaust.

Actually, as far as I know, no one has ever suggested that the Polish government in exile issued an order to kill Jews. So Mr Duda is on safe grounds there.

But he then went on to bemoan that Poles are being “vilified” with “false accusations”. I suppose Mr Duda believes that any accusations against Poles ipso facto constitute unfounded vilification.

He also objects to the death camps being referred to as ‘Polish’. I agree that ‘German camps in Poland’ would be more accurate. But those camps wouldn’t have been in Poland if the locals had detested them.

They didn’t. At best, they shrugged their shoulders with indifferent acquiescence. At worst, tens of thousands of them took an active part in the atrocities. And those who deny these facts are the murderers’ accomplices after the fact.

The Poles are Catholics, so perhaps they should begin to act accordingly in this painful matter. Redemption won’t come from denying their sins – it can only come from confession and repentance. Especially since history lays their sins bare for all to see.

From time to time, I point out the lamentable ignorance of the Russian liberal opposition to Putin (most recently, in http://www.alexanderboot.com/why-russia-has-no-chance/). Their hearts are in the right place, but their minds haven’t been trained to run things they say and write through a rigorous inner test.

However, Vladimir Abarinov stands out even against that dim background. Today’s Grani, one of the online magazines blocked within Russia, runs his article about Russian meddling in the British general election, where he refers to Dominic Cummings as “Norman Stone’s classmate at Oxford”.

Well, Cummings was born in 1971, when my late friend Norman (b. 1941) was a fellow at Cambridge. He got his undergraduate degree not from Oxford but from Cambridge, and he did so in 1962, when Cummings wasn’t even a twinkle in his daddy’s eye.

If Mr Abarinov is aware of some mysterious educational establishment in Oxford where Norman and Dominic cribbed from each other, he should by all means reveal that information. Barring that, he ought to seek treatment for the traditional Russian disease of speaking with an air of authority on subjects about which he knows next to nothing.

I can only repeat what I said in the article mentioned above, that, just as the world began with the Word, a successful opposition must start with a great idea, which itself has to be a product of informed and enlightened thought. That’s not in evidence among the Russian opponents to Putin, which is why the world won’t be spared his malevolent presence for a while yet.

The news that a Petersburg professor of history killed his mistress in a rather Baroque manner didn’t really surprise me.

Over the past century, Russian universities, at least their humanities departments, have been acting as conduits of the dominant political ethos. Since today it has a distinctly thuggish tint, it’s no wonder that thugs are in a position to shape young minds and, on this evidence, dismember young bodies.

Putin and his flunkeys express themselves in the argot of crime-infested slums, which is par for the course considering their background (“I was a common Leningrad thug,” boasted Putin once). That mentality now pervades even academic institutions, especially Putin’s own alma mater, Petersburg University, the hatchery of the ruling kleptofascist gang.

Enter Oleg Sokolov, 63, associate professor at that university, historian of Napoleonic wars, member of the Russian Society for Military History, confidant of Culture Minister Medinsky (himself Putin’s confidant), lecturer at ISSEP (Lyon’s political institute founded by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s granddaughter and reflecting the family’s values), recipient of the Légion d’honneur.

Yet one couldn’t complete the list of Prof. Sokolov’s credentials without mentioning his little eccentricities: he’s a brute and a murderer.

Those aspects of his personality first came to light in 2008, when his student mistress presented at a police station with her face beaten to a bloody pulp. According to her testimony, when she tried to leave Sokolov, he tied her to a chair, beat her up and threatened to kill her:

“…When the iron got red-hot, he held it so close to my face that I could feel the heat and threatened to disfigure me for life. After that he began to punch me metronomically in the face, also hitting me in the chest and stomach. In response to my pleas to stop, he hit me even harder and then threatened to kill me and bury the corpse at a nearby building site where it would never be found.”

Sokolov was in trouble, but not for long. Putin’s jurisprudence operates on two tiers: one for his own people, the other for everybody else. Loyalty and typological affinity are the principal criteria of guilt or innocence, and by such standards Sokolov was pristine.

That little pugilistic escapade didn’t even damage his academic career, as it would have done at any other university in the world: academic authorities may overlook affairs with students, but not using love interests for punching bags.

Yet Sokolov never missed a beat, as it were. He continued to pontificate to students about 1812, sometimes sporting costumes from that epoch for the sake of verisimilitude. Alas, he tended to borrow not only his ancestors’ clobber but also his colleagues’ work.

Last year another historian of Napoleonic wars, Evgeniy Panasenkov, sued Sokolov for plagiarism, alleging, with ample justification, that the latter had ripped off Panasenkov’s theory of that period.

Although the claim was obviously true, the court found for the defendant, thereby upholding the sacred principles of Putin’s legality. The judge could have cited a precedent: Medinsky, Sokolov’s patron, put someone else’s work in his doctoral dissertation. But then a culture minister is too busy with the affairs of state to waste time on such trivia as academic work.

A little later, as Sokolov was delivering a lecture in the university auditorium, a student got up, pointed out indisputable instances of plagiarism in Sokolov’s work and asked him how he felt about it. The intrepid youngster got an instant reply.

Turning up the volume of his proletarian voice, the academic screamed: “Get lost!”. When the pedantic student balked at following that advice, the recipient of the Légion d’honneur ordered his loyal retainers to “explain to the young man what’s what.”

That they did, by punching the student and bodily dragging him along with his classmate out of the auditorium. “Like priest, like parish”, as the Russians say. (For those who are interested, the incident appears on YouTube.)

Then the libidinous scholar embarked on another affair with a student, Anastasia Yeshchenko, 40 years his junior. On 7 November, the couple celebrated the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, and the festivities turned sour – possibly because Anastasia hadn’t learned the lesson of her predecessor and announced her decision to leave.

The scorned scholar then shot her dead with a sawn-off shotgun, as one does. Quite apart from anything else, that’s not a weapon widely used in academic circles, but this is Putin’s alma mater we’re talking about.

Sokolov then hid the body in his flat and the next day resumed the celebrations, this time with more loyal friends. Once the binge was over, on 9 November he decided to dispose of the body, which had begun to smell bad.

Not being a DIY fanatic, Sokolov didn’t have the necessary tools at home, so he had to go out and buy a hacksaw. Using that implement, he carved up the corpse, sawing off the head and the limbs.

Since he was unused to that type of work, Sokolov had to fight nausea by drinking steadily and eventually getting drunk. Leaving the unused portion of the body at home, he put the other parts into a backpack and went out to the Moyka embankment.

When I told Penelope about this, she quipped, “A man of many parts,” thereby reenergising our marriage. Anyway, proceeding methodically, as befits a researcher, Sokolov then threw the girl’s legs in the river.

But then the booze caught up with him and, still holding the backpack with Anastasia’s arms, he fell into the ice-cold water. By chance, somebody fished him out and delivered him to hospital where Sokolov almost died of hypothermia.

Speaking to the police, he explained he had killed Anastasia because she disliked his two daughters. Oh well, that’s all right then.

You might say that deranged murderers can be found anywhere, including any university. That’s true. However, much as I despise our own academic life, somehow I doubt that a chap with Sokolov’s previous would continue his profitable career at, say, Oxbridge or for that matter Sciences Po.

Do you sometimes feel we’re missing out on the academic freedom of Petersburg University and ISSEP? Well, by the looks of it, there’s now an opening at both institutions — although with Putin’s courts one never knows.

London’s flagship theatre, the National, is starting a run of a modern, multi-culti – RELEVANT! – version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters with an all-black cast.

As you recall, the play is about three women from a gentry family who grew up in Moscow, but are now stuck in a provincial town. Though they live more than comfortably and enjoy a brisk social (and other) life with the officers garrisoned there, they desperately want to return to Moscow, with its brisk cultural (and other) life.

The leitmotiv of the play is the recurrent phrase “To Moscow, to Moscow!” repeated in variably febrile tones. In fact, the great poet Osip Mandelstam once quipped: “Someone ought to have given those girls three rail tickets for Moscow at the beginning of Act I.”

Three Sisters is quintessentially Russian in a way in which, say, Shakespeare’s plays aren’t quintessentially English or Ibsen’s quintessentially Norwegian. It reflected the general contempt cultured Russians felt for country life, and still do.

Having to live anywhere other than Moscow or St Petersburg was seen as cruel exile, no matter how luxurious the exiles’ country estates, or how stimulating the company of their similarly confined neighbours.

That’s why British (though not French) audiences often respond to Three Sisters with consternation. Their desire to get away from Moscow, for which read London, is at least as widespread as the craving vectored in the opposite direction. Give a Londoner a mansion with a large park somewhere in Gloucestershire, and he’ll happily leave behind his chicken coop of a flat somewhere in Chelsea.

Yet somehow London audiences make the requisite leap of imagination, and Three Sisters seldom stays off West End stages for long. In my 30-odd years here I’ve seen various productions so many times that, as far as I’m concerned, the play should be renamed Thirty Sisters. 

Now call me a racist, a snob or a stick-in-the-mud, but I’m unlikely to see this one: my imagination just can’t leap that far.

From what one can glean reading the previews, the play is now set in a 1967 Nigeria just before the Biafran Civil War. Hence, rather than Olga, Masha and Irina, the eponymous, chromatically different sisters are named Lolo, Nne Chukwu and Udo.

To be culturally consistent, I’d think the ubiquitous battle cry must now be “To Lagos, to Lagos!”: portraying Moscow as the object of geographical craving would require one’s imagination to break every conceivable long jump record.

This attempt to attune classical plays to modern cultural and political sensibilities is by no means unique to this production. Nowadays just about every Shakespeare production features modern dress, modern music and modern accoutrements, such as computers, planes and tanks.

To be entirely up to date, many cast black actors playing white roles, women playing men and men playing women. Sometimes, as in the recent production of Richard II, the same actors play both female and male characters in the same play — confusing the hell out of the audience (well, me).

When I first saw Ophelia wearing torn jeans and gyrating on her bed to the sound of a boombox, I suffered a shock from which I still haven’t recovered – especially since it has been exacerbated by many subsequent atrocities in the same vein.

The problem with applying such a makeover to Shakespeare is that all those transvestite transculturalists continue to deliver Elizabethan lines, albeit as a rule not very distinctly. Surely any director, no matter how hubristic, should be put off by the tasteless dissonance? Fat chance.

Today’s directors worship in the temple of modernity, not art. The word ‘vandalism’ never crosses their minds – they don’t care what kind of aesthetic atrocities they perpetrate by catering to the warped tastes of today’s audiences and, especially, critics.

Reading the previews of the Nigerian Three Sisters, I recalled a crude but accurate Russian joke about a modernist production of the same play.

The dress rehearsal is under way. Forestage is Masha, fellating her love interest Vershinin. The director, sitting in the front row with a notepad in his lap and a pained expression on his face, winces. “Tania!” he shouts at the actress. “Stop champing! This is Chekhov!”

I’ve tried the same joke on my English friends, replacing Masha with Ophelia and Vershinin with Hamlet. They always laugh ruefully: the joke works because it’s only a slightly grotesque take on gruesome reality.

I’d be curious to hear the actresses in the upcoming production shout “To Lagos, to Lagos” in Nigerian accents. But £150 for two tickets is too much to pay for satisfying perverse curiosity.

As the last two millennia show, Christianity can survive heresy, agnosticism and atheism. I’m not so sure about its ability to resist systematic vulgarisation within itself.

This melancholy thought was brought on by the poster outside St Martin-in-the-Fields, one of London’s most central churches. “We understand…,” it begins.

The first part of the sentence is dubious theology; the second, pernicious politics. Both are so irredeemably vulgar that I’d almost prefer a message saying that the rector of that venerable institution doubts the existence of God.

Since the poster’s first statement is theological, it can only be discussed in theological terms. Being the supreme science, theology is the epitome of reason in that it’s impeccably logical. Yet the poster takes the ‘logical’ out of ‘theological’.

The cliché of everyone being equal in the eyes of God is the curate’s egg: good in parts. But those parts are much smaller than those where it’s wrong.

Is one to assume that, say, Adolf Hitler and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (the pastor killed in a Nazi concentration camp) are equal in the eyes of God? Or, say, Lenin and the thousands of priests murdered on his orders? Or St John Newman and Jack the Ripper?

If they were, one would find it hard to justify the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell. Surely God displays the ultimate discrimination by consigning bad people to one destination and good ones to the other? Verily I say unto you, on that evidence alone it’s hard to claim God to egalitarianism.

Equality before God exists to begin with, but it expires some time after a person leaves infancy behind and starts to make free choices between good and evil, virtue and sin, right and wrong.

Mankind’s ability to exercise free will in that fashion is God’s great gift, and one struggles to understand why he’d bother to give it to us if we had nothing to gain from good choices, nor nothing to lose from bad ones.

I don’t know what God’s ledger sheet looks like, but I do know that some people are more good than bad, some the other way around, and some have no discernible good traits at all. To claim equality among them all is tantamount to claiming equality among the choices they’ve made, which strikes me as illogical.

The poster would have been theologically unassailable had it said that God loves us all. But that would only mean ensuing equality if we all loved God in return and tried not to transgress against his commandments too much.

Since that’s demonstrably not the case, the unqualified egalitarian claim collapses – but not as loudly as the second, secular part of the poster about everybody being equal in the eyes of humanity.

What does it even mean? Clearly the chaps who displayed that bunkum hadn’t asked themselves that question before putting pen to paper.

Since, not being myself divine, I can’t vouch for God, I can only rely on prayer, doctrinal sources and my own reasonable conjecture to grasp his feelings. But – and I know some may disagree – I do see myself as fully human.

Moreover, in the course of a long life I’ve met thousands of people who could make the same claim with equal validity. Yet neither I nor anyone I know has ever regarded everybody as equal in our eyes.

Murderers and their victims? Savants and ignoramuses? Geniuses and hacks? Statesmen and spivs? Athletes and weaklings? Hard workers and parasitic idlers? Everywhere we look, people are unequal in our eyes, morally, intellectually, physically – you name it.

None of us can claim equality of outcome. And, since we are all born with different genes and to different families, we can’t even claim equality of opportunity. If at birth we are indeed equal in the eyes of God, we can’t claim even such short-lived equality in the eyes of humanity.

I try – with variable success, it has to be said – using my free will to stay in God’s good graces. But, at 5’7’’, I’ve never had a shot at playing goalie for a Premiership team, and no amount of effort would ever have addressed this glaring inequality.

By the same token, I doubt that any degree of application would enable many Premiership goalies to do what I do, so where’s the equality in that?

In other words, if the first part of the poster is highly debatable, the second part is simply idiotic – and ideologically idiotic at that. But it would be wrong to think the two parts aren’t connected.

The key message, one that the authors really wanted to convey, is the political statement of secular equality. The preceding nod in God’s direction is there merely to add verisimilitude to the subsequent deep bow in the direction of left-wing politics.

I don’t know what sort of liturgy, if any, St Martin-in-the-Fields uses, but I suspect its clergy probably think that 1642 is a PIN code, and I’m sure the female Bishop of London doesn’t mind.

If the Anglican Church used to be called the Tory Party at prayer, it has certainly changed not only its prayers, but also its political allegiance. On the plus side, Anglican churches are emptying so fast that not many parishioners will be affected.

Thank God for small favours.

I’ve taken the liberty to compile into a single article a few quotations from the man whose spirit still animates the European Union.

If you don’t recognise his photograph, try to guess his identity – and no peeking into the last two paragraphs where all is revealed. I’ll give you a clue: the writer inspired not only the EU but also Jeremy Corbyn.

The world economic and political development tends to gravitate toward a unified world economy, with its degree of centralisation dependent upon the existing technological level.

The economic and political unification of Europe is the necessary prerequisite for the very possibility of national self-determination.

On the all-European scale, the principle of the “right” to self-determination can be invested with flesh and blood only under the conditions of a European Federative Republic.

The United States of Europe – without monarchies, standing armies and secret diplomacy – is the most important integral part of the peace programme.

It would truly be a miserable petty-bourgeois utopianism… to think that the fate of development in Europe and the entire world will finally be secured if the state map of Europe is brought into correspondence with the map of nationality, and if Europe is split into more or less complete nation-state cells ignoring geographic conditions and economic ties.

The task is to combine the claims to autonomy on the part of nations with the centralising requirements of economic development.

Europe is not a geographical term; Europe is an economic term, something incomparably more concrete than the world market. Now the time has arrived for stating definitely and clearly that federation is essential for Balkanised Europe.

The national community, arising from the needs of cultural development, will not only not be destroyed by this but, to the contrary, it is only on the basis of a republican federation of the leading countries that it will be able to find its full completion.

Recognition of every nation’s right to self-determination must be supplemented by the slogan of a democratic federation of all the leading nations, by the slogan of a United States of Europe.

The necessary conditions for this presuppose emancipation of the limits of the nation from those of the economy and vice versa. The economy will be organised in the broad arena of a European United States as the core of a worldwide organisation. The political form can only be a republican federation, within whose flexible and elastic bounds every nation will be able to develop its cultural forces with the greatest freedom.

The capitalist forces of production had outgrown the framework of European national states.

What is perfectly obvious is that the customs barriers must be thrown down. The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life.

Germany had set herself the task of “organising” Europe, i.e., of uniting economically the European continent under her own control…

But France cannot stand aloof from Germany, nor can Germany stand aloof from France. Therein lies the crux, and therein lies the solution, of the European problem. Everything else is incidental.

Of course, the United States of Europe will be only one of the two axes of the world organisation of economy. The United States of America will constitute the other.

It must not be overlooked that the very danger arising from the United States of America (which is spurring the destruction of Europe, and is ready to step in subsequently as Europe’s master) furnishes a very substantial bond for uniting the peoples of Europe.

I shan’t keep you on tenterhooks any longer. The author is Leon Trotsky, born on this day 140 years ago.

Happy birthday, Leon! Thank you for your inspirational insights – and sorry you can’t be with us today. But fear not: as you Bolsheviks used to say, our comrade is dead, but his cause lives on. Your legacy is in safe hands, your prophecies are coming true, and your disciple may well be Britain’s next prime minister.

Her Majesty, God bless her, has taken bad advice and, as her loyal subject, I’m sorry about that.

The palace has announced that the Queen’s new garments will henceforth use only fake fur. Yet Her Majesty will continue to wear her existing fur outfits, of which one suspects she has a lifelong supply.

That has encouraged some columnists to reassure the few remaining conservatives out there that the gesture was merely symbolic. That’s true – but it’s the wrong kind of symbolism.

The argument against furs, meat, leather, hunting and so forth is merely symbolic too. Few New Agers shed any other than crocodile tears at the plight of minks: their rancour resides not in the text but in the subtext, in connotation rather than denotation.

At base, this is the sartorial extension of class war. It’s not that they love furry animals; it’s that they hate people who wear their pelts to keep warm and look good.

More broadly, they hate the civilisation that historically worships God, not animals, one weaned on the Genesis belief that all living creatures were created to serve man – and only for that purpose.

Arguing against New Age savages logically is pointless. Logic is helpless against statements emanating not from reason, but from the putrid swamp of sinister emotions.

Logically, the argument against furs doesn’t hold water for a second. To inject a modicum of sense into it, one would have to explain why wearing a coat made of ewe’s skin is wrong, while wearing shoes made of the same material or eating meat from the same animal is acceptable.

Pretending to be reasonable, some New Agers make the next step and also denounce both the shoes and the meat, which idiocy is lamentably acquiring some following. But that next step is a giant leap into neo-paganism: worshiping animals and even claiming they aren’t qualitatively different from man.

Whenever I hear this, I praise the New Agers for their ability to judge themselves so realistically. What’s important to remember is that this lot are typological equivalents of all anti-Western fanatics, whatever their ostensible cause. As often as not they are the same people.

Whether they demonstrate against furs, meat, nuclear power, capitalism or fossil fuels, in their viscera they are screaming hatred of our civilisation and its religious, intellectual, moral and legal underpinnings. All those things, in other words, that Her Majesty has undertaken to uphold.

Lest we forget, she’s not only the head of our state but also the Supreme Governor of our established church, which, for all its oil-trading hierarchs, female bishops, bouncy castles and increasingly demotic liturgy, remains residually Christian.

It’s possible that the Queen is our last monarch to accept the traditional title of defensor fidei, Defender of the Faith. But accept it she did and, from what one hears, sincerely.

That’s why it’s her sacred duty to defend not only the faith itself, but also the culture and civilisation based on the faith. And, while Genesis is unequivocal on the role of animals, I struggle to find anywhere in the West’s historical, religious and philosophical sources an injunction against wearing furs, eating meat or wearing leather shoes.

‘Western’ is the operative word because other civilisations encourage the worship of animals, such as cats or cows, and even some insects. That’s their privilege, and I’m not going to be my usual cultural supremacist self and claim that their creeds are inferior to ours. Suffice it to say in this context that they are alien and frequently hostile to ours.

Western civilisation has existed for about 3,000 years, yet only in the past few decades has enmity to furs begun to claim a high moral ground.

The underlying assumption seems to be that modern people, who managed to kill the better part of 300 million people in just one century, more than in all other centuries combined, have raised morality to a dizzying height their predecessors were unable to scale.

Our monarchy’s remit is to act as the bulwark against deadly neo-pagan perversions, not as their conduit and endorser. Defaulting on that duty, in matters big or small, jeopardises the very existence of the monarchy.

If, as is possible, our next government will be fervently atheist, anti-monarchy and borderline communist, our royalty will have their work cut out anyway. Any sign of weakness, and the savages will pounce – more than they’ve already been pouncing.

I’m sure Her Majesty had her arm twisted to sign her name to that New Age nonsense. One wonders if there’s still enough spunk left among the British to untwist it.

P.S. Speaking of our borderline-communist government to come, perhaps ‘borderline’ is superfluous. While the papers attack Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings for being an extremist bully, his Labour counterpart, Corbyn’s top man Seaumas Milne, was a member of the Communist party until 2016, when his boss had already been Labour leader for a year.

This is how Milne feels about communism: “For all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. It encompassed genuine idealism and commitment… .”

Be afraid.

A general observation first: an intelligent villain can do more damage than a stupid one. Stupid villains kill old women for their pension money. Clever ones murder millions.

Just look at the greatest evildoers of the 20^th century, which is to say in history: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot et al – not an idiot in the bunch. It’s only because they combined wickedness with intelligence that they were collectively able to murder hundreds of millions.

The evil of our aspiring prime minister is beyond doubt for anyone who knows anything at all about Comrade Jeremy. I shan’t bore you with a long list of evidence for this assertion – you could probably compile one yourself.

On the off-chance that you can’t, just Google CORBYN in combination with words like TROTSKY, MARXISM, VENEZUELA, MADURO, IRA, ANTISEMITISM, HAMAZ, HEZBOLLAH, HARD LEFT, TERRORISM – take your pick.

Once you’ve taken it, think of the damage this creature could cause given half the chance. But then heave a sigh of relief and thank your stars that his evil doesn’t come packaged with intelligence. Give us a stupid enemy over a clever one any day.

If you wish to contest this assessment of Comrade Jeremy’s mental faculties, I can recommend cranking up your trusted Google again to search for a compendium of inanities Corbyn has uttered in the course of his undistinguished career.

Actually, you don’t need a compendium. Just his current tweet should make a sufficient case for the prosecution. Here it is:

“There are 150 billionaires in the UK while 14 million people live in poverty. In a fair society there would be no billionaires and no one would live in poverty.”

The first sentence implies a causative relationship. Comrade Jeremy clearly believes that it’s the 150 billionaires who consign 14 million people to poverty. Now I realise I may be overusing the word, but this is, well, stupid.

Corbyn subscribes to the zero sum view of economics, which even anyone studying the subject in secondary school knows for the nonsense it is.

Zero-summers see the economy as a pie whose size is constant. Hence anyone having a big slice means someone else having a small one. Except that this assumption is demonstrably false.

Western economies constantly grow, the odd slump notwithstanding. All major share indexes are now 10 to 15 times as high as they were when I first cursed the West with my presence in 1973, meaning that some serious dough has been added to the pie to make it rise.

Then of course there’s the issue of how those 150 despicable vultures got their billions and what they do with them. Let’s just look at one of them, Sir James Dyson, of the vacuum cleaners fame.

Sir James made his billions by giving millions of households a better version of the essential appliance. He currently employs about 7,000 people in the UK, all of them on decent incomes and benefits. I don’t know how much they contribute to the Exchequer but, in round numbers, it must be a hell of a lot.

Hence, rather than increasing the number of the poor, Sir James actually reduces it. The same can be said about all the 150, even those who use their money only to make more money, which to Comrade Jeremy brands them as blood-suckers or, which is the same thing, Jews.

Yet even such reprobates increase not only their own wealth but also that of the whole nation. They are the ones who provide essential investment for the Dysons of this world, vicariously creating prosperity and keeping millions of people employed – including many in the financial industry that provides a quarter of our GDP.

Jeremy’s bogeymen also surround themselves with a vast cocoon of service industry: restaurants, hotels, shops, dry cleaners, hairdressers, designers, tailors, florists, shoemakers, builders, drivers, decorators, pilots, accountants, lawyers, travel agents – millions of people who otherwise could be among the putative 14 million poor.

Corbyn’s second sentence is equally moronic. The implication is that some people being richer than others testifies to society’s unfairness.

Now, fairness means everybody getting his just deserts. Hence Corbyn is in effect saying that Dyson doesn’t deserve to be rich and the poor don’t deserve to be poor.

That this is untrue ought to be clear to anyone with an IQ above that of a courgette. Most of those 150 pernicious billionaires didn’t inherit their wealth, but earned and multiplied it by their talent, application and commitment.

Since such qualities aren’t immediately associated with most of the poor, by and large both groups get what they deserve. Hence a society that takes on the impossible task of eliminating both the rich and the poor may be all sorts of things, good or bad depending on one’s priorities. One thing it can’t be is fair.

What it absolutely has to be is tyrannical, using fiat to put a lid on ambition, talent and enterprise, while drawing its support from a growing parasitic mob. That’s Corbyn’s ideal of fairness, and it has been gloriously achieved in Maduro’s Venezuela that Comrade Jeremy openly admires.

Since Corbyn is manifestly stupid, only stupid people support him. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have no intelligence – only that they don’t use it to vote.

I know some perfectly competent individuals who support left-wing parties for all sorts of spurious reasons that reason knows not of, to use Pascal’s phrase. Coming to the fore instead are things like ideology, resentments, envy – or simply inertia and mental torpor.

The rest of us hope that Corbyn will be too stupid to mobilise the national reserves of stupidity to drive him into Downing Street. And that the Labour Party is stupid enough to let this creature lead it into the general election.

Mikhail Gorbachev, a sprightly-looking 88, is now perceived as a world statesman, a status that encourages him to pronounce on global issues with an air of weighty bonhomie.

This time around he regaled BBC viewers with nostalgically sounding Soviet platitudes about the evil of nuclear weapons. Unless every possessor of those diabolic devices agreed to destroy them, he explained, the “planet” will remain in “colossal danger”.

The current standoff between the West and Russia isn’t quite the Cold War it used to be, according to him. Let’s just call it a Chilled War, added a smiley Gorby in an attempt at knee-slapping humour. But the two sides still fly warplanes and sail warships in close proximity to each other, which is asking for trouble.

The spirit of moral equivalence wafted through the air, bringing back the times olden. To Gorby, both Russia and the US are naughty boys shouting “Oh yeah?” at each other before schoolyard fisticuffs.

The wise schoolmaster looks down on them from the vertiginous height of his institutional and intellectual ascendancy and tells them to stop immediately. He brushes aside mutual accusations along the lines of he-started-it. As far as the schoolmaster is concerned, they’re both to blame equally.

That sort of reasoning was mendacious when the war was cold and remains so now, when it’s supposed to be merely chilled. Three Western countries stockpiled nuclear weapons only because of the Soviet threat. The threat is now Russian, rather than Soviet, but none the less dire for it.

NATO perceived then, as it doubtless does now, that only the US nuclear umbrella could protect Europe from impending Russian aggression. A conventional response has always been unrealistic.

In the Cold War days, the Soviets had 50,000 tanks, a force NATO simply couldn’t contain without resorting to cataclysmic weaponry. Its own conventional presence in Europe was so grossly outnumbered that it could at best only hope to slow the Russians down.

These days the Russian forces bristle with a more compact 15,398 battle tanks – not including the tens of thousands of mothballed machines from previous generations that can become battle-worthy overnight. The three largest European armies, British, French and German, have less than 1,000 among them.

The US tank force in Europe has diminished from 5,000 in 1989 to, in round numbers, zero today. Transporting tanks back in sufficient numbers should hostilities break out would take months, by which time the war would be over.

As Russia has shown over the past several years, she is pursuing an aggressive foreign policy, either attacking or threatening her neighbours and fomenting anti-Western sedition all over the world, including in the West itself.

Since some of Russia’s neighbours are NATO members under the aegis of collective security, the world is indeed a dangerous place, made more so by Russia — and less so by NATO nuclear weapons.

Rather than letting Gorbachev spout the old anti-nuke saws unchallenged, the interviewer should have pointed out that, of all European countries, only Russia has occupied vast tracts of foreign territory since the last war. And only the threat of nuclear response can prevent her from grabbing more.

Had I been the interviewer, such weighty matters wouldn’t have come up at all or, if they had, I wouldn’t have let Gorby get away with general banalities, all smacking of Soviet partisanship. Instead I would have asked him to share some factual information with inquisitive viewers.

For example, I’d be curious to know how a man whose top salary had been $600 a month could directly upon his retirement endow a foundation initially capitalised at nine billion dollars.

Yes, one could save a pretty penny by taking bag lunches, but the amount still sounds impressive. And if the money wasn’t Gorby’s, whose was it?

My next question would involve his pre-Moscow tenure as First Secretary in Stavropol, one of the two most corrupt provinces in the Soviet Union.

Is it true that Gorby’s nickname there was Mishka konvert (Mickey Envelope) in reference to his preferred way of doing business? And did his wife only ever intercede with her husband on behalf of supplicants bearing egg-sized gems?

Also, how did Gorby manage to ingratiate himself to KGB head Andropov, who guided his whole career with an avuncular hand?

When Andropov became General Secretary, the first thing he did was transfer Gorby to Moscow, filling the vacancy formed by the sudden demise of two Politburo members, one of a suspicious cardiac arrest, the other of an even more suspicious road accident. Why such affection?

On Gorbachev’s watch, billions of party dollars were transferred to the West and laundered through new holding companies and brassplates. Did he supervise that activity or, barring that, was he aware of it?

The same question, if you please, Mr Gorbachev, about the transfer of power from the party to the KGB that gathered speed during your tenure. Was it a planned and controlled process or did it just happen?

And how do you explain sending special forces into Vilnus when independence was in the air, to bust demonstrators’ heads with entrenchment tools? And by the way, how does he justify lying to the world about the Chernobyl disaster and continuing to do so until satellite evidence became incontrovertible?

Oh well, enough of that. Now you know why I could never be a BBC interviewer. I’d make distinguished old gentlemen too uncomfortable.

‘The worse, the better’ is a time-dishonoured Leninist tactic. Its essence is to drive the country into such penury and chaos that the desperate populace will welcome whatever the strategy is designed to achieve.

In that spirit the Bolsheviks and other socialists did their best to sabotage Russia in the First World War by demoralising the army with pacifist agitation and sowing sedition in the rear with endless strikes and limitless propaganda.

You know what happened next: an orgy of sanguinary repression and enslavement, millions of victims, and a malodorous reflux from which Russia is still suffering a century later.

Learning from the best, Mao raised ‘the worse, the better’ strategy to its logical, cataclysmic peak. Back in the 60s he advocated an all-out nuclear war, killing half of the world’s population but ensuring the triumph of communism for the survivors.

Putting a political objective before horrific human suffering strikes me as rather, well, unconservative, which is to say dubious.

For all political, military and economic earthquakes have one feature in common: while the ensuing suffering is guaranteed, nothing else is. Rising out of the ashes may be either a phoenix of virtue or a carrion of evil, and no one can know for sure which it will be. That’s why conservatives try to keep cataclysms at bay for as much as possible.

Thus I’ve often written that the West has taken so many wrong turns over the past few centuries that only a major military or economic disaster could get it back on track. But, I always add, no decent person could wish for such a calamity nonetheless.

Without taking exhaustive polls, I suspect that most conservatives would agree with me on that. After all, if true conservatism is defined by prudence, intelligence and morality, ‘the worse, the better’ strategy flies in the face of all these virtues.

That’s why it’s so surprising to see supposedly conservative Leavers advocating just that for the upcoming general election.

‘Supposedly’ is a key qualifier here because I’ve always had my doubts about people who taper their whole political Weltanschauung  down to the point of a single issue – even if I happen to agree with the single issue.

Conservative thought is based on a broad vision of things in their complex interrelationships suspended in a fine balance. Overstressing one element at the expense of all others can have the effect of sawing off three legs of a chair and hoping that just one leg will provide sufficient support.

Hence, by insisting on their ideological purity, Nigel Farage and his admirers are prepared to dynamite the very Brexit by which they swear and usher in a Trotskyist government into the bargain.

They want Boris Johnson to form an election-winning pact with the Brexit Party, thereby ditching the deal he managed to wrench out of the EU, one that parliament has already accepted. It takes a particular deafness to political nuances to think that any PM would ever do something like that.

I don’t know how long it took Johnson to reject the idea, but I suspect the elapsed time was measured in seconds. Then, says Farage, the Brexit Party will contest every seat possible, splitting the Leave vote.

And if as a result Britain will suffer the catastrophe of a Trotskyist government, then so be it. Those dastardly Tories will have only themselves to blame.

When I describe to people, in writing or orally, the full magnitude of the horror befalling Britain should that evil Marxist lot get their hands on the levers of power, they just shrug. We’ve had bad governments before and lived to tell about it.

True, Britain has had bad governments before. But never an irredeemably evil one, which the Corbyn-McDonnell clique is. So what, one reader wrote to me.

Let the people experience a few years of unvarnished, unadulterated socialism. They’ll be so appalled that we’ll finally get a true conservative party, which the Tories aren’t.

It’s that Leninist strategy at work again: the worse, the better. In this case, its success is predicated on a few assumptions.

First, that the emergence of a true conservative party, one capable of forming a post-Trotskyist government, is the likeliest consequence of Britain turning into an Anglophone Venezuela.

It’s not, if history is anything to go by. One thing evil socialists of either the red or brown hue are good at is brainwashing. Give them a few years at the helm, and they’ll fill the airwaves with so much effluvia that people will think they’re smelling roses.

More Germans voted against than for the Nazis in 1933. However, had an election been held two or three years later, Hitler would have won by a landslide. Dr Goebbels would have seen to that. And the Germans were at the time infinitely better educated than the Britons are today.

History is replete with examples of weak, vacillating governments being ousted, only to be replaced with bloodthirsty tyrants hungering for human flesh.

Without going too far back, both the Provisional Government in Russia c. 1917 and the Weimar Republic in Germany c. 1932 were ineffectual, quasi-socialist contrivances. Yet once they collapsed, it wasn’t conservative angels but socialist ogres who took over.

I’d suggest that, after a few years of Trotskyist mayhem, Britons will be much more likely to vote not for a hypothetical conservative party, but for one even more Trotskyist or else fascist.

The second assumption from which Farage groupies proceed is that true conservatism isn’t only desirable but also possible in today’s Britain. I agree it would be desirable, but I doubt it’s possible.

This isn’t an argument that can be adequately made in this abbreviated format, so, skipping the intermediate stages, I’ll simply give you the conclusion I reach in my books.

True conservatism is at odds with modernity because it’s deeply rooted in the founding Christian ethos of our civilisation. Those roots have been systematically severed, leaving us with a materialist, deracinated, egotistic world whose fields are so comprehensively sown with godless salt that nothing conservative can ever grow.

Indulging my pun Tourette’s, I always say that in any election we are faced not with the choice between a towering titan and a political pygmy, but with the evil of two lessers.

Any attempt to pursue what we see as absolute goodness can only result in the triumph of absolute badness. Seeking a political heaven on earth we run the risk of creating hell on earth.

So a message to Nigel Farage and his fans: by all means cut off your noses if such is your wont. But please don’t spite my face.