Category: Blog

Now that my friend has resigned his parliamentary seat, a void has appeared in my life. Or rather it has broadened, for the void dates back to July, when Dave left 10 Downing Street.

With Dave residing at that address, I was never short of receptacles for my bilious outpourings. When taking office, Dave told me over a pint (of Krug, his favourite pub tipple): “Alex, me old china [Dave likes to suggest he’s every inch a man of the people], as long as I’m ‘kin PM, you’ll never run out of ‘kin things to write about.”

That was one promise Dave kept, or rather the only one, for he has broken all others, such as one made on 8 July: “It’s my intention to continue serving as an MP and helping represent the interests of the people of West Oxfordshire and anything else I do will come a bit later.”

Now the people of West Oxfordshire, those hicks who never attended Eton, nor got pissed at the Bullingdon, have been made to understand that their pathetic little constituency is a small pond in which Dave is a big fish. Too big, in fact, to stay.

It’s said that Dave has left on a matter of principle, which I believe. Dave is indeed a man of high principle, and the highest of all is ‘look out for Number One’.

People say he has left to be free to challenge Theresa May’s plans on grammar schools, for doing so from the back benches would split the Conservative Party. Dave indeed detests this policy, as he told me over another pint of Krug at his local, Chez François.

“Alex, me old china,” he said, “we don’t want any of those proles to get ideas above their station. Anybody who’s anybody goes to Eton (or, at a pinch, the other place) and then to a degree at the Bullingdon. The proles can go suck an egg, or whatever it is proles suck. Teach them how to read, and before long they’ll figure us out, what? Can’t let that happen, can we now?”

As to splitting the party, Dave has never minded doing that in the least. For example, he courageously destroyed the Tories’ grassroots support by pursuing his two pet policies: homomarriage and the EU.

My only problem is that Dave didn’t go far enough. He advocated neither interspecies marriage, which would have been ineluctably logical, nor Britain becoming a straight German gau, with no nonsense about pan-European solidarity, which too would have been my preference.

But there’s no denying that Dave’s consistent, his detractors will say maniacal, pursuit of both policies split the Tories. Dave didn’t bat an eyelid, and one can’t deny his courage and integrity. There are a few other aspects of him one could deny, but we shan’t let them detain us now.

So that’s not why Dave flipped two fingers at the Mother of All Parliaments. He did so to graze in pastures green, as in dollar.

“If Tony can get $250,000 a pop talking to pissed Yanks,” said Dave, tossing, Bullingdon-style, his empty pint glass at the mirror behind the bar, “why the bloody hell can’t I?”

“Quite,” I said, wondering who on earth would pay good money to listen to either Tone or Dave. I mean, I’d walk to the ends of the earth to do so, but none of my friends would as much as cross the street. Still, there’s one fan of Tony and Dave born every second.

It’s a little-known fact that Tony and Dave are Siamese twins separated at birth (don’t let the difference in their ages mislead you). Since then Dave has looked up to Tone, who led the way out of their mother’s womb.

That’s why he called himself “heir to Blair”. Yet it would be churlish to deny that there was some sibling rivalry there as well.

For example, Dave always envied the ease with which Tone destroyed (“pissed all over”, was how Dave put it to me at Chez François) the House of Lords, one of our oldest institutions. Anything Tone can do, I can do better, said Dave and destroyed even an older institution, that of marriage.

Tone kisses Angela’s cheek, Dave can go him one better. Tone leads Britain into a bloody, and bloody meaningless, conflict, Dave won’t be far behind. Tone leaves Parliament immediately after leaving Downing Street, so will Dave.

Tony got a £4.5 million advance on his memoirs, Dave will get more: millions of people are gagging for the revelations his book will contain – I know, I myself can’t wait to read about his favoured brand of Bermuda shorts and Samantha’s ideas on fashion.

This can go on, the story of rivalry between Tony and Dave. Tony has earned £100 million in the nine years since leaving office – Dave can arrive at that magic figure in half the time. Tone has put together a buy-to-let empire of 32 properties worth about £38 million – that’s small change compared to what Dave’s going to do.

Please join me in wishing Dave best of luck in private life. I’ll miss you, Dave, me old china.

…to turn even clever men into blithering idiots.

Ideology is virtual faith without God, virtual rationalism without reason and virtual morality without morals. As such, it’s always pernicious, regardless of its slogans or institutional symbols.

And ideologues are always obtuse, regardless of the intelligence they may display in unrelated areas. Enter my favourite subject, Peter Hitchens, Putin’s typical right-wing fan.

When ideology isn’t involved, Hitchens, though saying nothing original, at least doesn’t say anything manifestly inane. Then Russia comes up, and suddenly he loses whatever modest mind God gave him.

British people are wary of rants, which is why Hitchens always sneaks a disclaimer in: “I risk being classified as an apologist for Vladimir Putin. I am not. I view him as a sinister tyrant. The rule of law is more or less absent under his rule. He operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press… crimes… can be traced directly to Putin’s government…”.

And yet, “as all around me rage against the supposed aggression and wickedness of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, I cannot join in.”

Why, pray tell, not? Surely it’s fine to detest “a sinister tyrant” who “operates a cunning and cynical policy toward the press”, suppresses “the rule of law” and murders political opponents? Especially if he constantly threatens the West with nuclear annihilation?

Hitchens explains why not, displaying not only his personal failings but also typical journalistic hubris. Hacks believe that visiting a place gives them unique insights. It doesn’t, especially not with notoriously enigmatic countries like Russia for which duping foreigners is stock in trade.

Hitchens spent two years in Moscow in the early 1990s, and at that time a Westerner in Russia was treated as a demigod. Visiting illiterate students, never mind marginally more erudite hacks, would puff up with pride when Russians twice their age and ten times their intellect sought their views on involved issues, hanging on every word.

Add to this a KGB trying to limit a correspondent’s contacts to trusted comrades and equally trusted ‘honey traps’, while his stock of caviar was never depleted, and you can understand how a man, especially one unremarkable at home, could fall in love with Moscow.

Hitchens certainly did: “The experience of living in that sad and handsome place brought me to love Russia and its stoical people, to learn some of what they had suffered and see what they had regained.”

My native city is indeed a “sad and handsome place”, and some Russians are indeed lovable, stoical and long-suffering. However, much of their suffering is self-inflicted.

Speaking of nineteenth century Russia, Joseph de Maistre remarked “Every nation gets the government it deserves”. Contemporary Russian writer Sergei Dovlatov brought that observation up to date: “Everybody is raging about Stalin, rightly. But somebody did write those four million denunciations.”

This sense of perspective is absent in Hitchens’s musings, which makes him your normal Russian groupie, like those impressionable girls on the make who roam the salons of New York, London and Paris. But Hitchens is worse than just that.

Having claimed he isn’t “an apologist for Putin”, he proves that’s exactly what he is. “Despite the fact that Moscow has abandoned control of immense areas of Europe and Asia, self-appointed experts insist that Russia is an expansionist power. Oddly, this ‘expansion’ only seems to be occurring in zones that Moscow once controlled…”

While wondering exactly who appointed Hitchens as a Russian expert (believe me: he isn’t), one has to point out that Moscow “abandoned control” when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991. Putin was then a Mafioso deputy mayor of Petersburg, placed by the KGB to keep an eye on the mayor Sobchak. Hence said abandonment had nothing to do with him.

Said expansion, however, began when Putin described the collapse of the USSR as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” and set out to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. Thus there’s nothing “odd” about Putin seeking to restore Russia’s control, violently if need be, over the post-Soviet space.

“The comparison of today’s Russia to yesterday’s U.S.S.R. is baseless. I know this, and rage inwardly at my inability to convey my understanding to others. Could this be because I have been unable to communicate the change of heart I underwent during my more than two years in the Russian capital?”

No, it’s because it’s hard to peddle a falsehood successfully, especially to people who don’t give a flying hoot about Hitchens’s changeable heart.

Of course today’s Russia isn’t a carbon copy of the USSR, or for that matter of Nazi Germany. Those two weren’t carbon copies of each other either. Yet there were many similarities – as there are between both and Putin’s Russia.

Putin takes his cue not from single-minded communist ideologues like Lenin and Trotsky but from synthetic despots like Stalin, who came up with a fusion ideology. Shaken into the new cocktail were aspects of communism, Russian chauvinism, time-honoured imperialism and even – in seeming defiance of constitutional Soviet atheism – Orthodoxy. That’s this tradition that, mutatis mutandis, Putin is restoring.

Communism is gone from the blend, replaced with ‘free enterprise’ (institutionalised gangsterism), while the proportion of the other ingredients has been increased. The resulting blend represents history’s unique kleptofascist government by secret police (with its clerical extension) and organised crime, operating with the violence and perfidy characteristic of both constituents.

It takes a mind neutered by ideology to defend such a regime. Hitchens does so by first saying that Putin is “a sinister tyrant”, then claiming he isn’t, then arguing, with a lamentable absence of logic, that, even if he is, he isn’t the only one. Just look at Yeltsyn’s Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and China.

“Erdogan… locks up many more journalists than does Mr. Putin,” he claims. That may be, but Erdogan doesn’t murder as many: Putin has had 250 Russian colleagues of Hitchens bumped off without wasting time on legal niceties.

Then of course there’s the torrent of nuclear threats streaming out of the mouths of Putin’s spokesmen – something even China refrains from. I doubt Hitchens’s Russian stretches to the task of following what he himself describes as Russia’s “controlled media”. If it were, even he would be horrified by the strident anti-Western hysteria being whipped up by every TV programme.

Or perhaps he wouldn’t be. Ideology does work in mysterious ways, all of them revolting.

A story is doing the rounds of a North Korean athlete apologising to Kim Jong-un for only winning a silver medal at the regular Olympics. “Not to worry,” replies the kindly leader. “You’ll get your gold at the 2020 Paralympics.”

 In a parallel development, one of my best friends sent me this e-mail: “Please come with me to Rio and help me host a parasymposium, a three weeks’ philosophy conference for those who can’t so much as spell ‘epistemology’, let alone practise it.”

 I’d be happy to, I replied, except that I’m already going there to referee the cripple jump event and take part in the obese marathon, open to those with a BMI of 40-plus. Mine is lower, but a strategically placed bribe should take care of that problem, while at the same time reaffirming the new Olympic ideals.

 But enough of this levity. Actually, I was going to write a serious piece about this, but instead decided to settle for a bit of plagiarism. My only excuse is that I’m plagiarising an article I myself wrote exactly four years ago. There’s nothing to change, nothing to add:

The Paralympics is upon us, as if to prove that the heights of vulgarity scaled by the regular Olympics aren’t the highest peaks possible.

This sideshow is supposed to testify to the triumph of unconquerable spirit over abbreviated flesh. In reality it testifies to something else entirely.

The whole thing smacks of Victorian county fairs, where people paid to look at bearded ladies or boys with two heads. Usually there were some tricks involved then: the beard was glued on, and the other head was made of papier-mâché. But the Paralympics is for real.

We’re supposed to admire those poor deluded people who put themselves on show to cater to the PC idea that they’re no different from those with a full complement of limbs. But they are. They’ve all suffered a tragedy, and they deserve our sympathy and prayers. One of those would be that God grant them the strength to bear their misfortune with dignity.

Yet dignity is precisely what the Paralympics denies them, while also diminishing the voyeurs whose bad taste is indulged by the sight of double amputees trying to outrun one another. Add to this the crass commercialism that inevitably accompanies sporting extravaganzas, the trumped-up enthusiasm of the TV presenters, the glued-on smiles of the sponsors, and the emetic effect becomes uncontainable.

It takes strength to refuse to be kept down by physical deformity. If these Paralympians did all the same things in private, one’s hat would be off to them – they’ve refused to wallow in self-pity, proving that the human spirit can triumph over physical incidentals.

But when they appear in a stadium to the accompaniment of a marching band, one’s hat remains firmly in place. Suddenly respect gives way to discomfort – surely not the emotion these poor people expect to elicit.

Imagine a pianist who loses both hands in an accident. He then acquires prosthetic limbs and, after years of toil, learns to play simple tunes to the standard of a little child attending music school. The pianist deserves respect and applause from his friends. He’d deserve neither if he then hired Wigmore Hall, had a PR company do publicity and played a recital to an audience who don’t care about music but love a titillating oddity.

Similarly, people who watch a tennis match between two wheelchair-bound players aren’t there to admire the game. If asked why they’re attending, they’ll give you the usual mantra of bien pensant jargon they’ve absorbed from ambient air. You’ll never get the real answer: they’re there to have their nerve endings tickled by what deep down they see as a freak show or, to be charitable, a circus act.

Our whole way of life these days both encourages and rewards exhibitionism. Grown-up people reveal to a million-strong TV audience their innermost problems, of the kind that in the past they wouldn’t have divulged even to a best friend. Millions watch morons copulate and relieve themselves on camera. Youngsters scream for attention by disfiguring themselves with tattoos and facial metal. Old women wear miniskirts and tank tops, old men with varicose legs sport tight shorts. People go to group therapy and let it all hang out: “I’m John, and I’m sleeping with my daughter…”, “I’m Jane, and I can’t stop sniffing glue…”

Paralympians parade a different sort of exhibitionism, and yet not all that different. The competitors put their deformities on show, knowing they’ll always find willing dupes eager to watch.

Suddenly we realise they’ve succeeded in their professed aim of showing they’re no different from healthy athletes or indeed from most modern people. Suffering, which in the past was believed to strengthen a person’s character and enable him to plumb greater spiritual depths, now has no such effect. Seeking to prove they’re as good as anybody, the Paralympians waste the chance to become better than others.

Suffering or no suffering, we’re all expected to function to exactly the same laws of vulgarity and rotten taste. Such laws will never be repealed. They’re here to stay.

This is my slightly shortened translation of yesterday’s article by Vladimir Yakovlev, published in a Russian Internet magazine blocked for internal consumption by Putin’s proud heirs to CheKa/GPU/NKVD/KGB.

 

 I was named after my grandfather.

My grandfather, Vladimir Yakovlev, was a murderer, bloody executioner, CheKist. His numerous victims included his own parents.

Grandfather shot his father, guilty of bartering for food. Having learned about that, Grandpa’s mother, my great-grandmother, hanged herself.

My happiest childhood recollections involve our old, spacious Moscow flat, the family’s pride. As I found out later, the family didn’t buy the flat. It was confiscated – that is, taken away by force – from a rich merchant’s family.

I remember the old carved cupboard where I would sneak jam. And the large, cosy sofa where Granny and I, a blanket tucked around us, read fairy tales. And two huge leather armchairs that, according to the family tradition, were used for serious conversations only.

As I found out later, for most of her life Granny, whom I adored, worked as a professional agent provocateur. Born to nobility, she used her lineage to establish friendships and provoke frankness. She’d then write denunciations.

Grandpa and Grandma didn’t buy the sofa on which I listened to fairy tales, nor the cupboard, nor the other furniture. They picked them at a special warehouse stocking furniture from the homes of shot Muscovites.

Using that warehouse, CheKists furnished their flats for free.

Underneath a thin film of ignorance, my happy childhood recollections are saturated with the stench of robbery, murder, violence and treachery. They’re saturated with blood.

Am I alone in that?

All of us who grew up in Russia are grandchildren of victims or murderers. Absolutely all, with no exceptions. Your family didn’t have victims? So it had murderers. No murderers? So it had victims. Neither victims nor murderers? So it has secrets.

Don’t even doubt!

Assessing the scale of Russia’s past tragedy, we usually count the dead. However, to appreciate the psychological influence those tragedies had on the generations to come, we must count not the dead but the survivors. The dead died. The survivors became our parents or our parents’ parents.

The survivors are widows, orphans, the exiled, the dispossessed, those who killed to save themselves or for ideology, the betrayed and betrayers, the ruined, those who sold their conscience, those turned into executioners, the tortured and the torturers, the raped, the crippled, the robbed, those forced to inform, the humiliated, those who lived through deadly famines, imprisonment, camps.

The dead number tens of millions. The survivors, hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions of those whose fear, pain, sense of constant menace from the outside world were passed on to their children who, in their turn, having added their own suffering to the pain, passed them on to us.

Statistically Russia has not a single family that one way or another doesn’t carry within itself the deadly consequences of the unprecedented savagery that went on for a century in our country.

Have you ever thought how this experience of three consecutive generations of your DIRECT ancestors is affecting your view of the world today? That of your wife? Your children?

If you haven’t, think now.

At school, we were taught about the beastliness of German Nazis. At university – about the crimes of Chinese Red Guards or Cambodian Khmer Rouge. They somehow forgot to tell us that history’s most horrifying genocide, unprecedented in scale and duration, happened not in Germany, China or Cambodia, but in our own country.

And living through this genocide weren’t those faraway Chinese or Koreans, but three consecutive generations of YOUR OWN family.

We often feel that the best way of protecting ourselves from the past is not to touch it, not to delve into family history, not to uncover the horrors that happened to our ancestors.

We feel it’s better not to know. In fact, it’s worse. Much.

What we don’t know continues to affect us, through childhood recollections, through relations with our parents. If we don’t know, we aren’t aware of this effect, which is why we’re powerless to resist it.

The most awful consequence of hereditary trauma is the inability to perceive it. And, as a corollary, the inability to realise how this trauma distorts our perception of today’s reality.

It’s immaterial what personifies fear for each of us, what each of us sees as a threat – America, the Kremlin, the Ukraine, homosexuals or Turks, ‘depraved’ Europe, fifth column or simply a boss at work or a policeman at the entrance to a station.

…in 1919, during the famine, my murderer grandfather was dying of consumption. He was saved from death by [CheKa head] Felix Dzerzhinsky, who dragged in from somewhere, probably from another ‘special’ warehouse, a carton of French sardines in oil. Grandfather ate them for a month and only because of that stayed alive.

Does this mean I owe my life to Dzerzhinsky?

And if so, how am I supposed to live with that?

Such voices aren’t allowed to reach Russians. Here are the kind of voices that scream off every TV screen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtkvbwVrgDg

In an eerie echo of German women of yesteryear screaming “I want a child by the Führer”, this women’s folk choir is singing “We all want to marry Putin” and “give him our maidenly honour”. The ladies’ ‘maidenly honour’ seems to be long gone, but it’s the thought that counts.

 

 

 

The words ‘fair education’ have the same effect on me that the word ‘culture’ allegedly had on Dr Goebbels.

Yet these dread words dominate the almost universal hysteria in the press over Mrs May’s intention to create new grammar schools. That, according to the critics, is unfair. The fair system is one we have now: comprehensive schools cranking out comprehensively illiterate savages.

A survey of teenagers aged 16 to 19 in 23 developed countries placed our youngsters at 23 in literacy and 22 in numeracy, which wouldn’t exactly qualify our education as a rip-roaring success.

Moreover, England is the only Western country where those aged 55 to 65 showed better literacy and numeracy than those aged 16 to 24. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the introduction of comprehensives in the 1960s, would it?

Never mind the quality, feel the fairness. Nothing else matters.

But what if – and I fully expect the god of progress to smite me – we suggested that levelling (aka fairness) isn’t a legitimate purpose of education? What if we reminded ourselves of how those purposes were defined before the 1960s?

Education was then expected, first, to incorporate youngsters into our civilisation, second, to develop their minds and, third, to give them basic tools for survival in the economic rough-and-tumble.

Anyone whose mind isn’t poisoned by what Mrs May correctly identifies as ‘dogma and ideology’ must see how spectacularly British education is failing on all three counts.

Starting from the end, about 650,000 youngsters are officially unemployed, which figure, though bad enough, is misleading. It excludes those who do odd jobs and those who only work part-time. Include them, and our youth unemployment rate wouldn’t be far off the Euro-area average of 20.7 per cent – this in a considerably livelier economy.

As to the first two desiderata, the less said about them the better. Forget about the civilising effect of education or developing pupils’ minds, let’s just hope we’ll keep most youngsters off the bottle and out of prison.

Perhaps teaching teenagers to read, write and add up would be a good idea too, modest though this goal is. Such minimum requirements used to be met in elementary school, whereas now they look like a shining ideal for secondary schools to dream of.

But an ideal it’ll remain for as long as we put equality before quality – for as long as the word ‘fair’ is bandied about. As it was yesterday on Sky News, which I courageously watched for 15 minutes or so.

First I was regaled by an illiterate rant from Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner. For the country’s sake, I hope Miss Rayner will remain in the shadows, for the way she talks, lexically, grammatically and phonetically, suggests only cursory familiarity with the subject under her aegis.

One can understand that, having produced her first, illegitimate, child at age 16, Miss Rayner had no time to learn how to speak English properly. But she does know how to use ‘fair’ and all its cognates with commendable fluency. Grammar schools, she explained, are unfair because only bright children are admitted – and the educated classes have brighter children.

The sports reporter Jacquie Beltrao chimed in, and knowing a thing or two about sports ipso facto qualifies her to pontificate on such subjects to a vast audience. Middle-class families, she explained, will be able to afford tutors to prepare their offspring for 11-plus exams or their equivalents.

I’ve got news for Miss Beltrao: more cultured families don’t even have to hire tutors. Having books in the house, rather than crushed beer cans, already gives their children an unfair head start. There’s also another factor… hold on a second, let me make sure no one’s listening… children from such families tend to have higher IQs than children from, well, different families.

Everywhere one looks life is unfair: some children are brighter than others, some are more cultured, some are more curious about the world than about places to score drugs, some have ambitions beyond producing illegitimate children in their teens. That’s how life is, and schools should accommodate such unfairness rather than trying to eliminate it and produce generations of feral ignoramuses.

Mrs May is absolutely right in this undertaking, but I doubt it’ll succeed. In the face of fierce opposition from most teachers and their unions, to say nothing of our ‘liberal’ media, the project will be either scuppered or diluted beyond recognition.

Even if it survives unmolested, it’s impossible to have better schools without better teachers. Where will these come from, in sufficient numbers to make new grammar schools work?

Most of our teachers have gone through the same moron-spewing system of education. Then they topped it up at teachers’ training colleges, which are hatcheries of precisely the ‘dogma and ideology’ Mrs May deplores.

They may be well-equipped to teach pupils how to use condoms, which is a significant part of the curriculum. But they can’t possibly incorporate youngsters into a civilisation of which they themselves aren’t a part.

Hence we need a considerably more, as it were, comprehensive overhaul than what Mrs May has in mind. But hey, we have to start somewhere.

As Trump has just reminded me, America has never faced such a catastrophic choice of presidential candidates, two corrupt and incompetent individuals, both with links to a hostile foreign power.

The power in question is Putin’s Russia, of which Trump is a fan. Putin, he said yesterday, “has been a leader far more than our president has been.” The KGB thug, he added, “has great control over his country”.

So had the gentlemen in this photo. So had Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Pondering such similes, one begins to think that leadership by itself is meaningless unless it’s directed towards a worthy destination.

Yet many seem to believe that leadership is self-redemptive, and no extraneous considerations matter. This dangerous fallacy produces adulation of evil foreign chieftains, rendering the country helpless to resist them.

Trump is trying to establish his own credentials by syllogistic association: Putin is a strong leader. Putin likes Trump (“I think when he calls me brilliant I’ll take the compliment, ok?”). Ergo, Trump too is a strong leader, and isn’t that what we all need?

It isn’t. What we need is a strong society, not a strong leader. It’s only weak and wicked countries that above all else require a strongman to control them. In healthy societies the leader’s personality counts for much less.

Political leadership does matter – but with many qualifiers that each may be more important than what they qualify. A good leader must be wise, just, selfless, prudent yet courageous, knowledgeable of political philosophy and history.

It’s those qualities that are worth highlighting before uttering the buzz word ‘leader’. But Trump wouldn’t understand that: neither his experience nor his intellect stretch that far.

It’s wrong to think that modern business experience, even if less marred by controversy than Trump’s, provides perfect training for high political office. If it does, it’s only by serendipity.

For example, today’s businessmen see nothing wrong in concentrating most of their bailiwick’s wealth in their own hands and those of their nearest associates. Interestingly, in the second half of the nineteenth century the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005 that ratio stood at 158:1.

Trump must admire the aspect of Putin’s leadership that, according to Credit Swiss data, has produced the worst wealth inequality in the world, with only 111 Russians owning 19 per cent of the country’s household wealth. Putin himself is much richer than Trump, and the Donald is trained to worship wealth, however amassed.

He also must see a parallel between a small board of directors headed by a ‘leader’ running a huge corporation and a Russia run by the KGB junta of a dozen men or so. What’s sauce for the corporate goose is sauce for the political gander.

In both cases, appearances of popular support are often maintained. In theory, a stockholder with a few shares has a vote that may change corporate policy. In practice, public ownership is dissipated so widely that no single vote matters. Control remains firmly in the hands of the board, usually ready to bend to the will of its ‘leader’.

Modern ‘democratic’ politics is similar. What decides the issue isn’t each vote but a winning voting bloc. Once it has been put together, the winner becomes for all intents and purposes unaccountable to the populace. Modern ‘leaders’ respond to Burke’s prescription of acting according to the electorate’s interests, not wishes, by acting according to neither.

This is the sort of leadership that Trump’s business experience has prepared him for. That’s why he has a QED expression on his face when saying “[Putin] does have an 82 per cent approval rating.”

He’s too ignorant to know that in a fascist country, into which Putin is rapidly turning Russia, approval ratings (or for that matter votes) are meaningless. Stalin had approval ratings of 105 per cent while running history’s worst tyranny. Ceausescu had an approval rating of 97 per cent the day before he was shot in the gutter, with crowds joyously dancing in the streets.

Trump is also too stupid to realise that such approval ratings, even if genuine, which Putin’s aren’t, testify to two things only: the absence of free press and the brainwashing effectiveness of mass propaganda.

Actually, ignorance and stupidity are the best possible explanations of Trump’s affection for Putin’s kleptofascist dictatorship. The recent statement by Trump’s son Don hints at a worse possibility: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets… We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

What part of Trump’s mind and experience has prepared him to ignore such naked self-interest? Probably none.

Russia’s sabres are rattling all over the world, half its budget is spent on the military, Putin has amassed 100,000 armoured troops on the Ukrainian border, his fighters cause near-collisions by flying, as one did yesterday, within 10 feet of US planes, his Goebbelses scream about turning America into radioactive ash – what a time for the US to have a president who admires the ‘leader’ cast in the mould of history’s worst tyrants.

The harrowing thought is that Hilary Clinton is just as bad, with possibly even stronger financial ties to Putin. The forthcoming election does evoke the old cliché about turkeys voting for Christmas.

“Why does the left love tyrannical regimes?” asks Edward Lucas, one of the few journalists who begin to understand international politics.

Yet this question is phrased incorrectly. It’s not just the left that suffers from such perverse affections. It’s also the right. It’s also the middle ground. It’s modernity in general.

Mr Lucas specifically talks about the West bending over backwards to do trade with China, which he correctly describes as another “evil empire”. Much of Mr Lucas’s article is about showing that China is indeed both evil and an empire.

The case he makes is unassailable, with many cited facts leading to the ineluctable conclusion: “The rule of law in China is a farce. Torture and other abuses are endemic. The justice system is a tool of the Communist Party.”

However, replace ‘China’ with ‘Russia’ and ‘the Communist Party’ with ‘the KGB junta’, and the conclusion will be just as true. However, while China’s useful idiots generally reside on the left, Russia’s sub-species mostly roam on the right.

To be sure, following the rape of the Ukraine, Western governments imposed some mild sanctions on Russia. But pressure is growing throughout the West to repeal or at least soften them. This pressure is exerted by the right, and it’s every bit as shrill and pervasive as anything the left screams about China.

The arguments for trade with China are mostly economic, as opposed to being only partly so in relation to Russia. That’s why the China-loving left has a broader appeal than the Putinista right.

If support for China is, say, 20 per cent ideological and 80 per cent economic, with Russia it’s roughly the other way around. But what I call Western ‘totalitarian economism’ is a factor in both cases. Both totalitarian politics and totalitarian economism are children of the Enlightenment, even if the latter was born on the wrong side of the blanket.

Because the Enlightenment severed the metaphysical roots of our civilisation, the tree withered and its fallen fruits rotted on the ground. Supposedly perpetrated in the name of reason, the Enlightenment destroyed reason by replacing spiritual ratio with materialistic rationalism. Falling by the wayside was the essential sustenance of our civilisation: faith, charity, honour, spiritual and intellectual pursuits.

All such realities were perverted, destroyed and replaced with virtual caricatures. As an almost immediate result, the West lost its founding raison d’être, forming a vacuum that nature abhors and people try to fill.

If Western reason had seen search for truth as the aim of life, the materialistic rationalism of the Enlightenment threw up money to act in that capacity. For the first time in history the economy assumed a starring role in life’s drama, a new development that was ushered in and then post-rationalised by new thinkers.

In that sense, there isn’t much difference among the benign Adam Smith, the evil Karl Marx, the matter-of-fact Max Weber and their retinues of followers and acolytes. When it came to replacing Western truth with totalitarian economism, they were all culpable. (Thus Weber: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.”)

Economy in general and trade in particular became deified or at least idealised. The British led the way, touting, along with material gain, the civilising and redemptive effect foreign trade can have on tyrannies.

Since then Western trillions, packaged as either trade or aid, have poured into the coffers of every diabolical tyrant of modernity, from Lenin to Hitler, from Stalin to Mao, from Putin to Xi Jinping – with utterly predictable results.

Not much civilising effect is in evidence. What is in evidence, amply documented in the past and rapidly piling up at present, is unbearable oppression, suppression of every known liberty, torture, assassination, unprecedented levels of corruption, millions murdered in the recent past and thousands being murdered at present, a world torn apart by two world wars and teetering at the edge of a third one.

But all that is happening in either the geographical or temporal elsewhere, while the profits brought in by trade with monsters are here and now. That’s the vindication of our vulgar post-Enlightenment modernity, and what better vindication than money can anyone want?

Add to this the gravitational pull of Chinese communism keenly felt by the left and the ideological attraction of Putinesque fascism giving the more ignorant parts of the right a tingling penile sensation, and one can understand why tyrannical regimes are thriving.

One could argue – in fact, I do argue in just about all my books – that all modernity, regardless of its professed ideological hue, gravitates toward tyranny definitely and totalitarianism probably. This isn’t a transient symptom but a systemic defect.

If the West’s traditional political and economic power was vectored from centre to periphery, devolving to the lowest sensible level, post-Enlightenment modernity has reversed that direction. Political power is now concentrated within central government, while its typological economic equivalent, the giant corporation, has usurped economic power.

China, Russia and similar regimes are merely extreme, rather than sole, manifestations of this tendency. They spread the kind of poison for which the West no longer secretes an effective antidote – its endocrine glands have atrophied and totalitarian poison is coursing through it veins.

 

Aristotle observed that political subversiveness will inevitably follow the cultural kind: “Any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole state, and ought to be prohibited…”

The idea is debatable, but it does contain a kernel of truth.

The columnist David Aaronovich has written two articles in The Times proving unwittingly that 1) Aristotle’s message may apply to culture at large and 2) the reverse is also true: political subversiveness in its turn produces cultural mayhem.

First, he wrote that his former membership in the Communist Party is entirely innocent, and so is the re-emergence of Labour Trotskyism. Second, he welcomed Glenda Jackson’s forthcoming appearance as King Lear in the West End.

Both messages are animated by subcutaneous resentment of our civilisation, which sentiment has become the hallmark of Western journalism. Both poisonous fruits dangle off the same branch of one tree.

The question to ask about the support of both communism and women playing male roles is Why? Pose it, and you’ll be amazed how close the two answers will be.

When a grownup (as opposed to an immature youngster) becomes a communist, he accepts that man isn’t an aim in itself but merely a material with which to build the edifice of universal happiness. A logical corollary is that, if said material is defective, it must be dumped into “the rubbish bin of history”, in Trotsky’s phrase.

Since most people fall short of the shining ideal, communism presupposes mass murder, a theoretical postulate that has been empirically proved in every communist country. A communist has to believe that an abstract political aim justifies the concrete massacre of millions.

Therefore a communist isn’t just intellectually misguided. He’s driven by a destructive animus, which is to say he’s evil.

This can’t be changed by merely abandoning communist phraseology or indeed convictions. The energumen resides not in the mind, nor in the vocal cords, but in the viscera, and that area is almost impossible to reach.

That’s why the wide spread of ex-communists among our opinion-formers is worrying. In most cases the ‘ex’ part is hard to believe. A man can’t become an ex-dwarf and, without a religious Damascene experience, he can’t become an ex-communist either.

Vindicating Aristotle, Mr Aaronovich shifts his innate subversiveness into culture. Why not, he asks, have a woman play Lear? Why not have two homosexuals play Romeo and Juliet, “as an exploration of transgressive love”? Why not have a black play Hamlet?

Because that’s “an insult to the playwright”, says the dramatist Sir Ronald Harwood. “But on this issue he’s completely wrong,” responds Mr Aaronovich, displaying the know-all effrontery so typical of communists.

The question to ask here isn’t Why not? but Why yes? It’s not that, as the playwright Sir Ronald says, the part “demands huge energy and masculine strength”. A woman is capable of possessing such qualities, although I doubt that the grossly overrated Miss Jackson does.

But why resort to this gimmick? Have we developed a shortage of male Shakespearean actors? Why have we decided that a prince of medieval Denmark could be black? What’s to be gained by portraying Juliet as a male pervert?

Apart from an expectation of commercial appeal, the Lear director is animated by the same impulse as a vandal who wants to relieve himself in a cathedral or spray-paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Just as man is but material to a communist, so is our sublime theatrical tradition but grist to the mill of any director’s hubris.

Even cleverer men than David Aaronovich sound ignorant and stupid when trying to defend a corrupt idea. He doesn’t disappoint either, by offering this argument in defence of thespian transsexualism: “Whatever gender Shakespeare intended in his writing, all Lear’s daughters were originally played by boys. Somehow the playgoers of the time managed to cope with this.”

The playgoers of the time didn’t have a choice because women were banned from acting in Elizabethan times. Given the opportunity, a Globe director would have jumped at the chance of casting a Maggie Smith as Cordelia or a Sarah Bernhardt as Goneril. But he would have muttered “Vade retro” if told to cast either woman as Lear.

“If you are black or Muslim or Jewish or white or male or female or gay or straight, these single qualities are held to define you in every way. But it’s a lie,” pontificates Mr Aaronovich, resorting to the communist trick of making an opponent utter nonsense the easier to ridicule it.

Such characteristics don’t define one in every way, but they certainly define one in some way. Hence having a conspicuously homosexual black man play Ophelia turns suspension of disbelief into suspension of sanity, as does casting an actress as Lear.

“King Lear is a play about the tragedies of ingratitude, ageing, madness and death,” Mr Aaronovich explains helpfully. “Shakespeare is not insulted by Glenda Jackson playing the part of his tragic king but rather, four centuries on, is honoured by it.”

Not blessed with his direct access to the playwright, I’d suggest that it’s not just Shakespeare who’s insulted by this cultural communism but elementary good taste – which is to say our whole civilisation.

St Augustine must have had a premonition of modernity when he wrote, “If you believe what you like in the Gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the Gospel you believe in but yourself.”

Today every man isn’t just what Luther described as “his own priest” but his own God. Hence the tendency either to ignore Scripture altogether or to treat it as an à la carte menu from which one picks a few items and ignores the rest.

An article in The Times by Tim Montgomerie provides an illustration to this observation. The subject is the growing Anglican acceptance of homosexually co-habiting clergy, which Mr Montgomerie welcomes.

Alas, when Mr Montgomerie tries to justify his position, he demonstrates in one fell swoop what’s wrong with a) modernity, b) Protestantism, c) his mind.

To wit: “In America, Christian acceptance of homosexuality rose from 44 to 54 per cent in seven years. Personally, I no longer see this as an abandonment of biblical faithfulness but as a potential rediscovery of the authentic Jesus Christ who, according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”

One could write volumes debunking every fallacy these 51 words contain, starting with logical lapses and going on to Mr Montgomerie’s ignorance of the very religion he claims to espouse.

The first sentence contains two rhetorical fallacies: argumentum ad populum and non sequitur. The first underlying assumption is that the more people support an idea, the truer it is. The second is that, if Americans feel something, it must be right. Since this argumentum ad populum is false, it’s also a non sequitur, providing no logical bridge to the next statement.

Mr Montgomerie’s deficit of intellectual rigour is only matched by his ignorance of the subject, as his second sentence proves. Yes, “the authentic Jesus Christ” (as opposed to the inauthentic one?) “according to the four gospels, did not once condemn same-sex relationships.”

From this one is supposed to infer that Jesus’s omission of homosexuality implies tacit acceptance. By the same token one could infer that Jesus saw nothing wrong in necrophilia, bestiality, coprophilia and all those other perversions he somehow forgot to mention in the Sermon on the Mount or any of his parables.

Apart from being logically unsound, this misapprehension evinces obtuse biblical literalism, so characteristic of sectarian Protestantism. In Mr Montgomerie’s case, this curiously coexists with the kind of selective approach to Scripture that’s closer to atheism or deism at best.

In addition to the Gospels, the Christian canon also comprises the rest of the New Testament and most of the Old. Both include numerous condemnations of homosexuality.

Citing the Gospels as the only valid source is therefore either pernicious or ignorant, take your pick. Then again, if Mark, Matthew and John contained injunctions against homosexuality, Mr Montgomerie would probably support his view by pointing out that Luke didn’t say a word about it.

Oddly, while ignoring most of the Christian canon, he seems to reduce all of Christian doctrine to Scripture. This is another typical Protestant failing, except that in Mr Mongomerie’s case it’s tinged with cavalier dismissal of the parts of the Bible that contradict his point.

Yet Christianity isn’t only the teaching by Christ but also – one is tempted to say mainly – the teaching about Christ. This has always been conveyed by and through the Church.

If one wrote out everything Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels, it would amount to about two hours of normal speech. Yet his ministry lasted at least a year. Surely he spoke for longer than two hours during all that time?

It has been the task of the apostolic Church to absorb not only written but also oral accounts of Christ, compiling them, with necessary interpretations, into coherent doctrine. The original oral accounts came from eyewitnesses, of whom there were thousands besides the apostles themselves.

This mission had started decades before the first Gospel was written down, with Christianity rapidly spreading on the strength of doctrine transmitted either orally or in short epistles, such as those by Paul, in which he condemns homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10).

Not recognising the Church as a depository and teacher of Christianity is therefore rank ignorance – even if one disagrees with Hilaire Belloc’s staunchly Catholic view that there’s no such thing as Christianity; there’s only the teaching of the Church.

What made Mr Montgomerie step on the path he doesn’t know how to navigate is his fashionably open-minded view not just on homosexuality in general but specifically on Anglican bishops openly living in homosexual unions, including marriage.

Here his co-opting the Gospels is particularly disingenuous. For in Matthew 19:4-6 and Mark 10:6-9 Jesus explicitly states that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, not any other combination thereof or any other mammals.

Mr Mongomerie’s unsound musings wouldn’t be worth talking about if they weren’t so typical and widespread. They’re another chapter in the civilisational suicide pact called modernity. And it’s our intellectually and morally unsound opinion-formers who’ll end up pulling the trigger.

Do you think it’s wrong to play computer games on your mobile during a church service? I certainly do.

Even a non-believer must realise that doing so is a sign of disrespect both to the liturgy and to those parishioners who take it seriously. If you don’t think either is owed any respect, don’t attend mass. If you do decide to attend, you’ve joined a game played to certain rules that must be obeyed.

Do you think the culprit should be rebuked? Good, we’re in agreement on that.

A footballer who trips an opponent must be whistled for a foul. A tennis player who steps over the line when serving must be faulted. And a boor who plays computer games during mass must be…

This is where the fun starts. Such a man could be dealt with in any number of ways. He could be told to stop or get out. He could be summarily evicted. He could be told never to show his face at that church again. In any civilised society, that is.

If you still think that Russia is one such, think again. For Ruslan Sokolovsky of Yekaterinburg has just been arrested for exactly that transgression. He has been charged with two crimes: insulting the feelings of believers and inciting hatred. The first one carries a prison sentence of up to three years. The second, up to five.

Either punishment would be too soft, according to the Interior Ministry spokesman. Not even five years in the slammer would be commensurate with the crime.

One would think that a supposedly Christian country acting like a Muslim theocracy should give Putin junkies in the West second thoughts. But it won’t. Nothing will.

No doubt they’ll hail this theocratic fascism as a laudable display of the KGB junta’s conservatism. They’d feel the same way even if Sokolovsky were immolated or torn in half by two horses, which was how religious issues were settled under the early Romanovs. That’s what conservatism is all about, isn’t it?

I wonder what excuse they’ll find for the next case, that of the Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin. There the judges who sentenced Luzgin are clearly liberals getting in touch with their feminine side.

The maximum sentence for Luzgin’s crime was three years in a labour camp, and yet he got away with a mere fine of 200,000 roubles. That’s about £2,300 in our money, roughly what a teacher gets in a year or a pensioner in 18 months.

What was the blogger’s crime? I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Luzgin was charged with publishing a piece that violated the tersely worded Article 354.1 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Vindication of Nazism by the public denial of facts established by the Nuremberg Trials’ verdict and by the dissemination of knowingly false information about the USSR’s activities during the Second World War”).

The blogger had the audacity to write that not only Germany but also Russia committed aggression against Poland, thereby starting the war. Admittedly, the information Mr Luzgin disseminated indeed denied the ‘facts’ established at Nuremberg.

Except that the trials where Stalin’s Russia sat in judgement along with the Western allies were both a travesty of justice and a giant cover-up. Apart from punishing Hitler’s crimes, the trial set out to exonerate Stalin’s, which were equally heinous.

There’s nothing false about the information that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a criminal pact dividing Europe between them. That happened on 23 August, 1939. A week later, on 1 September, the Second World War started with Germany’s attack on Poland.

Contrary to the popular misapprehension, the war wasn’t exactly a cakewalk for the Nazis. Though initially stunned by the blitzkrieg, the Poles regrouped to the east of the Vistula, and their resistance was growing stronger by the day. Meanwhile the Germans were running out of essential supplies, especially aircraft bombs.

Their new Soviet allies helped, restocking the Nazis’ arsenal, as they later did during the Battle of Britain. But the Nazis demanded more tangible action, and the Soviets obliged. On 17 September they knifed Poland in the back by attacking her from the east. That put paid to the resistance, and the two predators divided the spoils stipulated in the pact.

The SS Einsatzgruppen came in the Wehrmacht’s wake and began to exterminate Jews in the western part of Poland. Similarly, the Soviet army in the east was followed by the NKVD, which had by then gathered vast experience in mass murder.

Several hundred thousand Poles were immediately deported, to the accompaniment of pistol shots fired through the heads of the usual suspects: aristocrats, priests, teachers, writers, scientists, administrators – and POW officers. The widely publicised massacre of 22,000 such people at Katyn and elsewhere was the culmination of that process, far from its entirety.

Such is the historical truth declared criminally false in Putin’s Russia. Now what do you call a regime that, on pain of punishment, forces its people to accept lies as truth? I call it fascist. Putin’s useful idiots call it conservative.

I’ll spare your delicate sensibilities by not telling you what I call Putin’s useful idiots. Let’s just say that my understanding of conservatism is at odds with theirs.