Category: Blog

The discovery that the rather mediocre Easter Sonata, wrongly attributed to Felix Mendelssohn, is actually by his sister Fanny has poked the feminist hornet’s nest yet again.

Out flew the old insects ably led by the BBC, flapping their wings and buzzing the usual politicised inanities about the gross injustices suffered by women composers throughout the ages. The implication is that swarms of female geniuses have only been held back by flagrant discrimination.

Until now Clara Schumann has been the biggest inscription on the banners of musical feminism. It has been suggested, or sometimes actually said outright, that poor Clara had her composing genius suppressed by a regiment of Teutonic MCPs led by her husband Robert. But for such sharp practices, the world would realise she was at least her husband’s equal.

There was a brouhaha about this in 2015, when it was discovered that the A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, all of them despicably male. Clara’s name was held up as the greatest omission.

Now Mrs Schumann herself, one of the best pianists of her time, didn’t consider her compositions to be significant. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her own recitals, as was a common practice then. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

And yes, perhaps in the nineteenth century there existed some prejudice against professional women, although that didn’t diminish Mrs Schumann’s success in something she really was good at, performance. Yet, at a wild guess, women’s rights were even a smaller priority in the twelfth century, when the sublime composer Hildegard von Bingen plied her art unimpeded.

Hildegard’s works survive to this day not because she was a woman composer, but because she was a great composer. Which Clara wasn’t, and neither was Fanny, as her hundreds of known works demonstrate vividly to anyone whose ears aren’t blocked by ideological plugs.

This category demonstrably doesn’t include the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who have embarked on a widely publicised search for ‘lost’ female composers.

They have their work cut out, for, according to the BBC, there are at least 6,000 of those lost sheep, waiting to be found for the delectation of music lovers who’ve had their fill of MCPs like Bach and Beethoven. The suggested number is nothing short of staggering. Let me spell it out for you: SIX THOUSAND.

Now, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know music rather well. My wife, a concert pianist, knows it much better. This morning we put the 6,000 number to the test by compiling our own list of male composers, ranging from sub-minor to minor to major to super-major.

Admittedly, we only spent half an hour on this exercise and, had we spent the whole day and used some reference literature, we could probably have done better. As it was, we barely got to a hundred, scraping the bottom of the barrel, where some 18^th century Russian liturgical composers reside next to the lesser known Dutch and English polyphonists of the Elizabethan era (or whatever it was called in Holland).

Now it’s fair to assume that – due to discrimination only! – male composers must have outnumbered female ones at least 100 to one throughout history. Hence, accepting on faith the 6,000 figure put forth by the BBC, there must be more than 600,000 shamefully masculine composers languishing in the dark dungeons of history, waiting to come out and see the blinding light of fame.

I hope you realise that we’re no longer talking just about ignorance, stupidity and tastelessness. The toxic ideology of feminism has poisoned the brains of our culture vultures, rendering them certifiably mad.

Edwina Wolstencroft, BBC Radio 3’s editor, confirmed this clinical diagnosis when announcing plans to broadcast works by female composers, emphatically including Fanny Mendelssohn. I hope, said Miss Wolstencroft that “the live broadcast contributes towards Fanny’s recognition as a musical genius.”

Right. Fanny is ‘a musical genius’. So what term shall we use to describe those MCPs Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert? Since the verbal scale of human artistic attainment doesn’t really go higher than genius, we can only assume one of three things.

Either those gentlemen were demigods, sitting at the right hand of Apollo atop the musical Olympus, or Miss Wolstencroft et al. genuinely believe that Fanny is every bit their equal, or this lot care not about music but ideology expressed through music.

Dismissing the first assumption as sheer paganism, we have to accept some combination of the second and third ones as the likely cause.

Then we realise what a subversive role the BBC and likeminded institutions play in our culture, of which music is the salient representation. They are the enemy within, cancerous cells gradually eating away at everything that’s healthy and genuine.

As such, they cause even a greater harm than pop excretions. At least no one seriously considers those as the acme of the human spirit. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Miss Wolstencroft does.

I have a confession to make: I like puerile and even prurient humour, provided it’s funny.

Of course what’s funny to me may be offensive to you, tasteless to him and ought to be against the law to them. Fair enough.

But I’d rather a joke were puerile and even prurient than anodyne. Too many times have I been left feeling like a pariah in the company of clubbable gentlemen. One of them would tell a joke sounding as if he’d left the punch line out. All around me would be in stitches, while I’d be unable even to crack a polite smile.

Alternatively, I’d also feel like a pariah when, in a similar company, telling a joke I found hilarious and everyone else present felt like having me arrested.

Sometimes, when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, I can even come up with a decent one-liner myself. I recall some 30 years ago, when I had just moved from New York to London, talking about the race situation in America to the very embodiment of a clubbable gentleman (for the outlanders among you, ‘clubbable’ means fit for membership in a Pall Mall club, not someone you’d like to club, although the two may well go hand in hand).

Anyway, I remarked that most American blacks tend to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” suggested my interlocutor. “It’s the other way around,” I replied. “They’re black because they’re left-wing.” (I’ll spare you some of my jokes that fall into the puerile and prurient category.)

This lengthy preamble is an attempt at self-justification. For I have another confession to make: I like Jimmy Carr, the comedian most of my friends find beyond the pale. Obscene, tasteless, foul-mouthed, is what they call him. All true. Yet, to me, also funny. Sometimes.

The other day he appeared on Desert Island Discs. For the outlanders among you, this is a radio interview show first broadcast in 1942. A guest is asked which eight recordings, one book and one luxury item he’d like to have as a castaway.

His selections say a lot about the man. For example, though I still have enormous respect for Enoch Powell, I took it down a notch when, back in 1989, most of the politician’s musical selections were by Wagner. One has to be mad, I thought, to want to listen mostly to Wagner his whole life, or for that matter at all.

What interested me about Jimmy Carr’s appearance wasn’t his selections, but the subject touched upon in the interview. Is there anything he wouldn’t consider a laughing matter?

Obviously the latitude Mr Carr allows himself is practically limitless, as some of his material shows: “They say there’s safety in numbers. Go tell this to the six million Jews.” Or, “My girlfriends keep telling me they’re pregnant. I say, hey, I’m not made of coat hangers!”

He defended such irreverence on the show: “Because people are offended, does not make them right. Nobody should be drawing a line…” No line at all?

Oh well, there’s one exception: the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, when 94 people were crushed to death at a football stadium: “You could never joke about Hillsborough, as it’s a tragedy that’s touched people in a very specific way, and I cannot imagine anybody coming up with a joke about that.”

So Mr Carr does draw a line, but he draws it in funny places. Why just Hillsborough, appalling as it is? Why not Dunblane? The Holocaust? Our mutilated soldiers in Iraq (“We’ll have a f****** good Paralympic team,” he once quipped.) Why just Hillsborough?

One can only guess at Mr Carr’s motives, although PR probably has a role to play. As a Cambridge alumnus, he’s seen as rather posh, which nowadays is a failing in need of counterbalancing. It’s conceivably to that end that Mr Carr loads his jokes with swearwords more than do many comedians who only ever went to the school of hard knockers.

It’s conceivably for the same reason that he elevated football fans, generally seen as downmarket, to secular sainthood, putting them off limits for jokes. God isn’t afforded the same exemption.

When offered the Bible as one of his books for the island, Carr said he’d burn it “to help start his fire”. That’s what made me think about humour and its limits.

I hope you won’t think me solipsistic if I again refer to my own experience, that of a lifetime wag. As I grow older, I find that the areas open to my wisecracks are getting narrower. At times I don’t even deliver a funny line because I’m scared of offending. Not so much my immediate audience – I fear offending God.

As a lapsed Catholic and now an atheist, Mr Carr is clearly immune to such concerns. I just hope, for his sake, that before tossing the Bible in the fire, he reads one verse:

“Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.”

Then, to be on the safe side, he may have a Pascal wager with himself – one never knows. Meanwhile, have you heard the one about…

Suppose for the sake of argument that the Navy Seals have joined our own SAS in fine-tuning their urban warfare tactics on a mock-up of the Kremlin. At the same time, Western intelligence services are conducting a full-blown electronic war aimed at paralysing Russia’s infrastructure and disrupting her political process.

How do you suppose the Russians would react? Don’t know about you, but even as we speak I’m hearing hysterical shrieks about the rebirth of Nazi belligerence, Nato’s far-reaching imperialist designs, Russophobia and taking the world to the brink of nuclear holocaust.

In parallel, I can hear the likes of Peter Hitchens assuring us that the Russians have a point, that they’ve been surrounded by Western enemies throughout their history and are therefore understandably sensitive and, well, yes, Nato is imperialist and, if the Russians respond with ICBMs, we’ll have only ourselves to blame. Unless, or perhaps even if, this happens, we’ve nothing to fear from the strong, Christian, conservative leader Putin we wish we had.

Well, this situation isn’t at all hypothetical, except that the boot is on the other foot. Russia’s defence minister Shoigu has announced that the army is building a full-scale model of the Reichstag for training purposes. In other words, Russian troops are going to practise storming the building of Germany’s parliament.

The initiative has touched a chord in the mysterious Russian soul directly linked to a much-touted superior spirituality. Thousands of cars around Moscow are tastefully decorated with bumper stickers saying ‘To Berlin!’, ‘We can do it again!’ and ‘If you don’t like talking to Lavrov [foreign minister], you’ll talk to Shoigu’.

Drums are rolling and bugles blowing throughout the Russian press, with enough din to bring down the walls of Jericho – or of the Reichstag if you’d rather.

Compared to the hypothetical situation I outlined above, the Germans reacted to the real one rather nonchalantly. The word ‘provocation’ was mooted, but not too loudly, while the government spokesman dismissed the whole thing with a shrug of the shoulders: “This development is unexpected, speaks for itself and requires no comment”.

Yet even that limp-wristed response enraged the Russians. The defence ministry spokesman thundered: “Such attacks by German politicians not only cause extreme consternation but also make one ponder their real convictions as regards the ‘builders’ of the Third Reich in 1933-1945.”

Quite. The Germans’ mild dismay at seeing their parliament building used for storming exercises proves they are crypto-Nazis longing for world conquest and Auschwitz.

One wonders how the Russians would feel if Berlin were inundated with a profusion of bumper stickers saying ‘Wir Schaffen das Nochmals!’, ‘Drang nach Osten’ and ‘Sieg Heil!’. My imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

When it comes to the Russian threat, we don’t have to stay in the subjunctive mood for long. The present features non-stop Russian cyber attacks against Western institutions and infrastructure.

To me, there’s only a distinction without a difference between bombing a command centre and jamming its communications – or between slandering a Western politician into resignation and assassinating him. Both are acts of war.

Critically, this observation is shared by General Sir Adrian Bradshaw, deputy supreme allied commander in Europe. Gen. Bradshaw isn’t averse to treating electronic warfare as cause to invoke Article 5 of the Nato charter, in which an attack on one member state is an attack on all:

“Well Article 5 is when it’s declared to be Article 5… It is a political decision, but no, it is not out of the question that aggression, blatant aggression, in a domain other than conventional warfare might be deemed to be Article 5.”

Gen. Bradshaw emphasised that: “We require the ability to defend our vital assets from aggression in any area.” He then added a remark phrased in the only way the Russians understand: “Do not mess with Nato. You set foot in one of these countries… you’re taking on Nato with all that that implies… so woe betide a nation that does that.”

One wishes that Nato commanders spoke in this fashion when they aren’t as close to retirement as Gen. Bradshaw is (next summer). And that their statements were backed up with resolve on the part of Western governments.

Such resolve should be expressed not just in words but in tangible measures, of which a sizeable increase in defence budget is the most obvious and immediate. Say what you will about Trump’s affection for the Russians, but he seems to understand this, as his announcement of a seven per cent increase in US defence spending testifies.

Yet it’s not all about beefing up the military. It’s also – mostly – about beefing up the resolve to use it should this become necessary. History shows that wishy-washy ambiguity on the part of Western governments serves only to embolden wicked aggressors. The Second World War followed Munich not only chronologically but also causally.

Are we capable of learning the lessons of history? The French poet and thinker Paul Valéry doubted that: “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism. There are no other lessons.”

Unless we prove him wrong by learning the lessons of the 1938 appeasement, we’ll invite similar consequences. Actually, given the technological advances of which modernity is so proud, the consequences may be far worse.

John Major isn’t the sharpest chisel in the box – in fact, he resembles the box more than a chisel. But at least the box used to be seen as solid and sturdy, if dull-grey.

Yet the man who signed away Britain’s sovereignty and then engineered the ERM disaster, costing the taxpayer £3.4 billion, has gone barmy. As one symptom, he has lost touch with reality.

The other day Major fulminated against Mrs May, Brexit and all the fools and/or knaves who had voted for it. This was followed by the customary litany of disasters to befall a Britain no longer governed by Angie the Merkin and Jean-Claude Junk.

Brace yourself, for the future is gruesome. We’ll have to “change Britain’s economic model”. Now make sure you’re sitting down: we’ll have to run a low-tax, low-regulation economy.

You know, the kind that has proved a stratospheric success everywhere it has been tried. For example, that’s how all those Asian lambs turned into tigers, how Germany produced her post-war economic miracle (snappily called Wirtschaftswunder), how Britain herself had become a global empire before the likes of Sir John took over.

So why is it such a bad thing? Well, you see, “We cannot move to a radical enterprise economy without moving away from a welfare state”. Crikey. No welfare state, fancy that. How did Britannia ever manage to rule the waves without it?

And, a catastrophe of all catastrophes: the NHS will have to be dismantled. Let’s see. The NHS kicked off in 1948. Major signed away Britain’s sovereignty in 1992. How did the NHS manage to survive for 44 years in the interim? It did soldier on, with no Maastricht Treaty yet in sight.

One wonders what part of sovereignty Sir John doesn’t understand. All of them, by the sound of him: “…people who voted to leave Europe in the belief that it might improve their lives… their expectations will not be met and whole communities will be worse off.”

Well, I didn’t vote for Brexit in the expectation of a better life, at least not economically. It’s just that, for historical, constitutional and moral reasons, I want to live in a sovereign Britain, not one bossed by Angie the Merkin and Jean-Claude Junk. And from what I’ve heard, many share my feelings.

Reducing the whole thing to economics is missing the point – even when done by people who understand the discipline, a category that emphatically doesn’t include Major.

His limp grasp of economics was amply demonstrated during his tenure as chancellor and then prime minister. He doesn’t seem to know that these days cutting taxes and regulations isn’t just the best but the only known recipe for prosperity.

Nor does Major have the moral sense to realise that continuing to brainwash people about the NHS is appalling demagoguery. Or rather it’s not just morality that he lacks but also the ability to think sequentially.

Forgetting for a second that, like all giant socialist projects, the NHS was designed to serve not the people but the state, let’s look at it from a practical viewpoint.

Let’s start with the unassailable assumption, born out of empirical evidence, that civilised countries provide adequate medical care one way or another. Though these ways differ from country to country, they fall into three broad groups: wholly or predominantly socialist (Britain), wholly or predominantly private (US), a balanced mixture thereof (Western Europe).

The NHS is therefore not the end but a means, to be weighed against other means. Such a weighing exercise will show that wholly or predominantly socialist medicine is by far the worst possible way of looking after people’s health.

That’s why no other Western European country, some of which are in general more socialist than Britain, has chosen it, relying instead on a mixed system. And medical care in, say, France and Germany is provided more efficiently.

What they have may not be ideal, but the French don’t have to wait three weeks for a GP appointment, nor three years for a hospital bed. We do, which suggests that socialism doesn’t work in medicine any better than anywhere else.

Yet, following 70 years of relentlessly stupefying propaganda, the British attach sacramental significance to the NHS. It’s off limits for criticism, just as God is to believers. And this is the fallacy that Major is exploiting in his fear-mongering.

Tackle Tory hardliners, he hectors Mrs May, or it will be the death of the NHS. Is that a promise or a threat, Sir John?

Supposing, against all available evidence, that Britain regains economic sanity following Brexit, does this mean people will die in the streets with no medical help available? Of course not.

Medical care will be provided, and in a better way. Why, we may even increase our number of hospital beds to a pre-NHS 400,000, from today’s puny 140,000. We may even start building hospitals at the 1930s rate, a decade in which 10 times more hospitals were built than in the seven NHS decades.

Sir John ‘Edwina’ Major ought to be ashamed of himself for appealing to false idols so blatantly. But he won’t be. Shame isn’t something his kind can feel.

Throughout the Obama presidency, George W. Bush stoically refrained from uttering a word of criticism. His respect for the institution of the presidency was so strong that he wouldn’t douse it with the cold water of negativity.

Now either his stoicism has eroded or his respect for the office has diminished, but Dubya has decided to take a swing at the president from his own party.

A cynic might suspect Dubya of waging a personal vendetta, for the Bush clan has a bit of previous with Trump. During the campaign for the Republican nomination, Trump destroyed not just Jeb Bush’s candidature but probably his whole political career.

He took savage and highly effective swipes not just at Jeb, whom he mockingly called Bush III, but at the whole dynasty. The dynasty closed ranks, and now Dubya has lashed out.

He started out by demanding answers to the questions on any contacts that Trump and his men may have had with Russian intelligence officers, which isn’t an unreasonable request. I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times before: any illegal contact of that nature isn’t just an indiscretion but a capital crime.

But, as with any crime, the alleged perpetrator is innocent until proven guilty. So let’s sweep that accusation under the rug for now and see what else has made Dubya break his vow of silence.

We shouldn’t, he said in a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s immigration policy, prosecute people for their religion: “One of our great strengths is for people to be able to worship the way they want to…”

This proves that Dubya has read the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which is remarkable since he isn’t a bookish type. Neither is he a rigorous logician, for one doesn’t see any immediate link between prosecuting people for their faith and limiting for a while immigration from certain countries.

Since these days I’m given to homespun parallels, I’m not prosecuting my neighbours by not inviting them to dinner. Neither am I thereby suggesting even remotely that they shouldn’t eat anywhere else. I’m simply exercising my right to choose my guests.

“I am for an immigration policy that’s welcoming and that upholds the law,” added Bush, displaying yet again his only conspicuous talent: uttering meaningless platitudes.

How welcoming are we talking here? Indiscriminately? But America has never had an unqualified open-door policy, not in my rather long memory at any rate. Nor can America or any other country vet every migrant thoroughly, certainly not those millions coming from uncivilised – sorry, I mean differently civilised – countries. Hence vetting by category is unavoidable.

Anyway, if I were Dubya, I’d shut up about other people’s policies towards Muslims. His first reaction to 9/11 was to say that Islam is a religion of peace because not every Muslim is a terrorist. That’s like saying that Nazism was a philosophy of peace because not every NSDAP member gassed Jews.

His second reaction was to launch a criminally stupid war to promote democracy in tribal Muslim societies, while divesting of WMD those countries that were known not to possess them. It’s largely thanks to that criminal, neocon-inspired folly that the whole world is struggling to deal with the genie let out of the bottle.

But for Dubya’s well-documented inanity, his successors, not to mention Europeans, wouldn’t be trying in vain to keep millions of Muslims (guaranteed to include thousands of jihadists) off their immigration rolls.

“I don’t like racism,” explained Bush, implying that Trump’s meek attempts to reduce the number of potentially murderous arrivals are motivated by that deadly sin. No proof of that transgression was proffered.

How many Muslims would a politician have to admit to absolve himself? One million? Ten? Is racism the only possible reason for the reluctance to do so?

What else? Oh yes, Trump has responded tetchily to the media’s frenzied attacks the likes of which haven’t been seen since Watergate.

Though Trump’s response may have been ill-advisedly peevish, I’m man enough to admit that I probably wouldn’t have displayed greater patience under the circumstances. I’ve been known to tell people much worse things with much less provocation.

In any case, no averagely intelligent person would interpret what Trump said as an assault on freedom of the press. A man attacked has a right to defend himself, and no president has been attacked as vehemently and hysterically as Trump, before he has even had the chance to do anything.

Such considerations didn’t prevent Dubya from regaling us with more meaningless banalities. Freedom of the press, he kindly explained, is a good thing because: “Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive. And it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power…”

Lord Acton once explained the corrupting potential of power more epigrammatically (“…and absolute power corrupts absolutely”), but then he was a clever man, which is more than can be said for some others I could mention.

As to the sly dig at Trump, does Bush think that talking back to the braying press constitutes a greater abuse of power than using false evidence to expose the world to the innate violence of the ‘religion of peace’?

“I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” was another Bush profundity. True. But politicians like him are deadly to it.

Solomon relied on wisdom and Alexander on soldierly directness to solve tough problems in ingenious ways involving cutting implements. It’s distressing to observe that, in solving the problem of leaving the EU, HMG is displaying neither quality.

Justice Secretary Liz ‘Elizabeth’ Truss has announced that, sorry about the manifesto pledge and all that, but the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) will remain in place until after the 2020 general election and possibly beyond.

“The British Bill of Rights,” she explained, “is not something we can do at the same time as we are putting through the Great Repeal Bill… It’s important we only do one constitution reform at a time.”

This is arrant nonsense on more levels that one finds in a modern skyscraper. Where are Solomon and Alexander when we need them to sort out our government?

Solomon, having cast an eye over Britain’s political tradition, would explain to Miss Truss that there are no two constitutional reforms under way, nor even one. There’s simply a repair job.

Allow me to explain so that even our ministers can understand. The other day a careless driver damaged a side mirror on my car. My local mechanic Mark fixed it at a cost of £75. Can you say he reformed my car? Of course not. Mark simply returned it to its original state.

Extrapolating ever so slightly, leaving the EU is tantamount only to a quick repair job, not a constitutional reform. The job does involve more than one step, but we used to be blessed with politicians who could walk and… well, do that other thing at the same time.

Solomon would then deductively proceed from the general to the specific by explaining to Miss Truss that Britain needs the ECHR like he himself needed another wife. He already had 700 of them, plus 300 concubines, and Britain has for centuries had enough legal provisions to satisfy the most insatiable lust for human rights.

The rights of Englishmen is a notion predating the ECHR by some 800 years, and in the intervening period the concept has grown in both scope and depth. There have been glitches here and there, but on the whole Britain has done rather well in that respect, and manifestly better than any other country in Europe.

Our constitution is arguably the best and certainly the longest-lasting the world has ever seen. And as Lucius Cary said almost 400 years ago, “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

The ECHR was thrust down our throats by the most revolting personage ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street. Tony Blair remembered what a great time he had had waiting on tables in Paris in his youth and decided once again to be subservient to the French and Germans.

Because France, where young Tony used to serve customers, is a revolutionary republic, its constitution lacks an organic claim to legitimacy. Hence nothing goes without saying, or rather writing.

Every little legal quirk has to be put down on paper, and no constitution can survive for long. Since 1789 France has had 17 different constitutions, each spawning a plethora of new laws. These come down from top to bottom, originating in the fecund minds of avocats who bang their clever heads together to lord it over the French.

By contrast, English Common Law, vectored from bottom to top, has throughout history built a solid capital of justice and legitimacy, accepted as such by all. Thus a switch to the continental system of positive law exemplified by the ECHR flies in the face of Lucius Cary’s (and Solomon’s) wisdom.

The ECHR is no more synonymous with human rights than the European Union is with Europe, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with democracy, republicanism or indeed people. The continentals are welcome to it, but their meat is our poison.

Over to you, Alexander. How do we solve Liz Truss’s problem? (And please don’t tell her to start by using her full name, rather than its emetically populist contraction. She’s a modern, not Macedonian, politician.)

There’s no time in her busy schedule to leave both the EU and the ECHR because the latter involves a lot of messing about with a custom-made British Bill of Rights. How can the poor girl solve this conundrum?

Simple, says the Hegemon. Leave the ECHR effective today and forget any new Bill of Rights. We already have one such, passed in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution, as the Dutch occupation is commonly known. Didn’t need that one either, as we didn’t need the Glorious Revolution – but that’s a different story.

Just take care of freeing our ancient constitution from the yoke of European legalism, and human rights will take care of themselves. As they have done for a lot more centuries than France has been a revolutionary republic, Germany a unified country or the ECHR a twinkle in anyone’s eye.

Having thus chopped through that knot, Alexander returned to history, followed by the wise King Solomon. We, on the other hand, are stuck in the present, where we’re ruled by nonentities like Liz ‘Elizabeth’ Truss.

 

No, not the one you think. Another, longer word, deriving from the Etruscan symbol of a magistrate’s power. That symbol, a bundle of wooden rods, was called fasces.

Later the word passed on, via ancient Rome, to 20^th century Italy, where its derivative described a socialist heresy. When this movement reached Germany, it acquired a more descriptive name: national socialism.

Terminological precision matters, if only to prevent a word from acquiring such a broad meaning that it stops meaning anything much. So Italian fascism and Nazism aren’t identical.

The most salient difference is racism, which was fundamental to the latter but not to the former. There are other differences as well, but for the moment let’s concentrate on the commonalities. What the two regimes had in common could be described as fascism in a supra-Italian sense.

Persons of the leftish persuasion often describe anyone to their right as fascist. This reinforces my conviction born out of lifelong observation that left-wingers aren’t just misguided, strident and ignorant but also stupid.

One defining characteristic of intellect is the ability to discriminate among various concepts, which heavily relies on taxonomic precision. Hence using the same term to describe Benito Mussolini and, say, Margaret Thatcher is a clinically valid symptom of idiocy. The two have nothing in common, other than the fact that lefties dislike them both.

Yet it’s possible, with all appropriate disclaimers and qualifications, to use the term ‘fascist’ in a broad sense. This presupposes some core characteristics, and indeed they exist.

Fascism combines nationalism (with or without a racist dimension) in philosophy with populist demagoguery in rhetoric, corporatist socialism in economics and statism in politics. Violence is extraneous to this definition for being derivative. Violence in se isn’t the goal; it’s only a means, which may or may not be required.

If required, fascist governments won’t hesitate to use it to the most gruesome extreme, as they did in Germany. If not, they’ll use it with relative moderation, as they did in Italy, pre-Anschluss Austria or pre-war Poland.

This longish definition means that calling, say, Margaret Thatcher or Donald Trump fascists says nothing at all about them, while saying a lot about the caller. He’s a stupid leftie, and I’m sorry about sounding so tautological.

Neither Thatcher nor Trump is a nationalist though both are patriots (a valid distinction). Both can be described as populist (Trump more, Thatcher less) in that they appeal to the masses directly, over the head of the political establishment. Trump uses demagoguery more than Thatcher did, but not nearly as much as Hitler or Mussolini. Neither statism nor corporatist socialism has much to do with either Thatcher or Trump.

In short, if you accept my definition of fascism, neither Thatcher nor Trump qualifies. But Marine Le Pen does.

Nationalist – yes. Populist – yes. Demagogue – yes. Statist – yes. Socialist – yes. Marine ticks all the boxes.

Now there’s one feature of fascism that puts it side by side with communism and, in modern politics, nothing else. It’s evil.

Under duress I could accept that a socialist, especially a young one, may be misguided. After all, not many people are capable of delving into politics as deeply as the subject requires, and most are guided by their feelings rather than thoughts.

It’s even possible to imagine that a socialist, while unwittingly working to an evil end, may be driven by good motives. Impressionable simpletons often are, and God save us from them.

But no such assumption can be made about either communism or fascism. Both are unequivocally evil. Both presuppose tyranny as the starting point, not, as conceivably could be the case with socialism, an unintended if assured consequence.

This, regardless of whether or not we like some policies fascists advocate. For example, I share Le Pen’s opposition to the EU. But the destruction of that wicked contrivance should be brought about by a revolt proceeding from noble motives. If it’s defeated by fascism, we may discover that the cure is worse than the disease.

Fascism only ever succeeds in a climate of collective psychosis. That condition, albeit so far in a relatively mild form, exists in France.

Political conservatism can’t exist there even in theory, what with modern France at its founding being a revolutionary republic. What can French conservatives possibly wish to conserve? The heinous, mutually exclusive fallacies of liberté, egalité, fraternité?

Add to this the unhealed trauma of having been conquered by Germany 77 years ago, and you’ll understand why the French are collectively ready for the analyst’s couch.

They sense that the established order is letting them down badly, and the brighter ones among them realise that their affection for a German-dominated EU is a form of the Stockholm syndrome. But what’s the alternative?

Real conservatism is impossible (monarchists are regarded as harmless oddballs in France, sort of like flat-earthers). Communism is out of fashion. The Word of God could stop fascism in its tracks, but it’s muted by laïcité.

In today’s globalised world no land is an island, not even Britain. So, if in the next election Le Pen proves to be mightier than the Word, we’ll all feel the shock waves.

A newspaper story caught my eye and evoked all sort of thoughts, associations and historical facts.

Back in 1998, two homosexual men, who today would be married and, if they could wait a year or two, possibly in church, adopted two toddlers from a Russian orphanage in Ulyanovsk.

With the factual precision so typical of today’s press, the paper refers to the place as “a frozen wasteland 550 miles east of Moscow”. In fact, it’s a major industrial centre on the Volga inhabited by over 600,000 souls.

Some of them are no doubt proud of living in the birthplace of Alexander Kerensky, the last head of the Provisional Government ousted by the 1917 Bolshevik coup. Conceivably more of them take pride in sharing their birthplace with the chap who led the coup, Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), after whom the city is named.

But this historical detour is by the bye. What matters is the present, along with the more recent past.

The two adopters were ecstatic: for obvious reasons they never thought they’d be able to experience the joy of fatherhood, or motherhood if you’d rather. Yet the joy turned out not to be so joyous.

Another detour, if I may, this one from personal experience. Many years ago, two of my friends, both university professors, had despaired of producing a child. So they adopted a lovely baby boy and raised him the way cultured parents raise their children.

Sure enough, the boy grew up a nice, kind-hearted, well-read young man. The trouble was he wasn’t very bright. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t do well at school, which saddened my friends. They loved him, he loved them, tried his best to please them, but nurture didn’t unequivocally triumph over nature.

One hates to generalise on the basis of limited information, but it stands to reason that most parents putting up their children for adoption don’t pass on perfect genes. In some cases, the genes may be so imperfect that no amount of loving care will work.

As it didn’t in this story. Both boys were abandoned by their mothers at birth and, at the time they were adopted and brought to London, they were dying of malnutrition and neglect, which is par for the course in Russian orphanages.

By adopting them, the two Londoners probably saved their lives, but at a significant cost to their own. The smaller boy had learning difficulties, which, to their credit, his two father/mothers managed to overcome. He’s now studying biology at university and, judging by his photograph, is a pleasant youngster.

However, the bigger boy made his father/mothers’ lives a misery. In fact, he put their lives in jeopardy.

The lad started out by breaking the family dog’s tail. Then he moved on to bigger things. He tried to strangle both father/mothers with a dog lead, beat them up, threatened them and his brother with knives and screwdrivers, smashed their furniture and electronic appliances, and even punched holes in the wall (I told you he was big).

Now penniless and despondent, the men took out a restraining order that their foster son ignores. Moreover, by his own admission, the lad “went through a homophobic stage”. That was largely brought on by his classmates who mercilessly teased him about having two fathers.

Now that I’ve let my narrative meander, here’s another historical detour. At the end of the 12^th century a young Mongolian chieftain Temüjin’s 16-year-old wife Börte was kidnapped by a hostile tribe. When Temüjin, soon to become Genghis Khan, recovered Börte a year or so later, she was pregnant.

Yet, contrary to biological evidence, Genghis declared her son Jochi his own and promised to impale anyone who contested that declaration. Nonetheless, Mongolian mauvaises langues slyly called Jochi “a son of two fathers” behind his, and wisely his father’s, back.

The classmates of the boy in question didn’t have to be quite so furtive, and the boy grew up fighting every day of his life. He grew up hating not only his mean classmates, but also his father/mothers.

Returning to the nature-vs.-nurture argument, it’s possible that the boy was born such an irredeemably rotten apple to begin with that he’d grow up bad even in a normal family, like the one of my friends from way back.

But it’s not counterintuitive to suppose that the perversely unnatural environment in which he grew up encouraged his bad heredity and suppressed the better part of his character.

Allowing homosexual couples to adopt children goes against, well, just about everything: history, physiology, reason, common sense, theology, philosophy, sociology – even common decency.

I’m sure there’s much anecdotal evidence showing that sometimes such adoptions work out well. But any possible benefits are nothing compared to the fundamental debauchment of the very concept of marriage, family and parenthood inherent in the legalisation of such practices.

The trouble is we can’t even say that any longer: the pagan demiurge of egalitarian political correctness is a wrathful deity, ready to smite any infidel. I just hope that the two homosexual parents won’t lay their lives at this totem pole.

 

You won’t find anyone who despises conspiracy theories as thoroughly, and mocks their holders as readily, as I do. There’s a caveat though, as there usually is.

Dismissing conspiracy theories shouldn’t mean denying that perfectly non-theoretical conspiracies do exist, and always have. And when it comes to Russia, they don’t just exist but abound.

For example, in the musical chairs of the Romanov succession, more tsars than not ascended to the throne by violent coup d’état, and in fact the dynasty was ended by a red, as opposed to purple, conspiracy.

This fine tradition was continued and greatly enhanced by the Bolshevik dynasty that has been reigning, mutatis mutandis, for 100 years. As an illegal contrivance to begin with, it has never had provisions for legal succession. New leaders move into the Kremlin as a denouement to only three possible scenarios: assassination, bloodless coup, bogus elections.

Of course secret police is inherently conspiratorial, and in Russia infinitely more so than in any civilised country. The organisation itself has often found itself on the receiving end of conspiracies. It’s only in the last 50 years that its heads have been allowed to retire. All the previous ones fell to conspiracies, historically verified or as near as damn.

Dzerjinsky probably and Menjinsky almost definitely were poisoned. Yagoda, executed. Beria, ditto. Merkulov, ditto. Abakumov, ditto. The murders they themselves had perpetrated were mostly by category, irrespective of any individual wrong-doing.

But they themselves were whacked, to use Col. Putin’s preferred term, for rational reasons, all traceable to some tectonic shifts in the Kremlin. A pattern was always visible to a naked eye, usually with no telescopic magnification necessary.

These days, however, optical instruments come in handy, along with some analytical ability. Murderous patterns bucking statistical odds are still discernible, but analysis isn’t easy.

For example, in the last two months of 1984 no fewer than five defence ministers of Warsaw Pact countries, including the USSR, suffered fatal cardiac arrests. The logician in me refuses to accept that sudden onset of heart trouble as purely coincidental.

The deaths were visible results of invisible struggle, probably of the armies against the increasingly dictatorial power of the secret services. In Russia the process got under way under the aegis of Yuri Andropov, KGB chief turned dictator, who had died earlier that year – but not before passing the relay baton on to his able successors, of whom Putin is the latest and the ablest.

The army continued to suffer attrition both before and during Putin’s tenure. Between 1991 and 2015, 42 Russian generals died, with only three of the deaths possibly attributable to natural causes.

The graph of those deaths shows two noticeable peaks. The first one happened in 2002, when as many generals died as in the previous 11 years combined. The second peak occurred in 2014, with three more generals dying in 2015.

One can only guess at the nature of those peaks, but the guess is reasonably educated. For 2002 was the culmination of Putin’s war in Chechnya; 2014, the beginning of his war in the Ukraine. In both wars, the army had to play a humiliating second fiddle to FSB and Interior Ministry troops, and also to paramilitary formations.

It doesn’t stretch imagination too far to surmise that there was a rumble of discontent among the army’s high command, which could only be quelled in the traditional ‘whacking’ manner that comes so naturally to the ruling KGB junta.

And now another epidemic pattern emerges, that in the Russian foreign service. Since late 2016, several Russian diplomats have died, again defying statistical likelihood. Here are six of the best:

In November, 2016, Sergei Krivoy, head of security at the New York consulate, had his head bashed in fatally.

In December, 2016, Andrey Karlov, ambassador to Turkey, was gunned down in Istanbul.

Just hours later, senior diplomat Petr Polshikov was shot dead in Moscow.

A month ago, Andrey Malanin, Russian consul in Greece was found dead in his bathroom, with the official cause of death rather vague.

Roughly at the same time, Alexander Kadakin, ambassador to India, died of a heart attack, even though he had never suffered from health problems before.

Later, Vitaly Churkin, Permanent Representative to the UN, died of a heart attack in New York.

Coincidences? Possibly. However, as Russian spies are taught, if coincidences number more than two, they aren’t coincidences.

Trying to explain this blight sweeping through the Russian Foreign Ministry would get us into the area of conjecture, where the charge of spreading conspiracy theories looms. However, if we justifiably refuse to accept all these deaths as coincidental, some explanation is needed.

Back in the 60s and 70s, western analysts tried to figure out the identities of the ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ in the Soviet Politburo. Actually, they were all hawks, whose disagreements had more to do with tactics than strategy.

Today the situation may well be different. Putin’s kleptofascist junta is made up of offshore billionaires, whose wealth encourages at least some dovelike tendencies. These leaven the bellicose instincts of what the opposition sources call the War Party. Putin himself observes the tussle with avuncular divide et impera equanimity.

It’s conceivable that the diplomats had to die for falling foul of the hawks. It’s also possible they themselves were hawks who had upset the doves. Other possibilities exist too.

One way or another, we should follow the unfolding epidemic with more than just academic interest. The contagion may well affect us.

How does one get rid of those blasted un-English creatures? Can’t kill them all, what-what? Not without being accused of various inhumane thingies faster than one can say Camilla.

Banishing them is possible in theory, but how’s one to round them up, millions of those blasted un-English nasties? All the bearskins in London won’t be able to do it, and anyway they’re too busy posing for tourists. A bloody royal pain, that.

They come here, just a few at first. And then, faster than one can say Diana, there are millions of the those bloody un-English creatures, eating the natives out of house and palace.

HRH Prince Charles is especially worked up about migrants from America, who are so bloody pernicious. Yet HRH has come up with an ingenious solution.

If we can neither prevent migrants from coming nor cull them en masse, then at least we can make sure they don’t breed in that oversexed, most un-English way.

To that end HRH is proposing an effective yet humane measure. We could slip powerful oral contraceptives into the migrants’ food, thereby sterilising them for a few years, breaking their reproduction cycle and eventually reducing their numbers. A good thingy too: can’t have too many Yank undesirables here, can we now?

Before you scream Dr Mengele, let me assure you that Prince Charles is blissfully unaware of the broad possibilities inherent in his proposal. And, should he be made aware of them, he’d doubtless be appalled. For all I know, he has no particular animosity toward American immigrants, at least not the human kind.

In fact, judging by his deafening silence on this issue, HRH isn’t concerned about any human immigration whatsoever. And when it comes to Islamic immigration, he positively welcomes it because we have a lot to learn from Muslims, especially that spirituality thingy.

As he explained last Christmas, “I feel that we in the West could be helped to rediscover the roots of our own understanding by an appreciation of the Islamic tradition’s deep respect for the timeless traditions of the natural order.”

Indeed we could. And while at it, we could learn a few other thingies from Muslims as well, such as how to treat women, forgive our enemies and fly large planes into tall buildings.

The didactic possibilities are endless, but migrants preoccupying HRH at the moment aren’t Muslim. It’s not Homo sapiens he’s worried about, but Sciurus carolinensis.

Grey squirrels. It’s those American migrants that HRH wants to sterilise to kingdom come, even before his own kingdom comes.

How did those undesirables originally cross the Atlantic to arrive at our shores? As far as I know, they can neither fly nor walk on water. Anyway, arrive they did and immediately set about oppressing the native English reds (red squirrels, that is, not Jeremy Corbyn types).

Being American, greys are bigger, stronger and brasher than diffident English reds. Hence they beat reds to available food, leaving them to starve to death. Moreover, greys also carry a virus fatal to reds. As a result, the current grey population of Britain stands at a huge 3.5 million, while the native reds have been reduced to a derisory 140,000.

If you’re seeking human parallels, don’t expect any from me. And certainly don’t expect them from Prince Charles. He’s just concentrating on the task at hand, that sterilisation thingy.

Now grey squirrels are classed as vermin in Britain, making it possible to kill them without the kind of repercussions one would suffer if harming a human intruder. So, rather than spending millions on HRH’s flavour of the month, why not just cull them?

That wouldn’t cost a penny and could in fact make quite a few. The government could for example organise fee-paying squirrel-shooting parties on public and National Trust lands. Enough people in Britain are happy to pay for the privilege of shooting pheasants, and those poor birds do nobody any harm. So why not squirrels?

Truth be told, HRH and other RHs have been known to bring down a bird or two (or two hundred) on a sporting weekend, so he can’t possibly have compunctions about solving the grey problem that way.

Actually, he does. He favours sterilisation because it’s a humane alternative to culling. To be consistent, HRH must immediately donate his collection of Purdey shotguns to a Muslim charity. No, perhaps that’s a bad idea. But you get my point.

To be perfectly honest, as an inveterate urbanist I don’t care a certain portion of squirrel anatomy what colour most of those tree-climbing rats are. Reds are prettier, but I can satisfy my aesthetic cravings in other ways.

Apparently, greys also strip the bark off broadleaved trees, leaving them exposed to disease. That I do care about, but not as much as I do about other thingies.

Such as our royals systematically being reduced to figureheads allowed to speak only on trivial issues or ideally none at all. Squirrels interest me too, though in a different way.

Genetically, reds and greys are some 20 times further apart than humans and chimps, who share 99 per cent of their active genetic material. And yet, their colour and size apart, the two squirrels look the same to an untrained observer, while humans and chimps don’t.

Therefore squirrels can act as a starting point of inquiry into the nature of humanity, at the end of which perhaps lies the realisation that there’s more than genetic makeup to being human.

I’d love to hear such thoughts from HRH, when he has a spare moment from extolling Muslim spirituality. But I won’t. He’s preoccupied with that sterilisation thingy.