Category: Blog

Shakespeare gave one answer to that question; Hamza Yousaf, Scotland’s first minister, another. At the risk of offending our great bard, Mr Yousaf’s answer is more replete with implications.

According to him, what may be in a word is criminal prosecution for ‘misgendering’, a term one will try in vain to find in Shakespeare’s vast vocabulary. Moreover, I’m sure he wouldn’t have been able to understand the term even if it had been explained to him.

But you do, don’t you? Of course, you do. After all, you haven’t been living on Mars all this time. Misgendering means using personal pronouns appropriate for a person’s sex at birth. That is, still describing a deranged man who suddenly claims to be a woman or a spaniel as a ‘he’ and not, respectively, ‘she’ or ‘it’.

Such stubbornness can be exacerbated by any attempt to rationalise Pronoungate (I’m proud of my neologism). If you argue that, since it’s impossible to change one’s sex, we are all stuck with one of the original two, each complete with its own set of pronouns, you’ve just graduated from misdemeanour to felony. And if, God forbid, you cite that reactionary book on the subject of “male and female created he them”, we’re talking capital crime.

Such is the upshot of Mr Yousaf’s addition to the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act, which appropriately went into effect on All Fools’ Day. This instantly became a global issue thanks to the tweeted comment by Scotland’s most famous and possibly richest resident, J.K. Rowling.

Being herself woke in every other respect, she voiced her opposition in characteristically convoluted terms: “In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.”

I’m not quite sure what she meant, other than expressing some vague opposition to the Act. Miss Rowling thus issued a ‘come and get me’ invitation to the police, who have so far refused to take her up on it.

Then Ally McCoist, the former Scotland footballer, claimed that he and 48,000 other Rangers fans would breach the law at this weekend’s match with Celtic. At least that’s what I think he claimed: his accent isn’t always penetrable.

I’m happy to report that not all Scotsmen are so-o-o-o yesterday. At least 6,000 of them have got into the spirit of the times by either demanding that Miss Rowling be imprisoned or, more sinister, denouncing their friends and neighbours for the hate crime of misgendering.

Police Scotland are duty-bound to investigate all such reports, and the more they investigate the mightier the influx of denunciations. Since by all accounts Scottish police occasionally also have other crimes to contend with, they’ve responded to the challenge with the pragmatic ingenuity for which Scotsmen are so justly famous.

A network of over 400 ‘third-party reporting’ centres have been created, where irate people can report hate crimes. They can also do so anonymously, and where else did I observe that convenient possibility in my youth?

Moreover, 500 hate crime ‘champions’ have been trained to referee and filter such reports before they reach the police’s good offices. All in all, one has to marvel at how pragmatic people can be when dealing with institutionalised insanity.

Vindicating Newton’s Third Law, Mr Yousaf’s action caused a reaction. Some Scots got angry and, according to P.G. Wodehouse, “It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” They demanded that Mr Yousaf himself be indicted under the Act for his 2020 speech in which he railed that almost all senior public posts in Scotland were held by white people.

By since claiming the top such post for himself, Mr Yousaf has done much to reverse that iniquity, but racial rancour in his speech was unmistakable. Fair is fair: if J.K. Rowling should be done for a hate crime, then she should be handcuffed to Yousaf.

Things haven’t gone as far yet, but the outcry has been loud enough. Everyone from the Catholic Church to the National Secular Society has voiced all the usual concerns about suppressing free speech and encouraging snooping. Hence Mr Yousaf felt called upon to issue a disclaimer.

Don’t you worry about free speech, he said: “people should have the right to be offensive and to express controversial views.” Alas, the treatment implied in that blanket statement just may be worse than the disease.

You might have noticed that levity creeps into my tone whenever I talk about the worst symptoms of modern lunacy. I don’t have in my psychological makeup the ability to discuss seriously which pronouns are appropriate for which of the 100-plus sexes supposedly in existence. If a man chooses to wear a skirt, he remains a man to me – and I don’t mean kilts here, as I hope my Scottish friends realise.

Nor do I acknowledge that simply stating biological facts can be construed as a crime. If lunatics decide to play that game, I can’t stop them. But neither can I be expected to join in.

However, I do have a serious problem with the statement that “people should have the right to be offensive”. This is at best a circular argument, at worst a foolish one.

Suppose for the sake of argument that a politician delivers a speech arguing that all Jews should be gassed and all blacks lynched. Does he have a right to be as offensive as that?

Obviously not. So let’s narrow the example down then. Suppose a passer-by says that sort of thing to a Jew or a black in the street. Would that be exercising the right to free speech?

Does the person on the receiving end have any recourse? A punch in the snout would come naturally but, first, not everyone is fit to deliver one and, second, that sort of thing is illegal. We aren’t supposed to protect ourselves; that’s what we have police for.

This is reductio ad absurdum, of course. The example I’ve proposed falls under the rubric of inciting racial hatred, and we’ve had laws against it for decades. So fine, think of your own examples of intolerable insults, those offending a person’s honour and dignity. Then think of the last time honour and dignity had any tangible meaning.

When a decade ago one footballer called another a “f***ing black c***”, only the middle word was deemed culpable. Calling an old man who accidentally jostled someone on a bus the other two words is perfectly all right. Nothing illegal there.

A curious dichotomy is observable here. On the one hand, people are ordered to be hypersensitive even to personal pronouns they consider misused. On the other hand, they are trained to think that words don’t matter.

Thus, when a politician utters something godawful, his fans wave objections away. It’s not his words, but his deeds that matter. Quite. So what if, say, a German chancellor tweets “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”? Or, more realistically, if a US president describes an avowed enemy of his country “a genius”? Shall we agree then that, in some situations, some words are actually deeds?

Sorting those words out would take more than 500 Scottish ‘champions’. Add a few zeroes to that number, and we still won’t be able to come up with any objective criteria of legal or illegal offensiveness. And subjectively, anything can be classified as an imprisonable offence.

The issue is fundamental. We are observing hectic self-serving attempts to introduce absolutes into an inherently and institutionally relativist landscape. This reverses the old trend of overlaying hitherto unshakable absolutes with relativities.

Prosecuting someone for saying ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ is a logical development of the liberal mindset geared to destroy every last fragment of our civilisation. The old certitudes have been cast aside, with their place taken up by ersatz relativities serving as weapons in the hands of modern vandals.

When the Gestapo told Hermann Göring that one of his deputies was a crypto-Jew, he replied: “At my headquarters, I decide who is and who isn’t a Jew.” Applying the same logic, victorious modernity decides which relativity should be raised to an absolute and which absolute demoted to a relativity. In other words, which weapons should be commissioned and which decommissioned.

We may attack one modern perversion after another, don Quixote-style, only to find that those awful giants are actually windmills. It’s impossible to score any lasting victories without defeating the real ogre, the post-Enlightenment mindset that’s now ubiquitous.

The first thing the putative Age of Reason did was destroy reason and hence any sensible notion of reality. Madness descended, and we shouldn’t be surprised that it now speaks with the Scottish accent.

After all, the Church of England, speaking with the perfect received pronunciation, has just informed teachers at its schools that, if they say it’s impossible to change sex, they are breaking the law. And the prelates don’t mean the law laid down in Genesis and Matthew.

That’s how Dr Samuel Johnson described patriotism on April 7, 1775.

Since Dr Johnson loved England with all his heart and still didn’t consider himself a scoundrel, he had to be talking not about patriotism as such, but about something else.

Sure enough, Johnson was specifically referring to William Pitt, 1^st Earl of Chatham, and his ‘patriot party’. The author of our first dictionary was scathing about “self-professed patriots”, not true ones like himself.

Like any true love, true patriotism is a quiet emotion, something whispered in private, not shouted off the rooftops. Wear it on your sleeve, and patriotism will get caked in grime.

When a man tells all and sundry how much he loves his wife, you can be sure he abuses her in private. His protestations of love are his way of saying: “See what a good, virtuous fellow I am, how the milk of human kindness is overflowing my heart.”

Similarly, when a man asserts his patriotism, insistently and out loud, it’s not his country he loves but himself. His patriotism is a form of self-aggrandisement. Unsure about his own virtue, or perhaps sure of its absence, he wants to bask in the reflected glory of his country, sensing that thereby he himself can become glorious.

That’s why I detest any public manifestations of patriotism, such as hand on heart, slogans, institutional symbols worn in the lapel or, mainly in the US, bumper stickers saying “My country, right or wrong”. If a man does that sort of thing out of sincere conviction, he is chronically lacking in self-confidence. If he does so for an ulterior reason, such as political gain, he is, well, a scoundrel.

Like any kind of love, patriotism always has two components, and only their ratio changes from man to man. One component is love offered to one’s country for free, the other is something a country has to earn.

The free component is visceral; the second, contingent. Dr Johnson loved England the way every native-born Englishman, and even a co-opted one like myself, loves her. We feel intuitive affinity with people who inhabit “England’s green and pleasant land” and the land itself. Why, even I have grown to prefer warm beer to cold vodka, although I may still compromise by using the former as a chaser for the latter.

That type of love is almost universal. Even the Cambridge spies who had worked most of their lives to harm England, felt pangs of acute nostalgia when they ended up in Moscow. They desperately missed English things: Coleman’s mustard, Jermyn Street clothes, a good pint and – incomprehensible today – The Times.

The earned component is what Edmund Burke, Johnson’s contemporary and friend, meant when he said: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” In other words, we’ll offer some of our love for free. The rest must be earned.

If a country refuses to earn it, it forfeits its claim to our love, some of it, much of it or, in extreme circumstances, even all of it.

I’m sure, for example, that Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, whose Diary of a Man in Despair is among the most moving accounts of life in Nazi Germany I’ve ever read, still loved Bach, Goethe, the Black Forest, the Rhein and, for all I know, apple strudel. But he hated Nazism passionately and hence also Germany, which at that time was Nazi — at least partly because of her cultural inclination.

The Nazis hanged Reck-Malleczewen at Dachau a few days before the war ended. Their Germany had no need for Germans like him. I’m not certain that today’s England has any need for his cultural counterparts either. I doubt even France needs them, and I know the US doesn’t.

Reck-Malleczewen was an aristocrat by birth and, more important, by culture. The culture that was the flesh of his flesh was German, to some extent. To a greater extent, it was Western, which is to say European. He loved German culture not because it was German, but because it added a German glint to the light of a great civilisation.

He might have felt some affinity with the local burghers, but I’m sure a much greater one with those who shared his own culture, even if they didn’t have the good fortune of having been born German. Since European culture as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, belonging to it trumps any cultural particularism – and it precludes any cultural nationalism.

It doesn’t have to preclude patriotism, but it may diminish it by practically obliterating its earned aspect. Cultured, conservative Europeans like Reck-Malleczewen these days feel homeless wherever the home is, England or America, France or Germany, Holland or Italy.

Do they still love their countries, where they no longer feel wanted? Yes, probably, perhaps. To some extent. But they feel more at home with those who share their culture, wherever they come from.

Cultured Englishmen have more in common with cultured Frenchmen or Dutchmen than with their own tattooed football lovers who welcome supporters of visiting teams by a rousing chorus of “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be krauts”.

Loudmouthed patriotism, especially when it degenerates into blood-and-soil nationalism, is alien to our culture and hence to the very essence of our civilisation. From its first steps it asserted much higher loyalties than love of one’s country: “neither Jew nor Greek”.

Once we’ve established this pecking order, we can take delight in our own country – if not always as it is, then at least as it was in the past and, we hope, can still be in the future. And we can smile when reading the words of another great European, Joseph de Maistre (a Frenchman who never lived in France):

“Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.”

This was the title of a video I stumbled on while surfing the Internet. The film was short, only about 30 minutes, but it was good enough.

The author covered the Ardennes breakthrough, one of the most daring and successful operations of the Second World War. Getting an airing was the irresponsible negligence and incompetence of the French high command, with every general certain that no modern army could advance through those hills densely covered with impassable forests.

The French expected an attack through Belgium, the traditional route of northern armies into France. It was there that they (and the British expeditionary corps) concentrated most of their resources. The German advance through the Ardennes and towards the Channel cut those troops off, and their desperate attempts to break through the encirclement ultimately proved unsuccessful.

Quite a few names, both French and German were mentioned, but two were inexplicably left out: Gen. Manstein who planned that operation and Field-Marshal Rundstedt who commanded the Nazi troops. That was an innocent omission though: 30 minutes isn’t very long and there was a lot of ground to cover.

One error was less innocent but more understandable. The author described the German Pz-IV tank as ‘heavy’. Such classification came directly from Stalin’s historians, who had a vested interest in grossly exaggerating the strength of the Wehrmacht, explaining thereby the catastrophic routing of the regular Red Army during the first few months of its war.

In fact, the Germans had no heavy tanks at all until the Panthers and the Tigers made their appearance at Stalingrad in late 1942. The Pz-IV weighed 25 tonnes, which was lighter than the Soviet T-34 (26.5 tonnes) that’s universally described as a medium tank. At the same time, the Soviets started the war with a real heavy tank, the KV (50 tonnes), for which the Germans had no analogues until almost two years later.

Sorry, did I say catastrophic routing? That’s how the defeat of the French army during the six weeks starting on 9 May, 1940, is normally described, including in France herself. That defeat still rankles as a national shame, when, according to de Gaulle, “the shaken nation was totally paralysed”.

Yet that’s not how the official Soviet, and now Russian, history treats the period following the German attack on the Soviet Union (22 June, 1941). Yes, there were original setbacks, admit those historians. But the Red Army was fighting heroically, making the Nazis pay dearly for every inch of Soviet territory.

That version of events effortlessly migrated into the works of most Western historians as well, the German scholar Joachim Hoffmann being a notable exception (his seminal book Stalin’s War of Annihilation is a masterpiece). While praising the heroism of the Red Army, those same historians are openly derisory about the performance of the French during those fateful six weeks.

That version has become part of folklore. The video I’m talking about helpfully provided a sequence from an animated film, in which the French are described as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”. While most French people I know would resent such vulgarity, they wouldn’t take exception to the general view of their six-week debacle.

So there we have it: Germans enjoying a cakewalk through northern France, with the French army routed without putting up any meaningful resistance – on one side. On the other side we have the valiant Red Army heroes irrigating every patch of Soviet territory with German blood, the early setbacks notwithstanding.

However, Descartes taught that all knowledge is comparative. So do let’s compare those French six weeks with the same period in the war between Stalin and Hitler, roughly until the end of July, 1941.

The Franco-German war unfolded in Flanders and Normandy, on a territory about 300 km long and 150 km deep. That area was about the size of Lithuania, which the Wehrmacht Army Group North, the weakest of the three attacking the USSR, occupied in a week.

It took the Germans 14 days to reach the Channel, with their panzer divisions covering 350 km. During the same 14 first days of the other war, the German Army Group North covered 470 km, and the Army Group Centre 425 km.

During the French campaign the Wehrmacht suffered 156,000 casualties (killed, wounded, MIA). In the Soviet Union, the Germans suffered similar casualties by late July, 1941, but they were advancing along a frontline 1,450 km long, having covered an area 100 times as large as the part of France they occupied.

By 9 July, 1941, the Germans had exceeded in Russia every marker of victory achieved in the entire French campaign (the numerical strength of routed enemy troops, depth of offensive penetration, weaponry captured). By that time the Wehrmacht suffered about half the number of its losses in the entire French campaign.

Looking at the same first six weeks, the Germans lost 640 tanks in France and 503 in Russia – this though, unlike the Red Army, the French were desperately short of anti-tank weapons, and even those they had were poor. In air combat the contrast is even starker.

During the French campaign from 9 May to 24 June the Luftwaffe lost 1,401 planes, with another 672 badly damaged. In Russia, the similar six-week numbers were 968 and 606 respectively.

This is especially remarkable since the combined air forces of France and Britain only had 700-750 fighter pilots, whereas the Russians had about 3,500 just in their western military districts (and about four planes per pilot). Moreover, the Luftwaffe had twice the number of warplanes in France that they had at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.

You may say that after the first few weeks and months, when the Nazis took over four million Soviet POWs (more soldiers than the Wehrmacht had altogether), the Soviets regrouped, remobilised, rearmed and eventually ended up on the winning side.

True. But so did the French, although their contribution to the Allied victory wasn’t as significant as the Soviet one. Still, the French reclaimed Paris on 25 August, 1944 – which by no means excuses their performance in 1940. By the same token, the Soviets’ entry into Berlin in May, 1945, shouldn’t make us forget about the defeat they suffered in 1941, perhaps the greatest military catastrophe in history.

If such is the story, what’s the moral? Simple. Whenever you read history books, make sure you have a bag of salt and ideally a bottle of tequila within easy reach.

And if such history emanates from official Russian sources, start downing shots before opening the book. That may prepare you for the retrospective political propaganda that passes for historical scholarship in Putin’s Russia.

At least they never referred to that little incident at Gethsemane as ‘Kissgate’. This jarring portmanteau neologism is reserved for the crime committed by Luis Rubiales, former head of the Spanish FA.

When the ref blew the final whistle at the women’s world cup last August, Spain stood the proud winner. Rubiales was ecstatic: his girls were at the apex of women’s footie, such as it is.

Allow me to remind you that Señor Rubiales is neither Finnish nor Norwegian nor even Japanese. The blood bubbling through his veins is Spanish and therefore red-hot. Since such temperature isn’t conducive to icy self-restraint when expressing joy or sadness, Rubiales couldn’t contain the emotions bursting out of every fibre in his body.

He rushed to the victorious team and planted a kiss on the lips of ball-kicker Jenni Hermoso who didn’t seem to be resisting that manifestation of triumphant delight. However, a few days later she realised in hindsight that she should have been resisting.

In fact, she had been resisting, if only inwardly. Hence she self-diagnosed an acute trauma that could only be assuaged by a sizeable compensation for her and a prison term for the exuberant official.

Hermoso complained, and Rubiales was arrested and handcuffed as he stepped off his flight from the Dominican Republic to Madrid. According to the prosecutors, that kiss was ‘unwanted’ and hence constituted sexual assault, one notch down from rape.

A warrant had been issued for his arrest, and he left Barajas Airport in a van driven by those Civil Guard chaps in funny hats. That was a double whammy because Rubiales is also facing corruption charges.

Public prosecutors involved in the case are seeking a two-and-a-half year prison sentence. That could potentially make this incident the second most momentous ‘Kissgate’ in history.

Since the corrupt peccadillos only came to light after the kissy-kissy, one has to assume the police started digging on the assumption that a man capable of such a heinous crime also had to be guilty of other transgressions. In any case, the two crimes are lumped together, with the prosecutors seeking a year for kissing and 18 months for money laundering.

Actually, since it was England, which as we know is God’s own country, that Spain defeated in the final, God must have punished the libidinous official for gloating over England’s misfortune. This is the first thing that springs to my mind.

Then there is some gloating of my own: obviously it’s not only Britain that’s off her rocker. Spain is just as insane, as much in the grip of woke madness. Yes, Scotland threatens to prosecute anyone for using wrong pronouns or, even worse, insisting that only men have penises.

Yet it’s just as crazy to treat a kiss, even if ‘unwanted’, as a criminal offence. It’s crazy to believe that a heavily tattooed lass hard as nails who grew up prancing about naked in locker rooms full of lesbians could actually have been scarred for life by a kiss.

(I’m not libelling women’s football, only imparting information. I once had a semi-professional woman player working for me years ago, and her inside knowledge was that 50 per cent lesbian in any team was an accurate assessment. Only last week a scandal broke out in Australia when it turned out that five out of the 11 starting players in a professional team were born male.)

It’s crazier still that a man who perpetrated that offence should be charged with a criminal offence even though everyone knows Hermoso wasn’t at all traumatised. No harm, no foul, would be a sensible reaction.

Yet Rubiales is prosecuted not for any damage he might have caused poor Jenni, but for his implicit challenge to the ideology of wokery. Any encroachment on the inviolable sovereignty of a woman’s body is an implicit attack on one branch of that ideology, feminism.

Unwanted touching, kissing, even a look wandering down from the eyes are all treated as sexual assault, just as rape is. They must all be punished, if so far still with varying severity. Hence, though Rubiales didn’t actually rape anybody, it’s only a matter of degree. A rapist is a criminal, Rubiales is a criminal and, once we’ve established that, we only have to decide on the punishment to be meted out.

No idealist philosopher in history, from Plato onwards, could have fathomed such a total break with reality. It’s as if all modern countries have lodged themselves in a parallel universe, where it’s not perception but ideology that’s the only reality. (Marshall McLuhan, eat your heart out.)

Señor Rubiales, who had to resign his post, refuses to take it lying down. “I will defend my honour,” he tweeted. “I will defend my innocence. I have faith in the future. I have faith in the truth.” So do his accusers and prosecutors. They just define truth differently.

Rubiales finished his tweet by posting a photo of the Spanish flag. He should have posted a picture of the rainbow one. He’d stand a better chance of acquittal.

You’ve heard a million times that opposites attract. But they don’t. When they attract, they aren’t really opposites. They are the same dish served with different sauces.

That’s why whenever people apply that platitude to the political extremes of left and right, I feel that something is wrong with their definitions, indeed with today’s whole political taxonomy.

I shan’t repeat what I’ve written many times before, other than stating that the taxonomy I use is based on civilisational, cultural and psychological factors, not on any particular political beliefs.

In my book How the West Was Lost, I identified the key clash of today as one between those stubbornly clinging to the fragments of a smashed Western civilisation (‘Westmen’, in my terminology) and those who are committed to annihilating all such fragments (I called them ‘Modmen’).

The first group used to form the mainstream of Western politics, while the second one operated at or beyond the fringes. Neither group was monolithic, each had numerous subgroups (for example, I distinguished between nihilist and philistine Modmen). But all of them had more in common with one another than with anyone in the other group. Westman and Modman were irreconcilable. For one to live, the other had to die.

That’s exactly what has happened. The mainstream that used to reflect the political aspect of our civilisation has disintegrated. This could be expressed as a crisis of conservatism, but the mainstream I’m talking about didn’t just consist of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives.

Much of the Labour Party in Britain or the Democratic Party in the US used to belong to the mainstream too (I’m talking about the countries I know best, but parallels could be drawn throughout the West). Western civilisation was a diamond with many facets, and its politics had to reflect and refract a whole spangled spectrum of brightly sparkling glints.

That made Western politics rather amiable. People diverged and argued, but without demonising one another as implacable enemies. They all loved and wanted to preserve the same things, even if they disagreed on how to go about preserving them.

I recall how surprised I was in my twenties when I first arrived in the West and found out that a conservative like William F. Buckley and a liberal like John Kenneth Galbraith were personal friends. Where I came from, people of such opposite views didn’t exchange drinks and Christmas cards. They exchanged bullets.

And then that mainstream ran dry – the tributaries feeding it had disappeared. The centre of our civilisation fell apart, and the mainstream no longer had anything to reflect and refract. But politics didn’t disappear. It just fell prey to the extreme groups that until then had been seen as the loony fringe.

You can see that by looking at the two parties that used to belong to the left half of the mainstream: British Labour and American Democrats. Both are now in the hands of those I described in my book as nihilist Modmen – extremists determined to destroy what’s left of our civilisation, by violent means if need be. And European parties traditionally inclined to the right of the mainstream are increasingly coming under the sway of populist demagogues with fascisoid tendencies.

If we look at the political shifts currently under way, we’ll begin to understand the strategy of the avowed enemies of the West. Such as the Soviet Union and its reincarnation as Putin’s Russia.

Both have relied on subversive forces within the West to undermine it, and in that sense nothing changed when the USSR became the Russian Federation. What has changed is the troubled waters in which they fish.

The KGB used its unlimited funds in real or counterfeit currencies to buy agents of influence in the West, including a few here and there who genuinely disliked communism. But most, those Lenin used to call ‘useful idiots’, they didn’t have to buy. They got them for free by appealing to their left-wing conscience.

For example, the ‘atomic spies’ didn’t betray America’s most precious secret for money. They believed in the proclaimed values of the Soviet Union, which they felt were closer to the real interests of their own countries. Some of them were conscious agents of the Soviets, but most were recruited ‘in the dark’, to use the KGB parlance. That is, they were spies without realising it.

When in the late 90s, early 2000s KGB operatives finally ousted the Party to become the Russian government, they brought their skills and training to bear on their expanded responsibilities.

KGB officers were no better than Party apparatchiks at running the country for the benefit of its people. They didn’t know how to convert the world’s richest natural resources into a thriving, prosperous economy. They had neither any talent for public administration nor any interest in it.

What they did know was how to subvert and undermine the West anywhere and in any way they could. The imperative for doing so was coded into their DNA. They no more had to ask themselves why they hated the West so much than a fox has to ask itself why it kills chickens, often more of them than it can eat.

Any recruitment starts from analysis. Intelligence officers cast a panoramic glance at a target country to identify any potential weak spots. They then narrow that field of vision to particular individuals or groups and go to work.

Career KGB officers that make up over 80 per cent of today’s Russian government are eminently capable of the same analysis I’ve attempted here. Hence they know that the traditional political mainstream in the West has disintegrated, and it’s the former fringes that have become, or are rapidly becoming, the mainstream.

Whether the fringes used to adorn the left or the right edge of the mainstream is immaterial to the Russians, and in that they display a more realistic assessment of Western politics than many of our own commentators do. You put your left foot in, you put your right foot out, but it’s all the same dance to the Russians.

This explains the situation so many of our commentators find baffling. Putin is successfully recruiting ‘useful idiots’ among both card-carrying lefties, in the vein of Chavez or Maduro, and those usually identified as extreme Right, such as the German AdF or the French National Rally (né National Front).

The new mainstream, formerly known as the lunatic fringe, is swelling with the influx of disaffected conservatives and frustrated liberals. They feel they have to seek alliances wherever they can find them, and the erstwhile extremes look more promising than the impotent remnants of the mainstream run dry.

This is what makes an utterly evil Putin Russia such an attractive proposition to seemingly respectable Westerners of various political hues. They have been recruited ‘in the dark’ by real experts who know how to identify and exploit weaknesses.

If you wonder why Western support of the Ukraine is waning, look no further. Putin’s friends are following orders, most of them subliminally transmitted. And they are succeeding.

When Kipling wrote his poem If, little did he know that 130 years later one of its metaphors would acquire a literal meaning in France.

“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” has become a day-to-day challenge in French schools. For Muslim pupils and their parents have bombarded French teachers with over 130 death threats, some tastefully illustrated with videos of beheadings.

To balance the rather archaic nature of the threats, they are laudably communicated with the use of the latest achievements of Western digital technology, including the schools’ own websites. This incorporation of tradition into modernity should please every champion of the latter.

The threats are eminently credible. In the past few years a Paris teacher has been beheaded with a cleaver, and many others have been stabbed, one fatally. A veritable open season on teachers seems to be under way in France, and to understand why, next time you talk to a French teacher ask how laïcité (secularism) is working out for him.

That law was introduced in 1905 to finish the job started by the Revolution or, more broadly, by the Enlightenment. Stripping that outrage of its misnomer title and attendant cant, it represented an attempt to destroy Western civilisation and replace it with some other.

The first part has proved easier. Christianity has been successfully relegated to the status of a quaint personal idiosyncrasy, and many generations of Frenchmen have been educated in the spirit of laïcité, with few complaints heard – from Frenchmen, that is.

The trouble is that many pupils are French in name only. Instead of praying at the altar of laïcité, they worship Allah and his prophet Mohammed, with their promise of 70 virgins in heaven. That just may be the only place where that number can be found, what with French schools practising laïcité in the full range of its benefits.

Having despaired of finding so many unsullied maidens in French schools, and reluctant to look for them in heaven just yet, Muslim pupils still cling to the outer paraphernalia of their creed, such as headscarves, abayas, burkas, skullcaps, all presumably accessorised with cleavers. Alas, in 2004 the government passed a law banning not just cleavers but all such symbols, along with religious services and instruction.

Lest it may be accused of discrimination, the French government reconfirmed its commitment to égalité by also banning the display of symbols associated with other religions, such as Jewish kippahs, Sikh turbans and large Christian crosses. Predictably, exponents of these creeds meekly acquiesced. Just as predictably, the Muslims didn’t.

Since they tend to express their grievances with cleavers, some teachers have resigned, choosing life over career. Most, however, still defy danger, displaying the spirit of audace, so highly prized by Napoleon.

To protect those brave souls, armed guards have been posted at dozens of schools. The reports I’ve read fail to mention what they are armed with, which is a lamentable omission.

Is it just pistols or are French schools bristling with the barrels of assault rifles, machineguns or perhaps field artillery? Napoleon, after all, showed the riot-dispersing potential of grapeshot that French educators would be ill-advised to ignore. Even if the existing level of threat doesn’t justify reliance on such ordnance, it never hurts to prepare for the future.

For the problem is only going to get worse. France has by far the greatest Muslim population in Europe, both in absolute numbers and in percentage terms. There’s no excuse for this, but there is an explanation.

Some French colonies, such as Algeria, were integral parts of France politically and administratively. When de Gaulle agreed to make Algeria independent in 1962, a huge influx of technically French Muslims inundated France, a torrent that has since gathered strength.

Unfortunately, France did even a worse job than Britain (which is saying a lot) trying to incorporate the Muslim population into society. Rather than trying to combat Muslim particularism, the government fostered it by banging millions of Muslims into downmarket suburbs and laying vast amounts of emoluments on them.

As a result, young Muslims sneer at France, a country that they say has left them behind. “Nique la France!” has become the battle cry of riots regularly illuminating the country with burning cars, shops and restaurants (the verb in the slogan has a sexual meaning I’ll let you guess.) At least our rioters wield their torches without at the same time spewing hatred of Britain.

The problem, not only in France but throughout the West, has far-reaching implications. These bring into question the very survivability of the ersatz civilisation brought in to replace Christendom. Fault lines have appeared, and the fissure seems to be getting wider everywhere, not just in France.

All modern Western states are informed by Enlightenment fallacies, one of which is equality all around. The old principle of reductio ad absurdum has come into play, and the absurd has become ridiculous. Discrimination has lost its erstwhile positive connotations to become the worst vice, nay crime, in the scripture of modernity.

No one charged with it can defend himself without leaving the strangulating confines of the new ideology. Thus the 2004 ban on religious symbols in schools was really put forth to limit the Islamic colonisation of education. But, in the good modern tradition of lumping all religions together, the French had to extend the ban to Christian crosses and Jewish Stars of David for otherwise they would have been accused of discrimination.

They thus decommissioned the only weapon that could conceivably defend France against Islamisation: a clear and proud statement of Christian heritage. Neither France nor any other Western country can say – in fact, lie – to its population it’s a Christian country. You don’t have to be a Christian yourself, but in public at least you must conform to Christian standards of dress and behaviour. If that’s unacceptable, you know where the door is.

Mandated, institutionalised secularism goes against human nature. Deprived of religion revealed by God, people have to seek ideological cults revealed by assorted villains.

Muslims, whose religion allows for no reformations or free thought, combine evil ideologies with their traditional faith to issue an open, often violent, challenge, to host societies. And what can our societies offer in defence? Multicultural transgender efforts to save our planet from internal combustion?

I’m not sure we still have what it takes to survive. Read Faust, ladies and gentlemen: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving who every day must conquer them anew.” Words to live by – and a test we seem to be failing.

No one can reliably name a year, century or age that changed man and his world for ever.

But it’s easy to say which day did just that. Easter Sunday, 2,000-odd years ago today.

Hellenic man had always struggled with death, its finality, its cruelty, its nothingness. Death seemed to render life meaningless, deprive it of any sense of purpose.

Life itself had to be regarded as the purpose of life, and the Hellenes, weaned as they were on logic, couldn’t fail to see a self-refuting paradox there.

To be sure, there were all sorts of Orphic fantasies about afterlife, but that’s what they were and were seen to be – fantasies.

And then, on this day, 2,000-odd years ago, people weren’t just told but shown that, just as there is death in life, so there is life in death.

Now they knew there was no such thing as a happy end to life. If it was to be happy, it wasn’t the end.

There had never been such rejoicing, never such an outburst of hope, liberation and energy. Imitating God in Christ became man’s moral commitment overnight. But more than that: the ability to do so became his ontological property.

Man was no longer a lodger in the world; he had become its eternal owner. He could now imitate Christ not only by being good but also by being creative. And create he did.

Thus, on this day 2,000-odd years ago a new civilisation was born, the likes of which the world had never seen, nor ever will see. More important, a new unity – a new family – came into existence.

Universal brotherhood became a reality: all men were brothers not because someone said so, but because they all had the same father.

This unity formed a bond far stronger than even the ordinary, what is today crassly called ‘biological’, family. And it certainly betokened a much closer concord than any worldly alliances, blocs, contracts, agreements, political unions – or for that matter nations or races.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” explained Paul, making every subsequent, secular promise of equality sound puny and vulgar.

It hasn’t always worked out that way. Just like the ancient Hebrews who were dispersed because they broke God’s covenant, the world blithely pushed aside the lifebelt divinely offered.

It hoped to find unity in itself – only to find discord, devastation and the kind of spiritual emptiness for which no material riches can possibly make up. ‘Diversity’, that buzz word of godless modernity, can never resolve into a unity.

But the lifebelt was not taken away. It still undulates with the waves, still within reach of anyone ready to grasp it and climb aboard.

Knowing this makes today the most joyous day of the year – regardless of whether or not we are Christians, or what kind of Christians.

On this day we can forget our differences and again sense we are all brothers united in the great hope of peace on earth and life everlasting. We can all, regardless of where we live, rejoice on hearing these words, ringing, thundering in whatever language they are spoken:

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN!

HAPPY EASTER TO ALL!

At a dinner party the other day, I sat next to a charming and exceedingly clever woman. Though I’ve known her for many years, until that evening the subject of religion never came up.

However, the proximity of Easter made such exclusion impossible, and my dinner companion said she was Presbyterian. As such, she thought the whole idea of transubstantiation (Eucharistic bread and wine turning into the body and blood of Christ) was nonsensical.

I began to mumble something about Aristotle with his substances and accidents, but stopped myself in mid-sentence. Discussing such things with a charming woman at a boozy party is a social faux pas, a crime worse than theological ignorance.

So instead of boring her by whispering sweet philosophical nothings into her ear, I’m going to bore you in writing, though I hope not too much.

Christian theology is basically interpretation of Scripture, which according to believers is the word of God. But God was an exceptionally gifted writer who used a variety of techniques: straight talk, poetic imagery, metaphors and other figures of speech, parables, novelistic narration.

Such virtuosity, incidentally, is sometimes used as proof of authenticity: human writers began to learn all such narrative techniques only when the novel took its place on the literary landscape in the 18^th century.

Since the Evangelists couldn’t be confused with Messrs Richardson and Fielding, one has to believe God himself was moving their quills. By themselves, they wouldn’t have been able to make it up, as was indirectly stipulated by Tertullian (Credo quia absurdum).

All in all, it’s undeniable that some Biblical pronouncements are literal and some are figurative. Much of theology is about understanding which is which and converting such understanding into doctrine.

This leaves room for arbitrary interpretations: various denominations choose to treat as figurative the same passages other denominations understand literally, and vice versa. And cultured atheists treat the Bible as merely well-written science fiction and read it for its prose only (especially the KJV).

Relevant to my aborted dinnertime conversation are two passages in the New Testament, both becoming even more poignant at this time of the year:

“And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; for this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” (Matthew 26: 26)

And,

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life: and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6: 53-54)

Now, according to Catholic doctrine, which Protestants, such as my Presbyterian friend, consider nonsensical, the Eucharistic bread and wine turn in substance into the body and blood of Christ. The highlighted words are key.

They don’t eliminate the mystery of the Eucharist or, for that matter, any other Christian dogma. But they put the mystery on a philosophical footing.

The philosophy comes from Aristotle’s teaching on substances and accidents, the former being the metaphysical essence of things and the latter their outer properties and attributes. To illustrate, in a crude way guaranteed to make my philosophically educated friends gasp, just look at a tree.

It may be pollarded or not, in bloom or not, in leaf or not, robust or dying, but it will remain the same tree in substance. All the permutations above, on the other hand, are what Aristotle called accidents. This is confirmed by committed urbanists who sneer at any request to identify a particular tree (“It’s a tree, innit?”).

The same basic teaching reappears in Kant’s notions of noumena and phenomena, and in any number of other philosophies dealing with the nature of reality. In Catholic doctrine, the substance of the bread and wine taken at communion changes into the body and blood of Christ, while the outward appearance of the treats remains the same.

In some Protestant denominations, especially Calvinist ones like Presbyterianism, the bread and wine are merely symbols, metaphors or ‘pneumatic’ reminders of Christ’s presence. As Calvin put it, “the Spirit truly unites things separated in space”, but Christ’s body and blood aren’t physically present at communion.

Such are the crude outlines of the profound and nuanced issues involved. These can’t be blithely dismissed out of hand, in my friend’s manner, or stupidly described as a form of cannibalism, as atheists often do. But no one can deny their existence.

Some of history’s greatest minds pondered and debated the doctrine of the Real Presence for centuries, and they’ll doubtless continue to do so in perpetuity. It’s up to individual Christians to decide whether to dip into such waters just below the surface, more deeply, or not at all.

But only some familiarity, no matter how cursory, issues the license to pronounce on such matters. Alas, this basic requirement is nowadays routinely ignored, and not just in this area.

“I’m entitled to my opinion” has become a buzz phrase of modernity. Whenever I hear it uttered in defence of obvious ignorance, I always reply: “Yes, but you aren’t entitled to an audience.” Alas, the idea that strong opinions ending up in the public domain must start from at least some knowledge has fallen by the wayside.

The counterintuitive assumption that all men are equal leads inexorably to an even sillier one, that all opinions are equal. This is guaranteed to reduce thinking to sloganeering, which is especially noticeable in politics.

In religion, most believers would be better off if they simply accepted Church dogmas just because the Church says so. The Apostolic and Nicaean Creeds are as far as most believers have to go. Those who choose to go beyond that point and delve into the tremendous corpus of Christian theology and philosophy, will be richly rewarded, but such inquisitiveness is by no means necessary.

What’s not just unnecessary but offensive is self-confident promulgation of ignorance. Especially when it proceeds from the ideology of equality so dear to every modern heart.  

During this Holy Week, one’s mind has to turn to matters divine even as one’s body consumes hot cross buns in toxic numbers.

Hence I thought of a recent conversation with a good friend, who is an Orthodox Christian (the Constantinople rather than Moscow patriarchate, as he always seeks to make clear). I said something contemptuous about the happy-clappy lot, and my friend rebuked me. “I welcome anyone who celebrates Christ,” he said.

I admired the sentiment, admitted he was a better Christian than me and left it at that. But then what the French call l’esprit d’escalier (literately, ‘staircase thought’, one that occurs to you after the conversation) led me to think that, had the Church always displayed such open-armed hospitality, it would have disappeared a long time ago.

Hence my tendency to regard even mainstream Protestantism, never mind its quasi-pagan sects, as out and out heresies. That makes it hard for me to see, say, a Baptist or a Pentecostal as a brother in Christ.

Since the time of St Paul one, perhaps the main, function of the Church has been to find a compromise between the truth as revealed from heaven and life as lived on earth. The static perfection only achievable in the kingdom of God had to be balanced against the dynamic human nature made imperfect by the Fall. The great synthesis based on the dual nature of Christ had to be made to work in everyday life.

This wasn’t an Eastern synthesis of things similar in nature. It was a balance coaxed out of a clash between opposites: one of them divine, the other human, both perfect and both extreme. The balance was so precarious that it had to be vigilantly observed: one step too far in either direction, towards either the sacred or the profane, and a precipice beckoned. One or the other end of the seesaw would shoot up, tossing either God or man into the abyss.

The Church had to find a compromise between perfection, as reachable only in the kingdom of God, and the imperfection of human nature, as precipitated by original sin. This the Church achieved during the period roughly demarcated by Paul at one end and Aquinas at the other.

In the process it had to fight off numerous heresies, each aiming to destroy the delicate balance. There the Church had to make sure it was preserving the Revelation in its fullest, without overstressing any one aspect. Such overstressing is in fact the essence of heresy; for all intents and purposes it might serve as its definition.

Most people assume that a heresy puts forth a wrong proposition, or at least one that contradicts the orthodoxy altogether. That’s not quite true. In fact, most heresies aren’t wrong in their main belief.

Where they err is in trying to assign an unduly universal significance to that one idea, passing a part for the whole. This inevitably puts too much weight at one end of the seesaw, destroying the balance.

For example, it’s not wrong to assert that Christ is God, as Docetism did, and neither is it wrong to say he is a man, as Arianism did. It is heretical, however, to deny the balance of the two – the balance without which Christendom wouldn’t have come about.

In fact, the Greek word hairesis implies a choice, inclination towards one thing, which then forms a distinct view of the world. This can act as the starting point for a political party, ideology, religious sect or philosophical school. In other words, the term hairesis contains an idea of something unilateral, of an obstinate concentration on just one of all the facets. 

While orthodoxy runs across the spectrum, heresy is by definition partisan and divisive. The sectarian spirit promoted by a heresy is characterised by egotism and ensuing atomisation. These are unavoidable whenever a partial thesis is proposed as the essence of absolute truth.

Such sleight of hand denies an antithesis to a thesis, making any synthesis impossible. There is nothing to synthesise. The balance no longer works, and doctrine is split into mutually exclusive aspects.

Thus the business of heretical sectarianism is choosing the fragments it finds attractive. On the other hand, the business of catholic orthodoxy consisted from the very beginning in gathering together all the pieces in their wholeness.

However, in trying to achieve this goal, the Church laid itself open to subsequent attacks launched by critics, from the early heretics to Calvin, from Wycliffe to Hus, from Luther to Jansen. With varying justification, such critics could always find the everyday practices of the Church wanting when held up against the absolute ideal put forth in, say, the Sermon on the Mount.

That has been either the nature or at least the tactic of most schisms and all reformations, including the one we spell with a capital ‘R’. And even when they weren’t officially declared to be heretical, they all used the heretic stratagem of placing too much emphasis on one or a few things at the expense of the balance among all.

However, had the Church not found such a balance, Christianity would now be remembered at best as a timid attempt to reform Judaism in the early days of the Roman Empire.

It wouldn’t have become a world religion, and neither would it have had the chance to create history’s greatest civilisation. Therein lies the strength of the Church. But therein also lies its weakness. For, trying to adapt to the relative imperfection of human nature, the Church itself had to become relatively imperfect.

Also, trying to fashion a religion that could thrive among peoples of different history, culture and national character, Christianity had to adapt more and more to the local conditions, especially as the monolithic Roman world was dissolving into separate nations.

Here the inherent Christian universalism was invaluable: at every critical point, when the world is being put asunder, people need a unifying religion where, in St Paul’s words, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek… for ye are all one in Jesus Christ.’          

Had the church been able to prevail over the atomising tendencies of individuals and nations, much grief could have been avoided. Yet it wasn’t always able to do so, and increasingly it wasn’t people who had to adapt to Christianity, but Christianity that had to adapt to them.

Adapting to the character of each nation meant at least slightly varying its own character from one geographical location to the next. As indirect proof of this, the Venerable Bede, England’s first historian, testifies that already by his time (d. 735) the barely post-natal English Church had already acquired traits peculiar to it, long before the great schism occurred.

The underlying faith of, say, an Englishman, a Gaul and a Corinthian was the same. But, when their cultural idiosyncrasies came into play, it was a safe bet that their religions wouldn’t remain exactly the same in perpetuity. Thus an institution created to spread the absolute truth had to, by its very nature, overlay its mission with potentially deadly relativities.

That wasn’t just a rhetorical conundrum. It was a disaster waiting to happen. For, trying to be all things to all men, the Church had to delve deeper into worldly matters than was good for it. That made it vulnerable to worldly criticism first and savage attacks second.

Those were launched by people who either couldn’t grasp the delicate nature of the balance maintained by the Church or hated that balance because it took something away from one or two things they held as paramount. That was heresy in action, and Luther, Zwingli, Calvin et al. were heresy personified.

They didn’t quite succeed in their mission of destroying the Church. But they did manage to split away from it. The house was divided against itself, and it could no longer stand as tall. A button was pushed for a gradual marginalisation of Christianity as a social, intellectual, moral and aesthetic dynamic.

In the subsequent centuries Protestantism proved its inherently factious nature by splitting into hundreds, some say thousands, of heretical sects, each celebrating Christ in, to be kind, rather idiosyncratic ways. Not only each sect but also each adherent is invited to have his own take on doctrine – to a point where the doctrine becomes unrecognisable.

So yes, perhaps I’m indeed mean-spirited and therefore a lousy Christian. But to me Christianity is inseparable from Church doctrine, which Protestantism has been systematically destroying for centuries by thousands of pinpricks.

In the good Christian tradition, I love Protestants as men and women, while detesting their heretical cults. (I could say the same about socialists and any number of other secular deviants, but won’t because that would be off my subject today.)

According to an education watchdog, universities in England could be told to sever links with foreign countries if such links undermine free speech and academic freedom. That’s good to hear.

In parallel developments, Spain cuts links with countries that practise bullfights, Russia with those that invade other countries, France with those that continue to work in August, and Holland with those that make cheese.

If you find such possibilities risible, we should all roll on the floor with laughter at the news that British universities are concerned with free speech and academic freedom. However, once that hilarity has stopped, we should catch our breath and read the news more attentively.

For the Office for Students (OfS) is only worried about those basic freedoms when they are imperilled by contacts with foreign countries, specifically China. In effect, OfS is only opposed to outsourcing suppression of free speech, not to such suppression per se.

This is a sort of protectionism. OfS doesn’t want foreigners to mess with our academic freedom at a time when our universities are doing a sterling job of it all on their own.

Any biology professor who insists that only women can have periods is likely to lose his job and be blacklisted for life. Any climatologist who questions, never mind debunks, the global warming swindle, ditto. Any sociologist who as much as hints at innate racial differences, ditto. Any professor who refuses to speak in vox DEI, ditto. Any political scientist who finds fault with the welfare state, ditto. Any English professor who refuses to acknowledge bowdlerised versions of great books or accept the woke mauling of grammar, ditto. Any historian who denies that England has always been racist, ditto. Any professor of theology insisting that not all religions are equally worthy, ditto. Even any physicist who doesn’t accept the string theory, ditto.

Our top universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, routinely and rudely ‘cancel’ conservative speakers. For example, a friend of mine got cancelled at the last moment, having accepted the invitation to appear a month earlier. So much for free speech.

This isn’t to deny that the links between British universities and foreign countries are nothing short of scandalous. Most of our higher education is financed by overseas students on scholarships, and many of our research programmes are sponsored by foreign governments, with China taking pride of place.

According to OfS, this situation is as intolerable as its prose: “For instance, if it means that there are people who are employed by an institute who are preventing legitimate protests or shutting down lecturers from covering certain kinds of content regarding that country for instance, or that country’s foreign policy.”

Should that be the case, says OfS, all such links must be “terminated”. This presumes on the goodness of human nature more than is warranted. For in effect OfS expects many of our academic institutions to “terminate” themselves.

In fact, whenever their overseas sources of income show signs of drying up, our top universities instantly begin to cut courses, roll up research programmes and lay off staff. Foreign students in particular are the cash cow that has to be milked – or else.

No wonder. Some of such respectable institutions as University College London, Imperial College and the London School of Economics are getting up to 80 per cent of their student fees from overseas. And over the whole Russell Group comprising our top universities (including Oxbridge), that proportion is over 57 per cent.

While fees for domestic students have been frozen at £9, 250 a year since 2017, foreign students pay several times more, and no one seems to take issue with such blatant discrimination. Foreign governments don’t seem to mind either: China alone boasts about 100,000 students at UK universities, and believe me: they don’t patronise our mushrooming network of crypto-polytechnics.

This situation can be neatly summed up by the old proverb: he who pays the piper calls the tune. It’s hard to expect an institution sustained by China’s funding to come up with scathing criticism of, say, China’s massive cyberattacks on the West currently under way.

On the other hand, it’s both hypocritical and counterproductive for institutions committed to abusing academic freedom only to object when such abuses are perpetrated by Johnny Foreigner. Reaffirming commitment to free speech should be the starting point for anyone seeking solutions to the Chinese communist piper calling the British academic tune.

Once that commitment has been chiselled in stone, solutions to the problem that so vexes OfS will offer themselves. Otherwise this is a case of the pot calling the kettre brack.

It’s dishonest to tell a professor not to pull his punches when criticising, say, China’s foreign policy while telling him in the same breath that he isn’t free to insist that Israel’s fight for survival shouldn’t be hamstrung by international pressures. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander, that sort of thing.

Once we’ve established that basic principle we can talk specifics. It’s obvious that freezing domestic student fees at an unsustainably low level was inspired by wokery. In this case, it was the egalitarian fallacy that at least 50 per cent of all Britons should have the benefit of higher education.

It’s true that high fees shouldn’t block the path of talented youngsters from poorer families. But I’ve looked up ‘talented’ in the thesaurus and haven’t found ‘all’ among the synonyms. The government should join forces with charitable foundations to offer enough grants and scholarships to ensure that intellectual talent rises to the top even if it starts at the bottom.

Yet anyone who has ever stood in front of a class will tell you that talented students of any social origin hardly ever make up more than 10 per cent. The rest of them should be charged the kind of fees that would enable the universities to sustain themselves.

That would enable all students to seek and eventually find their level. Some would soar all the way to Nobel Prizes, others to simply high levels of academic competence. And some, conceivably most, would weigh the pros and cons to decide they’d be better off studying plumbing than pre-Socratic philosophy.

Foreign students should be welcomed on the understanding that they must be happy to live by British standards of academic freedom – take it or lump it. (I mean the re-established and re-confirmed standards, not the nonexistent ones currently in place.) The same should go for overseas funding of research programmes.

Foreign investors must be made to understand in advance that, even if their money may be welcome, their meddling isn’t. If they feel their sensibilities are too brittle to countenance the direction in which research is going, that’s just too bad. The take-it-or-lump-it principle applies.

Now, if you re-read the last six paragraphs, you’ll know that no university professor can advocate such subversive ideas and remain a university professor. Therein lies the real problem. The strangulating influx of foreign lucre is just a subset.