Category: Blog

Manny Macron tried to prepare properly for his meeting with Ukrainian president Poroshenko. I suppose he must have taken seriously Brigitte’s threat to send him to bed without supper if he didn’t.

But then Manny made the mistake of taking extracurricular history lessons from Poroshenko as he went along. That got the poor lad terribly confused.

Both the preparation and confusion were reflected in his concluding statement. Speaking of Putin’s theft of Crimea, Manny said he understood that Russia is the aggressor in that conflict. That rated an A.

As Brigitte was smiling with maternal pride in the background, Manny rephrased the same thought by saying that Ukraine isn’t an aggressor. France doesn’t recognise the illegal Crimea annexation and knows who started this war between the Ukraine and Russia.

Since he was saying the same thing over and over again, a maximum of a B was merited. However, Brigitte had taught Manny that repetition is the mother of learning.

But then she winced and made a mental note to mark Manny’s performance down. She realised that, against her explicit instructions, Manny had picked up some history from Poroshenko on the hop. That’s where things went awry.

“I must tell you,” Manny said to Poroshenko, “that our two countries have relations of very long standing, going deep into history. You’ve devoted some time today to paying tribute to Anne of Kiev. You’ve shown how important this very old eleventh-century history is, how deeply rooted our ancient relations are.”

In other words, Poroshenko taught Manny that Princess Anne of Kiev was a Ukrainian lass who married the French king Henri I and thereby cemented the budding friendship between the Ukraine and France.

Here Manny showed a bit of confusion and much inconsistency. For, meeting Vlad Putin a few days earlier, he had accepted with alacrity the latter’s assurance that friendship between France and Russia also goes back to that versatile (polyvalente) Kievan girl.

Manny must decide whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian to avoid future confusion. Perhaps a few more history lessons wouldn’t go amiss. Above all, he should learn neither to play politics with history himself nor to let others get away with doing so.

It has to be said that the French themselves aren’t above a little sleight of hand when it comes to relating events of yore. Thus France won every battle she ever fought. Some victories were military but, when that couldn’t be claimed, they were moral. One way or the other, there were no defeats.

If the victory was merely moral, the absence of a military triumph has to be ascribed to treason. Thus the French never say “We were beaten”. They say “We were betrayed” (Nous sommes trahis).

In that spirit, the French won resounding moral victories against the English in such landmark battles as Crécy, Agincourt and Waterloo.

In the first two, merely half a century apart, perfide Albion employed treacherous, unsporting tactics of putting archers armed with longbows on high ground. As aristocratic, heavily armoured French cavalry trundled uphill, getting stuck in the mud, those perfidious English yeomen picked them off one by one, cutting down what French history books describe as the “fine flower of French nobility” (la fine fleur de la noblesse française).

And at Waterloo the French, led by that genius sans pareil Napoleon, won a resounding military victory over the English, only to have to settle for the moral kind when the Prussians arrived. A victory by any other name, in other words.

However, even though the French may play fast and loose with history, they don’t use such academic shenanigans to score political points. No doubt Manny thinks that, likewise, there’s no harm in the Russians and Ukrainians both claiming Anne for their own. So it’s back to school for him – and perhaps Brigitte ought to give him six of the best (actually, he might like that).

As I’ve written in the past, it’s easy to settle the argument about whether Anne was Ukrainian or Russian. She was neither.

Anne was a Scandinavian princess of the Rurik dynasty that founded and ruled Kievan Rus. The historical roots of both the Ukraine and Russia can be traced back to that principality, but to refer to it as either Ukrainian or Russian is like referring to Saxony as English.

In due course Kievan Rus was wiped out and the centre of eastern Slavic lands shifted to a newly founded Moscow. In 1240 Muscovy was conquered by the Golden Horde, while the territory west of it fell under the sway of Lithuania and eventually the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Following the Cossack Rebellion (1648–1657) led by Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, that territory was incorporated into the Russian Empire. In the process, Khmelnytsky’s men murdered 300,000 Jews, establishing a record of anti-Semitic atrocities that stood until Hitler.

The word ‘Ukraine’, meaning ‘outskirts’ in Slavic languages, was unknown until the seventeenth century, while the word ‘Russia’ in the geopolitical sense is only about a century older. Elizabethan maps identify the place as either Muscovy or even Tartary, and what is now the Ukraine was in English known as Ruthenia until 1804.

I hope next time Manny has to follow either Poroshenko or Putin on their forays into history, he’ll be able to catch them out in bastardising history for political purposes.

At least Poroshenko doesn’t use this ploy for aggressive purposes. Putin does, as he did when justifying the theft of Crimea by claiming it was originally Russian. That’s like saying that Bolivia was originally Spanish.

Crimea was traditionally the frontier between the civilised classical world and the savage steppe. As such, it was colonised by the Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Genoese and the Ottoman Empire.

It was from the latter that Russia claimed Crimea roughly at the same time as Britain conquered India. As a result of Khrushchev’s gerrymandering, Crimea was transferred to the Ukraine in 1954, again but a few years after India gained her independence.

Crimea is thus Russian in the same sense in which India is British, and Putin was no more justified in his geopolitical larceny than Britain would be in trying to occupy, say, Bengal. Hence what in the hands of the French is an innocent, if slightly silly, game of historical chicanery, in the hands of the Russians becomes an offensive weapon claiming human lives.

Bad boy, Manny. But not to worry, you’re still young enough to learn. Brigitte will see to that.

 

The common misapprehension is that madmen show signs of their condition at all times. Clinical practice and Peter Hitchens prove this isn’t so.

Most deluded people sound normal when discussing subjects that don’t trigger their delusion. Usually only one topic sets them off, although, Hitchens can evidently afford two.

He tends to make sense on most other subjects. But when a sore subject is mentioned, he’s away with the fairies. Since he controls the content of his Sunday column, one of those topics comes up regularly, but yesterday Mr Hitchens regaled us with both.

With the obtuseness of a certifiable maniac, he prefaces the first one with a veiled suggestion that it’s not he who’s mad but just about everyone else: “Plenty of people hate me for daring to point it out. Tough. I’ll say it once again…”

Well, I for one don’t hate Mr Hitchens. I’m genuinely concerned about his mental health, and also about the sanity of the publications that allow him to indulge his delusions.

The one reason plenty of people are supposed to hate him for concerns a startling discovery for which he takes credit without false modesty. Apparently psychotic people may commit violent acts, and psychotropic drugs may make people psychotic.

If that’s where Mr Hitchens left it, everyone would agree and some would say he’s stating the bleeding obvious. But he doesn’t leave it at that. Scanning the past 1,400 years and especially the last few, Mr Hitchens tends to suggest that Islamic violence has nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with cannabis.

This tends to provoke comments about his sanity, or shortage thereof. I myself have written about this worrying situation a few times and, to obviate a need to repeat myself, you can easily look up those pieces (for example, 26 March, 2017).

Hitchens’s column yesterday is mostly a reaction to the reaction. He indignantly denies any charges of trying to vindicate Muslim terrorism. He has never done it and would never do it.

However, and that’s where the mania kicks in, he goes on to demonstrate that some murders, namely the one of Jo Cox, were indeed perpetrated by deranged chaps with a history of drug abuse.

By itself this illustration is a meaningless truism. It’s like saying that earthquakes sometimes happen. However, the statement becomes crazy if it’s augmented by a hint that earthquakes sometimes happen because there are too many black cats about.

On this occasion Mr Hitchens spares us his usual, somewhat illogical, extrapolation to the effect that, because some acts of terrorism are perpetrated by dopeheads, Islam has nothing to do with any of them. But this conclusion follows from the whole corpus of his writing on this subject.

Suddenly we leave the realm of rhetoric to enter one of psychiatry, especially since Mr Hitchens then segues into his parallel, unrelated mania. This has to do with his almost erotic adulation of Col. Putin, who wages a noble single-handed war against Nato’s attempts to blow up the world.

As proof of this dastardly intent Hitchens cites some facts. But then all madmen do that – it’s only in the spin they put on the facts that their disease reveals itself.

In this case, Mr Hitchens observes correctly that: “American nuclear bombers flew to the Baltic. Nato heavy artillery let rip close to the Russian city of Kaliningrad. A Nato jet buzzed the Russian Defence Minister’s plane.”

He then asks a presumably rhetorical question: “Who is actually turning up the heat here?”

Why, certainly not the KGB-run regime that pounces like a rabid dog on its neighbours, annexes their territory, murders tens of thousands, starts three wars in the last decade, amasses hundreds of thousands of troops on its western border, spends half its budget on the military, directly threatens at least three Nato members thereby creating a threat of nuclear war, constantly violates the airspace of Nato countries, foments trouble around the world, launches cyber attacks on Western institutions, conducts hysterical non-stop anti-Western propaganda in all media.

Of course not. It’s Nato, silly. You know, the organisation that has protected our freedom for the past 68 years.

This infernal organisation has a charter whose Article 5 says that an attack on one member is an attack on all. Since Putin’s regime has an overwhelming superiority in conventional capabilities over Nato in Europe, the latter would have only two options should the former pounce on the Baltics the way it has already pounced on Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine.

One, not to respond at all. Two, to respond with nuclear weapons.

The first option would neuter Nato out of existence, leaving Putin in control of Europe. The second one could spell nuclear holocaust. That’s why the most realistic option isn’t to respond to Putin’s aggression, but to try to prevent it.

To that end, following the decision taken at the 2014 Nato summit, in the immediate aftermath of Putin’s theft of the Crimea, the Western alliance has put a 5,000-strong contingent into the three Baltic members of Nato. They’re there to act as a tripwire in case of a Russian attack, and their presence is designed to discourage such an attack by demonstrating Nato’s commitment to Article 5.

Even such a tiny force, however, needs to be in a state of readiness. That’s why Nato has conducted the training exercises that our clinical case equates with “turning up the heat”.

Now hardly a day goes by that Russian planes don’t buzz Nato planes or installations. Yet Hitchens regards as an act of unprovoked aggression one of the few such incidents initiated by Nato.

Nato commanders are understandably tense every time Russian fighter-bombers appear in close proximity to the Baltics. In the case that pushed Mr Hitchens over the edge, two such warplanes materialised in the region, escorting an airliner that happened to carry Putin’s defence minister Shoigu.

This is how Nato explains the incident, first pointing out that the two fighter-bombers didn’t respond to air traffic control or requests to identify themselves:

“As is standard practice whenever unknown aircraft approach Nato air space, Nato and national air forces took to the sky to monitor these flights. When Nato aircraft intercept a plane they identify it visually, maintaining a safe distance at all times. Once complete, Nato jets break away.”

Moreover, Nato stated it had no information about who was aboard the passenger plane. All in all, it takes an advanced case of derangement to interpret the incident as Nato “turning up the heat”.

Actually, I’m paying Mr Hitchens a compliment by suggesting he’s unwell. Otherwise I’d have to wonder why a sane British hack feels called upon to repeat Putin’s propaganda verbatim.

The great racing venue has changed since a few decades ago and certainly since the time of Queen Anne. That otherwise ineffectual monarch willed Royal Ascot into existence and it has become one of the highlights of England’s social calendar.

All subsequent monarchs, including the reigning one, have always graced the Royal Enclosure with their presence, conferring an aura of dignity on the proceedings. By royal decree the racecourse has always been open to the public, and the public flocked in.

Champagne was sipped, cigars smoked, bets placed, and ladies and gentlemen would cheer the thoroughbreds, some of them their own, some belonging to their social superiors.

And then, step by step, Britain showed the Bolsheviks how to make their cherished dream come true. There was no need to shoot the ladies and gentlemen. It was sufficient to marginalise them for the proletariat to emerge victorious.

Enough has been written about the demographic catastrophe England has suffered in the last few decades. Yet the parallel social and cultural catastrophe is largely ignored, mainly because it’s no longer possible to resist the creeping proletarianisation. It’s best to keep silent in the hope of avoiding chastisement and re-education.

I’m not using the word ‘proletarian’ in the Marxist sense of factory or manual worker. We have precious few of them left, and those still extant don’t necessarily display the cultural symptoms of déclassé anomie.

Such anomie is the sub-cultural property of the mob, whose members may nowadays hold any job at all, from taxi driver to lawyer, from salesman to fund manager, from advertising executive to cardiologist. Prole anomie has become a badge of honour, proudly worn by all who strive to belong.

Those who don’t belong had better be good at subterfuge or, if they’re not, at least keep their mouths shut. The mob may forgive a meek outsider, but it’ll pounce on a fierce critic.

Step by step, the mob has succeeded at either vulgarising or destroying every institution through which some checks on it could be applied. The House of Lords is the most conspicuous casualty, having fallen victim to the mob’s idea of ‘democracy’. No thought is ever given to the ancient constitution of the realm, which they don’t understand, and those few bits they do understand they hate.

The less eye-catching losses may be less lethal, but they rankle as much. Just look at a newsreel of the crowd at a football match some 60 years ago. See those working class chaps wearing their Sunday best, cheering their team enthusiastically but with hallmark English restraint?

Now compare them to the savage tattooed mob of today, screaming obscenities at the top of their voices, waiting to pick a fight with their counterparts rooting for the other team. See the difference?

Or listen to disgusting, anti-musical prole din blaring in public places, making it impossible to have a quiet meal in any restaurant where one doesn’t have to pay a fortune. Look at the vomit-inducing and vomiting throng tumbling out of pubs at night, scan the newspapers the morning after a public holiday for the photographs of revolting public displays in every city centre – listen to the way people talk on buses, listen to they way their children talk.

It would be unrealistic to hope that an ancient institution like Royal Ascot would be spared the effluvial flood. Indeed it hasn’t been.

At first the mob began to use it for their pathetic attempts at jumped-up gentility. For one day in a year those feral accountants and sales supervisors, accompanied by their wives or girlfriends, would don their pseudo-toff garments and try to impersonate aristos.

In parallel, the aristos, including the younger members of the royal family, were avidly adopting the manners and mores of the proles. At some point the two tectonic plates clapped together in the middle, and Ascot was turned into a Walpurgisnacht, and, which is worse, a pretentious one at that.

Yesterday provided evidence for this observation. All those savages, some fathers of multiple children, some stock brokers, all equally barbaric, staged a mass brawl, with tables flying, fences tumbling, chairs used for their ballistic properties. Welcome to Royal Ascot, ladies and gentlemen.

That being Ladies’ Day, the ladies weren’t far behind. They too brawled, their tasteless slag dresses slipping off their loose, milk-white, often tattooed flesh.

Today’s papers are jammed full of photographs preserving this mobfest for posterity. Drunk men trying to kill one another. Slags passed out pissed. Couples with their tongues stuck down each other’s throats. Middle-aged women in ridiculous slapper outfits cheering on. Welcome to Royal Ascot, ladies and gentlemen.

People who say they love England really don’t. They love the memory of what England was, the greatest and most civilised land on earth. Well, that England is gone, stamped in the dirt by the rampaging victorious mob.

That so many brainwashed British voters opted for Corbyn may be a harbinger of impending disaster, but it’s not exactly a disaster in itself.

After all, there are enough sensible people in the UK to rally together and explain to the public the evil nature of the ideology Corbyn’s lot are inflicting on Britain.

Or are there? One begins to revise this optimistic outlook when observing the number of supposedly reasonable, conservative people not only blind to the deadly threat presented by Putin’s kleptofascist regime but actually enthusiastic about it.

This shows a vast capacity for “useful idiocy” and moral decrepitude among the very people who should be counted on as a force for good. For only two types of people can admire Putin’s regime: fools and knaves.

Neither can be relied upon to mount serious resistance even to domestic political evil. Suddenly the impending troubles take on calamitous proportions: in the absence of intelligent, moral opposition, evil may well triumph.

The evil of Putin’s regime is evident from its internal practices, placing Russia close to the bottom of every list rating countries for freedom of speech, civil liberties, the rule of law and all other vital categories. A regime that routinely murders political opponents, and whose police torture and kill people in their custody, is an evil regime.

Putin fans who form a political judgement without learning the relevant facts are fools. If they don’t want to know the facts, they’re knaves. And those who know such facts and still support Putin are as evil as he is.

But let’s make allowances for the traditional Anglo-Saxon indifference to what’s going on in less fortunate countries. The widespread feeling is that even a naughty regime is acceptable provided it doesn’t threaten us directly.

So, ignoring both the moral and intellectual paucity of such nonchalance, let’s concentrate on Russia’s crimes committed in our own country.

In 2006 Putin’s government passed a law giving its agents an 007-like licence to kill its enemies abroad. Since then Putin’s hitmen may have “whacked” at least 14 people in Britain alone.

Tellingly, US intelligence services have been passing on information implicating Putin’s FSB in a string of assassinations on British soil. However, Theresa May, as both Home Secretary and Prime Minister, deliberately delayed or sidelined public inquiries into definite or likely hits, citing “national security” grounds and the need to protect “international relations”.

The 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 was the first ever case of nuclear terrorism, and as such couldn’t be hushed up. Many less spectacular murders have been, with the government all too eager to accept suicide or natural causes as the explanations of deaths.

Thus the British toxicologist who diagnosed the polonium poisoning of Litvinenko is supposed to have killed himself by multiple stab wounds – this though suicide by stabbing is rare this side of Japan, and suicide by multiple stabbings rarer still.

HMG displays touching credulity when investigating a spate of almost simultaneous accidents, suicides and heart attacks befalling British subjects and Russian immigrants who find themselves on Putin’s wrong side. To wit:

Alexander Perepelichny, young man blowing the whistle on Russian money laundering, dropped dead while jogging in Surrey. Official ruling: heart attack.

Boris Berezovsky, oligarch who financed political opponents to Putin, found hanged in his bathroom. Official ruling: suicide.

Scot Young, facilitator of Berezovsky’s money laundering, defenestrated in London. Official ruling: suicide.

Young’s partners Paul Castle, Robbie Curtis and Johnny Elichaoff all died violently. Official ruling: suicides.

Badri Patarkatsishvili, Berezovsky’s business partner, dropped dead. Official ruling: heart attack.

Yuri Golubev, co-founder of Yukos, the oil company stolen by Putin, ditto.

Stephen Moss, 46-year-old lawyer working for Putin’s oligarchs, ditto.

Stephen Curtis (no relation to Robbie), British launderer of Russian money, dead in a suspicious helicopter crash. Official ruling: accident.

Putin’s sponsoring organisation teaches its agents to distrust coincidences: when they number more than two, they’re no longer coincidental. And when an enemy of the Russian state suffers an apparent heart attack, one ought to remember that the Russian secret police has been running a poisons lab since 1918.

Some of their best poisons induce heart attacks without leaving any traces. Perepelichny’s heart specifically had been doubtless weakened by his grassing up the players in the newly traditional Russian game of money laundering.

Anticipating the onset of heart trouble, Mr Perepelichny had taken out a multi-million-pound life insurance policy, with the attendant medical examination missing any cardiac defects. At the same time he had reported multiple death threats.

The few released results of the chemical analysis show that the grass died by, well, grass. This may qualify as a natural death in that it was caused by a naturally occurring substance.

The culpable toxic plant is called gelsemium, found only in remote areas of China. In the spirit of burgeoning Sino-Soviet alliance, the Chinese kindly make their native flora available to one of Russia’s few thriving industries, contract killing.

At least, in Britain Putin’s men kill only individuals. In the US they try to kill the whole political system.

In his testimony to Congress, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said: “In 2016 the Russian government, at the direction of Vladimir Putin himself, orchestrated cyber attacks on our nation for the purpose of influencing our election – plain and simple. Now, the key question for the president and Congress is: What are we going to do to protect the American people and their democracy from this kind of thing in the future?”

The answer is, pathetically little.

Mr Trump assures Americans that Russian meddling didn’t affect the presidential and state elections in any way. That may be, but it’s the thought that counts. And the thought is tantamount to war.

Cyber attacks are a vital part of modern warfare. They can be used to jam communications, silence command centres, sabotage guidance systems – or, as in this case, to subvert the country’s political system.

If there is a substantive difference between a cyber and a missile attack, it escapes me. Yet even assuming that it exists, surely the Russians provided sufficient grounds at least for the summary severance of diplomatic relations.

Instead the Trump administration merely expanded the existing sanctions, placing 160 individuals and some 400 companies on its sanctions list. However, even this namby-pamby response enraged Putin’s KGB junta.

Its prominent member, foreign minister Lavrov, said: “I can only express my regrets at the Russophobe obsession of our US colleagues.” Consonant with this refreshingly cynical rant is the response of our own pseudo-conservative useful idiots to any criticism of Putin’s Russia, no matter how factual.

All such critics are immediately accused of irrational Russophobia, as no doubt I’ll be following this article. We’re sleepwalking into disaster.

 

 

Every self-respecting company has a corporate charter. And every corporate charter says “Our people are our greatest resource” or words to that effect.

The phrase is a bit hackneyed, but who says people who compose such documents have to be accomplished stylists? Yet the sentiment is doubtless true. Any company is only as good as its employees.

That’s why it makes sense to hire intelligent, well-behaved, well-educated youngsters blessed with work ethic, sense of responsibility and social skills. Or so one would have thought.

However, in thinking so one would be overlooking a problem growing in significance by the day. For, statistically speaking, most of such youngsters come from solid middle-class families or – hold on a second, let me make sure nobody’s listening – even higher.

Employment practices tend to reflect this statistical probability, which isn’t to be confused with certainty. It’s possible for someone raised on a council estate by a single mother to be a brilliant, conscientious, successful employee. But, alas, that’s not the way to bet.

That’s why 61 per cent of successful applicants at top firms attended one of the country’s 24 most selective universities. And, at a guess, most such alumni come from middle-class families.

That’s not good enough for those who, like me, believe in progress above all. That’s why I’m in complete sympathy with the principles driving the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) and the government’s Social Mobility Commission (SMC).

Working hand in glove, they have come up with the Social Mobility Index, to be applied to all top companies. The goal is to make sure that most employees come from what our illustrious prime minister Tessa calls “just about managing families” (JAM).

To merit a satisfactory index, a company has to consider numerous criteria when interviewing a prospective recruit: his accent, the school and university he went to, his family background and parents’ occupation, the area he grew up in, whether or not he was eligible for free school meals and so forth. The lower the better is the guiding principle.

Education Secretary Justine Greening is almost as ecstatic about this initiative as she is about her girlfriend. Having companies compete for the prolier-than-thou accolade, she says, “is the collective goal we must all have if we are truly to tackle poor social mobility”.

I agree wholeheartedly – what other goal can we possibly have? Surely not making sure that our top companies remain internationally competitive.

Of course some might cite historical evidence showing that Britain used to be blessed with higher social mobility than any other European country. But that was achieved by unfair means, such as providing excellent education for anyone capable of receiving it. As a lifelong egalitarian, I’m aghast.

Equal education should be equally force-fed to all, regardless of ability. Hence I’m glad Mrs May and Miss Greening have abandoned their reactionary plan to bring back grammar schools. We don’t want 25 per cent of the pupils to be well-educated and the rest competent. We want them all to be equally ignorant, ideally unable to function in the modern economy, and that’s another “collective goal” towards which to strive.

Meanwhile, now that the Social Mobility Index is becoming a de rigueur employment criterion, I’ve done my modest best to promote this invaluable initiative.

If young persons of your kin or acquaintance are seeking a job, perhaps this advice will help them pass the interview with flying colours. I’ll highlight some possible questions (Q) and offer advice on wrong and correct answers (WA and CA).

Not to have to repeat mysel1f, every reply should start with “You what, mate?” and, after the question has been repeated, end with “innit”. The T sound in “what” must be replaced with the glottal stop. Warning: to pronounce this sound authentically, the youngster should spend hours practising, ideally with the aid of any Ray Winstone film. So:

Q: Where did you grow up? WA: Chelsea. CA: Under Chelsea Bridge.

Q: What does your father do? WA: He’s a financial consultant. CA: You mean me baby favva? Ain’t got no other favva, mate.

Q: What does your mother do? WA: Charity work. CA: Me muvva, she do it all, mate. Coke, meth, skunk – you name it.

Q: What kind of school did you go to? WA: Public school. CA: School of hard knockers, mate.

Q: And after that? WA: Exeter U. CA: Bugger U.

Q: Did you get free meals at school. WA: No, I’m afraid I didn’t. CA: Kin’ell, only grub I had, mate.

Q: Have you travelled widely? WA: My parents made sure we spent every holiday in a different country of great cultural interest. CA: Been to Shepherd’s Bush once, mate, to visit me bruvver at them Scrubs. He then ate a lightbulb, innit, and bled to death like.

Q: What is your favourite music? WA: Bach cantatas. CA: N**gaz Wiv Attitude.

Q: What is your favourite food? WA: Foie gras on toast. CA: Burger King on a bus.

Q: Do you smoke? WA: Absolutely not. CA: You mean fags?

This is just a small sample of the training programme I offer to all aspiring candidates for jobs at top companies. I can’t guarantee success, but I could definitely help a middle-class youngster reverse the statistical odds against him. Djamean?

The public reaction to the Finsbury Park incident reminds me of Russia, circa 1903. Now historical parallels are never quite exact, but they may be useful for illustrative purposes. This one certainly is.

In that year a wave of 600 anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. Kishinev and Kiev were hit especially hard. Thousands of houses looted, thousands of people beaten up, thousands of women raped, 48 people dead in Kishinev alone.

By the time the pogroms ended in 1906, 2,500 Jews had been killed, most of them in Odessa. (Russian chauvinists like Solzhenitsyn always precede such numerals with the word ‘only’.) But meanwhile it was 1903, and, in the wake of Kishinev and Kiev, the Jews of Gomel knew it was their turn next.

In preparation, they organised armed self-defence groups, which sprang a nasty surprise on those Russian patriots. When the marauding mob rampaged through the streets of Gomel, it was met with pistol shots.

As a result, ‘only’ 25 Jews died, and about as many murderous thugs. Now the term ‘moral equivalence’ hadn’t been coined yet, but, on the basis of the public reaction in the Russian press, it should have been.

Most papers insisted that both sides were equally to blame. Some, that the Jews even more so because they had fired the first shots. Phrases like “violence breeds violence” streamed off newspaper pages, along with regrets that the Jews hadn’t absorbed the Christian notion of turning the other cheek.

The subsequent court proceedings reinforced that line of thought. Eighteen Jews defending themselves were sentenced to penal servitude, and only 12 Russian thugs leading the rampage.

As I said, the parallel with the Finsbury Park aftermath isn’t quite exact. But neither is it nonexistent.

Unlike those Gomel Jews, Darren Osborne (no relation to George, as far as I know) wasn’t in any immediate personal danger – he wasn’t pre-empting or warding off an attack. However, he was justified in feeling threatened as a member of the group routinely and indiscriminately targeted by Muslim terrorists – just as Jews were targeted in Russia circa 1903.

That feeling he had, however justified it might have been, doesn’t excuse his criminal action. But it certainly mitigates it.

I’m not a physical coward – growing up in the tough neighbourhood otherwise known as Russia didn’t allow me that option. But nowadays I tense up slightly every time I find myself in a Central London crowd. And – call me a racist and report me to the Commission for Racial Equality – I automatically examine every young Muslim coming my way.

Is he carrying some work tools or a gun in that satchel? Is it food or a bomb in his Sainsbury’s bag? Unlike Mr Osborne, I’m a civilised man, so I don’t go beyond looking with apprehension. But I can understand his action, even if I can’t excuse it.

It’s not Islamophobia that has put the electricity of fear and tension into the atmosphere, but Islamic terrorism. So surely our response to the Finsbury Park attack should distinguish between action and reaction.

Both may be reprehensible, but it takes a broken moral compass to suggest they are equally reprehensible. Or else it takes a conscience warped by what some call political correctness and what could more appropriately be called our civilisation’s suicide wish.

This is a dangerous disease, and our prime minister is showing advanced symptoms of it. She assigned an equal measure of “hatred and evil” both to the Finsbury Park attack and the numerous and more deadly acts of Muslim terrorism that had provoked it.

The former, said Mrs May, is “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the latter. That’s why “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”

Nothing, Mrs May? That’s good to hear. So let’s begin by admitting that we’re at war – not with alienated loaners on cannabis, not with Islamists, not with Islamofascists, not with Islamic fundamentalists, but with Islam.

This war has been going on for 1,400 years, and it has had lulls alternating with flare-ups. We’re going through a flare-up now, and unless HMG does something about it, people like Darren Osborne (no relation to George) will.

If they start doing it en masse, that could spell disintegration of public order, with vigilante justice replacing the rule of law. And then, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

When Enoch Powell thus quoted Virgil in a similar context, he was instantly vilified, and our progressive press still sputters spittle at the “rivers of blood” speech. But, even though Powell didn’t have specifically Muslims in mind, he saw the dangers of multi-culti diversity.

His moral compass hadn’t gone haywire, as Mrs May’s has. If she really will stop at nothing to defeat violence, she should start by stopping the Muslim action first, and the reaction to it second. This isn’t just a temporal sequence, but a moral pecking order.

 

 

Observing a fortnight ago the aftermath of yet another Muslim atrocity, I suggested a couple of stock acronyms for expressing public condolences.

Since all politicians use the same platitudes, there’s no point in spelling them out in full. Hence T&P and IV are time-saving ways of saying ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘innocent victims’.

In that spirit my T&P go to the IV in Finsbury, where a gentleman shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims” and “I did my bit” drove his white van through a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque.

The driver obviously never attended the Muslim Offensive Steering Course (MOSC for short), for his IV score was meagre by comparison to those usually achieved by the alumni of that educational establishment: a mere one dead, 10 injured.

In spite of that underachievement, the Muslim Council of Britain described the incident as “the most violent manifestation” yet of Islamophobia. That offended my sense of fairness.

Haven’t we already learned that suicide bombers or van drivers manifest nothing but their own madness? Aren’t they all alienated, cannabis-addled loners pursuing no ideological or religious objective?

Therefore this particular van driver is entitled to the same consideration. His pusher must have given him some skunk instead of his usual milder weed, and off he went.

The driver certainly didn’t mean to ‘do his bit’ by ‘killing all Muslims’. It was skunk talking, not Islamophobia. White people are a race of peace and they can’t all be tarred with the same Islamophobic brush. I mean, fair’s fair.

Not everyone sees it that way. Toufik Kacimi, chief executive of the Muslim Welfare House, told Sky News that “he is not mentally ill, he is conscious, he did what he did deliberately to hit and kill as many Muslims as possible.”

And not a single spliff anywhere in sight, no symptoms of derangement – just a perfectly sane, calculating Muslim-hater, symptomatic of a most worrying trend threatening every Englishman of the Mohammedan persuasion.

Comrade Corbyn doesn’t pray, so the ‘P’ part of my acronym doesn’t apply. Thus his “thoughts are with… the community affected by this awful event.” As I’m sure they are with the victims of the atrocities committed by Comrade Corbyn’s friends from Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA.

Our future prime minister hasn’t limited himself to stock condolences. He also said: “I’ve been in touch with the mosques, police and Islington council regarding the incident.”

He isn’t the only one concerned. Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police has promised to put extra security around mosques, even though “it is an incredibly challenging time for London”, with emergency services already “stretched”.

The Deputy Assistant Commissioner wisely refrained from mentioning what it is that they’re stretched by, which suggests he’s going places in politics. Anyway, the task he has set himself and the Met is difficult, but not unduly so.

There are only (!) 427 mosques in London, so a thousand or so armed officers may suffice to provide the extra security. Doing the same for millions of other Londoners risking their lives every time they find themselves in a crowded place is a different matter altogether.

No sane person would condone the Finsbury act of terrorism. No intelligent person would say it was unpredictable, especially if he studied physics at school. Didn’t Newton explain that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?

It’s axiomatic that, if the state won’t protect the people, the people will protect themselves. The laws of political correctness superseding all other laws, the state has done nothing to solve the problem of Muslim terrorism or even to acknowledge that this is what it is.

This problem, it’s useful to remember, is of the state’s own doing. Both main parties are implicated in this, but especially the one so ably led by Comrade Corbyn. For, as Peter Mandelson has admitted with his customary cynicism, Blair’s government deliberately set out to admit millions of Muslims, whom they correctly saw as future Labour voters.

At the same time no efforts were made to integrate the Muslims into British society. On the contrary, Islamic particularism was encouraged in the name of diversity. Nor has anything been done to make sure that none of Britain’s 1,600 (!) mosques would be used as recruitment grounds for mass murderers.

Specifically, from 1997 until 2003 the Finsbury Park Mosque, the site of this morning’s crime, provided a platform for Abu Hamza to preach Islamic hatred for our hospitable country. And this was far from the only mosque used for that purpose.

Those impassioned youngsters, many of whom can’t even speak proper English despite being born in Britain, are easy clay to mould. They go out and kill in the name of Allah, with people in Britain becoming increasingly desperate and insecure.

Pressure has been building up in the cooker for a long time, and everyone knew the top would be blown before long. Actually, the only thing that surprised me was that the first act of unsanctioned counter-terrorism took place in London: I thought a northern city, such as Leeds or Manchester, would be more likely.

How long before Muslims are routinely attacked in the streets? How long before order turns to ordure? It’s anybody’s guess. But this is a matter of when, not if.

I’m genuinely sorry for those poor people in Finsbury. But I’m even more sorry for Britain.

We should all follow the example of His Grace Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since Comrade Corbyn may soon inaugurate an age of justice and equality, if at some cost to liberty, His Grace has made all the necessary provisions for the future.

He has established himself as an early frontrunner for the job of Atheism Minister in Comrade Corbyn’s government.

His duties will consist in detoxifying the population currently coming off the opium of the people. Since going cold turkey may prove medically dangerous, His Grace has already devised a titration strategy featuring several incremental steps.

The first such step was taken the other day, putting tears in the eyes of all noxious Christian insects (a term Comrade Corbyn will doubtless borrow from Comrade Lenin) and a broad smile on Comrade Corbyn’s face. After the full implications of His Grace’s new policy have been realised, the Nicene Creed will be slightly modified.

Instead of “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins”, it’ll say “I acknowledge two or more baptisms for the commission of sins”. (The part about believing in one God also needs some work, but that has been put off until His Grace assumes his new office.)

This alteration is only a stop-gap measure, designed to fill in until the complete new version of the Welby/Corbyn Creed has been adopted. In the final draft this sentence will be further changed to say “I acknowledge no baptism for any reason whatsoever, and God shall smite anyone who believes in him.”

For the time being, the new text is required to accommodate the numerous instances of men and women changing their gender (or sex, as it’s still called by the aforementioned noxious insects). This creates conundrums of great theological import.

For this perfectly legitimate and laudably courageous act invalidates the baptism of John, who has now become Jane, a name that never crossed the lips of the priest performing the original ritual.

As a woman imprisoned in a man’s body, John might have been baptised as indeed John. Now, as a woman mercifully released from the confines of her alien body, complete with a fixture that no self-respecting woman should possess, Jane may need to be re-baptised as such, perhaps for fear that her noxious insects of parents may otherwise disinherit her.

Those bishops gathering at Nicaea in 325 somehow failed to provide for such a situation, which goes to show that they lacked not only prophetic powers, but indeed elementary foresight. Their shameful oversight has now been corrected by His Grace, who has sanctioned our hypothetical John’s re-baptism as our hypothetical Jane.

The ensuing change in the Creed will soon follow, with other valuable details added. For, to provide for the real if unlikely possibility that, having lived as Jane for a while, John may want to revert to his original identity, the text will now say “two or more baptisms”. And it’ll replace the outdated, passive word ‘remission’ with the vibrantly active word ‘commission’.

Having thus established his credentials for a post in Comrade Corbyn’s government, His Grace Comrade Welby has provided an inspiration for us all. I for one would like to apologise to Comrade Corbyn for having been misunderstood as his opponent or, God forbid, critic.

In fact, when I referred to him as an evil exponent of a cannibalistic ideology whose election would spell a possibly irreversible catastrophe for Britain, few realised that I was merely trying to conceal my unmitigated admiration for Comrade Corbyn and everything he stands for.

One thing that particularly appeals to me is his idea of requisitioning rich people’s houses to accommodate the socioeconomically disadvantaged. It’s patently unjust that one such downtrodden person, Alexander Boot, has to live in a small Fulham flat, while some noxious insects live in large Belgravia houses, where they don’t even spend every minute of every day.

Yes, the flat is reasonably well appointed, and Fulham is a nice area of London, but the unfairness of it all rankles nonetheless. As a first step towards correcting this injustice I propose that a 10-bedroom house in Belgravia, Chester Square for preference, be requisitioned and given to me. Let those even more socioeconomically disadvantaged than me have the Fulham flat, once they’ve completed a fridge-operating course.

I realise that this initiative will be insufficient to qualify me even for a minor post in Comrade Corbyn’s government. But perhaps our venerable Archbishop will see it in his heart to employ me as his amanuensis at the new Atheism Ministry.

My CV includes all the necessary educational qualifications. At my Moscow university I took compulsory courses – and passed exams! – in such essential academic disciplines as Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Marxist Aesthetics and – most relevant of all – Scientific Atheism.

I’m ready and willing to serve Comrade Welby and especially Comrade Corbyn, whose forthcoming advent I now see as the dawn of a new era and a welcome step towards the arrival of paradise on earth.

Watch this space and join all the wise men in following the star that now shines not over Bethlehem but from the Kremlin turrets. Long live the new Creed!

 

Her Majesty’s realm is in mortal danger, and the sooner we realise this the better. It’s not hysterical alarmism but stark realism that makes me want to scream so someone will hear: BRITAIN IS ON THE VERGE OF CATASTROPHE!!!

Bolshevik-style sedition is gearing up to subvert Parliament, overturn centuries of Europe’s most stable political system and plunge the country into the kind of despotism she has never suffered in all her history.

The neo-Trotskyist Labour Party is working in cahoots with the Mafioso unions and all sorts of degenerate extremists to use the mob as a wrecking ball swinging away throughout the summer.

Once the cornerstone of our parliamentary monarchy has been knocked out, another election will be called in the autumn. This time the bullied and brainwashed people will vote themselves into Bolshevik-style slavery by electing the evil creature Corbyn and delivering power to his wire-pullers.

He’ll no doubt promise to restore order, which will be appealing after several months of non-stop strikes, demonstrations and violent riots. People already corrupted by decades of socialist propaganda will prefer any kind of order to chaos – they’ll joyously swap liberty for tyranny in the hope of some peace and quiet.

The parallel with the Bolshevik mayhem isn’t a product of my disturbed mind, for the militants don’t bother to conceal the source of their inspiration. Moreover, they flaunt it – in so many words.

And the words are: “We will have a Red October with Jeremy Corbyn as our Prime Minister!” Red October, as I’m sure you know, refers to the 1917 advent of social justice, equality and mass cannibalism in Russia.

Lest you might think it’s just the loony fringe frothing at the mouth, thunderous incitement to sedition comes from the upper reaches of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has called for unions to drum up a million people to stage a riotous demonstration on 1 July and destroy what will be left of British polity.

The leftovers won’t be plentiful. The wrecking ball will start swinging next Wednesday, when a vast mob will be out in force to drown the Queen’s speech with sloganeering shrieks and harangues.

Make no mistake about it: what has been going on in London for the past two days is but a rehearsal for the mass revolt – and these masses are indeed revolting. Expertly egged on by today’s answers to Lenin’s ghouls, they storm public buildings, fight with police and create a general mayhem under the slogan of “May out!”

Make no mistake about this either: the fiery tragedy in North Kensington isn’t the reason for the disturbances. It’s but a catalyst added to the already bubbling discontent by neo-Bolshevik evildoers.

They don’t have to reinvent the tactical wheel. It was invented by Lenin’s gang and attached to a juggernaut that then rolled over millions of lives.

In keeping with that fine tradition, a sinister organisation called the National Shop Stewards Network has issued a circular on “linking up strikes”. Meaning that all unions, including teachers, doctors, ambulance drivers, rail guards, flight controllers and cabin crews etc., will coordinate industrial action to do the greatest possible damage and plunge the country into chaos.

The subject of the e-mailed circular is “Organise to Get the Tories Out”, which at least offers the benefit of honesty. They could have said, for example, “Organise to improve the working conditions” or “Organise to demand better public services”. That’s what they would have said had they felt a need for subterfuge. But they don’t: the rabble-rousers are feeling smugly self-confident.

Nor is any subterfuge likely to deceive anybody. After all, doctors, pilots and teachers may all have grievances against their employers, but they aren’t likely to be the same grievances.

Hence uniting them all together into one massive revolt can’t possibly aim at addressing specific problems. The only possible aim is sedition leading to a revolution, which in some quarters may be called treason.

Says Comrade McDonnell: “What we need now is the TUC mobilised, every union mobilised – get out on the streets. We need people doing everything they can to ensure the election comes as early as possible.”

But we’ve just had an election, Comrade, which Labour lost. One realises that the EU has fine-tuned the technique of ignoring elections whose results it doesn’t like and telling people to vote again until they get it right. But one hoped Britain would be immune to such chicanery.

The hope is forlorn. It increasingly appears that Britain isn’t immune to anything, including a bloody Bolshevik takeover.

On 14 August, 2015, shortly after Corbyn took over Labour, I wrote: “‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,’ said Edmund Burke. Jeremy Corbyn is a harbinger of such a triumph, which good men must realise – and do something about it.”

What can we do, now that said triumph is just round the corner? I’d suggest we, just like our enemies, should learn the lessons of Red October.

At that time, resolute action on the part of Russia’s Provisional Government could have nipped Bolshevik evil in the bud. Yet the democratic government vacillated, couching its cowardice in bien pensant phrases about vox populi. A catastrophe followed, and the whole world is still reeling from it.

What form resolute action should take is open to debate. But the debate should start from the premise that what’s planned for this summer is criminal in the strict legal sense of the word. And criminals should be dealt with by any means required, including, if all else fails, armed force.

These are painful words for a conservative to utter, but, unless they’re uttered and acted upon, there won’t be any conservatism. What there will be is social and political disintegration followed by the advent of a tyranny red in tooth and claw.

If the government calls for volunteers to fight this plague, count me in.

The Grenfell Tower disaster is assuming the significance of that fatal 1914 shot in Sarajevo. Awful in itself, it looks as if it may yet lead to something worse.

The mob braying for blood has already occupied Kensington Town Hall, and the PC brigade is cheering, ill-advisedly certain that the blood will be someone else’s and not theirs.

The usual emetic sentimentality is dripping from every word uttered in public. This was conspicuous this morning, when Sky News interviewed Communities Secretary Sajid Javid.

Looking appropriately aggrieved and customarily robotic, his face immobile, the white visible all around his empathetic irises, Javid opened his mouth to say what government ministers usually say under such circumstances.

But before the first fulsomely sympathetic sound came out, the interviewer said: “First, would you like to express your condolences for the victims?”

This peremptory request had a twofold purpose: reminding Javid of the statutory protocol for such interviews and communicating urbi et orbi that Sky News is on guard against any possible deviation from the diktats of modern ethos.

Mrs May didn’t comply: she visited the site of the inferno but didn’t hug any surviving residents. She isn’t much of a hugger, which I think is to her credit. But the mob thinks otherwise. It’s holding her personally responsible for the tragedy – even though she had already announced a full independent inquiry and wept privately at Number 10.

But weeping privately isn’t good enough. The Dianisation of the public is in full swing: just like the 1997 mob screaming at Her Majesty “Ma’am, show us you care!!!”, today’s version demands public effusiveness and knows it can enforce it.

Unlike Mrs May, Comrade Corbyn can hug with the best of them, which he demonstrated at the site of the fire. This arguably most evil leader of a major Western political party also said a few things that a mere couple of decades ago could have been treated as incitement to riot.

He practically demanded that the mob march on Westminster to reverse Labour’s electoral defeat. And he struck a note of avuncular reassurance when proposing ways of resettling the newly homeless survivors:

“Properties must be found – requisitioned if necessary – in order to make sure that residents do get rehoused locally… How is it acceptable that in London you have luxury buildings and luxury flats kept empty as land banking for that future while homeless people look for somewhere to live?”

I’ll tell you how it’s acceptable in two words, Comrade: private property. The idea of requisitioning comes naturally to a communist in all but name, but outside that murderous ideology people’s property is seen as a guarantor of liberty.

If the mob – or the state scared of it – ‘requisitions’ people’s houses, that’ll mean letting the jinni of left fascism out, thereby perpetrating a far worse tragedy than even the Kensington inferno.

In keeping with the sacramental protocol, I too would like to express my heartfelt condolences to those directly touched by the incident. And then there are a couple of other things.

First, in my rather long life I’ve owned about 20 fridges, made in the USA, Britain, Italy, Germany and France. The first half a dozen or so were made in Russia, and I hope you’ll take my word for it that they weren’t state of the art technology even by the standards of the time.

Yet none of them has ever exploded, and until 14 June I hadn’t heard of any such explosions with other people’s fridges either. The Ethiopian owner of the explosive appliance must have done something wrong, even though fridges aren’t the hardest machines to operate.

Not being an expert in fridge design I can’t even guess what that might have been. Keeping explosives next to the fish fingers would do the trick, but nothing else comes to mind, though it might come to the mind of a refrigeration expert.

What does occur to me is that it’s not Mrs May who’s to blame for the tragedy but Comrade Corbyn, or rather the ideology he touts with fanatical zeal.

Looking at the post-inferno TV footage with the sound turned off, one would be hard-pressed to guess that the incident happened in London. Every Asian and African group is represented in huge numbers, with only a few token white faces present for diversity’s sake.

It was socialist ideology that flung Britain’s doors wide-open to millions of people who were alien and typically hostile to its ethos, knew nothing about it and were unwilling to learn. Just think: if those people hadn’t been admitted to Britain, they wouldn’t have been there to throw their children out of the top floors of a burning building.

This influx has created incalculable economic, social and cultural problems. The obvious one is housing: in Britain people don’t live out in the open, or at least aren’t supposed to. The climate is rather inclement for that, to mention just one thing.

Now these days most public services aren’t there to serve the public. They’re an expression of an ideology, the further to the left the better. This ideology has a clearly perceived aim: increasing state power.

Urban planning is like any other public service. City councils aren’t out to make people’s lives better or their towns prettier. They want to find an architectural method of making their power absolute.

That’s why in the several post-war decades they were joyously razing Georgian and Victorian terraces and replacing them with modern eyesores unfit for human habitation. If you’re interested in the scale of this architectural subversion, read up on the destruction suffered by formerly one of our most beautiful cities, Bath.

This is where Corbyn meets Corbusier, emphasising the similarity between communism and fascism. And Corbusier’s fascist outlook can be inferred not only from his writings but, more tellingly, from his day job.

Corbusier’s work screams totalitarianism in concrete, his preferred material. He didn’t care which totalitarian was in power, as long as Corbusier was his architect. Stalin, Laval, Mussolini, Hitler could all look at his designs and smile.

When you see today’s ugly concrete structures giving parts of great European cities that unmistakeably Soviet je ne sais quoi, think of Corbusier. It’s to his ideas that we owe today’s vast areas of state-run tower blocks.

Corbusier strove to drive people into soulless, inhuman slabs of concrete, and his British co-ideologists promptly obliged by inundating the country with stinking, drug-addled, crime-brewing hellholes mostly inhabited by welfare freeloaders.

For people like Corbyn, such jerry-built tower blocks are ideal. They play the same role as mass immigration and the welfare state: creating a mob dependent on, and controlled by, the government and, typically, voting Labour.

Regarded in this light, the strategy has worked: Kensington has gone Labour for the first time in history, and it was Northern Kensington that swung the vote, people who live in tower blocks identical to Grenfell Tower.

Those who wonder why the state didn’t spend a few extra thousand to install fire-proof cladding or fire-sprinkling systems miss the point. Of course all those monstrosities disfiguring London’s skyline were slapped together on the cheap.

It suits the ideology much better to construct 10 death traps than one sound building. Ideally, they’d want all London housing to be run by the state, reflecting Corbusier’s fascist ideas expressed in cheap concrete.

I’d suggest that, next time Comrade Corbyn wants to point a finger at someone, he do so in front of a mirror. If he can stand the sight, that is.