Category: Blog

Lunacy seems to be contagious, and the strain Russia is spreading is particularly virulent.

One symptom is the coverage of Brexit on Russian state television. For example, Dmitry Kisilev, affectionately described by some as Putin’s Goebbels, used his talk show on Rossiya 1, the government’s TV mouthpiece, to accuse Dave of murder.

You see, Dave tried to prevent Brexit by “a sacral sacrifice: the murder of MP Jo Cox… And what now? He divided the country, even spilled blood, but lost ignominiously.”

Putin’s dummy didn’t clarify whether Dave murdered Jo Cox personally or by proxy, but in either case it’s a shame that the British media failed to inform the public that Russia is openly accusing the British PM of violent felony.

Bugles scream and drums rattle all over the Russian media, and it’s not just empty posturing either. Since the same Kisilev threatened in 2014 to “turn the US into radioactive ash”, Russia’s military muscle has got a shot of steroids. Her military expenditure now equals 5.5 percent of GDP and close to a staggering 50 per cent of the federal budget – something seldom matched by any country even at wartime.

Since Putin’s land grab in the Ukraine, the first attempt for decades to rearrange European borders by force, Russia has saturated her western areas with troops deployed in an offensive formation. Dozens of new weapon systems have been brought on stream and moved into advanced positions. This is accompanied by a torrent of hysterical threats against the Baltics, Poland and other neighbours Russia sees as being within her sphere of influence.

Hardly a day goes by without Putin’s TV mouthpieces bewailing the plight of Russian minorities in places like Estonia (which plight is all about having to learn the local language) and threatening to defend the consanguine brethren by whatever means necessary.

What Russia considers necessary includes deliberate mass murder of civilians with weapons banned in the civilised world. One such weapon is thermobaric bombs, the most powerful explosives this side of thermonuclear warheads.

These Russia rains on the residential neighbourhoods of Aleppo and other Syrian towns, causing what we call collateral damage and what for the Russians is the intended effect.

Equally illegal are incendiary cluster bombs that the Russians, in their efforts to prop up Assad’s regime, have used on numerous occasions. Another government channel, RT, formerly known as Russia Today, inadvertently blew the whistle on this by showing RBK-500 cluster incendiaries being loaded up on Russian ground-support planes. The footage was hastily edited out, but not before experts identified the weapons.

That Russia increasingly resembles a rabid dog is beyond question. But rabies is infectious, and dogs can pass it on by biting unfortunate victims. One such victim is Peter Hitchens, who hardly misses an opportunity to declare any Russian threat nonexistent.

“Nobody who knows anything about Russia,” he writes, “thinks this is true”. Well, at the risk of sounding immodest, I know considerably more about Russia than Hitchens does, but this isn’t about an erudition contest. It’s about facts, such as those I’ve cited above.

But Hitchens obviously shares Stalin’s belief that, “if facts are stubborn things, so much the worse for facts”. Hence, “a couple of weeks ago we more or less secretly sent British troops to Ukraine, a country with which we are not in any way allied, and which is a war zone. Was Parliament asked about ‘Exercise Rapid Trident’? I can find no record of it.”

This is disingenuous. First, rather than being secret, our involvement was widely reported. Second, the government isn’t constitutionally obliged to seek parliamentary approval for sending a small contingent to participate in an exercise explicitly requested by the host country’s government, in this case the Ukraine.

Also taking part were the Ukraine herself, the US, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Turkey. All of them are either NATO members or countries vitally concerned about Russia’s shenanigans. Echoing Hitchens, ‘I can find no record of’ any of these countries asking legislative permission at home, which makes me think that was another example of empty rhetoric on Hitchens’s part.

Speaking of empty rhetoric, lame-duck President Obama expressed the hope, and lame-duck PM Dave the assurance, that Brexit wouldn’t diminish Britain’s commitment to repelling the Russian threat.

Such reiteration is redundant to the point of, well, madness. It’s like saying that England’s abysmal exit from the UEFA Championship doesn’t diminish her commitment to do well at the Tour de France. The two things have nothing to do with each other.

Brexit means leaving the EU, not NATO, and it’s NATO, not the EU, that has kept Russia at bay for the last 71 years. One has to be mad not to realise this or not to see the grave danger presented by Putin’s kleptofascist regime. Or else one has to be François Hollande who has declared that he regards Putin as a partner, not a threat, and NATO should have no say in Europe’s dealings with Russia.

Without NATO, France and the rest of Europe would have been a Russian colony for at least half a century. But then Messrs Hollande, Hitchens et al are too insane to realise this.

This isn’t a figure of speech. The blood of 179 British servicemen and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is on Tony ‘Yo’ Blair’s hands.

Sir John Chilcot’s report, every one of its 2.5 million words, leaves no room for doubt, reasonable or otherwise: Blair is as guilty of those deaths as he would be had he murdered all those people himself. He lied to the people, Parliament and even his cabinet colleagues to draw the country into a criminal war initiated by a harebrained US president expertly primed by the neocons.

“I am with you, whatever,” Blair wrote to George W. Bush, a blanket commitment he had no constitutional right to make without prior parliamentary endorsement. But how else could Tony be seen as a global statesman if not by riding the neocons’ coattails, kissing what was between them as he went along?

In reality Blair was seen as something else: a poodle to Bush’s master, someone who could be summoned with a contemptuous “Yo, Blair!”. But then he would have responded to “Yo, Fido!” if such self-debasement could have paved the way to a place at the top table.

Though Dave has given him a good run for his money, Blair is the most revolting personage ever to disgrace 10 Downing Street in my lifetime. He personifies everything objectionable about the modern world driven by the ‘Enlightenment’ into the pitch-darkness of soulless, mindless anomie.

He’s the quintessential type of modern leader: an important nonentity. For the public, corrupted by the toxic cult of celebrity, responds with enthusiasm to any display of the same qualities that in the past were seen as a mark of a smug, not particularly bright nobody obsessed with self-aggrandisement.

If we listen attentively to a retarded footballer pontificating on the delights of European federalism, why can’t we elevate someone like Blair to Number 10? No reason at all.

All it takes is a vacuous grin permanently pasted on a rather effeminate face, an accent showing signs of efforts to bring it down a few notches, a chiseller’s knack at lying effortlessly – and presto, we’ve got the kind of PM we deserve.

The accent alone is a sufficient telltale sign: Blair knew he had to drop his aitches and do glottal stops to have any credibility with the chaps who belt out Internationale and Bandiera Rossa at their party conferences. However, the aitches had to come back and the glottal stops to drop out whenever he schmoozed his Islington friends or solicited funds at black-tie soirées. It would have taken a superhuman effort not to get things wrong, and Tone would occasionally blunder, though not often.

One charge Blair can be absolved of is that of immorality. He isn’t immoral. He’s amoral in that he has no real concept of right and wrong. Whatever suits him at the moment is right, whatever doesn’t is wrong – there’s something Leninist about that, which is what Tony ‘Anthony’ was in his student days. (By all accounts, he was a few other things as well – just Google ‘Miranda’ Blair and ‘public lavatory solicitation’, see what you get.)

The other day Stephen Glover wrote a good article, arguing that such dedicated amorality has to be a sign of mental illness. I’m not qualified to pass clinical judgement, but if amorality, Blair style, is indeed a kind of psychopathology, it’s nothing short of pandemic.

Most modern politicians suffer from it, although admittedly in Blair’s case the disease seems to appear in its severest form. Just look at his relationship with Rupert Murdoch.

Blair could be justified in changing his surname to Murdoch: Murdoch created Blair politically just as he created his children physically. Without Murdoch’s News Corporation, Blair would have been an obscure Labour MP shunned by his parliamentary colleagues for his insane ambition unsupported by any discernible qualifications.

Gratitude would have been in order, but what does Blair do? He has an affair with the old man’s young wife, doubtless causing him no end of grief. But when that happened, Blair was no longer a PM. He was a millionaire socialite, and that’s the sort of thing socialites are expected to do to be taken seriously.

Speaking of his millions, every one of them was made in ways consistent with Blair’s take on morality. Tone has never met a bloodthirsty tyrant he couldn’t love, provided the checques didn’t bounce.

For example, no self-respecting man would want to sully his hands with the dirty money paid out by Nursultan Nazarbayev, who turned Kazakhstan into one of the world’s biggest Mafia families. Yet Blair is proud to have that criminal among his clients, one of many such personages on his list.

“If I was back in the same place with the same information, I would take the same decision,” said Blair about his criminal decision to be with Dubya, whatever.

We can’t expect remorse from an amoral psychopath, but we should expect reasonable grammar from someone who went to good schools. Oh well, Blair may not know that it should have been “If I were…” but he knows something much more important. How to get away with murder.

The OED defines xenophobia as “deep-rooted fear towards foreigners”, but who cares about dictionary definitions any longer?

In its true sense, xenophobia is a relatively rare psychiatric condition that I, for one, have never encountered, although I believe the experts who say it exists.

In its corrupted sense, ‘xenophobe’ is used in the UK to describe anyone who loves England; wants it to remain England; objects to the English becoming a minority in their country, as they already are in their capital; thinks our laws should be passed by Parliament, not Angela Merkel, and based on our legal tradition, not the Koran; likes to deal with English-speaking service personnel in England; has voted Leave in the recent referendum.

It also describes the security guard at Canterbury cathedral, who dared display that quirky, if slightly savage, sense of humour that’s a distinguishing, and to me appealing, characteristic of the English working class.

Argentine dance teacher Silvinia Fairbass, resident in Britain for 12 years, visited the cathedral but somehow couldn’t find her way in. She asked the guard for directions, who, having detected a foreign accent, said, pointing southwards, “Dover’s that way, love.”

This is so much more subtle than what I heard some 40 years ago in Texas, when complaining about slow service at a garage. “Boh,” said the grease monkey, “if y’all doan lahk it here, whah dontcha go back where y’all cum from?” That remark hurt and I took all of 20 seconds to recover my composure.

Mrs Fairbass took a while longer, proving that, though of foreign origin, she has already been imbued with The Guardian way of reacting to transgressions against the prevailing ethos.

“I think since the referendum, unfortunately, there has been a minority who see a platform to voice their opinions against foreigners,” she wrote on Facebook.

“Yes, I’m a foreigner living in the UK. I’m also a British citizen, a hard-working person, a mum, a wife, a house owner, a teacher who inspires young people, I’m also an enthusiastic and positive person. I can speak two languages, I have two bilingual children, I have an amazing husband and I run my own successful little business.”

Easy, love. This isn’t a job application you’re writing. It’s a silly complaint about an off-hand snide remark that any normal person would have forgotten before reaching the cathedral’s stained glass depicting Thomas à Becket.

The guard deserves a reprimand. But do let’s keep our hair on: the referendum has nothing to do with the sentiments he expressed. Long before Maastricht one could hear similar feelings communicated at football stadiums every time England faced foreign opposition.

When England were playing against Holland, the fans chanted “If it wasn’t for England, you’d all be Krauts.” Against Turkey: “I’d rather be a Paki than a Turk”. Against France: “You’re French and you know it”. (If you don’t understand this one, you probably don’t follow English football, but I’d rather not translate. It’s offensive enough, trust me.)

None of this is praiseworthy, but do let’s dismount our high horse. A bit of savage humour is far from the worst thing English football fans have been known to perpetrate. And anyone who thinks people can be cured of primal tribalism must be living on a different planet.

Switching from psychology to physics, let’s remind ourselves of Newton’s Third Law that says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Now switching back to psychology, let’s also accept that most people prefer to be surrounded by those who are broadly similar to themselves. This means not only race or ethnicity, but also other factors, such as class.

From my own experience (and I hope my CV protects me from any charge of Little England xenophobia), the English welcome foreigners with more real cordiality, if less shoulder-slapping conviviality, than even Americans, who pride themselves on being descendants of immigrants.

London in particular is the most cosmopolitan capital city in the world, actually a bit too cosmopolitan even for my taste. But there’s a limit to English hospitality, especially when it comes to welcoming hordes of migrants who aren’t just alien to our culture but actively hostile to it.

It’s when our governing spivs set out to dilute Englishness the better to lord it over the English that Newton’s law kicks in. The deliberate action of demographic subversion (to which the likes of Blair and Mandelson own up with pride) causes an equal and opposite reaction of hostility towards foreigners – especially when the subversion is imposed by a vile pan-European contrivance over whose actions the British have no say.

When the proportion of those who speak funny reaches a certain critical mass, people rebel, as they have done everywhere throughout history. Witness the 1282 rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers, when the locals murdered 6,000 people who either didn’t speak their language at all or did so with a French accent.

The English so far are limiting themselves to dubiously humorous remarks, but there’s only so much they can take. Hence Mrs Fairbass should count her blessings: if we indeed leave the EU and stem the influx of foreigners, she ought to say thanks to the referendum. It might yet succeed in keeping blood off our streets.

Normally, there are only two possible courses of action.

The most natural thing would be for the victim to report the crime and assist the police as best she can. Alternatively, some women may be so traumatised that they may choose to suffer in silence.

‘Normally’ was actually a disclaimer, for our time is far from normal. Witness the dilemma that gored Selin Gören with its horns.

Selin, 24, is a German woman, a prominent member of the Linksjugend Solid, an extremist far-left youth organisation. Her remit is to make sure the millions of aliens cordially invited by Angela Merkel suffer no racist abuse.

If what happened on 27 January weren’t so disgustingly awful, one would be prepared to suggest there was poetic justice to it. For three of those potential victims of understated hospitality grabbed Selin off the street and dragged her into a dark playground.

There she was forced to ‘perform a sexual act’ on two of them, with the third assailant providing a blow-by-blow commentary, accompanied by hissing abuse at the victim. At least that’s what she thought it was, for her assailants were Arabic-speaking migrants.

Eventually the girl broke loose and ran to the nearest police station, where she experienced a severe conflict of pieties. Yes, she had been subjected to a violent and degrading assault. However, she was concerned that, should the details of the gang rape become known, anti-Muslim feelings would become even stronger.

Hence the third possible course of action, one I didn’t think of: Selin went to the police but lied to them. Omitting the rape, she only said that her handbag had been stolen – by “foreigners and Germans alike”, all speaking German.

However, having discovered the next morning that the libidinous Mohammedans had raped another woman in the area, she owned up. Presumably out of sympathy for her ordeal, the police didn’t charge her with perverting the course of justice – to the regret of those who refuse to accept against all evidence that we now live in a madhouse.

But Selin then suffered another attack, that of remorse. Consequently she did what anyone experiencing such feeling would do: she apologised, using her Facebook page as the medium. Addressing a hypothetical collective Muslim, a recent arrival in Germany, Gören wrote (I’m abridging her rambling message):

“Dear male refugee,

“I am so incredibly sorry! I am happy and glad that you made it here. But I fear you aren’t safe here.

“You aren’t safe here because we live in a racist society. I am not safe here, because we live in a sexist society.

“But what truly makes me feel sorry is the circumstances by which the sexist and boundary-crossing acts that were inflicted on me may make you beset by increasing and more aggressive racism.

“I promise you… I will not stand by idly and watch as racists and concerned citizens call you a problem.

“You are not the problem. You most often are a wonderful human being, who deserves to be free and safe like everyone else.

“Thank you that you exist, and glad to have you here.”

In other words, “the sexist and boundary-crossing acts” were inflicted on Selin by Germany’s society, not by those three “wonderful human beings”. Absolved of any personal responsibility, they’re as much the victims of the gang rape as Selin is.

According to the same post, many other women are also driven by their flaming conscience not to report being raped by Muslims. God forbid someone might suggest that the country’s immigration policy ought to be more selective. They’d rather suffer in silence and let the innocent victims of society go on raping to their hearts’ content.

One wonders if Swedish women, 40 of whom have so far been raped during the ongoing Islamic festival, are equally forgiving. Some judges from here to Australia certainly are: they often let Muslim rapists off, citing ‘cultural differences’ as an extenuating circumstance. Does the compulsion to stone adulterers or castrate young girls also fall into that category, Your Honours?

Does suicide bombing? It could be plausibly argued that, while our culture encourages us to build skyscrapers, the Muslims’ culture makes them fly hijacked airliners into those skyscrapers. Vive la différence and all that.

The problem indeed isn’t with the Muslims, Selin is right about that: they are what they are. The problem is with us: we are what we’ve become.

We’ve jettisoned absolute truth as the ballast holding us down. As a result our reason has lost any teleological aspect – in other words, it has stopped being reason. Instead we’re each encouraged to have our personal sets of little truths: you like one thing, he likes another, they like a third – who’s to say which is right?

The only judgement we accept is not to be judgemental: nothing is right or wrong, anything goes. If in the past people like Selin would have been confined to the margins, possibly to the lunatic asylum, today they set the tone for the whole society. Increasingly they are the whole society.

Saying that they ought to be confined to the margins, possibly to the lunatic asylum, is already difficult; before long it’ll become illegal. Brace yourself: before long Selin will become an EU Commissioner. She’s amply qualified.

 

“Did not the American Revolution produce the French Revolution? And did not the French Revolution produce all the calamities and desolation of the human race and the whole globe ever since?”

Truer words have seldom been spoken, and do you wonder who was that inveterate reactionary speaking them? Who was that vermin who dismissed at a stroke the keystone events of our glorious modernity?

That arch-Tory Dr Johnson who said, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”? No, it was John Adams, America’s second president, writing in 1811, when Adams belatedly realised what he and his friends had perpetrated.

Say what you will about the Founders but, unlike their today’s heirs, they weren’t deaf to semantic distinctions. For example, they knew the difference between a republic and democracy.

‘Democracy’ never appears in their writings, except in pejorative contexts. Thus Thomas Jefferson: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”

The Founders didn’t realise that a republic adhering to Enlightenment tenets will always become a democracy, while the latter will avoid ‘mob rule’ only by turning itself into a giant bureaucracy increasingly detached from the people it governs.

I’m always wary of countries whose origin can be traced back to a particular date. They’re inevitably contrivances, owing their existence to a violently expressed ideology rather than organic development.

The US too is the living embodiment of Enlightenment principles realised by ideologues. Like most revolutionary demagogues, the Founders had to concoct legitimising grievances, portrayed as unendurable but in fact mythical.

Thus they described that nice George III as a tyrant. In fact, if anything, his American subjects were a privileged lot compared to the English themselves.

One made-up grievance was taxation without representation. In fact, a typical colonist was taxed at barely a third of a metropolitan subject (many of whom weren’t represented either). With the advent of ‘liberty’ their taxes instantly went up, the Americans realised they didn’t like them even with representation and have been studiously avoiding them ever since.

One would guess that, given the choice of being taxed at half their income with representation or at 10 per cent without, a majority would opt for the latter. But the expensive toothpaste of centralising statism (otherwise known as modern democracy) cannot be squeezed back into its tube.

Add to this the founding claim that, self-evidently, “all men are created equal”, and the ostensible justification for the revolutionary outburst begins to look even more nebulous. (As a clever American once quipped, “This truth had better be self-evident, because you sure as hell can’t prove it.”)

But that doesn’t mean there was no justification. There was: the advent of our soulless, anomic modernity adumbrated by the ‘Enlightenment’, whose clarion call the Founders heard in every tonal detail.

The ‘Enlightenment’ was animated by hatred of Christendom, its civilisation, philosophy and above all religion. It wasn’t by accident that most Founders were, at best, deists and haters of Trinitarian Christianity. (Many were also Masons, and the republic’s livery includes much Masonic imagery. It’s also worth noting that both the architecture of the shrines in Washington’s Tidal Basin, and the inscriptions inside, frankly proclaim their pagan origin.)

Jefferson was among them, and he rejoiced that the First Amendment built “a wall of separation between Church and State”. To make this wall impregnable, he created his own patchwork gospel, pasting into a notebook the bits he liked and omitting those he hated, which is to say anything miraculous.

St Augustine must have had a premonition of Jefferson 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 but yourself.” In fact, solipsistic belief in self, curiously mixed with pandemic conformism, became a distinguishing feature of Americans, and not the most endearing one.

What was born on the 4^th of July was the battering ram of modernity, the debaucher of everything sublime in our civilisation and the creator of “happiness”, understood in the crudest, materialistic sense.

The American dream, summarized by Kennedy so forthrightly as “two chickens in every pot, two cars in every garage”, is the stuff of which nightmares used to be made, vulgarity raised to the altar of neo-pagan deities. Alas, the chickens and the cars aren’t strong enough adhesives to keep society together.

Hence the founding American anomie, while producing the ‘happiest’ society the world has ever known, has also created the most atomised and disjointed one. Moreover, Americans evince the characteristic smugness of a provincial autodidact, certain that he has solved all the little problems of life and now must teach others the only true way.

I hope you understand that everything I say is underpinned by an unspoken “with notable exceptions”. I do know many cultured and civilised Americans; in fact, I’m proud to number many among my friends and readers.

Those Americans I cordially congratulate on their 240^th anniversary – except that I suspect they may not see it as a cause for celebration.

Scrofulous youngsters are out in force, demanding a re-run of the referendum. Most of them are students or recent graduates, meaning they appear as ‘educated’ in the demographic rubric.

So they are, but not in the sense in which the word used to be understood. They’ve been educated to believe that they’re entitled to belong to, or at least to be governed by, the political elite that has invalidated politics.

To be sure, elaborate games are played to determine which ideological twin rises to the top. But the system is geared to throw up nothing but twins, all mentally and morally retarded, all adept at tricking the people into believing they actually have a say.

Demos has been taken out of democracy, and the term is still bandied about for subterfuge only. Yet suddenly the silent majority was granted the chance to speak out – but only because the governing spivs were sure they’d win. The ‘educated’ elite wanted to go on lapping up the gravy falling off the EU train, while professing an undying devotion to democracy.

However, the demos refused to be tricked; it saw through the propaganda and the scaremongering. Predictably, all hell broke loose.

The scrofulous youngsters, expertly prodded by scum like Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair et al, set out to vindicate the grim vision of The Lord of the Flies. There are no rules, except the rule by the savage infants of all ages, the ‘educated’ elite.

Abuse is being heaped on the majority. They’re all stupid, bigoted, racist and [insert your own pejorative term – anything will work]. They’re too dumb to realise that democracy is but a game, a few perfunctory contortions the elite goes through before getting its way.

It’s as if someone had replaced Monopoly money with real cash – nothing like that to kill a good game. Democracy has spoken and the ‘educated’ wish it had kept its mouth shut.

Now I’m opposed to modern unchecked democracy in general and direct democracy in particular: it’s sheer folly to rely on this method in the devilishly complex task of governing a great country.

Edmund Burke argued that representatives are elected to act according to the people’s interests, not wishes. And, to make sure representatives act in the people’s interests rather than their own, elected political power needs to be balanced by the apolitical hereditary kind.

Burke would be aghast to see an issue of vital constitutional import being settled by plebiscite. But he’d be even more horrified if he realised that his cherished balance has been destroyed. One end of the seesaw has violently shot up, throwing skywards intellectual and moral retards who despise not only people’s wishes but also their interests.

The old Whig would think it over and then grudgingly admit that any method of bypassing the dictatorship of the retards is preferable to letting them run unopposed. He’d also be curious to know what the word ‘educated’ means nowadays, so different it is from his own understanding.

Back in Burke’s day any secondary school provided an infinitely better education than even today’s Oxbridge, never mind all those mock-university polytechnics. And a university degree was invariably synonymous with education.

Today it’s more nearly antonymous to it. In the humanities, even the sheer corpus of data conferred by modern universities is minuscule compared to the past. But real education is so much more than gathering information. It’s what happens as a result, a shift towards moral and intellectual understanding, enlightenment in the true, lower-case sense of the word, rather than bogus capitalised one.

If that shift occurs, any gaps in erudition can be filled by self-education. If the shift doesn’t occur, no amount of information will help.

It’s safe to say that today’s universities don’t produce any such shift, quite the opposite. It’s as if their real purpose is to keep the young infantilised for ever.

Hence no truly educated people want a re-run of the referendum. Only two types do: fools and knaves. Leaving knavery apart, just look at what the re-runners are saying, which is neither grown-up nor clever.

“The Leave campaign won by lying”. As any educated person would know, that campaign lived or died by the claim that Britain would regain her sovereignty by leaving the EU. Only an ignoramus would think that was a lie.

“The referendum was advisory, and Parliament can overturn the result”. If that statement had been made before the referendum, not after, it would ring plausible. As it is, it’s dishonest and ignorant.

“The young were disfranchised.” That would be a good idea: today’s young aren’t equipped to vote. But alas that didn’t happen; the young had the same vote as everyone else. They chose not to use it: less than a third of them voted, versus 85 per cent of the over-55s. Tough. Now they should shut up and listen to their elders – rather than doing a creditable impersonation of Mao’s Red Guards.

That’s modernity for you. Inaugurated in the name of reason, it has destroyed reason. Touting humanism, it has debauched human dignity. And, devoted to democracy, it has reduced it to an obscene spectacle in the theatre of shadows.

While arrogantly claiming I know something about the science of politics, I humbly admit that I understand little about its mechanics. And whenever I forget to be humble, something like the current madhouse gets me back in touch with reality.

The Tory leadership contest seems all but sewn up. Home Secretary Theresa May has been endorsed by all and sundry, and her lead in the polls is so vast that, this once, one must conclude that the polls aren’t lying.

Why, even our most conservative paper The Daily Mail has come out in favour. The editors must have their reasons, considering that Mrs May is far from being the most conservative contender.

I find it impossible to understand how it’s possible to entrust the negotiations about leaving the EU to someone who campaigned against it. The only healthy premise for such negotiations is utter contempt for the EU and everything it stands for. In the absence of such, the negotiator may succumb to one of numerous temptations to sell Britain down the river.

Liam Fox, my preference of the bad bunch, isn’t seen as a serious contender, so the choice is reduced to Mrs May, with her awful taste in clothes, and Mr Gove, with his awful taste in women. But then modern democracy is all about the evil of two lessers.

(Speaking of Mrs May’s clothes, when announcing her candidature she wore a trouser suit of Clan Gordon tartan. Generally speaking, it’s in bad taste to wear tartan unless one is entitled to it by birth, which Mrs May isn’t. Specifically speaking, this is another example of devious politicking: support me, she’s saying to the Scots subliminally, and I’ll rain bribes on you to stay in the Union.)

Given such an uninspiring choice, any sensible person would prefer Gove. At least he had the courage to put his career on the line by leading the Leave campaign. Mrs May shilly-shallied at first, then came out in favour of Remain. However, she hedged her bets by keeping a low profile.

This lack of any discernible convictions seems to be an innate, or else family, trait. Although raised as an Anglican by her vicar father, young Theresa augmented her grammar-school education with a spell at a Catholic school. That’s a bit too ecumenical for anyone who takes religion seriously but, being a modern politician, Mrs May takes nothing but Mrs May seriously.

The Mail doesn’t seem to mind anything about her, and the things it admires are odd. According to the paper, she isn’t “a divisive, ideology-driven Right-winger”. This is leftie longhand for a conservative, and it’s disheartening to see a conservative paper using it.

The whole thing about Mrs May is that she’s a congenital fence-sitter, neither left nor right, nor anything much. Because she stands for nothing, she can fall for any lie proffered by the EU.

Then The Mail fires a shot in the class war by extolling Mrs May’s humble origins: “she is not a member of the privileged classes”. The implication is that Cameron is an unprincipled, ineffectual spiv because he’s a toff. This is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that.

Being an Old Etonian should be neither an automatic qualification nor disqualification to hold a government post. An overwhelming majority of Britain’s best political leaders came from ‘the privileged classes’, but the requisite qualities of intelligence, integrity and character aren’t confined to any particular group.

A claim that a vicar’s daughter is ipso facto more attuned to the interests of the common man is false, and grossly so. That by itself is sufficient to show that The Mail isn’t really a conservative paper.

Mrs May isn’t a conservative either, which is why she too joined the class battle, though with her characteristic timidity: “If you are from an ordinary, working-class family,” she said, “life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.”

Note the acuteness of observation and depth of thought. Consider also that so far the only intention Mrs May has stated as a future PM is to reverse just about the only sensible policy of Dave’s administration: commitment to eliminating the budget deficit.

So by all means let’s destroy the economy by continuing to spend billions (trillions?) more than we earn. That’ll help working-class families no end.

“Certainly,” admits the paper generously, “her record on controlling immigration has been disappointing, to say the least.” Not to worry, “in her steeliness, she is somewhat reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher”.

And chicken salad is somewhat reminiscent of chicken wire. The only thing the two ladies have in common is the same set of chromosomes, which these days is supposed to give a candidate a leg-up.

I’m not an unequivocal admirer of Margaret Thatcher, but she certainly had the strength of her convictions. Mrs May has neither strength nor convictions: she has no immediately obvious qualification to lead her country.

And here’s the clincher: Ken Clarke has endorsed her. Now Ken has maniacally devoted the last 20 years of his career to dissolving Britain’s sovereignty in the EU’s. Single currency, single army, single taxation, you name it, Ken loves it all.

One has to believe he knows something about Mrs May we don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Levy has written an article saying nasty things about Junk, as Jean-Claude likes to be known to his friends, among whom I proudly number myself. Actually Junk’s preference for this affectionate diminutive is regrettable, for nothing symbolises the unifying nature of the EU like his full name, including as it does both French and German constituents.

Mr Levy’s ad hominems are grossly unfair and in some quarters may be considered libellous. For example, he correctly states that Junk’s chosen tipple is Glenfarclas, a tasty Speyside malt whisky. So far so good, and any honest commentator would praise Junk for patronising a British product in preference to that froggish Martel Cordon Bleu he used to favour for breakfast.

Yet Mr Levy missed a further opportunity of praising Junk, instead targeting for scorn the scale on which Junk patronises that particular product. If he knew Junk as intimately as I do, he’d know that Junk consumes prodigious amounts of Glenfarclas, starting at breakfast, not because he’s, perish the thought, a drunk but because he specifically wishes to give a much-needed boost to Scotland’s economy.

After all, if Scotland does split away from the UK and joins the EU, Junk will have to pick up the tab currently footed by the English taxpayer. That’s why he has a vested interest in the state of Scotland’s economy: the stronger it is, the less the EU will have to pay in subsidies.

You may say that even consuming two bottles of Glenfarclas, as Junk does so faithfully, represents but a drop in the rapidly receding ocean of the Scottish economy. But hey, a man can only do what he can do, and what’s Mr Levy done for Scotland lately?

Fair enough, failure to praise doesn’t constitute libel, although it does suggest poor judgement on Mr Levy’s part. But then he maligned Junk to such an extent that, if I were Junk, I’d be instructing a law firm even as we speak.

But judge for yourself: “Juncker is said to have a particular weakness for Glenfarclas malt whisky (which costs up to £130), bottles of which are said to be kept in the fridge behind his Commissioner’s desk,” writes Mr Levy.

A weakness, Mr Levy? I’d call it a strength. The hack obviously wishes to impugn Junk’s character by implying that he uses EU funds for his own pleasure. That he may do at times, and who among us would miss the opportunity to stick our snout into that particular trough?

But, while some varieties of Glenfarclas do reach the level Mr Levy mentioned, its normal price range is within 10 quid on either side of £50, and I happen to know that these are the kinds Junk prefers with his cornflakes. However, it’s the second part of Mr Levy’s statement that really upset Junk.

“Alex,” he told me on the phone, “quel genre de Dummkopf does this espèce d’enculé think he is?” (Junk prides himself on his multilingual eloquence.) “No normale Mann would ever penser of keeping a decent malt in a foutu Kühlschrank. This would absolutely zerstören the saveur, turning a great Scottish product into pisse de cheval. Nicola would kill me tot if she found out I did that. I don’t keep my booze in a bloody Kühlschrank behind my desk. I keep it in my foutu Schreibtisch.”

Junk was referring to Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister. In fact, if truth be known, she’s a bit more than a friend to Junk, which he unwisely revealed to the media the other day.

Junk let himself be photographed kissing Nicola on the mouth, with his right hand on her left breast. Unwise it might have been, but that uninhibited gesture said so much about Junk, so many things that made me admire him even more.

For one thing, he was clearly in his cups, showing yet again his laudably unwavering commitment to boosting Scotland’s only viable export. Also, by indulging in public foreplay for the camera, Junk demonstrated commendable disdain for the wagging of the mauvaises langues, or mauvaises Zungen, as he likes to say with his multilingual ease.

And then, by feeling up this grossly unattractive creature, Junk showed that, in common with all worthy men, he’s more fastidious in his taste for whisky than for women. Of course he also gave Nicky the Fish, as he lovingly calls her, a sense of being wanted, something so important to plain women.

Or plain men, it has to be said, for immediately after the referendum Junk took advantage of another photo op by kissing Nigel Farage on the lips (“No Zungen, Alex, me old china,” he told me afterwards).

One can see how Junk and Nigel may feel affectionate towards each other, for all the divergence of their views. Men can have stronger bonds than mere politics, and those uniting Junk and Nigel are unbreakable. Both love a drink and both are married to German women, which again shows they got their priorities right. “There are no ugly women,” say the Russians. “There’s only not enough booze.”

So here’s to you, Junk. The sun is over the yardarm somewhere, Junk, my old porcelaine. Bottoms up, as Nicola would say.

The EU is a flimsy structure built on a foundation of lies. These are indeed fundamental, not a misquoted number here or there. Listing all the lies would be tedious, but it’s worth mentioning some salient ones, those bandied about widely.

One is that the EU is primarily a trading bloc, pursuing not so much political ends as the economic good of its members. In fact, the reverse is true – and has been from the very beginning. Witness these two quotations from Jean Monnet, the first one from 1943:

“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”

That’s the strategy. Here are the tactics:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Cynical? Devious? Evil? All those things, to be sure. But above all those clear statements are to the point: any claim that the EU is mainly about economics is a lie.

Nor does Germany, the EU’s ringleader, care about the wellbeing of other members – that’s another lie. Time and again the economic interests of every member nation except Germany have been wantonly sacrificed for political ends.

After all, no one could have been so stupid as to believe that fusing 28 nations, each with its own history and culture, into a single economic and political entity could possibly work. And as to the lunatic idea of imposing a single currency on 19 nations varying from Germany and Holland to Greece and Portugal, the results are there for all to see.

National economies were sacrificed at the altar of wicked politics, which is why the per capita GDP of every eurozone country (save Germany, of course) has declined since Maastricht.

However, of all the flagrant lies spouted by Eurogues, none incenses me more than the claim often heard in southern Europe, that the EU is a product of Catholic universalism, the modern answer to the Holy Roman Empire.

At play here is another example of what I call the larcenous shift of modernity, wherein Christendom’s social and moral property was broken off its religious underpinnings, dragged into the house of the new owner and adapted to his nefarious purposes.

Thus Christian expansiveness was transformed into modern expansionism. Christian introspection became modern obsession with psychology, understood in a materialistic way. And Christian nurturing of reason as a cognitive tool, one of many, re-appeared as modern belief in reason as a be-all and end-all.

Another term I favour is ‘rule by simulacrum’: people are fed sounds to which their ears have been attuned for centuries, except that those sounds now mean something different. Thus nebulous, secular human rights are a simulacrum of the Christian belief in the self-significance of every person created in the image of God; destructive modern egalitarianism is a simulacrum of the Christian belief in equality of all before God – and so forth.

By the same token, the founders of the EU, many of them Catholics (Monnet, Schuman, Gasperi, Adenauer, Spinelli), created a secular simulacrum of Catholic universalism. Hence their liberal use of words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘subsidiarity’, which came from the lexicon of Catholic social teaching.

That those men were raised as Catholics had as little significance as the Catholic background of Hitler or the Orthodox one of Stalin. Whatever they were in their private lives, in their pan-European politics they pursued strictly non-Christian, not to say anti-Christian, aims.

In this they followed a path well-trodden by all heresies throughout history. Heretics readily accept most of doctrine – except one detail. That one fragment is then broken off the whole and peddled as the most important thing. The ostensible aim is purification and simplification. The real aim is perversion and destruction.

Thus Arianism, a heresy that began, and almost made sure Christianity would end, in the third century, accepted practically the whole doctrine: a single, loving, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, Jesus Christ as the Son of God endowed with divine nature. One minor thing they didn’t accept was Christ being consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, part of the same triune Godhead.

That minor detail eliminated at a stroke the Holy Trinity, the cornerstone of Christianity, reducing Christ to the same role he’d later play in Islam, that of merely an important, divinely inspired prophet. Had Arius not been defeated at the 325 Council of Nicaea, Christianity would have been reduced to an obscure cult.

By the same token, those Catholics who conceived an EU, took such Catholic concepts as universalism and solidarity coupled with subsidiarity and shifted them into the secular realm of wicked politics. Alas, one minor detail, God, got lost along the way.

The genesis of the EU owes more (though not everything, I hasten to add) to the Third Reich than to the Holy Roman Empire. However, one has to admire the sheer effrontery of those who insist on its Catholic roots. Lesser men would be too embarrassed to pull such a fraudulent trick.

Talk to any woman who has gestated a foetus to full term, and she’ll tell you what a spiritually rewarding experience that is.

To feel a life growing inside you and then popping out to face the wonders of the world – such joy must transcend the quotidian life and reach out to the mystery of man, the mystery of God.

As a passionate believer in universal human rights, those bestowed not by some nebulous God but by the tangible, ironclad UN Declaration, I regard this transcendent experience as an inalienable right of every sexually mature human being, irrespective of sex… sorry, I mean gender, how very reactionary of me.

However, this indisputable right, bestowed by the United Church of Internationalism, has so far been denied to a full half of mankind… sorry, I mean personkind, how very reactionary of me. Granted, some men keep on trying to partake of this ineffable joy – 1.5 per cent of us if you believe research, or 25 per cent if you believe Peter Tatchell and other dedicated fighters for this sacred right.

Alas, all their vigorous, thrusting efforts to be impregnated by fellow men have remained in vain, frustrating their souls, blighting their lives and enraging those observers who, like me, are passionately devoted to equality über alles, the phrase Germans use to sing but prudently don’t any longer.

Any inequality demands correction and restitution, no one can argue against that. The first step is to acknowledge the enormity of it all and offer one’s heartfelt apologies.

His Holiness Pope Francis showed how the other day, by stating from the height of his ecclesiastical authority that “the Church not only should apologise to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by work.”

No parallel demand was issued for reciprocal apology from ‘gay persons’ who might have offended the Church, and quite right too. The Church, as everyone knows, is history’s greatest, nay only, oppressor, and she’s the one to keep apologising till the cardinals come home.

That’s the only way to pour balm on historical wounds, to alleviate the pain suffered by ‘gay persons’, women and children since that nasty male God chose to punish women by making childbirth excruciatingly painful.

All of us good Christians should sign, if only inwardly, this plea for forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find something else to apologise for, thereby correcting the pontiff’s omission. So here I am, on bended knee, offering my grovelling apologies to all those men who have since the time of Adam craved pregnancy but have been denied life’s unique experience by the cruelty of God and inadequacy of medical science.

You might think that, being neither God nor a medical scientist, I’m not to blame for this outrage personally. That only goes to show it’s you and not me who’s hopelessly reactionary. There’s no such thing as individual guilt – all guilt is collective, shared equally by every member of the delinquent group and indeed society at large. So, on behalf of all men who have never wanted to get pregnant I’m hereby offering an apology to those who have.

Now comes the restitution part, doubtless inspired by courageous women like Chastity Bowick, born a man but miraculously transformed into a woman, and an appropriately named one at that. As a boy, Chastity dreamed about giving birth one day: “If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” says Chastity, now as feminine as any woman you’d ever wish to meet, provided it’s not in a dark alley.

Well, Chastity, there is Santa Claus: the dream is about to become reality. According to Scientific American, the wonders of modern science are such that a former man can – or at least soon will be able to – become pregnant by uterine transplant:

“Here is how it could work: First, a patient would likely need castration surgery and high doses of exogenous hormones because high levels of male sex hormones, called androgens, could threaten pregnancy. (Although hormone treatments can be powerful, patients would likely need to be castrated because the therapy might not be enough to maintain the pregnancy among patients with testes.) The patient would also need surgery to create a ‘neovagina’ that would be connected to the transplant uterus, to shed menses and give doctors access to the uterus for follow-up care.”

A lovely read, that. All those technical glitches mentioned are soon to be removed – the march of progress is unstoppable. If something can be done, it must be done: progress springs to life from this unassailable premise. Hence before long it’s new women like Chastity who will develop that majestic glow hitherto denied them.

All we can do is rejoice with them, while apologising unreservedly for the cruelty of having denied them this dream for so long. I do hope His Holiness will join me in expressing such sentiments – he can do grovelling apology with the best of them.