Category: Blog

“The hero of my youth was just another tyrant,” writes Mr Aaronovitch of The Times with a note of nostalgia for his youth and Castro, now both departed.

Fair enough, we’re all stupid in our youth. For example, when I was 20, I thought A Hundred Years of Solitude was a great novel. How much dumber can one get?

Until 25 or so, our brains aren’t even wired properly, so what do you expect from youngsters? As long as they realise the error of their ways upon reaching maturity?

Aaronovitch evidently has. He has called Castro a tyrant, hasn’t he? As an adolescent, he thought Castro was a romantic hero, but now he knows better. Nature has taken its course.

Here he is, writing about his silly youth: “In 2001… I was still prepared to defend Fidel.” And: “… a little bit of salsa and cigar remained in my soul until that day in 2008 when it vanished.”

This gives an insight into Aaronovitch’s developmental timeline. Still an impetuous child in 2001, he had grown up by 2008, having purged his soul of all that salsa and cigar nonsense.

One infers that Aaronovitch’s biological maturity occurred somewhere in between those chronological milestones. Still a teenager in 2001, say 19 years old, he turned 26 or so in 2008, his brain now functioning at full capacity, all inane illusions left behind.

Just in case, I googled Aaronovitch to confirm the chronology. And what do you know? He was actually born in 1954. That makes him 47 in 2001, when his soul was still filled with salsa and cigars.

By any medical standards this has to be a case of retarded development. Aaronovitch’s youth lasted into his mid-40s and still lingered on seven years later. Must be some kind of hormonal imbalance, or else perhaps his mother dropped baby Davie on his head when breast-feeding him.

So what Damascene epiphany happened to young David, now 54, in 2008? He went to Cuba and was warned at a police station to watch whom he was talking to – or else. Flash! The retarded youth fell off his high horse and saw an image of Castro in the sky, saying: “Why do you love me so? Can’t you see I’m a tyrant?”

That experience broke through the dam of ignorance, and Aaronovitch started writing about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people, rather than just Cuba’s free medical care.

Of course until 2008 he hadn’t known about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people, although he had known about Cuba’s free medical care. Until then Aaronovitch must have been working down in the mines, where his access to information was limited and it was too dark to read anyway…

Hold on, the same Wikipedia article says he had by that time been a top journalist for at least 30 years, having enjoyed a brilliant career at the BBC, The Independent and The Times.

Thus he had access to some of the best data banks in the world, which means he knew all along about Castro’s concentration camps, executions and boat people. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hence, until he grew up in 2008, young Davie saw nothing wrong about a regime that murdered and imprisoned political opponents, spied on everybody, destroyed free press and – while at it – a previously thriving economy. A regime so ghastly that people were prepared to risk their lives to run away – with 77,000 dying in the process.

Therefore his sudden change of mind means he either didn’t have much of a mind to begin with or didn’t change it at all – or, actually, both. Aaronovitch was in 2008 and still remains an inveterate, unreconstructed leftie, whose understanding of the world hasn’t advanced from the time he indeed was a child.

Having tried to sell one cock-and-bull story, he then tries to flog another: “Now I know I am a latish convert to liberal democracy, though I don’t think I’m overzealous for all that; one lesson I learnt was to eschew heroes and over-complete ideologies.”

What matters in this instance isn’t so much what he converted to as what he converted from. Once a communist, always a communist, I say (making an exception for those undergoing a religious conversion).

Specifically on the subject of Latin America, Aaronovitch’s newly discovered commitment to liberal democracy didn’t prevent him from adoring Hugo Chávez, albeit with less ardour than Castro.

You see, unlike Chile’s Pinochet, who saved his country from Castro’s proxy Allende, Chávez was democratically elected, as indeed was Allende. Riding the wave of their electoral success, both Allende and Chávez nationalised industry, collectivised agriculture, supported every terrorist regime or organisation on earth, had their opponents silenced or arrested, and plunged their countries into penury.

But that’s fine with our new, not overly zealous, convert to liberal democracy. Chávez and Allende were democratically elected, so what’s the problem?

Of course they share that distinction with Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin and Ahmadinejad, whom Mr Aaronovitch probably dislikes. Yet that doesn’t make him ponder that perhaps it’s not method of government that matters but what kind of society it brings forth.

That would be delving too deep for our eternal adolescent. Anyway, you can’t expect him to find time to think. He’s too busy forming opinions.

The Guardian’s obituary on Castro reads like hagiography, understandably. Castro was merely a radical exponent of the same ‘philosophy’ The Guardian preaches in slightly muted tones, which is at base hatred of every founding tenet of our civilisation.

The Guardian has never seen a left-wing despot it couldn’t love, nor any leftie slogan it wouldn’t happily run up its flagpole. Naturally, Castro’s Cuba has always been one of its cherished causes.

Yet even I was surprised to see who wrote that revolting panegyric. If I were The Guardian’s editor, Richard Gott would be my last choice for this commission. Call it decorum, call it prudence, but I wouldn’t want someone exposed as a KGB agent of influence to write a eulogy for a Soviet puppet.

One would think that Gott’s 1994 exposure by KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky would have destroyed the hack’s credibility even in the eyes of Guardian readers. Apparently not.

After the truth came out, Gott, at the time the paper’s literary editor, admitted being in the pay of the KGB and resigned: “I took red gold, even if it was only in the form of expenses for myself and my partner. That, in the circumstances, was culpable stupidity, though at the time it seemed more like an enjoyable joke.”

Gott shares his sense of humour with Philby, and I’m sure he enjoyed the joke at the time. Yet in some quarters such jesting is called treason – the Soviet Union at the time was, as Russia still is, an avowed enemy of the West.

Soviet missiles were, as Russian missiles are, trained at us and our NATO allies. Soviet chieftains were, as Russian ones are, issuing threats of nuclear annihilation. The Soviet Union was, as Russia is, the deadliest enemy the West has had since Genghis Khan, although Islam is vying for this distinction too.

For a Western journalist, selling his services to the KGB was, and still is, tantamount to selling his soul to the devil, a transaction that can sometimes be regretted but never revoked.

Gott claims he got nothing but expenses, £10,000 or so in total. Yet, even if that’s true, it’s the thought that counts. The sum is peanuts by the KGB’s standards, and not a fortune by Gott’s. Yet some questioned that his services, whatever they were, would have been worth even that pittance to the KGB.

Such doubters simply don’t understand the nature of that sinister organisation. Weaned on spy novels, they see KGB activities as cloak-and-dagger stuff, stealing secrets, running agents high up in Western governments, ‘whacking’ (in Putin’s parlance) leading anti-Soviet figures.

True, the KGB did, and still does, all those things. But its principal function always has been, and still is, not just subverting the West’s military strength, but poisoning its mind and thereby paralysing its will.

Agents of influence like Gott were the toxic bacilli, they were, and still are, the slow-acting poison building up within the West’s brain. When it has reached a deadly concentration, the body will die. Without the brain to move it, the military muscle atrophies.

Any country that deserves to survive would have locked Gott up for life. But hey, even Anthony Blunt, exposed as one of the ‘Cambridge Five’, remained at large. Losing his knighthood was the spy’s only punishment, as his resignation was Gott’s.

Selling one’s soul to the devil is bad enough, but offering it for free is truly satanic. I’m certain that Gott did the KGB’s bidding not for a few pieces of silver but out of an innermost conviction. He genuinely believed, and still does, in the cause promoted by history’s most murderous cabal.

The KGB no longer serves Russia; it’s now the other way around. What with 85 per cent of Russia’s ruling elite made up of KGB officers, whatever they call themselves now, the KGB isn’t an arm of the country’s government. It is the country’s government.

Its status has changed, so have its slogans, but the objective of destroying the West hasn’t. And, as in the past, it has no problem recruiting Western quislings, mostly voluntary ‘useful idiots’ serving the cause with disinterested alacrity.

Since the KGB has changed its tune, the choir of its witting or, typically, unwitting shills has to intone different songs. The dominant parts are carried not by leftie falsettos but by rightie bassos, the booming voices of Fillon and Le Pen, Trump and Berlusconi, Hitchens and Booker – all those who are just as useful and idiotic as their leftie precursors.

But the nostalgic notes of admiration for the Soviet Union are still being struck by the likes of Gott. Hence his 4,000-word hagiography of Castro, with nary a mention of the tyrant’s tens of thousands of victims.

Not one word about Castro’s driving a sixth of Cuba’s population into exile and reducing the rest effectively to penal servitude. Nor about the destruction of a previously sound economy. Nor about the suppression of the free press, spreading military subversion all over Latin America and Africa – not even a single rebuke for bringing the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

This time the panegyric is paid for by The Guardian, not the KGB. One may be excused for wondering if there’s a valid difference.

Free medical care fails on all three counts: it’s not free and it’s about neither medicine nor care.

The state uses ‘free’ medical care as a justification for putting its foot down. The foot may come down with a big thud, as in Cuba, or furtively, as in Britain. But come down it will.

Those Cuban ingrates were prepared to risk their lives to escape free medical care. They’d rather be ripped off by those greedy US medics – really, there’s no pleasing some people. Alas in Britain we have nowhere to run.

The NHS has just approved plans to withhold non-urgent surgery for the overweight and smokers. This includes hip replacement, removal of tonsils and hernia, and other procedures that feel urgent enough to those who need them.

Someone ought to remind the NHS what medicine is for. Here’s the multiple choice:

a) teaching good behaviour, b) punishing bad behaviour, c) increasing the power of the state, d) treating the ill. If your answer is a), b), c) or all three, apply for a senior position with the NHS.

The logical inference is that the NHS doesn’t really need doctors, nurses or hospitals to achieve its principal goal, increasing state power.

It should cut out the middlemen (frontline medical staff and facilities) and employ only those who take the direct route to the desired destination: regulators, administrators and directors of diversity.

This is already happening without much fanfare: administrative staffs are mushrooming, hospitals or their departments are closing, the number of beds has gone down from a pre-NHS 400,000 to today’s 150,000 (although in the interim the population has grown by 20 per cent).

Yet so far this process has lacked an honest, forthright justification. This it has now been mercifully provided by Rachel Sylvester of The Times. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Miss Sylvester but, when I saw the title of her article (Closing Hospitals Can Help Us Save the NHS), I knew we’d get along just fine.

Here was a kindred spirit, someone who knows what the NHS is really for, I thought. Then I read the article and realised mournfully that we aren’t soul mates after all.

First, she doesn’t really understand the aetiology of the disease she set out to treat. “The financial problems facing hospital trusts are matched by a growing workforce gap,” she writes. In plainer words, hospitals don’t have enough money to hire enough qualified staff to treat patients.

Rather than pondering why this problem didn’t exist before the country was blessed with the arrival of the NHS, Miss Sylvester goes off on all sorts of tangential non sequiturs, justifying the derisory Russian quip about woman’s logic (something I emphatically and unequivocally disavow, I hasten to add).

A logical chain of thought would have some essential links: 1) We must have enough hospitals with enough staff to treat us; 2) Not having enough money to hire them isn’t an option; 3) The current system manifestly can’t satisfy this requirement; 4) Therefore the current system must be replaced with something known to work, such as the pre-1948 medical care in Britain.

Instead Miss Sylvester bemoans the high cost of hospital care (£400 a night), and states the blindingly obvious fact that “nobody seriously wants to spend more time than they have to in an institution where they are at risk of infection…”

That risk didn’t exist when our hospitals were run by two people, head doctor and matron, rather than by accountants and directors of diversity. Nor did the problem of finding enough qualified staff exist then – as it doesn’t exist anywhere else where socialism and medicine go their separate ways.

Other than that, her statement is one of those non sequiturs: it in no way denies that people should be able to stay in hospital for as long as it takes to get better. All this sets up the non sequitur to end all non sequiturs: her proposed solution.

Approaching the problem with the soldierly directness of Alexander the Great, Miss Sylvester proposes shutting down most hospitals and A&E units for lack of funds to pay qualified medics. Instead the few remaining medics should be concentrated in a few centres.

She cites Professor Naomi Fulop, who is an advocate of this system, as saying: “It may seem counterintuitive for an ambulance to drive a critical patient straight past the nearest hospital, but it saves lives.”

It won’t, dear, if this experiment is tried on a large scale. It’ll be a disaster. Even with A&E units operating at most hospitals, it now takes hours to be seen. Now imagine the logistic catastrophe of bleeding and apoplexic multitudes descending on the few centres in a city the size of London, where the average traffic speed is 9 mph.

Of course, when your turn comes, you’ll be seen by a medical ace, which is a comforting thought – if you don’t happen to be bleeding too fast.

Now I have a better solution: we should have enough local hospitals with enough qualified people to save lives. If the NHS can’t provide that, it’s not hospitals we should close down but the NHS.

Alas, this line of thought is impossible in a country where ‘free’ medical care is a religion, and the NHS its church. We don’t think about the NHS; we just worship it – all the way to disaster.

Some readers’ comments on my yesterday’s piece touched upon the issue of IQ. That jogged my memory and I recalled an article I wrote on this subject years ago. Committed as I am to responsible recycling, I thought I’d re-run it, for the subject continues to be topical.

Say ‘chairman’ instead of ‘chair’, and you’ll be accused of being politically incorrect. This re-emphasises that everything in modern life has become politicised, denying the very reason in the name of which modernity was shoved down people’s throats in the first place.

And modern politics precludes rational debate: the choice is between shrill propaganda and vile abuse. The moment today’s big-enders smell a little-ender, they won’t listen to arguments. As in any war, truth doesn’t matter. Only victory does.

Take IQ, for example. Its fans claim it measures intelligence. It does nothing of the sort. It measures potential for intelligence, which potential may or may not be developed.

Thus someone with a modest IQ of 110 (the average IQ of an American college graduate is 115), such as William Stockley, can become a Nobel prize winner in physics; someone with a low IQ of 86, such as Andy Warhol, can become a famous artist; and someone with a genius IQ of 187, such as Bobby Fischer, can become a dysfunctional moron away from the chessboard.

IQ testing may be a useful tool, for example in determining someone’s suitability for a job that depends on being able to solve practical problems quickly. In a sane world we’d decide where IQ is applicable and where it isn’t, and leave it at that.

In our mad world, however, equality has become such a political shibboleth for the post-truth post-Christians that they’ll deny obvious facts in its name. Whoever dares to mention the easily provable fact that different groups, be that class or race, have different median IQs will be accused of racism, fascism, elitism or some other faddish ism.

That happened, for example, to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of the bestselling 1994 book The Bell Curve, who were subjected to the kind of savage salvos that were never aimed by the same people at, say, Castro or Arafat.

The accusers are undoubtedly entitled to their own opinions, but they aren’t entitled to their own facts. And these show that a) median IQ scores do differ from one group to the next and b) they are the most reliable predictor of practical success in almost any occupation (except perhaps, on current evidence, public service).

For example, in spite of being discriminated against, the Malayan Chinese are heavily overrepresented in top positions. All sorts of spurious explanations are offered for this, but never the real one: the median IQ of the Chinese is a hugely significant 16 points higher than that of the ethnic Malays.

In the US, the descending scale of median IQ scores goes from the East Asians (refuting the Eurocentricity argument against IQ testing) to the Jews to the other whites to the blacks, and this happens to correspond to the relative scale of these groups’ practical success in life – as measured by education, income, family stability, propensity for crime and many other indicators.

No matter. Actual reality is no longer allowed to interfere with the virtual, PC kind. If the facts don’t support the egalitarian bias, then so much the worse for the facts – and for whomever as much as mentions them.

Material success is the main desideratum of the modern world, but political correctness – that is, imposing virtual standards on the real world – matters too. The first serves the all-important body, the second strokes what used to be called the soul, and now is called whatever psychobabble term is in vogue.

The two clash on the issue of IQ, with our materialists parlaying their high scores into practical success while bleating all along that IQ scores mean nothing. They do mean something. But not very much.

Before Jesus Christ became a superstar, intelligence testing, had it existed, would have been dismissed as a quaint irrelevance. The ability to get ahead in life was then not regarded as the indicator of human worth.

It went without saying that, on average, some groups of people tended to be more intelligent than others – and civilised people considered it foolhardy to think that any single representative of any group could be presumed to be intelligent or stupid simply because he belonged to that group.

Because it came from a sphere that was infinitely higher, the true equality shared by all towered over the transient inequality of worldly success. The bogus equality of the modern world, however, has to presuppose parity where none exists: practical ability.

Deception is the only way out of this conundrum: as empirical evidence destroys this presupposition everywhere we look, the evidence must be either falsified or, better still, hushed up. In this the modern world displays more ruthless consistency than Christendom ever did in opposing, say, the heliocentric theory.

A note to the PC purveyors: some facts have nothing to do with politics. They are just facts. Take them for what they’re worth, however little or great their value is. For denying facts is neither amusing, nor grown-up nor especially clever. Ever had your own IQ checked?

 

When Sir Christopher Wren designed one of the City’s most beautiful churches, St Michael’s Cornhill, Christian worship had been going on at that site for centuries.

It has continued until now. But neo-vandalism is putting paid to St Michael’s.

There are many ways of destroying a church. French revolutionaries favoured a wrecking ball; their Russian counterparts relied on dynamite; both would rob the churches first.

Robbery is no longer necessary in England: Henry VIII did such a thorough job of it that our churches stayed robbed. And wrecking balls and explosives are much too unsubtle for us.

St Michael’s is being destroyed by a delayed-action bomb called modernity. Such charges have been placed under every church in Europe, and they’re going off one by one.

The Times bemoans the impending demise of St Michael’s but, in a characteristically shoddy display, fails to explain it. The paper identifies the immediate reason (“the Anglican parish’s insolvency”), but without uncovering the underlying cause.

Instead it delivers an earth-shattering revelation: “For years it has been running at a loss, supported only by the generosity of a local livery company and by grants and donations from legacies, well-wishers and the diocese of London. However, in the past year these sources have dried up…”

Churches, gentlemen, aren’t commercial concerns. Fair enough, in Russia, where the church is an extension of the KGB-mafia oligarchy, the holy fathers are doing rather well for themselves.

They bypass import duties to flog booze and fags at a huge profit, and have even turned Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery into a money-spinning brothel. But in the civilised world churches always depend on charitable contributions.

These have indeed dried up at St Michael’s. However, this drought isn’t caused by the depopulation of the City, as The Times seems to believe. Five years ago, the City’s population was no bigger – and yet St Michael’s thrived.

Both the parish’s success and its collapse had the same reason: Peter Mullen. His arrival explains the former, his departure the latter.

Peter, the author of 30-odd books, is one of our best theologians and preachers. Yet to be a great pastor, a man has to be more than just good, pious and intelligent. Other qualities are essential too: charm, sociability, inner strength – the list can get very long. Yet no matter how long it gets, Peter has all those qualities in spades.

To say he performed a miracle at St Michael’s and his other parish, St Sepulchre-Without-Newgate would be frivolous in this context. But no less true for it.

When Peter (a close friend, hence my use of his Christian name) was appointed in 1998, the two parishes were moribund. The geographically natural congregation wasn’t there, and funding was hard to come by.

Yet Peter turned things around in short order. There’s no doubt that, had he applied his fund-raising talent to serve Mammon rather than God, he’d give Richard Branson a good run for his money.

As it was, his personality brought in funds, while his sermons and pastoral work drew parishioners from far afield. Many travelled for hours to hear Peter celebrate Mass the way it has been celebrated in England since the time of Christopher Wren.

A church being a conservative institution by definition, a modernist clergyman is an oxymoron. Peter would have none of that: it was strictly the Prayer Book and KJB for him. This wasn’t just because of Peter’s doctrinal purity: he brought to bear on his work his poetic sense and musical sensibility.

Peter has published books of poetry, and he’s an amateur musician. Mind you, one doesn’t have to be a poet to choose between, say, “With this ring I thee wed” and “This ring is a symbol of our marriage”. A simple ear for English will suffice.

Nor would Peter indulge those whom The Times extolls for “wanting alternatives to classical church music”. The celebrated choir of St Michael’s performed pieces reflecting Peter’s knowledge that such alternatives don’t exist for as long as Christian liturgy remains Christian.

His sermons were conservative too, and not just in the doctrinal sense. Peter was scathing about modern perversions, sexual, political or otherwise. He mocked trendy pseuds imposing their ideology on the church, and didn’t pull any punches when taking swipes at the Anglican hierarchs. It was living Christianity, bringing Christ to the world and the world to Christ.

That rubbed the modern, and modernising, Church of England the wrong way. The hierarchs’ resentment of Peter grew, and, when he reached the supposedly mandatory retirement age four years ago, they pushed him out – without the slightest regard for the future of his parishes.

They neither realised nor cared to what extent the success of St Michael’s and St Sepulchre was down to Peter – nor how quickly that success could turn to failure.

Soon after his departure, the choir of St Michael’s began to outnumber the parishioners, and the new rector could match Peter neither in doctrinal purity nor in fund-raising clout. Hence the demise The Times writes about.

That Michael Binyon’s slipshod article doesn’t mention Peter Mullen’s name even once is astounding. Peter could give Michael a lesson in journalism – not to mention some other lessons as well.

While magnanimously acknowledging that Castro had “his flaws”, the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition enthused about that “champion of social justice”.

Allow me to translate from the modern. Social justice actually means social injustice: a transfer of property from those who have a just claim to it to those who don’t – including the arbiters of social justice themselves.

As an essential corollary, those who interpret social justice differently have to be killed, imprisoned, driven into exile or otherwise disposed of. Eventually uniformity of opinion descends on those who remain: they all begin to see social justice in exactly the same light.

By those criteria, Jeremy’s idol isn’t so much a champion as a runner-up. The top spot is shared by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, although Fidel did his level best and it was a close-run thing.

The number of those El Jefe killed never quite reached 100,000. On the plus side, unlike that wimp Lenin, Fidel, his brother Raúl and his acolyte Che took a hands-on approach to executions.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Castro and his jolly friends flattered their role models no end. Like Lenin’s Bolsheviks, they grabbed power in several stages.

First, they took part in a revolution driven by others. Then they ousted their former coalition partners and banned free elections. Then they eliminated the ancien régime by the expedients I outlined above. Then they killed their former allies and, while at it, those of Fidel’s comrades who had ideas above their station.

Where that was done with the benefit of quasi-legal procedure, it sounded like a Spanish translation from the Russian popularised by the 1930s show trials. Defence attorneys would sum up by stating their disgust for the defendants and apologising for having to defend such vermin.

And Guevara came up with a legal insight that repeated practically word for word an earlier revelation by Stalin’s prosecutor Vyshinsky:

“We need no shilly-shallying with court procedures. This is a revolution, and evidence is secondary. We must act according to our convictions. They’re all a gang of criminals and murderers. Then don’t forget we have an appellate tribunal.|”

So they did, which body was presided over by Guevara himself. As a finishing touch, having passed and upheld the death sentence, the multi-tasking Che would often carry it out himself.

As this was going on, Corbyn’s “champion of social justice” smiled an avuncular smile into his shaggy beard. He himself was too busy with his personal harem. Well, at least, unlike his brother, he liked women.

While at it, Fidel was doing to Cuba what he did to his girlfriends. For social justice can’t be achieved all at once. It’s a dynamic process, essentially a journey from Point A to Point B.

When Castro arrived, Cuba under Batista was the second most prosperous country in Latin America. In some categories, such as the number of cars or telephones per capita, it was ahead of Italy.

Call it Point A. Point B is accurately described by a reader of mine, and I hope Mr Bosanquet doesn’t mind my quoting him:

“When I travelled to Cuba just before Fidel’s handover of power, Havana was a decaying slum, the only food around was stale ham and cheese sandwiches, teachers and doctors were living in penury, the people in the countryside were virtually starving, the only way young men could make money was hustling fake cigars – women through prostitution. I visited a friend with appendicitis in hospital and it was a filthy slum with patients dying from infections.”

Verily I say unto you: that free medical care is dear at the price. And judging by the fact that Cuba’s average monthly wage is currently under £15, things couldn’t have improved much since that observation was made, some 10 years ago.

The cause of social justice in Cuba has been served so well that Corbyn’s panegyrics are being echoed and outdone by his likeminded Castratos.

Thus the former MP George Galloway: “You were the greatest man I ever met, Comandante Fidel.”

Lord Hain, the former Labour cabinet minister: “Castro created a society of unparalleled access to free health, education and equal opportunity despite an economically throttling US siege.”

Rob Miller, director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign: “Certainly Fidel, Raúl and Che Guevara are… revered as the historic generation.”

To the former London mayor Ken Livingston, Castro was an “absolute giant of the twentieth century”.

Transatlantic fans of social justice wouldn’t be outdone. Thus Canada’s PM Trudeau: “Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century. A legendary revolutionary and orator, Mr Castro made significant improvements to the education and healthcare of his island nation.”

And Obama recalled “the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation.” That he most certainly did, though perhaps not quite in the way Barack Hussein meant.

I don’t know about you, but I have nightmares of our own jefes and comandantes taking over in the name of social justice. I wake up bathed in cold sweat, hoarse from my own screams.

This isn’t a proper Christian sentiment, I know. We’re supposed to love our enemies and all that.

So we must. In that spirit, one hopes God will be merciful on Fidel Castro’s soul, provided he had one. But in this world, all decent people have prayed for half a century that this monster rot in hell.

In its fulsomely well-balanced obituary, The Guardian had the gall to quote Castro’s Cuban sycophant as saying that, for all the material deprivation Castro caused, at least he guided the country through the nightmare of the 1962 crisis.

Well, now we’re on the issue of balance, I’d be tempted to mention that the crisis Castro guided his grateful people through was largely of his own making. It’s by generously turning his island into a Soviet missile base at Khrushchev’s behest, that Castro took the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe.

I remember 1962 in Moscow as if it were yesterday. As a child, I was taught to sing songs about heroic barbudos and shout “patria o muerte, venceremos” at public gatherings. Yet immediately pro-Cuban hysteria mandated by the Kremlin began to strike some cautionary notes.

The slogan rolled off the tongue quite easily when it was their patria and their muerte. Yet with SAC bombers expected over Moscow at any moment, my affection for the Castro-led barbudos, tepid at best, vanished in an instant.

Actually, I find it tedious to talk about the Kremlin’s blood-thirsty puppet who emulated the Soviet model of starving, torturing, imprisoning and murdering his people en masse, although not quite in the same numbers as his communist role models elsewhere.

People citing the number of those murdered or imprisoned by Castro praise the bearded monster for not having matched the Soviets or Chinese even in percentage terms.

But he certainly went the Soviets one better in the relative number of those who risked (and often lost) their lives fleeing from the cannibalistic barbudos and their loquacious chieftain (he’d orate for hours off the cuff, an impressive achievement to anyone who hasn’t actually read Castro’s incoherent rants).

All in all, 1.5 million Cubans have fled. Considering that Cuba’s population at the time Castro led his gang out of Sierra Maestra mountains was 6.9 million, that was quite good going.

Another praise for Castro that makes me see white (the colour of counter-revolution) is the effluvia over the universal literacy and ‘free’ medical care he bestowed upon Cubans in his munificence.

That people can read is a trivial datum compared to what they read. All communist dictators want people to be literate enough to peruse their speeches and other propaganda.

Literacy thus stops being a factor of learning and becomes one of brainwashing. With the Castrites (Castratos?) in power, the Cubans would have been better off in their former blissful state of illiteracy.

As to the canard of free medical care, it’s one oft-repeated even in countries that ought to know better. There’s no such thing. ‘Free’ in this context means provided by the state, largely for the same purpose as universal literacy – to exert control over the populace.

When the state, especially one that beggars the nation by practising communist economics, provides such services, it has to pinch elsewhere. Hence the average wage in Castro’s Cuba is under $20 a month. If it were even half that in the US ($4,300 a month), I’m sure Cubans would be happy to pay for their own blood tests and appendectomies.

Such wages accompanied by ‘free’ medicine and education don’t mean universal care. They mean universal slavery.

When I first arrived in the US from Russia (43 years ago – doesn’t tempus bloody well fugit?), I was amazed at seeing portraits of Fidel and Che Guevara everywhere, including the co-eds’ beautifully shaped T-shirts.

Chaps, these are mass murderers you’re glorifying, I wanted to scream, and at times did. Criminals who not only stamped their own people into the dirt but who also export their beastliness all over the world. Angola, Mozambique, other African countries, plus the odd ‘wet job’ carried out on behalf of their Soviet masters – don’t you know? Don’t you care?

They might have known. But they didn’t care. Castro and Che were kinda cool.

And it wasn’t just the US. I saw the same thing when coming to Britain 15 years later.

An old friend of mine married a comely English rose, and I was shocked to see a large portrait of Che Guevara adorning her wall.

When I took her to task, she explained that she had had to live through even a worse dictatorship, that of Margaret Thatcher. (Shortly thereafter my friend intercepted her e-mail thanking her boss for having let her perform on him an act that’s still illegal in some American states. I detected a causal relationship.)

Thousands of Cubans are dancing in the streets of Miami and other American cities (they’ve learned to keep such emotions in check in Cuba proper). They never thought Fidel was cool. They always knew what kind of evil was perpetrated on their country. One wishes all those mourning Castro’s death knew that too.

 

A valid test of any political method is the quality of those it elevates to government.

Looking at the parade of nonentities befouling modern cabinets, one can be justified in having doubts about our democracy run riot (if you don’t mind a little self-publicity, I express some of them in my book Democracy As a Neocon Trick).

Sir John Major is a case in point. That he isn’t exactly the sharpest chisel in the toolbox is widely accepted even by his friends. His morals were demonstrated when he stabbed his benefactrix Margaret Thatcher in the back. And his taste in women… well, say no more than Edwina Currie.

Now Sir John is actively campaigning to torpedo Brexit, referendum or no. There’s obviously an element of self-vindication there: it was Major’s signature that put paid to British independence at Maastricht in 1992.

That flourish of the pen damaged the sovereignty of Crown and Parliament more effectively than any other historical event that comes to mind offhand. If that’s not treason, I don’t know what is, although I’m sure casuistic loopholes prevent legal charges against Maastricht John.

That, having staked his whole political life on that act, Sir John now wants to prevent its unravelling is as understandable as it’s deplorable. His excuse is that he may not even understand what he’s doing – or saying.

There exists, Sir John declared yesterday, “a perfectly credible cause” for a second referendum. He then went on to prove that there’s no perfectly credible cause for Sir John. Here’s what he said:

“I hear the argument that the 48 per cent of people who voted to stay should have no say in what happens. I find that very difficult to accept. The tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy and it should not apply in this particular democracy.”

Sir John has heard the catchphrase, which is good, but I’m not sure he either understands its meaning or knows its provenance, which is unfortunate.

Actually, John Adams first warned against the tyranny of the majority during the debates about the American Constitution. Some 18 years later he realised with horror that his warning hadn’t been heeded: “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.”

Thomas Jefferson agreed with Adams’s low opinion of democracy. Echoing Plato, he remarked: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule [ochlocracy, to Plato], where fifty-one per cent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

You’ll notice that the Founders were talking about democracy in general, not direct democracy in particular. Later “the tyranny of the majority” appeared as a chapter title in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, to be quoted later still in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

Those gentlemen were absolutely correct in decrying unlimited democracy – and absolutely wrong in believing it was preventable by palliative constitutional tinkering, such as introducing an electoral college in America.

The only check on democracy proven effective is reducing it to just one of the mechanisms of power, counterbalanced by others. The proof was provided by England’s constitution, where the unelected power of the monarch was balanced with the elected power of the Commons, with the mediating hereditary power of the Lords making sure the balance didn’t tip too much one way or the other.

That was the greatest constitutional achievement in history, and it was wantonly undone by a succession of governing nonentities like John Major. Yet an argument can be made that removing checks on democracy is anyhow an ineluctable process, intrinsic to any practice of this system in our post-Enlightenment modernity.

One way or the other, given our existing conditions, it’s impossible to argue persuasively against the odd plebiscite, for example when an issue of constitutional import is at stake.

For democracy is self-nullifying. Unless people vote direct on every policy, which is patently impossible, “the tyranny of the majority”, so dreaded by the gentlemen above, is guaranteed to develop into the tyranny of a minority governing in its own interests but in the name of the people. A plebiscite can provide some check, however imperfect.

Every word in Major’s statement applies to democracy in general: in fact, considerably more people voted for Brexit in 2016 than for John Major in 1992 – and no one voted for him in 1990, when he became PM in the wake of a perfidious coup.

People had “no say” in anything he did, such as signing away 1,500 years of England’s constitutional tradition in 1992. One didn’t hear him object about the injustice of it all then.

While Major is intellectually and morally deficient, his successor, in addition to those attributes, is downright wicked. Blair avers we must have a second referendum if the British people decide that “the pain-gain cost-benefit analysis doesn’t stack up”.

To propose deciding the issue of British sovereignty on such criteria isn’t just ignorant, vulgar and crass. It’s evil, irredeemably so.

The two nonentities disagree on the value of arithmetic: one dislikes counting votes, the other supports counting pennies. But they converge in their obvious ignorance of, and contempt for, the best constitution mankind has produced so far.

 

Yes, I know it’s a rotten pun. My only excuse is that it’s applied to the most rotten personage ever to disgrace Westminster.

The scary news is that Blair has launched a political comeback. The scarier news is that he just may succeed.

Blair has spotted “a massive hole in British politics” – and the absolutely scariest news is that he’s right. A hole does exist, although Blair’s toxic presence is more likely to widen, not fill, it.

He regards Corbyn as a “nutter” and Mrs May as a “ total lightweight”, and he’s right on both counts. However, a man who, as prime minister, elevated corruption, cronyism and constitutional vandalism to hitherto unseen levels, commits an unspeakable effrontery when daring to criticise others and suggest he could do better.

Following the Chilcot report, inculpating Blair for lying about Iraq, he should have been charged with treason. I don’t know what else to call Blair’s promise to Bush that “I will be with you whatever”.

‘Whatever’ covered a plethora of obstacles to this unconstitutional commitment: absence of parliamentary or indeed cabinet approval, any thought for the assured consequences, life-threatening shortage of appropriate hardware and training in the armed forces, intelligence data showing that, in Chilcot’s language, there was “no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein”.

Having criminally caused the on-going Middle Eastern disaster now threatening us all, Blair proceeded to vandalise our ancient constitution by creating unnecessary institutions, such as the Supreme Court, and destroying or emasculating necessary ones, such as the House of Lords and the office of Lord Chancellor.

As a side line, in 2004 he flung open doors already ajar by going along with the EU’s suicidal decision to admit unlimited numbers of immigrants from places where hatred of the West is an article of faith.

While the Iraq caper may constitute treason de jure, Blair’s constitutional mayhem was treasonous de facto. As he and his lieutenants have admitted with refreshing cynicism, all that was done with a single purpose in mind: perpetuating his own power and that of his fellow spivs.

I realise that wishing to see Blair behind bars betokens a lack of realism, but it’s natural to expect that this creature be banned from politics for the rest of his miserable life. (Those interested in its auspicious beginning should Google ‘Tony Blair Miranda’. Let’s just say that young Tone added a whole new meaning to the Miranda warning.)

Or rather it would be natural to expect that in a country where some vestiges of political integrity survive. In Britain, however, Blair clearly expects the currently unelectable Labour Party to bring him back, putting all its rotten eggs into one bastard.

To that end he’s about to launch a comeback campaign, marshalling the support of cross-party malcontents, especially those desperate to undermine Brexit.

Blair’s so far unspoken manifesto should start with the words “Spivs of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your brains (of which you haven’t got much to begin with)”. He has already had talks with the former (Tory!) chancellor George Osborne, who’s still smarting from the unceremonious manner in which his own party dumped him.

You don’t win any prizes for guessing the main subject of the Tory-Tony conversation. For keeping Britain in the EU at all costs is the Trojan horse Blair has saddled to ride all the way back to power. The ensign flapping off his lance has ‘second referendum’ written on it.

If that doesn’t work, he and his new friend George will think up something else, and I’m sure Dave will resurface to add a helping hand. You see, Dave and George are biting every reachable portion of their anatomy over their decision to call the first referendum.

With the smug overconfidence typical of that lot, they were sure they’d win, thereby closing the issue of British sovereignty forever. True enough, had the referendum gone the other way, its results would have been declared ironclad in perpetuity: the EU and its Quislings only ever reverse referendums that go against them.

Now Blair is demanding a second vote even after Mrs May manages to invoke Article 50. This only shows that EU laws don’t matter to Blair any more than British ones do: this article of the Lisbon Treaty says that any country triggering it will leave automatically within two years.

According to Blair, “You can’t change this [referendum] decision, unless it becomes clear in one way or another, that the British people have had a change of mind because they have seen the reality of the alternative.”

For the British people to see “the reality of the alternative”, Britain must actually leave the EU. But that’s not what Blair means. His ‘alternative’ to Brexit is the current state of limbo.

This is created by using every casuistic holdup to force Mrs May to continue shilly-shallying until the will of the British people has been denied – not that she takes much forcing, being a Remainer herself.

Should Blair get and lose his second referendum, he’ll be screaming for a third. Spivs of the world are united, and they won’t be denied – barring the sort of cataclysm that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Who will rid us of this loathsome creature?

Two days ago, His Beatitude Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus’ Kirill turned 70, and I’d like to offer my belated best wishes.

I could also offer a eulogy, but there’s no need. One has already been delivered by Dmitry Kisiliov, the TV dummy to Putin’s Kremlin ventriloquist: “Patriarch Kirill is one of mankind’s leading thinkers. His thoughts on spirituality, duty, good and evil, wealth and poverty, meaning of life provide priceless spiritual supports for millions of people.”

St Paul, St Augustine, Nietzsche and Milton Friedman thus come together in the patriarch’s brocaded breast, and one can only prostrate oneself in awe. Then, having resumed the vertical position, one may dare offer a few comments, in the fear that a smiting lightning may strike at any moment.

Vladimir Gundiayev, as the Patriarch was in the lay world, remembers “that a man is not justified by the works of law but by the faith of Jesus Christ”. As a prelate, he has so much faith that he knows he can get away with anything for which lesser people would face everlasting fire.

For example, poor mortals can’t serve God and mammon, but, according to Gundiayev, that injunction doesn’t preclude other parallel careers. One can indeed serve two masters, in his case God and the KGB (FSB/SVR).

His Beatitude has been serving that organisation faithfully since at least 1972, when he first appears in KGB dossiers as ‘Agent Mikhailov’. Operational reports describe his assignments, always adding they were “fulfilled successfully”. No wonder the KGB then seconded Gundiayev to the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) – he earned it.

It’s from the height of Gundiayev’s dual consecration that the other day he addressed Russian abbots with a sermon of asceticism. He was scathing about their lives of comfort and luxury.

For example, he forbade them to decorate their sceptres with “baubles” and to have salaries. Abbots, he thundered, should “think more about heroic asceticism”.

Do as I say, don’t do as I do, goes the old saw, while an earlier one says in Latin that quod licet iovi, non licet bovi. Gundiayev’s flock are the bulls here, with him himself as Jupiter.

For His Beatitude doesn’t exactly practise what he preaches. The Russians began to notice that a few years ago, during what I then called the Watch’s Sabbath.

Gundiayev was photographed sporting a £30,000 Bréguet at a press conference. After the ensuing outcry, His Beatitude produced a doctored version of the same picture, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, his retoucher had overlooked a minor detail: the reflection of the watch on the shiny table top in front of Gundiayev. As befits a prelate, the picture became supernatural with idealistic Platonic touches: only the shadow of an object was perceived, not the object itself.

Nor is Gundiayev immune to delights of the flesh. Even though he’s a monk, the patriarch openly lives with a woman he describes as a distant relation, a kinship for which no documentary evidence exists.

This cohabitation unfolds in multiple residences, some of which belong to Gundiayev outright, while others are variously described as ‘church property’, ‘gifts’ or ‘convents’. Russian researcher Dr Bychkov has published a long list of Gundiayev’s palaces, yachts and jets of which he has either ownership or exclusive use. His Beatitude has confirmed most of the items, which suggests that ‘patriarch’ must be etymologically related to ‘pay’.

I particularly liked the story of a convent converted into a patriarchal residence and stuffed with designer furniture imported from Italy. One table cost €20,000, and its finish must have been specified as matte, just in case.

I shan’t bore you with a full translation of the list, hoping you’ll take my word for it: we’re talking about uncountable millions. A tiny detail: last year Gundiaev won a lawsuit against his neighbour, who lived beneath the patriarch’s personal property, a 1,450 sq. ft. apartment with a view of the Kremlin.

His Beatitude claimed that refurbishment of the neighbour’s flat had produced dust, causing damage to Gundiayev’s furnishings. The damage was estimated at over $1,000,000, leaving us to guess the overall value of said furnishings, not to mention the apartment itself.

But let’s not get hung up on trivialities. For, with Putin’s blessing, His Beatitude has issued himself a patriarchal dispensation to serve mammon on a serious scale.

Gundiayev’s business activities have earned him a personal capital estimated at between $1.5 and 4 billion. As a good businessman, he has diversified his activities since the time he was a simple metropolitan (bishop). Tobacco products, oil, spirits and foodstuffs have figured prominently among his interests.

In 1996 he was party to a ROC deal whereby huge consignments of tobacco products were imported as duty-free ‘humanitarian aid’ and then sold through shops at market prices. It’s estimated that Gundiayev’s cut of that scam alone topped $50 million.

Later he got into the oil business, earning a fortune whose exact size hasn’t yet been documented, possibly because investigators can’t count that high. Then in 2000 His Beatitude made another $17 million flogging caviar and crabmeat – every little bit helps. His other interests include semi-precious stones, banking, stock market and property development.

And so it goes on, ROC around the clock. Happy birthday, Your Beatitude! God bless the good works.