Category: Blog

Except that this morning my French friends aren’t referring to Islam in such terms. Actually, they never have.

‘Religion of peace’ is a term coined by les Anglo-Saxons on either side of the ocean. I wonder if Bush and Cameron still think that’s what it is. I wonder if they ever did.

Probably not: even our politicians seldom reach such levels of ignorance and stupidity. They do, however, operate at a level where suicidal, subversive multi-culti twaddle has been elevated to a religion, the only one they have (apart from looking out for Number 1, narrowly defined as themselves).

Otherwise they’d see that what goes on isn’t just isolated terrorist acts here or there. There’s a war on, and only one side is fighting it.

It’s not a war between our limited forces in the Middle East and any specific groups, from ISIS to el-Qaeda. It’s one between whatever little is left of our civilisation and Islamic barbarism, of which there is an inexhaustible supply.

A civilisational clash is a game that never ends in a draw. One side vanquishes, the other dies, if not physically then in every other meaningful sense. And we are losing.

What happened in Paris yesterday is but a skirmish in an all-out war of annihilation. Those killed aren’t victims. They are casualties.

The papers everywhere are full of expressions of solidarity, condolences and sympathy for the casualties’ families. These aren’t out of place; they are much needed.

Yet what doesn’t seem to appear anywhere is an answer to the lapidary question inevitably asked by les Anglo-Saxons, with their congenital pragmatism: So what are we going to do about it?

If the present is a reliable indication of the future, the answer is nothing. Nothing positive anyway.

For the present shows a civilisation desperately looking for a knife to slash its own collective throat. Well, this weapon has been found, and before long it’ll be sharp enough to do the job.

A civilisation can’t resist vicious predators when it itself is caught in the vicious circle of the virtual world, stripped of everything real and filled with apparitions, shadows, vacuous phrases flowing in and out of thin air, ideologies rather than ideas, fads rather than convictions, inner mushiness rather than a steel core, sentimentality rather than sentiment.

We’re under fire, ladies and gentlemen, and we have the guns to shoot back. But our trigger fingers are paralysed, our eyes can’t focus, our guns are silent – we are targets, not combatants. With every pseudo-liberal word uttered we’re painting a bull’s eye on our chest.

At a time when Muslims, even those born and bred in our countries, increasingly see themselves as soldiers in visible or invisible armies, we are admitting hundreds of thousands of them into the heart of our civilisation, what’s left of it.

This in the knowledge, recently conveyed by a Muslim scribe, that 40 per cent of the ‘refugees’ are agents on active jihadist duty – with the rest ready to provide support, physical or at least moral. (I don’t know what the proportion is among the Islamic multitudes already here, but it can’t be dramatically different.)

This at a time when assault rifles are firing in the middle of our great cities, when grenades are exploding in the middle of our ambling crowds.

We won’t sacrifice a single one of the bogus principles we mendaciously pretend to cherish in order to defend our people, our cities – our civilisation, what’s left of it.

We not only fail to answer the perennial question of what’s to be done – we fail even to pose it. For if we did so, the answer would offer itself, and out would go the puny, craven, utterly corrupt ethos of our post-modernity.

Name one nation, if you can, that didn’t suspend civil rights when its survival was threatened. You won’t be able to, for there has been none.

Just ask the children of those Nisei Americans, many of them native-born, interned in camps for the duration of the Second World War. Ask the children of those German refugees, including Jews, interned on the Isle of Man, with no individual wrongdoing anywhere in sight.

We made them suffer for their group association with our enemies, which was an awful thing to do. Yet it was also a necessary thing to do because our survival was at stake.

Going against the grain of our civilisation was hard, but we had the backbone and moral fibre to do it. The backbone has now been broken in too many places to count, and the fibre has turned to vapour.

We are so scared that we may have to fight an all-out war that we refuse to admit we’re already in the middle of it.

We lack the courage to deploy the weapons without which we are defenceless: mass deportations instead of mass importations, internment instead of benefits, blanket retribution against countries even tangentially involved in the murder of our people instead of precision strikes against villains most in the public eye.

That means we’ll lose – quite possibly that we’ve lost already. All we seem to able to be do is count our dead and shed a tear or two, with variable sincerity and invariable fear.

The Paris casualties, RIP.

Russian folklore thrives on the character of Holy Fool, a protagonist typologically resembling a Sufi dervish, in the Hodja Nasreddin vein.

If anything, this elucidates the Asian nature of Russia this side of a few Westernised writers. Still, though this Russian Sufism is too gnostic for my taste, there’s no harm to it.

But there’s a difference between a Holy Fool and a downright schizophrenic. Such as Pyotr Pavlensky, who faces a long prison sentence for setting on fire the door of Moscow’s KGB/FSB headquarters to express his protest against Putinism.

This act is being hailed by the few opposition websites remaining in Russia, and in our own Guardian, as sheer heroism. True enough, taken in isolation, the arson betokens recklessness rather than madness.

But it’s not in isolation: Pavlensky has form venting his civic conscience in much more radical acts. This is what I wrote about him two years ago:    

On 10 November the Petersburg conceptual artist (whatever that means) Pyotr Pavlensky travelled to Moscow to score some valid political points about police curtailing the freedom of political self-expression.

He went to Red Square, stripped naked and affixed his scrotum to the pavement with a huge nail hammered into the cobbles.

The police removed the nail, wrapped the conceptual artist in a blanket and took him to hospital. He had chosen the site well – had he done the same thing in a less visible place, the cops would have probably yanked him to his feet without bothering to remove the nail.

It has to be said that young Pyotr has a bit of previous with that sort of thing.

In July 2012 he had his naked body wrapped in a cocoon of barbed wire and delivered to the main entrance of the Petersburg Legislative Assembly. There he stayed until the police released him with garden shears.

That particular performance was called ‘Carcass’. The aim was to symbolise… well, you can guess what.

A few months later he went even further, this time to protest against the imprisonment of the Pussy Rioters, the young girls who themselves had protested against something or other by singing obscene rap lyrics in a cathedral. Their prior political action took the form of public copulation in a museum.

In defence of their God-given right to register protest, Pavlensky turned up at Petersburg’s Kazan Cathedral, his mouth sewn up with a thread. He was carrying a banner saying, ‘Action of Pussy Riot was a replica of the famous action of Jesus Christ (Matthew 21:12–13)’.

Without entering into a full-blown theological debate, one should instead comment on the lamentable state of Russian psychiatry. For after his protest was all sewn up, Pyotr was found sane.

His nail stunt was called ‘Fixation’ – by affixing his private parts to the cobbles he was making a statement about the people’s fixation on something they shouldn’t be fixated on. A bit weak as far as visual puns go, but there we have it.

“A naked artist, looking at his testicles nailed to the cobblestone is a metaphor of apathy, political indifference and fatalism of Russian society,” declared Pavlensky in his statement to the media. I suppose this clarifies the matter.

Far be it from me to suggest that there’s nothing to protest against in Putin’s Russia. On the contrary, Russia is already bearing every hallmark of a fascist state, and things are getting worse.

But surely every normal person must realise that the escapades of an obvious madman trivialise all serious protest? The next time a meaningful anti-Putin action is undertaken it will be lumped together with self-mutilation, blasphemy and public indecency.

Yes, any normal person would realise this. That’s why it’s particularly worrying to read comments by the crème de la crème of the Russian intelligentsia. One may get the impression that normal Russians are in short supply. To wit:

Kirill Serebrennikov, film director: “…A powerful gesture of absolute despair… Affixing one’s sex organs to the cobbles of the country’s main square is a fixation on one’s own impotence… Everything is perfectly honest.”

Marat Gelman, political technologist (whatever that means): “I think it’s a sign of despair. I think, yes, a normal person won’t act in this way. But evidently the situation in the country isn’t normal…. It’s a MANIFESTO OF IMPOTENCE.” Also its possible cause, the cynic in me is tempted to add.

Irina Kosterina, culturologist (whatever that means): “The meaning and message are absolutely intelligible: this is political art-activism. Alas, those to whom this message is addressed aren’t sufficiently advanced to understand it.”

Evidently neither am I. However, if you still think there’s hope for Russia yet, such comments – among many – should disabuse you of this notion.

A country is hopeless when its intellectual elite sees disgusting self-mutilation as a valid form of political protest. As to the frankly pathetic attempts to intellectualise madness, Russia has a long, if not necessarily honourable, tradition along those lines.

A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy and all that, and at least this time Pavlensky mutilated an inanimate object, not himself. However, given his history, any civilised country would put him in hospital, not in prison.

But then who said Russia is a civilised country?

Or scaffolding? Road works? Restaurant service? Shop assistance? And God only knows how many other things?

All those Poles, Romanians and Bulgarians seem to practise such skills in Britain, where the supply of native talent must be running dry. How do those back home manage, with all those lads leaving for England’s green and pleasant land (without knowing this phrase or its provenance)?

Unless East European countries have made giant strides in cloning, their own countries must seem denuded. Like in the good if not so old days, they must be forcing professors of classical philosophy to dig ditches rather than poisoning young minds with all that Protagorian sophistry.

When in January last year the EU ordered us to extend a warm welcome to Bulgarians and Romanians, those who weren’t overjoyed were branded with the usual names: Little Englanders, xenophobes, reactionaries, scaremongers – and I haven’t yet got to the good stuff.

Any fears of a deluge were described as paranoia, although few paranoiacs of my acquaintance display such sound common sense. After all, if practically any UK job or, failing that, benefit package pays better than practically any job in Romania, it takes little suspension of disbelief to predict large numbers of immigrants.

So it has proved, as figures released yesterday show. Three out of four new jobs in Britain go to EU migrants, and there are 219,000 Romanians and Bulgarians working here – those we know about. (All told, there are 982,000 East Europeans employed in Britain, a number growing by 15 per cent a year.)

Since we know that at least as many of them live off benefits, and suspect that at least as many work for cash, bypassing the clutches of our statisticians and tax collectors, we’re probably looking at the better part of a million Romanians and Bulgarians gracing us with their presence.

This adds a whole new meaning to the notion of Balkanisation, which, as a lifelong lexicography junkie, I welcome. However, in my other incarnations, such as that of customer, I note with dismay that I can’t recall the last time I was served in a London shop or restaurant by a native, or at least fluent, speaker of English.

Judging by the fact that everyone plying similar trades in France seems to speak perfect French, East Europeans favour London over Paris. This is particularly odd considering that some East European countries, especially Poland and Romania, have always had strong cultural ties with France.

France gets Romanian playwrights (at least three major ones), we get Romanian waiters. That’s grossly unfair – even though both of us get an equal share of Romanian pickpockets.

That this situation puts unbearable pressure on our medicine, education and social services is a well documented fact. Few realise though that the pressure is exerted in two ways, one direct, the other vicarious.

First, new arrivals themselves use such services, costing the Exchequer billions every year. The second, and more subtle, way is that they push the lower end of wages way down.

Coming from a country with an average monthly income of €345, anything Romanians can get in Britain must seem like a fortune, and our employers aren’t above exploiting this situation.

Hence it no longer pays for the locals to take such jobs; they can do better going to the social once a week than to a building site every morning. It would take an exaggerated belief in human goodness to expect them to opt for the dignity of honest labour under such circumstances.

Our government officials continue to claim that immigrants, even those from perverse political and social backgrounds, make a valuable contribution to British life. When ‘immigrants’ is left unqualified with a cautious ‘some’, this claim is a bold-faced lie.

The net economic effect of mass immigration from the EU is hugely negative. Yet it’s negligible compared to the damage being done to our social, cultural and demographic fabric that, in London, is already lying in tatters.

London is, and has been since time immemorial, a cosmopolitan city, the financial hub of the world. But in the recent past it was still a cosmopolitan English city, which it no longer is. The native element currently stands at 44.9 per cent – and dropping fast.

Considering that London attracts about a third of Britain’s labour force, such multi-culti crosspollination can have devastating consequences for the whole country, similar to those suffered by the Roman Empire, whose demise was largely caused by mass immigration diluting national identity.

It takes more than central government to turn a country into a nation. However, our government is eminently capable of turning our nation into a rootless, piebald hybrid, reducing the world’s greatest language to an illiterate patois, the world’s greatest parliament to a rubber-stamping stooge to the EU, and the world’s greatest city to an oversized refugee camp.

On the plus side, our spivocrats can count on many new, grateful voters. Muslims have provided this service for Labour, East Europeans will do the same for the Tories.

Everyone goes home happy – only to find that the home is no longer there.

Dave Cameron’s list of demands, nay abject pleas, to the EU gives him a sporting chance to claim the title for himself.

Think of any pejorative adjective you care to name, and you’ll see it applies to Dave’s initiative. Craven? Yes. Stupid? But of course. Cynical? To say the least. Dishonest? You bet. And we haven’t yet reached treasonous, unpatriotic and self-serving.

Every word he wrote to Donald Tusk or uttered in the subsequent speech is a blatant attempt not to change the EU’s ways, but to trick us into voting to stay in come the referendum.

Actually all those pejorative adjectives were already valid before one word went on paper or crossed Dave’s lips. For, as he has made abundantly clear, he’ll campaign for the In vote no matter what.

It’s as if you started negotiating a discount on a new car by promising to buy it at any price. Hardly a strong bargaining position, is it?

Dave’s inner premise for the negotiations, his assumption, or rather pretence, is that the EU is reformable.

Pretence is actually more likely than assumption because Dave, though hardly the sharpest tool in the box, isn’t a clinical idiot. He has to know that the EU is the equivalent of a beast, not a human being.

Unlike man, it has no freedom of choice. Like an animal, its every action is predetermined by its genetic make-up, and it single-mindedly pursues the sole purpose for which it was created.

A lion devours smaller animals for their protein. A bee gathers pollen. The EU creates a single European state. It can no more offer any concessions deviating from its in-built imperative than a lion can turn vegetarian or a bee shun flowers.

Peter Oborne says in today’s article that even Dave’s pathetic little pleas are likely to go unheeded, and he may be right. However, if EU bureaucrats thrash out with Dave a strategy to trick Britain into staying, they very well might make it look as if they’ve relented.

That would only mean a change in words, not in substance. Take, for example, Dave’s entreaty for the UK to be released from the commitment to an ‘ever-closer union’.

You don’t like ‘closer’ Dave? Not a problem, mon ami. How about ‘friendlier’? Or ‘cooperation’ instead of union? Would that work?

This distinction without a difference probably will, especially when billions in the EU’s ill-gotten cash are thrown behind the In campaign, propped up by our own billions Dave will generously toss into the fire of pro-EU propaganda.

Or take the issue of immigration from the EU, one that’s close to most British hearts, and for good reason. HMG has acknowledged that about half of such fortune seekers are receiving social benefits of at least £6,000 each.

Let me get my trusted calculator out… Right. Legally there are 3.5 million EU immigrants here. Half of that is 1.75 million, let’s call it 1.5 to be fair – and to be fairer still, let’s disregard the multitudes who are here illegally.

Now ‘at least’, when applied to money, is as mendacious as ‘average’. Bill Gates and I have an average income in the billions. This statistic may tell you something about his income, but precious little about mine.

And ‘at least’ is so open-ended that it leaves room for stratospheric conjecture. But let’s be modest and round it up only to £10,000, and then multiply it by 1.5 million. The product is 15 followed by nine zeroes. A hell of a lot.

At this point I’m talking only about the financial cost, not the social, cultural and demographic ones, which are even more crippling. So what’s Dave begging the EU to do about it?

Oh, to let us withhold benefits until the immigrant has been here for four years. Never mind the 15 followed by nine zeroes that’s already being doled out. Anyone who knows elementary school arithmetic will see that, since the influx of immigration will hold steady, the staggered qualification for benefits won’t reduce our overall expenditure a few years down the line.

And, as Mr Oborne writes, even that meaningless request may be ignored since one already hears squeals of ‘discriminatory!’ coming out of the federasts’ well-oiled throats.

More likely, there has to be a semantic copout there too, such as introducing terms along the lines of ‘reduced entitlement’ or ‘limited access’. Dave and Angie will bang their heads together and think of something, I have every trust in them.

My favourite plea is that “The United Kingdom would like to see a target to cut the total burden on business.” If I were Merkel, I’d have a broad smile on my face. It’s like asking a florist for a free leaf.

If there’s one thing (other than corruption) the EU has in abundance, it’s targets. How many would you like, Dave? Ten? Twenty? Have all you want, mein Freund, they don’t cost anything.

Another abject plea is for our Parliament to regain a teensy-weensy bit of its sovereignty. Not much. Certainly not all of it. Just a smidgen will do, enough for Dave to carry the referendum.

All this proceeds to the accompaniment of mathematical calculations, with one side trying to prove that, if we leave, we’ll be a fiver worse off, with the other side countering that we’ll be a tenner wealthier.

This in the year in which Britain celebrated the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, an event that led to the gradual development of the best legislative system the world has ever known. This in a country known as ‘the mother of all parliaments.’ 

That sort of thing has an emetic effect on me. Well, at least Dave isn’t nauseated.

 

 

 

 

 

 Russia faces a ban from the Rio Olympics for running a state-sponsored doping programme. Blood samples, 1,417 of them, destroyed, officials bribed, the unbribable ones threatened along with their families – naughtiness all around.

The scandal gathering momentum now has been brewing for a year, and it was a year ago that I wrote about it. Looking at that article now, I realise that every word still applies – so here it is, almost every word of it:

There I was, thinking that nothing the Russians do can possibly surprise me. How wrong I was, and I thank Putin’s sports establishment for reminding me of the dangers of complacency.

In this instance what surprised me wasn’t so much the revelation that Russian athletes cheat, but the scale of this activity – quantity rather than quality.

The fact itself is yesterday’s news, or even the day before yesterday’s. For example, one remembers the glory days of the Soviet Union and its satellites, when a dozen top women athletes turned out to be something else.

Oh they were athletes all right, but they weren’t quite, well, women. Some were hermaphrodites, some practically men, and none really qualified for the women’s events they had been dominating.

When chromosome testing was first introduced at international events in 1966, many ‘female’ athletes from communist countries (the Soviets Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova, Klavdia Boyarskikh, the Rumanian Iolanda Balàzs, the Pole Ewa Klobukowska and many others) announced their retirement.

It wasn’t just sex, or rather trans-sex, games. Soviet fencers were caught rigging their foils to set off the touché lamp when no contact was made. Doping was rife. Soviet judges routinely cheated in gymnastics, figure skating and diving competitions.

The wartime slogan ‘Everything for victory!’ was smoothly shifted into the sports arena, and nothing was off limits.

For example, when Soviet sports scientists established that a woman’s body is at its physical peak shortly after terminated pregnancy, this opened all sorts of exciting opportunities.

Shortly before the 1968 Olympics the gymnast Natalia Kuchinskaya was impregnated by her coach and made to abort the baby, specifically to enhance her performance. She repaid the loving attentions of the Soviet state by winning four gold medals.

I must compliment Putin for his honesty. Speaking at last May’s military parade in Red Square, he proudly declared that “Continuity of generations is our chief asset.” It most certainly is.

Not to let the national leader down, the Russian sports establishment dutifully retained and built on the Soviet version of sportsmanship.

A well-researched German documentary has just alleged that as many as 99% of Russian athletes are guilty of doping. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) possibly, and the Russian Athletics Federation (RAF) definitely, have been accused of being in cahoots with the scheme.

The (extremely) latent Russian patriot in me desperately wants to believe that the country’s sports officials acted purely for the glory of the motherland, with no pecuniary interest involved.

Alas, that’s not exactly the case. For example, Liliya Shobukhova, winner of the 2010 London Marathon, admits paying the RAF €450,000 to cover up a positive drug test.

The Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko denies the allegations, but then he would. Such slander, he said, is yet another attempt on the part of the West to besmirch Russia’s pristine honour. Recorded testimony of both athletes and former anti-doping officials counts for nothing, as far as Mr Mutko is concerned. It’s all beseless.

Perhaps. Allegations of wrongdoing, baseless or otherwise, are a standard weapon of Cold War, something that’s unfolding in front of our eyes.

It’s just that some allegations are more, and some are less, credible than others. For example, few would take on faith an allegation that 99% of, say, British athletes are doped up to their eyeballs every time they compete. Yet the same allegation about Russia, given both her history and current evidence, rings true.

The Russian sports establishment is run by the same amalgam of the KGB/FSB and organised crime that runs the whole country. Expecting probity, sportsmanship and fair play from that lot is like expecting statesmanship from Dave Cameron.

I’d go as far as to suggest that even in the absence of state sponsorship, Russian and Eastern European athletes would be doing the same things, if possibly on a smaller scale. Thus most doping bans in professional tennis have been imposed on Eastern European players – even though they are relatively independent from their federations.

Westerners simply don’t comprehend the full scale of moral degradation suffered by a nation under communist rule. Four generations of Russians and two of Eastern Europeans were brainwashed to believe that morality is coextensive with the good of the state.

Even assuming against all evidence that things then changed drastically, it’ll take at least as many generations – and I’m being uncharacteristically generous – for these countries to recover from the trauma.

They haven’t yet, not by a long chalk. This should (but won’t) give our own rulers some second thoughts about all those Eastern Europeans, millions of them, settling in Britain.

One hears many good-natured people saying that, when all is said and done, those people are products of Christian civilisation. Hence we shouldn’t be unduly concerned about being inundated with them.

Wrong, my friends. These people come from a civilisation so corrupted by communism that lawlessness has penetrated their DNA.

There are exceptions of course; there always are. But as the Russian version of sportsmanship shows, these exceptions are the kind that prove the rule.

 

 

 

Israelis claim they don’t think about terrorism and, if so, my hat’s off to them. If I lived there, I’d be quaking in my boots.

Yes, I know one should never project one’s own feelings onto other people, especially those living in extreme circumstances. And I do understand that danger activates protective mechanisms that drip antidotes into the bloodstream.

For example, when I lived in the Soviet Union, I feared arrest for various anti-Soviet activities. But that was a background fear that didn’t really affect my day-to-day life.

The fear was there somewhere, beneath the surface, and it only came up when, say, someone I knew was arrested or imprisoned. But, in the vegetarian early 1970s, such events were relatively rare.

How would I have felt had they happened every day? I probably wouldn’t have displayed the casual, nonchalant courage of today’s Israelis.

For in Israel acts of individual terrorism do happen on most days, with a collective disaster always lurking around the corner. Both the everyday occurrences and the potential for disaster spring from the same source, one that both Dubya and our own Dave have described as a ‘religion of peace’.

Israel is the bulwark of our civilisation faced with the threat of an impassioned Islam. She struggles not only for her own survival, but also for ours, and it’s lamentable that so many in the West fail to realise this.

It’s as if war has been declared, and only one side has shown up. We sit in the relative security of our island, listening to assorted Corbyn clones pontificating on the Palestinians’ plight. That’s what drives Muslims to violence, they claim.

This doesn’t quite explain why most armed conflicts all over the world, from Africa to Timor, from India to Indonesia, from Chechnya to Azerbaijan, have in the post-war years involved Muslims, with nary an Israeli in sight.

Israel may be the focus of Muslim violence but she isn’t its cause. She just happens to be in the forefront and hence in the line of daily fire.

Daily has a slight connotation of once daily, but outbursts of Muslim brutality often come in twos or threes. Yesterday was typical in that respect.  

First a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into a group of hitchhikers, injuring four people including a pregnant woman. Then a Palestinian lass stabbed a security guard, a knife being a natural fashion accessory to accompany a hijab.

Both terrorists were shot on the spot, the man fatally, the woman not quite. So far I haven’t read any articles in our press castigating Israelis for wantonly taking the lives of two peaceful Muslims (I haven’t seen today’s Guardian yet).

However, whenever Israel protects herself with a larger-scale action, there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth all over our newspapers and airwaves.

Our flaming conscience can just about handle, at times, acts of individual self-defence, with only a few people threatened at a time. When the whole nation strikes out to thwart extinction, we throw our hands up in horror.

Look, another bombing raid – how dreadful. Look, another foray into Palestinian territory – how brutal. Look, another peaceful terrorist base razed – how uncivilised.

This gets me back to the beginning, my hopeless attempt to picture myself living in Israel. My imagination has proved insufficiently acute, but perhaps you can do better.

So picture a normal day in Tel Aviv or somewhere near the West Bank or anywhere in Israel. You wake up to reports of multiple rockets fired at your country’s villages by exponents of the religion of peace.

None of them hit your house; you heave a sigh of relief. You go out into the street, not consciously thinking about danger, but inwardly tensing up nonetheless.

Will this black-clad woman plunge a knife into your belly? Will this car swerve into you deliberately? Will your bus be blown up by a bomb? Will your family be kidnapped while you’re out? Will a crazed mullah order a nuclear strike on your country?

Now multiply this day by 365, then by the number of years you’ve been around and imagine how you’d feel. Can you do that? Well, you’re a better man than I am.

 

 

 

 

That the Russian Orthodox Church is an extension of the government is a truth universally acknowledged, as Jane Austin would say.

Moreover, considering the CVs of all its top hierarchs, including Patriarch Kiril, one can pinpoint the exact slot into which the Church fits within the governmental structure: the KGB.

When this organisation still went by that testosteronal name, His Holiness (then head of the Church’s foreign affairs) had a codename ‘Agent Mikhailov’. This appears in numerous KGB reports, each invariably ending with a pat on Agent Mikhailov’s back: “the assignment was successfully completed.”

However, none of those assignments was as important as the Patriarch’s present mission. Agent Mikhailov’s assignment today is to link Christianity with today’s government, or, to personalise the task, Jesus Christ with Vlad Putin.

As a theologian, the patriarch is aware of certain differences between the two: Jesus was an hypostasis of God, but Vlad is at this stage only semi-divine, although he too is an hypostasis – of the KGB junta running the country.

But this problem isn’t insurmountable for someone who, in addition to the Orthodox catechism, is well-versed in Marxist dialectics.

As part of the job, Kiril must do a St Matthew and trace back Putin’s genealogy, a task simplified by the lamentable, yet indisputable, fact that Vlad was made, not begotten. Meaning, to translate from the ecclesiastical, that both his Mum and Dad were human beings, each complete with a birth certificate and CV.

Establishing Vlad’s spiritual lineage is trickier, and it’s Kiril’s expertise in doing so that makes him a model KGB prelate.

Here the desired parallel with Jesus begins to break down. God is eternal, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Vlad can, at a stretch, claim the last three distinctions but not the first – he had a human Dad and he also had spiritual predecessors.

His Holiness’s KGB assignment was formulated in terse terms leaving no room for interpretation: Lenin begat Stalin, Stalin – skipping a few intermediate steps – begat Putin. For ever and ever, amen.

Therefore Stalin must be without sin, even as Putin is without sin. Whatever Kiril’s ostensible subject may be, that is the message of every sermon delivered by His Holiness ex cathedra or otherwise.

It’s in this context that the speech he made on 4 November must be understood. As you read the Patriarch’s ringing words, notice the distinctly Nazi vocabulary His Holiness chose:

“Today’s Russia would not exist without the heroism of the previous generations who in the 20s and 30s not only tilled the land, although that too was important, but were also creating industry, science, the country’s military might. [The virtue of a leader in charge at the time] cannot be doubted even if said leader committed evil acts. Where he showed will, strength, intellect, political resolve, we point out his indisputable successes…” And where he murdered tens of millions we rebuke him with filial deference.

Leni Riefenstahl, where are you when we need you? Can’t you just see it?

Black and white footage, with the set lit only by a torch held high above Vlad’s muscular torso. The title comes on: The Triumph of Will, Strength, Intellect and Political Resolve. Cut to a giant double portrait of Stalin and Putin projected onto a cloud. Background music segues from the Horst Wessel Lied to the Russian anthem.

Just imagining such a scene brings tears to my eyes, but not so much as to obscure the obvious: never in history has any church suffered as much as the Russian Orthodox Church suffered under Stalin and his precursor Lenin.

Millions of parishioners apart, at least 40,000 priests were shot in the first few post-revolutionary years, and in many instances ‘shot’ was a figure of speech. Priests of all ranks, from bishop down, were horrendously tortured, quartered, burned alive, crucified, castrated, turned into pillars of ice by having water poured over them in -40 weather, flayed alive – well, you get the picture.

In 1937-1938 alone, 80 per cent of the episcopate were culled, accompanied by the lesser ranks. Come the war, the Church, now slimmed down and house-trained, happily blessed Stalin, sanctifying him as the nation’s Saviour.

By establishing apostolic succession, the Patriarch made sure that some of that sainthood would rub off on Putin. This at a time when Russian churches bless icons of Stalin and put them up next to the Virgin and St Nicholas – and when school textbooks describe Stalin as an able administrator, occasionally strict but always fair.

Bugles are blowing and drums are rattling all over Russia, with Nazi-style vocabulary muscling in on the language of state propaganda, otherwise known as the Russian press.

Putin is doing his bit by striking the poses of antique semi-naked gods, displaying his prowess at martial arts, diving to great depths and otherwise auditioning for a role in a Leni Riefenstahl film.

The Patriarch appears in a supporting role, and, though his part is important, he won’t be allowed to upstage the leader. But to see a major Christian prelate acting as Dr Goebbels and even sounding like him is painful, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

I reached this unorthodox conclusion upon reading that the host of Pienaar’s Politics on Radio 5 commended James Cleverly, MP, for answering his questions honestly.

Honesty is of course a laudable quality — but it’s not a redeeming one. Much depends on what one is honest about.

For example, Jeremy Corbyn (the leader of the Labour Party, for my foreign readers) is widely praised for honestly holding views that, if acted on, would turn Britain into a Greece with bad climate.

Call me a moral relativist, but I’d rather our politicians advocated and executed good policies even if in their hearts of hearts they’d rather destroy Britain with a couple of well-aimed blows. I’d forgive them such hypocrisy.

As I would have forgiven Mr Cleverly for having uttered the usual dishonest platitudes instead of the honest replies he chose to give to the interviewer’s questions.

For example, he was forthcoming about having looked at hard porn on the Internet. Even allowing that such viewing practices resulted only from adolescent curiosity, one wishes he had kept such revelations to himself.

After all, MPs pass laws affecting our lives. In a sense, this is a paternalistic relationship: we are like children whose daily lives are in their parents’ hands. Of course we can vote politicians out, even as a child can run away from home.

But if we choose to stay put, we expect those in a position of authority to convey an image of strength and probity. No son would have much respect for a Dad who sobs every night after work and openly two-times Mum. Decorum matters.

So does taste. Mr Cleverly readily proffered the information that he would love to snog Home Secretary Theresa May and marry Yvette Cooper, the Labour MP, who happens already to be married to another hare-brained politician.

Whatever one thinks of Mrs May’s political performance, it’s hard for anyone with a modicum of taste to see her as a sex object. And even if one’s tastes do run towards middle-aged women with bad dress sense and an overbearing personality, it’s best to keep such preferences private.

This way one is entitled to ask whether Mr Cleverly fantasises about Mrs May or indeed Mrs Balls (the name by which Miss Cooper is known outside Parliament) when watching hard porn — and whether or not he smokes marijuana (which he also admitted to having done) while doing so.

An MP should not make public admissions that wouldn’t necessarily jar only if coming from a pop star, an actor or even some philosophers. They, unlike parliamentarians, represent no one but themselves.

If their listeners are appalled by their pronouncements, they can simply shun their work. Mr Cleverly’s constituents don’t have such an option, at least not until the next election. Neither do the rest of us, those on whose behalf he part-governs the country from the height of his mind, character and morality.

Though he harbours ambitions of becoming a Tory leader one day, one wonders how such an obvious lightweight could ever be elected to Parliament in the first place.

But then one remembers that the chap he defeated was caught sending naked pictures of himself to an undercover journalist. I couldn’t find out whether the targeted hack was male or female, but either way my opinion of politicians didn’t improve much. Nor has Mr Cleverly’s honesty done much to help.

Would it be preposterous to suggest that our modern democracy fails on the most significant desideratum of any political system: elevating to government those fit to govern?

What is so scary about our rulers isn’t their dishonesty, corruption and unbridled egoism but their total lack of any serious substance. One recalls with nostalgic longing such politicians of yesteryear as Messrs Talleyrand, Metternich and Disraeli.

None of them had an honest bone in his body, a skeletal deficiency for which they compensated by possessing statesmen’s mind and character. Our lot today is to applaud chaps who honestly say what they think, revealing how little they really do.

 

Autumn is called ‘fall’ in the US (as it used to be in England), which is a good word, evoking leaves gently flapping in the breeze – not airliners tumbling out of the sky.

Alas, that very fate befell the Russian Airbus A321 that crashed over Sinai, killing all 224 passengers and crew on board.

When such a tragedy happens, the natural question is why. Sometimes the answer is clear, as in the case of the Malaysian Boeing brought down by a Russian BUK missile over the Ukraine.

Since that incident implicated the government of a large country armed with nuclear weapons, it took a year-long investigation before fingers got to be pointed in earnest, but let’s face it: only fanatical champions of Col. Putin refused to see the obvious straight away.

The Sinai crash is still being investigated, and its cause is still unknown. But certain conclusions can already be drawn, certain options ruled out or in.

One of the former is the ISIS claim of responsibility, with pride and glee dripping from ever word. A display of such feelings over 224 innocent deaths says a lot about champions of the religion of peace, but that’s a separate subject. Yet ISIS still isn’t equipped with missiles boasting enough range to hit a plane flying at 31,000 feet, which is what they claimed.

Of course ISIS could have planted a bomb before the airliner took off from Cairo, and such a trick can’t be as hard to pull off there as at a Western airport: in a Muslim country there has to be more ambient sympathy to the ISIS cause among the staff.

The crash is consistent with this theory. The plane didn’t experience any engine failure, and the pilots didn’t send any distress signals. The analysis of the debris shows that the Airbus broke in half in the air, which of course could have been caused by an explosive device.

But there may be an explanation both more innocent and as criminal: an aircraft passed as flight-worthy really wasn’t.

Russian airlines lead the world by a wide margin in both the number of the deadliest crashes and their death toll. Even the state-owned Aeroflot has an appalling safety record, to say nothing of smaller cowboy airlines, such as the one that owned the A321.

If you believe Putin’s propagandists, the mysterious Russian soul is too preoccupied with matters of the spirit to pay sufficient attention to such mundane matters as air safety. Hence Russian pilots routinely shorten to zero the distance between bottle and throttle, and quite a few drunk fliers have been prevented from climbing into the cockpit at Western airports.

In one instance, a Russian pilot was actually arrested in Denmark. In another colourful tragedy, albeit one that happened quite a few years ago, a pilot gave his little son a ride in the cockpit. When the plane was over Siberia, he put the plane in autopilot and let the boy play with the controls while he himself answered a call of nature. The tot accidentally disengaged the autopilot, and the airliner plunged to its death.

Another frequent reason for crashes is the lackadaisical work ethic of ground crews, who also like the odd lemonade before dinner (or a gulp of antifreeze when lemonade isn’t available).

Though this plane was registered and serviced in Ireland, it was owned by an iffy Russian company Kogalymavia, and I can’t help thinking that Russian practices just might have rubbed off on the Irish – especially since the A321’s service record is consistent with the accident (if that’s what it was).

In 2001 the plane suffered a tailstrike, which technical term describes the tail end hitting the runway on landing or take-off. This usually happens when the pilot either pulls up or raises the nose too aggressively, which Russian pilots, with their daredevil nature preoccupied with metaphysical concerns, have been known to do.

Usually a tailstrike leads to no immediate danger, but the effect may be delayed. The subsequent repairs, if done in a slapdash manner, may cause a later structural failure of the airframe after repeated cycles of pressurisation and depressurisation at the weak point.

Such damage is historically hard to detect at certification checks, and many a Russian plane has come apart in the air due to structural defects or metal fatigue.

All this is of course speculation. But the possibilities aren’t limitless: planes don’t just happen to disintegrate in the air for no reason, giving the pilots not even a second to scream ‘Mayday!’.

Whether the crash was caused by a criminal act or criminal negligence, criminal remains the common denominator. The numerator is the 224 corpses. RIP. 

Over a lifetime I’ve assumed that women add up to roughly 50 per cent of our bedroom population. This has certainly been the case in my own sleeping quarters practically ever since I started wearing long trousers.

Tempora mutantur and all that, but simple arithmetic would suggest that, when males and females share such quarters even nowadays, they add 50 per cent each to the sum total. Even if they prefer solitary slumber, the proportion will still remain roughly the same, with a slight allowance for the greater number of women in the population.

Lest you might think I’m a stick-in-the-mud, I hasten to reassure you that I’m well aware of the growing tendency of men sleeping with men, and women with women. Here one’s calculations become more difficult, for one never knows whether such unisex bedrooms attract more male or female couples.

That is, such calculations used to be more difficult.

A government-backed report has proudly announced that female representation in bedrooms now “modestly exceeds” 25 per cent, which counterintuitive figure represents a vast improvement over a paltry 12.5 per cent in 2011.

I never realised things had changed that much. I’ve vaguely heard of the new-fangled practice of men marrying men, but reducing female representation in bedrooms to a risible 12.5 per cent strikes one as lamentable.

So much happier does one become on hearing that the proportion now stands at 25 per cent, which to one’s traditionally trained eye still looks low, but at least the vector seems to be pointing the right way.

It won’t be long before female representation in bedrooms will reach…. Oh my God, I’ve done it again.

My wife has just looked over my shoulder, called me a dyslexic twat, and pointed out that the report I’ve read talks about female representation not in bedrooms but in boardrooms – specifically those of FTSE 100 companies.

How silly of me, must talk to that nice girl at Specsavers. Oh well, this changes the story from slightly titillating to downright menacing.

Apparently the government mandates that, unlike our bedrooms that are still randomly split more or less 50-50, the chromosomal composition of our boardrooms is actually for the law to decide. Nothing is to be left to chance.

Even though FTSE 100 companies are supposed to be owned by their shareholders, who historically decide how and by whom the firms are run, it’s up to the government to rule who should be elevated to the board.

The only whiff of disagreement one observes in the rarefied HMG atmosphere seems to be whether the number of women sitting at the long oval table should be measured absolutely or proportionally. While acknowledging the dire and indisputable need for regulation, Lord Davies, Minister of State for Trade and God Knows What Else, favours the former.

However, His Lordship mournfully explains that ‘gender inequality’ (I had to look the term up, for at first I thought he was talking about grammatical categories) is far from being the sole problem. ‘Ethnic inequality’ is a parallel and equally pressing concern.

“In order to combat both issues,” says The Times, “he urged graduates not to work for companies which were not diverse.”

This strikes me as slightly wishy-washy. The government should never leave such vital matters to be decided by personal choice. Urging isn’t good enough – ordering works so much better. Where does Lord Davies think we live, a free country?

Here’s my modest proposal. At a cost to be calculated but not to exceed £10 billion, police details must be placed at the entrance to all companies (not just the FTSE 100 ones) where diversity isn’t up to desired levels.

All young persons walking in should be subjected to a quick police interview, according to this sample questionnaire:

“Where do you think you’re going, sunshine?” [If the answer indicates that the entrant is a job seeker, proceed to the next statement.]

“Keep walking, mate [or, if female, ‘love’], and if you ever show your face here again, I’ll do you.” [Should the interviewee  enquire where he/she should seek employment then, proceed to the next statement.]

“Not my department, mate/love. Call Lord Davies’s office, they’ll sort you out.”

I feel confident that, should this proposal be taken up and acted upon, the current target of 33 per cent female representation by 2020 will be exceeded, as will be the target for a pleasing racial and ethnic mix.

Of course, to facilitate matters, it would help if the government were simply to nationalise all FTSE 100 companies and, ideally, all others as well. As the example of such economic powerhouses as the Soviet Union shows, this would not only simplify control but would also increase productivity and hence the living standards in the nation.

But I realise with quite some chagrin that this decisive step may be slightly premature. We’ll have to wait until Corbyn’s premiership for such benefits to be bestowed on the nation.

I wish I could offer not just sound advice but also tangible help. Alas, I no longer have any involvement with boardrooms.

I do, however, retain some control of my bedroom, and I hereby undertake to make sure its own ‘gender composition’ will stay at least 50 per cent female for the foreseeable future.