Category: Blog

A reader once asked me how I’d vote on 8 November if I could, to which I replied: “Trump, weeping all the way to the booth.”

Having followed US elections for almost half a century, I can safely say that I’ve never seen a contest featuring two such awful candidates. Both of them are corrupt in every possible way, of which fiscal corruption is the least important.

I distinguish between peripheral and fundamental corruption. The former is a politician using his position to help himself to a bung or a bang; the latter, a politician corrupting the very principles of government.

For example, Edmund Burke’s finances probably wouldn’t stand up to today’s exacting standards. And yet this great political thinker courageously battled in Parliament against every threat to the realm. His fundamental integrity was beyond doubt, and that’s what really matters in a statesman.

This is more than one can say for Trump, who won by using the whole repertoire of vulgar populism. His business experience has taught him how to trick rich people into giving him money. Now Trump has used similar techniques to trick poor people into giving him votes.

To that end he has done an about-face on 17 major issues, which doesn’t bode well for the next four years. His elasticity on every serious matter of intellect and morality makes it impossible to predict what he’ll do as president.

Conservative noises feature prominently in Trump’s brand of populism. Indeed, it’s hard to find fault with most of his pledges on domestic policy: cutting taxes, reducing social spending, undoing Obamacare, tightening immigration controls.

Some of his ideas on foreign policy aren’t bad either, such as repudiating Obama’s nuclear treaty with Iran. His motivation for it, however, is open to doubt.

Reintroducing sanctions on Iran would reduce the supply of oil and therefore increase its price. This would benefit every oil producer, but most of all Putin’s Russia, bringing us to potentially the most dangerous aspect of Trump’s presidency: his apparently reciprocated affection for the Russian dictator.

This may not be entirely disinterested. Trump’s son Don once admitted that, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

I’m not convinced that Trump is capable of looking beyond his business interests, or of considering foreign policy in any other than mercantile terms. Hence, for example, his manifest contempt for collective security underpinned by NATO: America’s partners, he believes, aren’t pulling their budgetary weight.

That’s true, but if Trump regards this as sufficient reason for America not to come to the aid of a NATO member attacked by Putin’s Russia, we’re in for a rough ride. Any sensible president would reconfirm America’s commitment to the NATO Charter first, and only then put pressure on other members to contribute their fair share.

I don’t know whether or not Trump’s presidency will benefit Putin. It is, however, certain that Putin thinks so.

His mouthpieces, both on TV and in the Duma, were screaming for weeks that the choice between Trump and Clinton was one between peace and nuclear war. Putin’s Goebbels Dmitri Kisiliov has reissued in this context his favourite threat to turn America into radioactive dust, which was reiterated even more stridently by the leader of Russian Lib/Dems Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Another mouthpiece, Sergei Sudakov, predicts that Trump will see his principal task in restoring trust between America and Russia. Therefore “he’ll move away step by step from the politics of globalism and American hegemonism.”

Dmitri Mikheyev of the Hudson Institute confirms my suspicion that the Russians are banking on Trump’s predominantly mercantile worldview. America, he writes, “can’t fight wars against all and all over the world… That’s expensive, so Trump will strike a deal with Russia – that’s cheaper.”

Dr Deliagin, of the Institute for Globalisation Problems, is ecstatic: “Trump’s victory is one of reason, hard work and dignity over corporate madness and a real danger of a world war. America has decided to go to work rather than destroy mankind…” which contextually was Hillary’s goal.

Everything points at Putin’s preference for Trump, and Vlad clearly did all he could to help his friend Donald: having Assange drip-feed compromising revelations of Hilary’s numerous misdeeds, using the bombing campaign in Syria to punctuate Trump’s messages at critical points in the campaign, computer hacking.

In fact, Michael McFaul, Hillary’s man and former US ambassador to Russia, tweeted a sardonic sour-grapes message to that effect: “Putin intervened in our elections and succeeded. Molodets [Well done].”

Interesting times lie ahead. It’s conceivable that, by appealing to Trump’s business sense, the Russians will try to talk him into striking a global version of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, dividing the world into mutually respected spheres of influence.

If that’s the case, the outcome of such a ‘deal’ (a word understandably over-represented in Trump’s vocabulary) may well be the same as that of the original pact – with even more cataclysmic consequences.

All we can do at the moment is pray, rejoice in Hillary’s demise – and take solace in the amount of spittle sputtered by the neocons at the very mention of Trump’s name. Their enemy has a decent shot at becoming my friend, but Trump has a long way to go.

Nuremberg saw the halcyon days of Nazism so expertly filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. To keep things in balance, 13 years later it also saw 10 corpses hanging off the gallows.

Yet now Nuremberg rallies are back. The pomp and circumstance aren’t quite the same as in the good old days, but the animating spirit has survived intact.

The current pageant is staged by a far-Left mob demonstrating against the City Council that banned a malignantly anti-Semitic display at the Nuremberg Left (!) Literature Fair.

The display in question is a travelling exhibit of racial hatred, an interactive photographic installation on which passers-by write what they think about Jews in general and Israel in particular.

Passers-by readily comply, producing exactly the sort of stuff for which Julius Streicher danced the Nuremberg jig. Here are a few choice bits:

Jews, writes one concerned citizen, are “an elite of criminals, the New-World-Order-Mafia, enslaves the rest of the world and controls politics, media and corporations.”

Another chap draws historical parallels: “Hitler is the past, but Israel is the present.”

Yet another expresses himself pictorially, by producing a Der Stürmer-style cartoon that shows a Jew, draped in an American flag and a Star of David, scoffing a child off the end of a fork. A glass of blood next to his plate completes the picture.

The installation has a distinct sense of déjà vu, which lessens its novelty appeal. More interesting is the hysterical anti-ban campaign, featuring fisticuffs and clashes with police.

What’s especially symbolic about this brouhaha isn’t just its place but also its timing. For tomorrow and the day after mark the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when similar sentiments found such a shattering expression.

Also fetching is the protesters’ appeal to freedom of speech, a liberty to which the Left has only a rather selective commitment.

For example, the show organisers represent Arbeiterfotografie, a group that regards Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “one of the greatest statesmen in the world”. Yet if he deserves this accolade, it’s definitely not on the strength of Iran’s dedication to free speech.

Now these chaps are accusing the Nuremberg Council of censorship, which is prohibited under the German Constitution. I haven’t got its text handy, but, if that venerable document countenances unqualified verbal licence, it’s seriously flawed.

For, contrary to the liberal cliché, freedom of speech can’t possibly be absolute. It has to be a matter of consensus, which by definition makes it relative. Every society is justified in censoring speech it finds dangerous to its survival. Every society has done so – including today’s Germany.

For example, the country criminalises Holocaust denial and bans Hitler’s masterpiece Mein Kampf . Without passing judgement on such measures, one can’t deny the existence of precedents.

The earliest precedent can be found at the birth of our civilisation, midwifed as it was by Christianity. Even though free will and the resulting freedom of the spirit are cornerstones of Christianity, Jesus made it clear that some speech is acceptable and some is not:

“And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Hence an offensive word may confine the utterer to eternal hell, a considerably harsher injunction than a ban on Nazi propaganda masquerading as art.

My earlier statement about the Left’s understated commitment to any free speech that doesn’t comply with the Left’s diktats opens up another interesting area of discussion.

A persuasive argument could be made that no constitution should protect those who seek to destroy it. The Left, especially its extreme wing exemplified by the snappily named Arbeiterfotografie, has no more moral right to demand freedom of speech than Julius Streicher would have to insist on the impartiality of the press.

The law of self-preservation hasn’t so far been repealed, and every society has a right to defend itself against those who do it physical or moral harm. Freedom of speech isn’t always good, nor is some censorship always bad.

In art specifically (and such installations don’t qualify as such even when they don’t carry cannibalistic messages) there are two types of censorship: proscriptive and prescriptive. The former tells artists what they can’t do; the latter tells them what they must do.

While the latter kills art stone dead, there’s no evidence that the former unduly inhibits self-expression. In fact, one could argue that the greatest masterpieces of art and literature were created in the conditions of some censorship, while its absence seems to have a stifling effect.

Free speech can’t be allowed to act as a weapon in the hands of those who wish to destroy free speech. A group – predictably Left-wing, just like its Nazi progenitors – that promotes both jihadist or anti-Semitic propaganda thereby relinquishes its right either to defend free speech or to claim its protection.

It’s civilised people who should do so, and they must be careful not to overstep the line beyond which justifiable social self-defence ends and tyranny begins. Yet they’re unlikely to confuse the two – for otherwise they wouldn’t be civilised.

Champions of this wicked contrivance like to trace its origin back to the Holy Roman Empire or, further back, imperial Rome. Such retrospective claims don’t hold up to scrutiny.

It’s counterproductive to look for any ancient precursors to today’s political Leviathans. American democracy shares nothing but the name with the Athenian kind. The French Republic doesn’t even remotely resemble the Roman one. And the adhesive of Charlemagne’s empire was Christianity, which in the EU is at best marginalised.

EU antecedents are much more recent than that. Here are a few quotations, and if I told you they came from Juncker, Delors or Barroso, you’d probably believe me.

“It is only on the basis of a republican federation of the leading countries that Europe will be able to fulfil itself completely… The economy will be organised in the broad arena of a European United States as the core of a worldwide organisation. The political form can only be a republican federation…”

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

And “The peoples of Europe must regard Europe as a field for a unified and increasingly planned economic life…Without this supplementary slogan the fundamental problems of Europe must remain suspended in mid-air.”

Neither Juncker nor Delors nor Barroso said that but, if one of them was your guess, you were warm. For this lucid exegesis of European federalism came from their fellow socialist, Leon Trotsky.

You know, the chap who argued that his socialist colleague Joseph Stalin was too soft, an argument that Uncle Joe refuted with an ice axe. Unlike Stalin, who preferred deed to word, Trotsky had the gift of the gab and put it to good use on many subjects, including European federalism.

But he can’t claim all the credit for his deep grasp of the idea. For his socialist precursors Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Kautsky (“… universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal army – … the United States of Europe would possess… overwhelming power”) said all the same things long before Trotsky, and his socialist contemporary Adolf Hitler said similar things too.

Yet even they can’t claim to be pioneers. “I owe everything to Marx,” Hitler once said, and the notion of a single European state was one of the things he owed.

Both Marx and Engels detested a Europe of sovereign states. On the contrary, they saw a United States of Europe as a shining ideal for which to strive.

In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, they anticipated that “in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency,” capitalism would lead to “intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”

When in 1893 Engels was asked whether he envisaged a United States of Europe, he replied: “Certainly. Everything is moving in that direction. Our ideas are spreading in every European country.” He was half a century before his time, but the prescience is undeniable.

Why did the original socialists, along with their internationalist, nationalist and ‘democratic’ followers, favour a single European state? That question can be asked only by someone who finds it hard to strip socialism of its carefully cultivated virtual image.

Socialists like to portray their creed as a secular answer to Christianity, whereas in fact it’s its ghastly caricature. Those who insist on drawing parallels between Christianity and socialism always hate the former and love the latter.

Socialism’s kingdom begins and ends in this world. Politically, divested of its meaningless waffle about sharing and caring, socialism is all about transferring power from the periphery to the centre, from the individual to the omnipotent central state.

This is the diametrical opposite of the Catholic concept of subsidiarity, devolving power to the lowest sensible level. Socialism’s raison d’être is to concentrate all power at the highest possible level, the central state.

Whether it was called national, international or democratic, this is the only aim any kind of socialism has ever achieved everywhere it was tried in earnest. This is the only aim it has ever really wanted to achieve.

It stands to reason that socialists would loathe any traditional nation state, whatever method of government it uses. Whether it’s a republic like France, a republican federation like Switzerland or a constitutional monarchy like Britain, a nation state would have excreted and wrapped itself in an elaborate cocoon of custom, legality, culture, political ethos and whatnot.

Since in the West these derive from Christian antecedents, they are fundamentally at odds with socialism, which can only triumph by riding roughshod over such irritating obstacles. Hence its inherent urge to expand has to make it overstep national borders sooner or later.

The EU has much more in common with, say, Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia than with any organic Western nation state. The ineluctable logic of supranational universalism is coded into socialism’s DNA, and it’s those genes that gave birth to the EU monster.

“Workers,” wrote Marx and Engels in their Manifesto, “have no motherland”. One could replace ‘workers’ with ‘socialists’ or ‘Eurocrats’ with no detriment to the meaning.

Cardinal Nichols, head of the Catholic Church in Britain, is unhappy with us.

Rather than learning “from the vibrancy of the Muslim faith that comes here”, we seem to be apprehensive about the influx of crowds who set us such a good example of piety.

“It does nobody any good,” continued my former co-author (we both contributed essays to the book The Nation That Forgot God), “this somewhat self-indulgent way in which people have begun to express themselves and their distaste and their hatred of people who they see as different. And that is creating a culture of fear among people who have been welcomed here.”

The boot seems to be on the wrong foot, and it doesn’t fit. A culture of fear is being created precisely by those who bring their vibrancy here. Their vibrant faith brainwashes its exponents to fly airliners into tall buildings, blow up buses or indiscriminately spray crowds with bullets.

Such suicidal abandon is prescribed by their scriptural sources, which don’t leave Muslims much free choice. Those whose faith isn’t sufficiently vibrant may be beheaded, stoned to death or, if they manage to escape, hunted down. Fatwa Knows Best is the longest-running Muslim series.

As someone who arrived at these shores late in life, I can testify that the British have none of that “distaste and hatred of people who they see as different”. On the contrary, I was struck by the hospitality with which I was welcomed here.

I was readily accepted not just as a guest to this country, but as someone who belongs here – as British as they come, so to speak.

So I was. I spoke and wrote native-quality English, knew English history, constitution and literature, was up on the folklore (including the part that only appears in unabridged dictionaries), didn’t mind warm beer and drank Scotch as my first preference.

I was still different, but people either didn’t realise that or forgot it after the first few minutes of conversation. I fit in – because I wanted to.

The same can by no means be said about most Muslim arrivals, even those who aren’t professional jihadists infiltrated into this country. They don’t fit in – because they don’t want to.

Considering this, I’d say that the British are displaying remarkable, some will say suicidal, tolerance. Incidents of racial or religious violence are practically nonexistent, unless of course the odd cross word and an askance glance are regarded as such, which nowadays is often the case.

Sometimes one wishes the British weren’t so docile. Consecutive governments, committed to squeezing the square peg of Britishness into the round hole of EU federalism, have deliberately set out to dilute the indigenous ethos with alien admixtures.

Some, such as Blair’s lot, admit this openly. The Tories don’t, but their actions shout off the rooftops. The two top positions in the present government are occupied by politicians who campaigned for keeping our borders open to all and sundry – including millions of those who are doctrinally obligated to hate us.

I suspect that they, along with our judiciary (independent from HMG but not from its EU sympathies), media and much of the ruling elite have decided to defeat (or at least dilute) Brexit by subterfuge. If they succeed, there will be no end to the incoming religious vibrancy that so appeals to His Eminence.

The vibrations will have such a destructive amplitude that the resonance may bring the house down, and the British people are beginning to realise this.

They indeed fear that, even in the absence of Muslim violence (a pipe dream in itself), the sheer demographic shift will reduce them to the status of unwelcome guests in their own country. Britain is in danger of being dominated by millions of those who are at best alien and more typically hostile to everything Britain is.

The danger is so much greater because of what His Eminence calls their ‘vibrant faith’ and I’d rather call ‘ideological fanaticism’. For all their sterling qualities, the Muslims can’t usually boast a propensity for characteristically British moderation. Rabid stridency is more down their alley.

Now, given, at best, acquiescence on the part of HMG, what recourse do the British have to limit the scale of this alien invasion, if not to stop it altogether?

Magna Carta, a document marginally more seminal to our statehood than even the EU Human Rights Act, gave the answer 800 years ago (as repeated by Henry III): “… it shall be lawful for every one in our realm to rise against the government to use all the ways and means they can to hinder until that in which have transgressed and offenced shall have been brought again into due state …”

No one in his right mind would want this to happen. But if it does, it’ll be thanks to our bien pensant leaders, secular or religious, who don’t see the blindingly obvious danger and do nothing to combat it.

We have nothing to learn from the Muslims’ vibrant faith, Your Eminence, or any other type of fanaticism. The strength of Christianity can only come from within, and diluting this strength by multi-culti pronouncements indeed “does nobody any good.”

There’s no denying that High Court lawyers have thrown Brexit into confusion.* Shakespeare must have anticipated this situation when he made Henry VI’s Butcher Dick utter the above words.

Part of the reason confusion reigns is that so many people, including me, clearly prioritise their beliefs. For pious people, God is clearly above any prioritisation, but a pecking order exists for more quotidian creeds. The higher one will always take precedence.

For example, the kind of people who currently insist that Parliament must have its say in not so much Brexit but even the invocation of Article 50 also believe that our sovereignty has to be moved from Queen and Parliament to the EU.

Chaps, don’t you sense self-refutation in your arguments? If you fervently believe in British sovereignty vested in Her Majesty’s Parliament, how can you welcome a situation where most of our laws come from a foreign body unaccountable to king, country or, for that matter, God?

It’s that prioritisation kicking in. Remainers love the EU for whatever reasons, the principal one, I suspect, being the kinship bureaucratic elites everywhere feel for one another, trumping whatever loyalty they may have towards their own people.

Some of them, by no means all, may also quite like our parliamentary tradition, but their affection for the EU occupies a higher rung in the ladder of their pieties. Hence their strategy is to derail Brexit by whatever means. If that involves screaming their previously understated love for Parliament off the rooftops, then so be it.

M’lords on the High and Supreme Court, most of whom are Europhiles, play along. They seem to ignore the issue of the royal prerogative, which actually vests HMG with executive powers. Among those is the power to abrogate treaties, which has been put into effect for as long as I’ve been following British politics.

The very same people who never raised an infinitesimal objection whenever the government exercised this prerogative over the last several decades (not wishing to date myself, I won’t tell you how many), now scream bloody murder about the government wishing to invoke Article 50, thereby acting on its royal prerogative and fulfilling an unequivocal popular mandate.

Actually, I shouldn’t be tossing stones out of the glass house in which I live. For I too am guilty of the same twisting and turning, if in the opposite direction.

For I detest the EU with the same passion that its champions love it. In fact, I detest it even more than some UKIPers do, who seem to be deaf at times to the clearly fascist noises emanating from that vile contrivance. My years in Russia have made my hearing extremely acute in perceiving such sounds, which may be ultrasounds to others.

This detestation of the EU is even stronger than my opposition to direct democracy by plebiscite. I think it’s ridiculous that constitutional issues, anchored as they are in centuries of history, a careful accumulation of precedents and reams of political philosophy, should be decided by a show of hands – which extremities mostly belong to people who don’t have much of a clue about constitutional history, legal precedents and political philosophy.

Edmund Burke, one of our greatest constitutional thinkers, would be appalled by this. He believed that, once elected, MPs should govern according to people’s interests, not their wishes. It was understood that the wise and virtuous people trusted with representing their constituencies knew better than the constituents themselves how their interests could best be served.

If Burke were told that people would decide in a plebiscite the issue of Britain’s sovereignty, he’d immediately retire to his Beaconsfield estate and live a hermetic life thereafter. He might suspect, rightly as it happens, that our parliamentarians solve the conflict between the people’s wishes and interests by representing neither.

Not only am I opposed to direct democracy, I have severe misgivings even about democracy of universal suffrage tout court. When unchecked by the power of other estates, one-man-one-vote democracy first becomes what Tocqueville called ‘tyranny of the majority’, and then the tyranny of a small elite governing in the majority’s name.

Sooner or later, such an elite begins to serve itself, rather than the demos in whose name it supposedly governs. That explains why so much of our governing elite (‘the establishment’ in the popular parlance) are attracted to the EU – answering to a supranational body makes them largely unaccountable to their own people, thereby increasing their domestic power and, consequently, enhancing opportunities for personal advancement.

In case anybody is interested, I’ve actually written a book about this, Democracy As a Neocon Trick. But, having written it, I still agitated for a Brexit referendum, realising it gave Britain the only chance to regain her independence, getting her constitutional essence back on track.

Obviously I’m the anti-EU teapot calling the federalist kettle black. I too seem to prioritise my pieties; I too am prepared to overlook certain inconsistencies, not to say mutual exclusiveness.

And, figuratively speaking, as I hope you understand, I do think Butcher Dick was on to something. How else can we prevent lawyers throwing spanners in the Brexit works?

* My previous post reflected this confusion. I mistakenly attributed remarks made by Lord Kerr of Kinlochard to Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore. My only excuse is that I’m not the only culprit: The Times ran the former’s statements under the latter’s photograph. Also, having visited my ex-neighbour Brian Kerr in his Westminster apartment a few years ago, I assumed, wrongly as it happens, that this was grace and favour. In fact, by contrast to some of our other public servants, Lord Kerr commendably pays for his own accommodation. If my mistake caused any offence, I’m sincerely sorry, especially since I like Brian Kerr very much.

 

 

Muslims murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings.

And yet, in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, a Swedish bishop representing all three groups wants to remove crosses from the country’s churches to make Muslims feel more at home. Eva Brunne, the first openly homosexual bishop in Sweden, got that idea from her wife, who was deeply concerned about the Muslims’ feelings.

Now far be it from me to dispute the legitimacy of the phrase ‘her wife’, even in the clerical, nay episcopal, context.

As founder, chairman and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity and Multiculturalism, I readily accept that a bishop can be a) a woman, b) a lesbian and c) married to another woman. My only regret is that the proposal is so negative.

Why stop the welcoming hand halfway at merely taking the crosses down? Wouldn’t the Muslims feel even more at home if the crosses were replaced with crescents?

After all, making Muslims comfortable has to be what Christianity is all about. In Sweden at any rate.

Reactionaries might suggest that the best way for anybody to feel at home is to stay there, but such a seditious thought undermines the whole concept of multi-culti inclusion and, yes – Christianity.

Didn’t Jesus say “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand”? In other words, proselytise. Welcome all and sundry. Make them feel welcome, even if it takes removing all visual references to Christianity.

Literalists may argue that he only spoke of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” as a target audience, but that’s silly. He meant everybody, including Muslims, and don’t tell me they didn’t exist at the time.

Being fully divine, Jesus knew that six centuries later a religion would appear that would encourage its adherents to murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings. God is outside time, isn’t he?

A stickler for historical detail may suggest that so far Christianity has made remarkably few inroads on Islam. Christians are being massacred all over the Middle East, and Eva Brunne’s generosity so far hasn’t been reciprocated. Saudi mosques still proudly display the symbols of their cult, and the number of churches in Saudi Arabia equals, in round figures, zero.

That, however, is no reason to give up on the Swedish version of hospitality. On the contrary, efforts must be redoubled to abase Christianity, thereby doing the Muslims’ job for them.

So yes, the Swedes should definitely replace crosses with crescents. Ideally, in the spirit of Christian proselytism, they should ban Christianity altogether and replace it with Islam as the country’s dominant religion.

That would be jumping the gun, but not by much. The demographic shifts produced by Europe’s hospitality to Muslim arrivals are working towards the same ideal anyway, so why not take the initiative?

Eva Brunne thinks so: the church shouldn’t be “stingy towards people of other faiths”. Even to the point of abandoning one’s own.

The huge potential for heresy built into Protestantism has been fully realised. If, according to Luther, “every man is his own priest”, then it’s but a short step to the notion that every man is his own God.

Hence every man – and woman! – is justified in thinking that Christianity is anything he – or she! – feels it is. In fact, the song ‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings…” should be elevated to the status of a Protestant hymn.

Such solipsism explains the fracturing sectarianism of Protestantism: if everything is open to personal interpretation inspired by feelings, the church will naturally split into numerous churchlets.

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” was a prophetic statement. The Reformation is directly responsible for the demise of European Christianity, exemplified by walking perversions like Eva Brunne and the attendant universal atheism.

Yes, Christianity is in the doldrums everywhere in Europe, including its Catholic part. But at least the firm belief still resides at the heart of the Church that doctrine may take precedence over the way people feel.

Politically correct, multi-culti modernity gnaws at the outer edges of Catholic doctrine, biting bigger and bigger chunks out. But the fangs of modernity still haven’t reached the heart.

The Pope made that clear on his recent visit to Sweden, where he was greeted by Antje Jackelén, the female head of the country’s church. Speaking at a subsequent press conference, the pontiff stated unequivocally that the Catholic Church would never have female priests.

He cited his predecessor John Paul II as the utterer of the final word on the issue, but in fact he could have gone even farther back. The Church doesn’t allow female priesthood because Jesus didn’t ordain women.

The popular counterargument is that Jesus felt constrained by the standards of his backward time. Had he chosen today’s progressive Sweden for his incarnation, he’d be consecrating lesbian bishops like nobody’s business. Thus the outdated notion of God’s timelessness has fallen by the wayside, along with Christianity in general.

One suspects that Martin Luther would be unhappy about the direction his church (and other Protestant confessions) has taken. But the law of unintended consequences worked against him. He divided the house – and it didn’t stand.

Let’s start with empirically provable facts and go on from there.

Fact 1: The EU is built on lies, of which the most dangerous one is that it can act as a defensive alliance.

The lie is necessary for the EU to bring all European armies under its command, thereby subjugating nation states even further. Typically for that wicked contrivance, its defence policy pursues nothing but political objectives.

These are the only objectives it can pursue, for EU members are manifestly incapable of defending themselves against the juggernaut of Russian aggression.

Fact 2: Russia is gearing for war. It has amassed 30 motorised divisions on its western borders, with more tanks, by an order of magnitude, than Britain, Germany and France possess put together. The deployment pattern points at a direct threat to the Baltic EU (and NATO) members.

The large-scale civilian evacuation drills, vast army exercises in offensive tactics, surreptitious call-up of reservists, massive deployment of missile forces all cost billions which Russia’s shrinking economy can’t afford to keep up for long. That means the country is looking at some short-term action soon.

This is confirmed by the ratcheting up of war propaganda. Putin’s Goebbelses are clearly priming the populace for war.

All this may just be an on-going effort to blackmail the West into submission. Yet only a fool would ignore the possibility that the threat is real and war is just round the corner. Even a greater fool would believe that the EU is ready to fight it.

Fact 3: Only NATO is capable of matching up to the Russian military muscle. And, for all practical purposes, NATO means the USA.

Since NATO was formed in 1949, its European members have always been assigned the role of a sacrificial delaying force only. They were supposed to hold on long enough for the US to perform today’s answer to D-Day.

It was also mostly the US nuclear umbrella, rather than Britain’s two Tridents or France’s minuscule force de frappe, that has been keeping Soviet, now Russian, aggression in check.

Hence the EU, one of whose declared aims is to nullify US power, is digging a hole for itself. Conceivably it could survive without American economic assistance, but it certainly can’t resist Russia, the only militarily virile European power, without American military protection.

Fact 4: At no time since the Second World War has America been in a weaker position vis-à-vis the potential Russian threat.

The most disastrous election campaign in US history has weakened the country’s spirit and will weaken it even further regardless of who wins in a week’s time.

The Democrats are accusing Trump of being in Putin’s pocket, and their harangues aren’t wholly groundless. Trump’s son has admitted that a great deal of the family income comes from Russia, and persistent rumours suggest that Putin has paid for much of Trump’s campaign.

Even if that’s not the case, it’s hard to see how Trump’s pronouncements on Putin would be different if it were. He regularly makes pro-Putin appeasement noises and has often cast doubt on America’s willingness to come to Europe’s aid under his presidency.

Less publicised is the fact that the utterly corrupt Clinton Foundation has also received vast amounts of laundered Russian cash. Hillary is making tough noises now, to differentiate herself from Trump, but her record as Secretary of State is that of craven appeasement towards Putin.

Her reaction to Russia’s 2008 aggression against Georgia was to present Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov with a ‘reset’ button. It was also during her tenure that Obama abandoned the Bush administration’s plan to build a missile defence shield in Eastern Europe, a decision KGB Vlad described as “correct and brave”.

Now let’s use these facts as the starting point of ratiocination leading to a dismaying conclusion:

The US interregnum period between 8 November, 2016 (presidential election), and 20 January, 2017 (presidential inauguration), is by far the most dangerous one in Western post-war history. The combination of a sitting lame-duck president and a freshly elected appeaser may well render America both impotent and unwilling to stand up to Putin’s threat.

The KGB-trained chieftain will doubtless see this period as a window of opportunity. The opportunity to do what is open to question. It may be that he’ll hold a gun to the West’s head and demand economic concessions, which he sorely needs.

Russia’s economy is rapidly contracting, with living standards sliding down even faster. Though it’s impossible to take opinion polls conducted in a totalitarian state at face value, it’s clear that Putin enjoys some popular support – even if it’s in reality short of the notorious 85 per cent. But, should food disappear from the counters, such support may prove brittle.

Since 1917 the evil Russian state has relied on the West to bail it out, which the West has been willing to do, much to its own detriment. But war is another time-proven trick for totalitarians to solve their economic problems.

No one knows which of these stratagems, blackmail or war, Putin will choose. Perhaps he doesn’t know that himself yet. But the only possible explanation of the available facts is that he’ll definitely choose one of them.

Brace yourself for a long, harsh winter.

 

 

 

Our neognostic economists like to hide behind the smokescreen of recondite jargon, concealing that the economy is too simple for economists to understand.

Or else they utter deliberate falsehoods, designed as a means of self-perpetuation. True enough, most economists would be made redundant if people applied to economics the only faculty it takes: common sense.

Economists have failed to predict a single major development in world economies, from the 1929 stock market crash to the subsequent depression to the 2008 crisis. That, one would think, would force them to display some humility when making their doomsday prognoses.

Fat chance. With the arrogance of jumped-up ignoramuses, they extol the virtues of the single European market, predicting calamitous consequences should Britain be mad enough to leave it.

Now, let’s agree on the terms. No single European market, in the real sense of the word, exists. There’s only a protectionist bloc slapped together for purely political purposes. As such, it doesn’t function according to market laws, and Europeans are paying through the nose for this travesty.

It has been known at least since the time of Adam Smith and David Ricardo that protectionist tariffs, like those imposed by the EU, hurt one’s own consumers.

Smith wrote 240 years ago that “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Hence belonging to a protectionist bloc hurts the domestic economy, and getting out of it is well-advised, provided it’s done right. This may sound theoretical, but it’s the kind of theory that has been amply proved in practice everywhere in the world.

According to David Ricardo (d. 1823), a free-trading nation will always do better than a protectionist contrivance even if the latter imposes unilateral tariffs on the former. But to do so, the free-trading nation must realise it’s dealing from a position of strength and act accordingly.

Too often Mrs May and her ministers sound like supplicants when dealing with the EU on Brexit. Too often they listen to the choir of economists bleating about losing foreign investment if, God forbid, we may be so silly as to leave the deified single market.

This is arrant nonsense. All we have to do is make real market laws work for us, and then we won’t have to issue specific guarantees to foreign investors, such as the one apparently given Nissan to keep up its Sunderland plant.

Investors are sensitive to the economic climate, and, when it’s beneficial, they need no special inducement to invest. Realising this, Britain can practise economic oneupmanship vis-à-vis the EU, which is shackled by its politicised anti-economics.

However, Britain can only capitalise on its competitive advantages by accentuating them. Certain measures that Mrs May uses only as bargaining chips in Brexit negotiations must be brought on stream immediately, irrespective of how the horse-trading is going.

For example, a couple of weeks ago she hinted at the threat of introducing a 10 per cent corporate tax rate should the EU bar us from the single ‘market’ (which is, in fact, closer to the Zollverein, the trick Prussia used in the nineteenth century to bring all German principalities under its sway).

This should be done anyway, single market or no single market. Foreign investment is the oxygen without which Britain, with her currency imbalance, will suffocate. And what better way to bring foreign companies in than making it cheaper for them to operate?

By 2020, Britain’s corporate tax rate of 20 per cent is set to fall to 17 per cent anyway, which already gives us a head start compared to Germany (29.72 per cent), France (33.33 per cent) and everybody else in the high-rent part of Europe.

Reducing it to 10 per cent would make the EU’s competitive position well-nigh untenable, and don’t think for a second the Eurocrats aren’t scared witless of the prospect. Coupled with our labour laws, already more liberal than on the continent and ripe for even more liberalisation, our generous tax policy is bound to act like a magnet.

By regaining our economic freedom, we could attract not only industrial investment but also the purely fiscal kind, taking advantage of the central position of the London Stock Exchange in the world of finance.

In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, France’s intellectually challenged finance minister Macron was threatening Britain with becoming like Jersey or, alternatively, Guernsey. That threat sounds more like an opportunity to me.

Britain should indeed take advantage of the political millstone around European economies by turning itself into a tax haven. If as a result we become as wealthy as the Channel Islands, not to mention as socially stable and crime-free, I for one wouldn’t shed any tears.

Bolstered by silly economists, the EU is bluffing, trying to conceal what a poor hand it holds in any Brexit negotiations. In response, Mrs May should change her language from ‘may we please?’ to ‘you shall’. She’s holding all the aces.

 

 

 

It’s becoming easy to think that any explicit association with today’s Conservative Party may tar a man with an indelible blotch.

I’m not even talking about the increasingly socialist noises made by leading Tories, including Theresa May. This has been par for the Tory course for so long that any initial novelty appeal has long since worn off.

But at least there have always been individuals and groups within the party that would buck the Zeitgeist by supporting causes they regarded as morally right.

One such cause was Brexit. It was thanks to organisations like the Bruges Group (founded by Margaret Thatcher), and also to individuals like Lord Tebbit and John Redwood, that regaining British sovereignty has become possible.

Alas, the very groups – and individuals – that fought for the cause of our constitution are playing lickspittle to a foreign power presenting an existential threat not only to Britain’s constitution but indeed to her physical survival.

Enter Tory Councillor Robert Oulds, Bruges Group’s director. The Group has released a video showing Oulds interviewing Alexander Kofman, one of the chieftains of the bandit gang calling itself the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’.

“Is there a moral responsibility on the Donetsk People’s Republic,” asked Oulds, “to expand its borders to, in a sense, liberate territory from the rule of Kiev, liberate those people that do not want to be dictated to by the current junta in charge in Kiev?”

The question contains the answer. According to Putin’s gang, now ably supported by the Bruges Group, it’s the gang’s moral duty to expand its aggression against a sovereign people refusing to live in the same servitude under which it lost millions of people and every conceivable liberty.

To what extent Oulds et al are acting as free agents is open to debate. What’s beyond doubt is that Putin’s government is making good use of its KGB recruitment techniques.

In those olden days, the KGB bribed Western opinion formers to toe the Soviet line through Western media. The bribery wasn’t always a straightforward transfer of cash: the KGB was capable of subtler techniques of seduction. It knew that stroking people’s egos could be as effective as greasing their palms.

To that end, it would organise all-expenses-paid ‘fact-finding’ junkets for Western politicians and intellectuals. On one such, Henry Wallace, FDR’s VP, was favourably impressed by Siberian concentration camps, where millions had perished.

Hundreds of Westerners, all those Webbs, Steffenses, Shaws, Wellses, buried their conscience under the mountains of Caspian caviar. Shovelling it into his mouth at a Kremlin reception, G. B. Shaw expressed his bemusement at Western reports about the Soviet famine. That was 1931, when millions – at least five million in the Ukraine alone – were being didactically starved to death to make them see the benefits of collectivised agriculture.

In parallel, the KGB created hundreds of Soviet fronts, academic, political and civic. These were the syringes through which the syphilitic contagion of bolshevism was injected into the West’s bloodstream. Transparent Soviet fronts, like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, attracted hordes of Soviet agents of influence, witting or unwitting.

Those chaps, Jack Straw and Tony Blair spring to mind, were intuitively predisposed to flock towards left-wing causes. All the KGB had to do was channel their instincts into the proper conduit, which wasn’t hard.

Now FSB/KGB officers make up 85 per cent of Russia’s government – meaning they are Russia’s government. Much to their delight, they’ve discovered that the old techniques work well in a new setting – and with new targets.

Russia’s ideology has been changed from bolshevism to imperialism. Hence, even as the left of yesteryear could easily be seduced by progressivist verbiage because its ears were already attuned to it, today’s right tropistically reaches for the God, Putin and country banners flapping in the Russian wind.

Translating such instincts into action favouring the KGB state is just a matter of KGB tradecraft. So far Putin’s kleptofascists have set up 10 pressure groups in Britain, but that’s only those that are upfront about it.

Some others aren’t, and they may even be ‘played in the dark’, in the KGB jargon, meaning used unwittingly. But that doesn’t matter one way or the other.

What matters is that Ben Harris-Quinney, chairman of the Tory Bow Group, appears on Putin’s TV, saying things like “It is important to acknowledge the massive potential cost of sanctions [against Russia] to the West and explore other options.”

Western media, added Harris-Quinney, are promoting a “sleepwalk towards war or conflict with Russia.” It’s as if it were Western media rather than Putin’s kleptofascist state pouncing on neighbouring countries like a rabid dog.

But never mind small fry like Oulds or Harris-Quinney. No decent person would ever shake hands with anyone appearing on Russian TV and acting as Putin’s agent of influence. However, even Tory icons like Lord Tebbit and John Redwood are openly blaming the EU for Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine.

Not only do we allow the KGB to set up its propaganda outlets in Britain, but we also let our venerable institutions fall into its hands.

The other day, hacked Kremlin e-mails revealed that Alexander Lebedev, the Russian billionaire who, through his son, owns The Independent and Evening Standard, tried to orchestrate a press campaign to secure western approval for the theft of Crimea.

Lebedev, ladies and gentlemen, was – and is – a career KGB officer. (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life,” Putin once said). So Lebedev has a job to do, and he can no more be blamed for it than a dog can be blamed for chasing a cat around the block.

The blame lies with those who allow such people to buy our mainstream papers and turn them into mouthpieces of enemy propaganda. It also lies with people like Tebbit and Redwood, who are led so far astray by their justified hatred of the EU that they unwittingly expose us to a far greater danger.

 

Some readers have taken exception to my describing Russia as uncivilised. Russia, they replied, is as civilised as any other country, just look at Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

It’s all my fault. Most words have multiple meanings, and it’s incumbent upon a writer to define his terms, especially those used in a potentially controversial context.

There’s no doubt that Russian culture is one of the world’s greatest. But culture and civilisation aren’t so much synonymous as practically antithetical.

The kind of culture that produces a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky is created for few by fewer. At the time those two gentlemen were writing, close to 90 per cent of Russians were unable to read their novels, or anything else.

A similar observation could be applied to any culture. Perhaps the minority of Englishmen or Frenchmen able to contribute to culture either actively, as creators, or passively, as consumers, was greater than in Russia. But it was – and remains – a minority nonetheless.

Cultural disfranchisement in Russia was exacerbated by the servitude in which most Russians lived throughout their history. De facto slave owners, all those noblemen followed by the commissars, didn’t want their chattels to read Tolstoy and get ideas above their station.

The commissars did insist that the slaves learn to read, but they made sure that the newly acquired skill was applied only to learning the latest Party directives. Dostoyevsky didn’t come into it.

Civilisation is altogether different, not to say opposite.

It’s a method of organising life without any group having to resort to arbitrary force. This is replaced by an intricate ganglion of laws, custom, prescription, prejudice, equity, consent, civility (another cognate of civilisation), respect for others, good manners – it would take a long book even to enumerate all the components.

While culture thrives on esoteric exclusivity, a civilisation can’t last unless it includes all, or at least most, members of society. Some may drive it, some may sleep in the back seat, but they all must be inside.

Russia’s historical tragedy is that she borrowed the small cultural component of Western civilisation without also borrowing its entirety. Partly that’s the West’s fault: the quasi-Western cultured Russian was born at a time when the West proper was already becoming senile, its own roots severed by the Enlightenment.

Russia forged ahead culturally with youthful vigour, emulating the West’s path, but skipping many intermediate steps. Whenever things looked as if they’d take too long to develop, the youngster would simply borrow them ready-made, making more or less good use of them.

Thus Catherine II was involved in a lively correspondence with Diderot and Voltaire. That most absolute monarch of her time routinely described herself as a republican and sought Diderot’s advice on how to weave the ideals of the Enlightenment into the Russian political fabric. (This didn’t prevent her extending serfdom to the Ukraine.)

Yet Catherine didn’t succeed in making Russia Western. It was too late for that. Had the westernisation started not with Peter I but with Ivan the Terrible, Russia would have had many useful things to learn from the West at its peak, and the gap between her and, say, England would never have grown so wide.

As it was, the Russians succeeded in turning their country into a mirror image of the West. The mirror is both concave and convex, so it distorts the picture, but not beyond recognition. It’s rather like an impersonator conveying the character by accentuating the most salient traits.

The Russians mixed Western hand-me-downs with the bric-a-brac from their own attic. Hence where the West had social unrest, Russia had manor houses burnt to cinders; where the West had the Bastille, Russia had molten pitch down the throat; where the West had Fourier, Russia had Lenin.

If the West is Dorian Grey, Russia is the portrait. Even as Wilde’s character was horrified by the grotesque mask into which his vices had turned the portrait, so should Westerners look at Russia not with scorn but with the sadness of someone whose soul has been turned inside out and its depravity revealed for the world to see. That’s a good way to look at Russia’s history and the animus behind it.

The difference is that over millennia the West built up a capital of civilisation. That is now rapidly being frittered away, and we’re cutting deep into the principal. How long the capital will last is anybody’s guess, but there’s definitely some left.

Russia has no such capital, and don’t let Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky mislead you. They’re a lot less representative of Russia than Stalin and Putin.

For, in the absence of the multifarious ganglion I mentioned above, culture isn’t a civilisation’s meat. It’s its poison, or rather an abortion-inducing drug.

The brisk musical life in Moscow or Petersburg tells you less about Russia than the brown streaks one sees on the walls of public lavatories away from those cities’ centres. The presence of a literature is nothing as compared to the absence of just laws.

All this may sound too abstract, but the upshot of an uncivilised, if cultured, Russia is a concrete danger to the West. Beware of the uncivilised barbarian with “a lean and hungry look”.