Category: Blog

The CIA, the FBI and the NSA hardly ever agree, but on this they do:

Col. Putin, KGB, “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election” to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency…”

Hard evidence to support this claim is forthcoming next week. However, a preview is already available. Russian spies hacked the Democratic National Committee, stole materials compromising Mrs Clinton and leaked them to WikiLeaks and DCLeaks.

Trump himself doesn’t dispute this. He tacitly acknowledges that the Democratic Party’s e-mail servers have indeed been breached. However, he claims that the cyberattacks had “absolutely no effect” on the outcome.

Since my conservative American friends ascribe divine powers to the Donald, I’m not surprised he knows the unknowable: how millions of voters may or may not have been affected by a steady flow of anti-Hillary revelations in the run-up to the vote.

The Donald knows: no matter how many of Hillary’s indiscretions had been pasted all over the papers as a direct result of the Russian thefts, not a single voter swung away from Hillary as a result.

The Democrats “got beaten very badly in the election”, says Trump, and US intelligence conducts a “witch hunt” against him. Since Hillary won the popular vote, I’d question the ‘very badly’ part. However, Trump may well be right that the intelligence community doesn’t like him.

Can’t say I blame the spooks. After all, hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t make derisory comments about American intelligence agencies. To be fair, their record vis-à-vis Russia in particular is indeed far from exemplary.

Not to cut too fine a point, US intelligence has failed to predict or understand most major events in Soviet and post-Soviet history. A few examples, out of many: it

• Dismissed Soviet defectors who had predicted the Nazi-Soviet Pact a year before it happened.
• Didn’t predict the post-war Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe.
• Didn’t think the Soviets would invade Hungary in 1956.
• Took Khrushchev’s bogus de-Stalinisation as real.
• Had no inkling about the Soviet missiles in Cuba until they were installed.
• Grossly overestimated the Soviet lead in missile technology in the 1960s.
• Didn’t understand the nature of Eastern European ‘communism with a human face’.
• Didn’t realise that the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ was largely just a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.
• Didn’t anticipate Putin’s annexation of the Crimea and attack on the Ukraine.

However, some of their reports have been correct, and this one probably is – electronic meddling leaves traces, easy for modern counterintelligence to track down.

Nor is there any doubt, at least for anyone who follows the Russian housetrained press, that Putin’s KGB junta favoured Trump over Hillary.

Vindicating both Newton’s Third Law and Pavlov’s theories, the few remaining unofficial publications enthused about Hillary, which defies reason. A more ill-suited candidate for US presidency is hard to imagine and impossible to recall.

That doesn’t mean, however, that Trump should get a free ride if hard evidence bears out the claim that the government of a country openly hostile to America has affected the US presidential election.

He explains that the DNC was only hacked because it was “poorly defended”. That’s like saying that a rape victim has only herself to blame because she walked alone after dark and wore a short skirt.

According to Trump, people are talking about the hacking only because they wanted Hillary to win. And as to Russia, “only stupid people, or fools, would think that it [having good relations] is bad!”

These typically crass statements are both wrong and as tasteless as one expects from a man who thinks Trump Tower is elegant and, which is worse, wears his ties six inches too long.

True, only fools would think that good relations with Russia are bad in principle. However, only Russian agents, witting or unwitting, would think such relations are good no matter what Russia does.

Does Trump think America should watch nonchalantly as Putin helps himself to chunks of Eastern Europe? Makes nuclear threats to America? Or, as in this case, flagrantly subverts American politics, something that historically has always been regarded as an act of war – irrespective of whether or not the subversion succeeded?

There are several possible courses of action now, depending on the answer to the question of whether or not Trump is indeed in cahoots with Russia.

If he had struck a deal with Putin, promising a quid pro quo, he was a Russian agent during the election and continues to be one now. That means, no matter how much or justifiably one detests Hillary, the election should be regarded as invalid and Hillary sworn in on 20 January.

If no collusion on Trump’s part can be proved, he should become president. If his subsequent actions then show a clear and unreasonable pro-Putin bias, that should be treated as prima facie evidence of collusion and Trump should be impeached, with VP Mike Pence becoming president.

If no such scenario plays out, I sincerely hope the Donald will go on to become as great a president as my conservative American friends claim he will with a passion approaching idolatry. But forgive me for feeling wary at the moment.

 

Don’t get me wrong: I have much respect for Andy Murray. No other British tennis player since Fred Perry in 1934 has risen to No. 1 in the world, so Murray’s achievement must be applauded.

I’m clapping my palms to raw meat even as we speak, which doesn’t prevent me from thinking that his elevation to knighthood delivers yet another slap in the face of the honour system.

What exactly are the criteria for turning an Andy into a Sir Andy? Seeking an answer to that question, I turned to the official website, and this is what it says:

“A knighthood or damehood can be presented for all types of different achievement, but usually the person nominated will have made a major contribution to the country at a national or international level; their work and achievements will be viewed as an inspiration to others; and they may have influenced their peers, industry or the nation through their sustained and outstanding commitment to their chosen area.”

The explanation is as woolly substantively as it is inept grammatically (following the single antecedent ‘a person’ with the plural personal pronoun ‘their’ is political correctness at its most asinine).

Forgetting that for a moment, let’s just say that ‘all types of different achievement’ is too open-ended to mean anything at all.

For example, I know a woman who can pull amazing faces. Should she choose to compete ‘at a national or international level’, she could win many gurning tournaments, while her achievements would doubtless inspire others and influence her peers, other competitive gurners. Would she then qualify for damehood?

Granted, there are different degrees of honours, as there are different degrees of achievement. But where do we draw the line, below which an achievement is too trivial to be recognised by Her Majesty?

Descartes, who notoriously had problems with absolute truth not proceeding from his own musings, postulated that all knowledge is comparative. Let’s generously concede that some knowledge indeed is and compare Sir Andy to others, those who were or weren’t knighted.

For example, Squadron Leader George Leonard ‘Johnny’ Johnson, the last living dambuster, was by-passed in the Christmas list though nominated, and Andy Murray, as he then was, wasn’t.

Johnson made a contribution to the survival of the realm, risking his life in one of the most spectacular air raids of the war. By contrast, Sir Andy made a contribution to his bank balance, risking nothing but a sprained ankle. Then of course Johnson was engaged in a manifestly Eurosceptic activity, which these days must be a disqualifying circumstance.

Another one who never received the honour was Francis Crick who co-discovered the structure of DNA. Crick’s double helix ought to have trumped Sir Andy’s double-handed backhand, but didn’t.

However, while Sir Andy didn’t add much to the international repute of the realm, neither did he subtract from it. That’s more than can be said for assorted pop cretins (Sir Elton, ring your office) who aggressively bring the realm into disrepute by catering to the basest instincts of man.

If a tennis tournament may be seen as a bloodless descendant of the gladiatorial contests of antiquity, a pop concert is a malodorous amalgam of Nuremberg rally, orgy and opium den. On the scale of human achievement, Sir Andy falls somewhere between Frances Crick and Sir Elton, but, on balance, closer to the pop end.

Recent honour lists have also rewarded those who made ‘major contributions’ to politicians’ campaign funds and/or played sustained labio-gluteal tributes to said politicians. Now I know that the Queen merely rubberstamps PM’s appointments, but for old times’ sake surely greasing Tony’s or Dave’s palm doesn’t qualify as ‘a major contribution to the country’?

Such persons won’t ‘be viewed as an inspiration to others’, nor influence, except in a negative way, ‘their peers or the nation through their sustained and outstanding commitment to their chosen area’, the area in such cases being the body part mentioned above.

This inflation of honours not only devalues them, but it also insults those great men and women, past and present, who have indeed provided vital services to the realm. This irrespective of whether or not they had (Sir Isaac Newton?) or hadn’t (Francis Crick?) received the honour.

Sir Andy is a hell of a tennis player, and I wish I could have one-tenth of his game and one-hundredth of his athleticism. Moreover, unlike some of our footballers, he has monastically dedicated himself to his craft, practising and training hours on end, eating nothing but right foods, taking ice baths and refraining from booze.

That deserves respect but not, in my view, a knighthood. For he, along with those offensive pop ‘musicians’, has already been adequately rewarded by the millions he has made – and I hope he’ll make many more.

Honorary titles, however, should be bestowed on those who have won respect for the whole country, not just for themselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dictionary defines nationalism as “an extreme form of patriotism marked by a feeling of superiority over other countries”.

Being innately conservative, I’m wary of extreme forms of anything, but it seems that growing numbers on the political right feel differently. ‘Nationalism’ is ousting ‘patriotism’ as the buzz word of Brexit in the UK and similar developments elsewhere.

Moreover, ‘nationalism’ is yet again fusing with ‘populism’, and one would think this blend would have left a bad taste in the mouths of those who know modern history.

Nuances of phrasing matter: they convey nuances of substance. Hence patriotic opposition to, say, the EU is best expressed both positively, as a desire to uphold the constitution of the realm, and negatively, as contempt for that corrupt and dictatorial supranational contrivance.

However, when animated by hatred of Johnny Foreigner, this otherwise commendable sentiment acquires menacing overtones. Nationalist opposition may well blow the EU sky high, but one wonders what else it may send flying.

The blend of nationalism and populism inclines towards fascism, and we should all be aware of the ramifications. The tendency to produce this blend seems to be global, as most things are these days.

From the US to Russia and everywhere in between, even some good people see nothing wrong with nationalism, as opposed to patriotism. The descending order of their feelings is conveyed in different languages but with roughly the same meaning.

“I love my country” sits at the top, and this is a laudable statement.

Like two siblings who possess a knowledge inaccessible to a stranger, countrymen – regardless of their individual differences – are united by a bond as strong as it may be invisible to outsiders.

Nor is there anything wrong with regarding one’s country as unlike any other. All countries are different; if they weren’t, we wouldn’t have so many countries.

But of course what matters here isn’t the text but the subtext: when people insist that their country is exceptional, they usually mean not ‘different from…’, but ‘better than…’. They’re entitled even to that opinion, as long as they recognise that tastes may differ.

Moving down a step, “I love my country, right or wrong” begins to be problematic. However, the problem isn’t insurmountable: after all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything. A normal son can’t always stop loving his wayward mother. Nor will a normal mother stop loving her son even if he shoplifts.

Another step down, and we overhear “I love my country because it’s always right, or at least more right than any other.” Between this step and the previous one a line was crossed separating patriotism from nationalism.

Implicit here is tribal, what before the advent of political correctness used to be called Hottentot, morality: if I steal his cow, that’s good; if he steals my cow, that’s bad. It took millennia of civilisation to overcome such tribalism, and evidently the job still isn’t quite finished.

Another step down, and the morass sucks us in waist-high. Here one hears (in America and Russia more than in Britain) “My country is always right because it’s guided by God.”

At this level American ‘manifest destiny’ and ‘a city on a hill’ are joined by the ‘Third Rome’ of Russia (revived after a few decades of communist messianism) and the ‘Gott mit uns’ of the SS. The underlying assumption is that our actions can only be judged by God, and he has given us an open-ended endorsement. Thus anything we do is justified simply because we do it.

The lowest rung reaches to the bottom of the swamp, where creepy-crawlies take refuge. Here the sentiment is “Because our country is guided by God, it’s our duty to impose our ways on others.” Since no real faith in God underlines this feeling, the clause at the beginning of the sentence may eventually be dropped for being superfluous.

Only Americans and Russians have traditionally descended this ladder below the top two rungs in noticeable numbers. Also specific to America and Russia is the heavy representation of this genre of nationalism in the political mainstream.

In other countries it used to be relegated to the lunatic fringe, an area inhabited, say, by France’s Front National, German neo-Nazis or our own dear BNP. European countries have always had individuals prepared to dive headlong into the swamp of sanctimonious jingoism, except that such willing divers have never represented the dominant ethos.

What’s worrying is that the European lunatic fringe is creeping up into the conservative mainstream, poisoning the well to a point where drinking from it may become bad for society’s health. That tendency is explicable in Newtonian terms.

Newton’s Third Law says that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. And the widespread post-war action has been directed against patriotism, wrongly equated with nationalism.

This led not only to economic but also political globalism. Rather than forming ad hoc alliances, nations were encouraged or coerced to form permanent unions. Nations were denationalising.

Patriots were demonised for stepping even on the top two rungs of the above ladder; loving one’s country became infra dig. Predictably, Newton’s law clicked in, and people began to react, or rather overreact. Internationalist sabotage created a nationalist response.

This is understandable, but that doesn’t make it any more acceptable. Once let out, the genie of jingoism won’t stay in the bottle, and there may be blood in the streets.

In 1968 Enoch Powell introduced ‘rivers of blood’ into common parlance by quoting Virgil: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’”

He was talking specifically about the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled immigration, but that river can have other tributaries as well. Such as nationalism.

Replace the damsel in distress with Marine Le Pen, the knight errant with Vlad Putin, and the picture becomes complete.

Even though Marine refuses to cater to bondage fantasies, at least in public, there’s no doubt she’s in distress. Her party is trussed hand and foot by lack of funds, that filthy lucre she pledges to redistribute fairly across France’s population.

The poor girl is trying to ride the global populist wave that has washed the Donald into the White House, May into Downing Street and Renzi into retirement – only to see her hopes being frustrated by the same moneybags she promises to dispossess.

You see, talk may be cheap but this particular hope isn’t. It takes money to run a campaign, not as much as in America, but still. And money is to be found in banks.

This simple truth was definitively established in the 1930s by the American robber Willie Sutton. After he was arrested yet again, Sutton was asked why he kept robbing banks. “Because that’s where the money is,” he replied with the sound common sense so characteristic of Americans.

Yes, but getting money out of banks isn’t always easy for those who eschew armed robbery. Marine has certainly discovered that.

She has appealed, hand outstretched, to French, European, British and American banks, only to be turned down. Somehow today’s plutocrats are less willing to finance extremists than were their predecessors in Russia, circa 1910, or Germany, circa 1930.

At least that’s one lesson they’ve learned well. Savva Morozov, the Russian industrialist, was suicided by the same Bolsheviks he had bankrolled, while Fritz Thyssen, who performed a similar service for the Nazis, got off easy: he was merely sent off to a concentration camp.

Such historical parallels leave Marine in the lurch, seemingly with nowhere to go – this at a time when she’s running close second to the Gaullist leader François Fillon. Since Marine thinks she has a good chance of overtaking Fillon, you can understand her rage at being thwarted by a shortage of funds.

Yet, just as this fair maiden is about to be ravaged, there arrives Vlad, his steed galloping, his armour gleaming in the winter sun, his sword raised high, the same weapon that has slain all those Ukrainians and Syrians.

Vlad has ridden to Marine’s rescue before. Back in 2014, he released her from bondage by generously offering a €9-million ‘loan’. So chivalry isn’t dead. It lives on in the KGB’s good offices.

Marine’s plight is less dire this time: she only needs a paltry €6 million. To be fair, rescuing her wouldn’t constitute undue hardship for Vlad. He could obtain such pocket change with one phone call to some housetrained oligarch, say the football-loving Abramovich, who probably tips as much every year.

My neighbour Roman knows the perils of recalcitrance. As Berezovsky’s example shows, Morozov’s fate may still befall those who play hard to get.

Having saved the damsel in distress, the knight errant would obtain her hand in marriage. Such is the tradition, and Vlad, seen by so many Western conservatives as one of them, is the last man to buck it.

He too wants to marry Marine, though possibly not in the conjugal sense. For, unlike his medieval predecessors, this cavalier is trained in KGB seduction techniques.

Hence Vlad needs a quid pro his quo. He could demand, and possibly get, Marine’s body, but that’s not what he wants. He wants her soul, and Marine is willing to put out.

In fact, she’s positively gagging for Vlad to knead her soul to his heart’s content. By way of a foretaste, she has already endorsed the annexation of Crimea:

“I absolutely do not believe that it was an illegal annexation,” she has declared. “There was a referendum. The inhabitants of Crimea wanted to join Russia. I don’t see that there is any reason to call the referendum into question.”

She’d possibly see a reason or two if less overcome with passion for Vlad’s rouble.

That referendum, for example, was conducted not before but after the annexation, meaning at gun point. The large Tartar community boycotted it, remembering the murderous deportation their grandparents suffered at the hands of Vlad’s role models. And armed theft of territory belonging to a sovereign state is still seen as illegal in some quarters.

What’s amazing is that Western governments are nonchalant about Vlad’s KGB junta recruiting leading politicians, using the tricks honed by the First Chief Directorate to run them like two-bit snitches.

While it’s not clear that Vlad affected the outcome of the US election, it’s beyond doubt that he tried to do so.

In addition to Marine, he’s also cultivating every ‘populist’ (in fact, typically neo-fascist) European group. Bulgaria’s Ataka, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party are all locked in passionate embrace with Putin.

They’re easy marks for KGB recruiters, as easy as those Oxbridge intellectuals were 80 years ago. ‘Populists’ tropistically reach for the fascist sun shining out of Vlad’s rectum, and the slightest of pushes will draw them all the way in.

Since Putin’s fan will become US president on 20 January, and Fillon admires Vlad as passionately (if more disinterestedly) as Marine does, it’s conceivable that soon every Western nation with the possible exception of Britain, will be run by KGB agents of influence.

Some will act in that capacity consciously, most will be recruited ‘in the dark’, to use KGB terminology. That’s a distinction without a difference: Vlad will feel free to remedy what he calls ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century’ by putting the USSR back together.

Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Belarus – brace yourselves. Poland, prepare to do so. Meanwhile, bonne chance to Marine, even though one wonders how French law feels about foreign countries buying French politics.

“If the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic. It cannot be both,” pronounced the outgoing US Secretary of State, leaving one to ponder the natural fit between the mixed zoological metaphors of lame duck and hare brain.

When it comes to Kerry, one wishes that the First Amendment to the US Constitution protected freedom not only of but also from speech. For seldom has a public figure ever delivered a statement so wrong on so many levels.

First, the State of Israel has been both Jewish and democratic for 68 years. Saying that what demonstrably exists is impossible is akin to a hillbilly looking at a giraffe in a zoo and saying “There ain’t no such animal.”

Second, Israel isn’t just a functioning democracy, but the only one in the region. Therefore, whatever deficit of democratic rights may or may not exist in Israel, all its citizens enjoy greater democratic rights than any of Israel’s neighbours.

Third, that roughly 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs may only preclude the state being democratic if it could be shown that this minority has no democratic rights. However, that’s not the case.

Arabs vote, they have three parties of their own (some of whose MPs openly call for the annihilation of Israel), serve in the cabinet and the armed forces (though not obliged to do so), provide some top officials and army generals.

The presence of an Arab minority no more disqualifies the State of Israel as both democratic and Jewish than the existence of a Catalan minority disqualifies France as both democratic and French.

Fourth, the State Department explicitly acknowledges the possibility of state religion being part of a constitutional dispensation.

Its officials practically dictated the texts of Iraqi and Afghani constitutions, stipulating that “The sacred religion of Islam is the religion of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” and, in Iraq’s case, “Islam is the official religion of the State and it is a fundamental source of legislation”.

If the sham democracies of those two states are allowed their own state religion, why can’t the real democracy of Israel be afforded the same privilege? One smells the rat of bias.

If the denotation of Mr Kerry’s pronouncement suggests he’s a fool, the connotation shows he’s also a knave (yes, one can be both). For his cherished ideal of a two-state arrangement isn’t held up by Israel stubbornly clinging to its Jewish identity. It’s being torpedoed by the Palestinians themselves.

The offer of a sovereign Arab state in Palestine has been on the table for decades, with Israel asking only for two eminently reasonable provisions: one, that the Arabs recognise Israel’s right to exist and, two, that they desist from terrorism.

The less said about the second provision, the better. The Arabs can no more desist from terrorism than the Dutch from consuming mountains of mediocre cheese – and if you disagree, just open a random newspaper on a random day.

As to the first provision, the Palestinian chieftain Mahmoud Abbas has put it better than I can: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli – soldier or civilian – on our lands.”

Allow me to translate from the Palestinian. He means not a final resolution but the final solution: if Palestinians acquire their own state on their own terms, every Israeli will be either massacred or driven into exile.

One would expect Israelis to find it awkward negotiating with a group fully committed to killing them all should a successful accommodation be reached. In fact, their willingness to talk to the potential genocides at all represents a miracle of restraint or, depending on your point of view, a death wish.

After all, talk is cheap, and it’s likely that at some point Abbas’s terrorists will utter a few comforting words, get their state and then proceed with acting on their innermost murderous urges.

Yet instead of praising the Israelis for their dangerously reasonable stance, Kerry rebukes them for refusing to commit summary suicide.

He can’t learn to be more intelligent than God originally made him, but one wishes Kerry learned the meaning of even-handedness. It’s not that difficult.

After all, Jordan occupied the West Bank from 1948 to 1961 without ever finding itself under pressure from Kerry’s predecessors to give Palestinians their own state. Nor did Lebanon go out of its way to do so when housing a large Palestinian minority.

One can understand their reluctance, for the Palestinians systematically turned the jewel of the Middle East into a ruin. Eventually, in 1975, they plunged the country into a bloody civil war that went on for 17 years and cost 250,000 lives.

So why is Israel being singled out for opprobrium? To the mindset so ably represented by Kerry and his boss, third-world savagery is an entitlement to moral ascendancy and preferential treatment.

In some fundamental ways, liberals (in the American sense of the word) detest our Judaeo-Christian civilisation as much as do their Fatah heroes, and they’ve certainly done more harm to it.

Domestic US politics prevent them from being overt about this, but they feel affinity for Palestinians – or for any visceral enemies of the West. A demand for a separate Palestinian state is another expression of the same sentiment that drives the brisk sales of Che Guevara’s t-shirts. What looks like touching concern for minority rights is in fact nihilistic anomie tinged with latent anti-Semitism.

John Kerry may have a bright career in front of him. Why, with luck he may oust Blair as the Middle East peace envoy. One can be both that and an idiot, no conflict there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day a young woman was beheaded in Afghanistan for going shopping without her husband.

This punishment strikes me as a trifle excessive, even though at times I do wish I could chaperone my wife to prevent her from taking excessive liberties with the credit card.

But hey, dura lex, sed lex as the Romans used to say. The law is harsh, but it is the law. Different religions have different laws, and all must be respected equally: that’s the essence of multiculturalism, of which I’m a lifelong champion.

Now if my objections to my wife playing fast and loose with credit cards are narrowly fiscal, Islamic law is much broader and more principled. A woman can’t leave home for any reason, unless accompanied by a close male relation.

Women are also banned from work, education and sartorial variety – the burqa makes them all look as if Halloween came early, and that’s classless uniformity at its best. Of course that way one is never sure until the moment of truth whether one’s date is Fatima or Ali, but an element of suspense ought to add excitement to the assignation.

Lest you might think some Muslim countries take a more liberal attitude to the fair sex, a Saudi man has just been sentenced to a year in prison for daring to suggest that men’s guardianship of women should be abolished as a bit archaic. The sentence strikes me as humane by Muslin standards: they could have chopped various portions of the rogue’s anatomy off, but commendably didn’t.

Saudi Arabia has got one thing right: women aren’t allowed to drive there. Anyone will sympathise who has ever sworn at a woman swerving all over the road or taking five minutes to back into a parking space big enough for an articulated lorry.

However, with a bit of an overkill, neither can a Saudi woman study, travel or work unless explicitly allowed to do so by a male family member, usually father, husband or brother. I have an image in my head of a 25-year-old Fatima asking her 12-year-old brother Ali for permission to go shopping, and it pleases the confirmed multiculturalist (and incipient misogynist) in me.

It also pleases me to notice that Christianity has never gone so far in keeping women in their place. St Paul, for example, didn’t go further than offering this eminently sensible, positively liberal advice: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience…”

No mention of beheading, dismemberment, lashing or punitive rape – but then again, we have our culture, the Muslims have theirs, and who’s to say which one is better? Certainly not our commendably liberal government.

Some Muslim countries, such as Bahrain, are perfectly westernised. However, even there a woman working as a sports journalist was the other day shot for no apparent reason other than being a woman working as a sports journalist. Westernisation must have its limits, as any denizen of Leicester will confirm.

The question remains as to how many people raised in the Muslim world would enrich our culture as much as our successive governments have promised. Even such a passionate champion of multi-culti rectitude as me can’t get rid of a few residual doubts. Then again, we’re governed by much cleverer people than me or, for that matter, you.

I recall making a typically frivolous remark a few years ago, at lunch with a lovely and formidable woman, a former Tory minister. “The Muslims,” she said, “terribly mistreat woman.” “Yes,” I replied, “but in spite of that it’s an awful religion”.

Since the venerable politician is a bit short on sense of humour, it took her a few seconds to realise I was joking. But, reading about these recent events, one realises that this savagery is really not a laughing matter. If anything can be off limits for laughter, that is.

I drove to my local French village the other day, where I was greeted by a large sign Bienvenus aux migrants (migrants welcome). The world is well and truly off its rocker.

Tom Wolfe is a natural phenomenon. Being able to produce at age 85 – hell, at any age – a coruscating essay like Kingdom of Speech smashes all sorts of stereotypes.

But then smashing stereotypes is Wolfe’s stock in trade. I know many superb journalists, but I can’t think offhand of anyone else who has created a whole new genre of journalism.

Wolfe has. It’s called New Journalism, and it blurs the line between literature and essay to a point where it isn’t clear where one ends and the other begins.

When Wolfe oversteps the line into the area of journalistic novel, he is, to me, less convincing, albeit still eminently readable. But one step back into novelised journalism, and Wolfe is without equals. He’s even without close seconds.

I’ve read just about his whole output, and my own literary path is signposted with such milestones as Radical Chic, The Painted Word, From Bauhaus to Your House, The Purple Decade, Hooking Up and so forth.

No turn is left unstoned – Wolfe is merciless to every modern perversion and its purveyors, as he now is to Darwin and Chomsky in Kingdom of Speech, an essay attempting to answer the question in my title.

Actually Wolfe’s answer comes rather late in the book. The first two thirds is a systematic thrashing of Darwin, with every haymaker landing right on the button.

I myself have got into that ring with just about every book I’ve written, but even so I’ve learned a few new facts.

For example, I didn’t know that ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ Huxley never believed Darwin’s slipshod theory and only devoted his life to shilling for it because it rationalised his own strident atheism: arguing that man is nothing but an animal is tantamount to delivering a redundancy note to God.

But the story of Alfred Russel Wallace is well known, and it drives a stake through the heart of Evolution, which Darwin and his champions have tried to pass for the Theory of Everything.

Wallace wrote a paper on natural selection (transmutation, as it was then called) and naively sent it to Darwin, seeking his help in introducing it to the Royal Society. Little did he know that Darwin had been thinking along the same lines for 25 years.

The Great Man, however, had refrained from publication because he feared that such a manifestly atheist work would hurt his glorious career as traditional naturalist. Yet Darwin, writes Wolfe, was a Gentleman, which Wallace wasn’t. So Darwin had the pack loaded.

Sir Charles Lyell and other Gentlemen of the Royal Society closed ranks behind Darwin and persuaded him to knock off an abstract of a book yet unwritten. The abstract was then presented at the same session as Wallace’s completed paper – alphabetically. Since the D comes before the W, Darwin reaped the ensuing harvest of adulation, while generously acknowledging Wallace’s honest but implicitly inferior efforts.

Wallace was at the time catching flies in Malaysia and had no clue about the unfolding tragicomedy. When the flycatcher did become aware of it, diffident man that he was, he didn’t argue against Darwin’s priority, choosing to remain a footnote to the hastily written Origin.

So far it was all good knockabout stuff, as typical of the cutthroat scientific establishment then as it is now. But a few years later Wallace did something that today’s Darwinists don’t like to mention.

He blew out of the water Darwin’s cosmogony, such as it was. Before things evolve, they have to be. So where did Evolution start from? Here’s Wolfe at his best:

“Darwin had apparently never thought of it quite that way before. Long pause… and finally, ‘Ohhh,’ he said, ‘probably from four or five cells floating in a warm pool somewhere.’ One student pressed him further. He wanted to know where the cells came from…”

No one, not Darwin, not Dawkins – no one – has answered this question in an intelligible way. Wolfe then proceeds to show that Darwin’s Evolution fails every one of the standard tests for a scientific hypothesis:

No one has ever observed and recorded this phenomenon. Other scientists can’t replicate it. The theory isn’t falsifiable, in the Karl Popper sense. Scientists can’t make prediction based on it. It doesn’t illuminate hitherto unknown areas of science.

Wolfe then lands another crushing blow: “Next to genetic theory, the Theory of Evolution came off not as a science but as a messy guess – baggy, boggy, soggy, and leaking all over the place.”

Wallace identified another gushing leak in Darwin’s cosmogony. He disavowed Darwin’s (and his own) theory because it couldn’t possibly explain the appearance of the human brain and its most conspicuous function: speech.

According to Darwin, natural selection delivers only meliorating characteristics necessary for physical survival. The brain obviously doesn’t answer this description, wrote Wallace. People don’t need to write sonnets to survive physically. Quite the contrary, that ability may well imperil physical survival. And in any case, it took man millions of years to learn how to use a tiny, if still significant portion, of his brain. He managed to survive famously – so why did the brain become so intricate?

Darwin’s take on speech was frankly risible: in The Descent of Man, he claimed that human speech had evolved from onomatopoeic gibberish, man trying to imitate sounds made by birds. Such musings are strictly for the birds: it’s easier to believe in Genesis than in birdsong evolving into a Shakespeare sonnet, Aquinas’s Summa or even Darwin’s Origin.

Wallace, being a scientist first and foremost, accepted that problem and realised that Evolution wasn’t the Theory of Everything. At best, it was a theory of some things, and not even a definitive one.

No such problems for Darwin. By frankly admitting in his preface to The Descent of Man that his aim was to prove that God didn’t exist, he stopped being a scientist and became a propagandist, typologically closer to Lenin’s League of Militant Atheists than, say, to Watson and Crick.

Having brilliantly shown what the origin of speech isn’t, Wolfe then proceeds to show what it is. That animates his frontal assault on Noam Chomsky, one of the founders of structural linguistics, whose theories tortured me at university.

According to Chomsky, every person’s brain contains a ‘language organ’, more or less the same for everyone. “To Chomsky,” writes Wolfe, “it didn’t matter what a child’s first language was. Whatever it was, every child’s language organ could use the ‘deep structure’, ‘universal grammar’, and ‘language acquisition device’ he was born with to express what he had to say,… whether it came out of his mouth in English or Urdu or Nagamese.”

Wolfe mercilessly mocks Chomsky and his theories, exciting my schadenfreude no end. Like Wolfe, I detest gurus of any kind, and leftie gurus like Chomsky especially. However, I’d more charitably describe this particular theory as dubious, rather than worthless – especially if I had Wolfe’s problem of offering a viable alternative.

Here he co-opts the anthropological linguist Daniel Everett, who spent years among the Pirahã people, a hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest and the most primitive tribe extant.

Everett was the first non-Pirahã to learn their language, which couldn’t have been unduly hard. The language has all of 500 words, heavily relies on whistling as a means of communication and has only one grammatical tense, the present. The Pirahãs are incapable of abstract thought and therefore don’t need words to express them. Their way of wishing someone goodnight is saying “Don’t sleep, there are snakes” (the title of Everett’s book).

Everett disagrees with Chomsky that language is innate. He argues that language is like the bow and arrow, a tool to solve a problem as it arises. Language, in other words, is a cultural artefact developed in parallel with culture.

Wolfe accepts Everett’s view uncritically, which to me somewhat mars his dazzling essay. Everett implicitly countenances Darwin’s theory by treating the Pirahã as a throwback to primordial times, an early stage in the development of man.

That presupposes a steady progress: in one era, out the other. But there’s no evidence for any such process. There exists, however, quite a lot of evidence to the contrary.

For example, the earliest known sites of human habitation show that all those thousands of years ago people were already as intelligent as any Darwinist and quite a bit more artistic. Also, rather than replacing one another with kaleidoscopic finality, human types happily coexisted. For example, Neanderthals overlapped with Homo sapiens by up to 5,400 years, with much crosspollination going on.

By saying that language is but an artefact, if one without which no other artefact would have been created, Wolfe not only accepts a clearly Darwinist argument, something he spent so many pages debunking, but also falls into a logical trap.

If language is an artefact without which no other artefacts would have been created, then it has to be an innate property. Man simply wouldn’t have survived the millions of years it supposedly took for language to develop without at least some primitive tools essential for his survival.

Wolfe refuses to accept, possibly for pragmatic reasons, that the creation of language is inseparable from the creation of man, which in turn is inseparable from general cosmogony. And no secular theory can match the intelligibility of the cosmogony story presented in Genesis.

I happen to believe it’s true, but such clearly retrograde credulity isn’t essential to realising that the story adds up philosophically and even evidentially (certainly better than any all-encompassing secular theory).

Much as I admire Wolfe and despise Chomsky, the latter is in my judgement closer to the truth: language was born at the same time man was. Trying to explain it in any other way is digging an intellectual hole for oneself.

That’s what Wolfe does, but that by no means diminished my delight in reading his idiosyncratic prose. Show me a writer who doesn’t envy Wolfe, and I’ll show you a hypocrite.

What an educational year 2016 has been, largely thanks to several front-page obituaries for great ‘artistes’ I had never heard of.

George Michael was one such, almost. Although I had heard his name, it was mainly in connection with various drug and sex scandals. I also knew he had something to do with pop music (an oxymoron, as far as I’m concerned).

Yet until today I hadn’t heard him sing a single note – and I still haven’t. That is, overcoming physical revulsion, I’ve made the effort of listening to a few of his songs. But I can’t describe Michael as a singer of notes.

Notes, and what they convey, are sung by musicians, which Michael wasn’t. He was a shaman of a pernicious cult. Every sound intoned by such shamans screams defiance of our culture, emphatically including music.

The couple of pieces I’ve heard suggest a modest ability, sufficient for gigs at seedy clubs in the dangerous parts of town, where one never goes except to indulge a perverse taste for slumming.

Yet judging by the tributes densely packing the front pages of formerly respectable newspapers, Michael was a musical genius, the equal of Bach and Beethoven, if expressing himself in a different genre. Here are some titbits:

“Troubled genius…”

“I’ve loved George Michael for as long as I can remember. He was an absolute inspiration. Always ahead of his time.”

“Honest, genuine talent.”

“…loss of another talented soul.”

“Heartbroken… Me, his loved ones, his friends, the world of music, the world at large. 4ever loved.”

“…the kindest, most generous soul and a brilliant artist.” (What happened to ‘artiste’? ‘Artist’ is so-o-o-o twentieth century.)

“What a beautiful voice he had and his music will live on as a testament to his talent.”

“A lot of us owe him an unpayable debt.” (‘A lot of us’ have bought 100 million albums by Michael. Surely that counts as at least partial repayment?)

“Another Great Artist leaves us.” Capitalised, no less.

Many weeping obituaries talk about Michael’s life, which has been – what shall we call it, in the nil nisi bonum spirit? – rather uninhibited. By his own admission he smoked up to 25 joints a day, was addicted to crack and for a long period had a new man in his life on average every five days.

In 1998, Michael was busted for performing ‘a lewd act’ in a Beverly Hills public lavatory, the kind of site that witnessed many of his conquests. He called the act “subconsciously deliberate”, as if soliciting sex next to the urinals could have been accidental.

Then there were arrests for drug offences (one for smoking crack in yet another public lavatory), a prison sentence for driving (under the influence) his SUV into a Snappy Snaps shop in Hampstead – all in all, ‘uninhibited’ is a fair description of Michael’s life.

Another description is suicidal, for one doesn’t have to be a psychiatrist to realise that Michael was systematically trying to kill himself, finally succeeding at age 53.

That’s another proof that he had nothing to do with music, for no great composer has ever killed himself (Tchaikovsky’s suicide is disputed). There’s something about music qua music that discourages that sort of thing.

However, for today’s quasi-musical shamans dying of old age is somehow illogical. Such bourgeois conformism would compromise the religious-surrogate aspect of pop. It’s not just the shamans’ vocal excretions or bodily gyrations that make up their appeal, but the totality of their lives.

While, say, the Beatles still tried to preserve a semblance of musicality, their followers have abandoned any such attempts. More and more, pop appeals not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp concealed underneath.

The appeal continues to be quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus had to die on the cross to fulfil his mission, the hypostases of the new god commit suicide or die of alcoholism, drug overdose, AIDS or, if they’re truly blessed, a combination thereof.

All those Sid Viciouses, Freddie Mercuries, David Bowies and George Michaels aren’t just dead pop performers. They’re martyrs at the altar of our anomic modernity. Pop goes the weasel of our culture.

At the risk of upsetting some of my readers, I dare say even if a decent person doesn’t mind the ‘music’, he should be turned off by the cultish, often overtly satanic, aspects of pop.

Purveyors of the new cult cultivate this image consciously – they know that hints at the devil pay handsome dividends. That’s why they perform in clouds of billowing smoke symbolising hell with a typical lack of subtlety, wear predominantly black (sometimes crimson) clothes, sport dark glasses making them look sinister – whatever works.

Aesthetic sense isn’t a prerequisite of a decent person, but moral sense is. And it’s that faculty that ought to be offended by the pop cult.

George Michael, RIP.

Many shops are still open on Christmas Day, and stampeding throngs are buying up everything in sight.

But there’s anticipatory weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in hell, where Mammon lives. For Christmas sales will sooner or later end.

There will be other sales, numerous other opportunities to inject new energy into the devout worship of Mammon. But no sale is quite like a Christmas sale.

So hurry! The chance of a lifetime! Discounts on everything! Today and Boxing Day! Including, and this is the best part, a 100 per cent reduction on the meaning of Christmas.

Churches stay open too, for old times’ sake, but their traffic is a trickle compared to the mighty torrent in Oxford Street. Some churches have found a solution: eliminating God from their liturgy and joyously advertising an ingenious marketing ploy.

This is the discount to end all discounts: Come and have a good time! Take the weight off your feet, blistered by sprints from shop to shop. No charge! You won’t have to ponder, repent, worship, even listen to those words no one uses anymore.

Come in, belt out some songs in a Karaoke sing-along, kiss whomever you’re sitting next to (they may be ‘well tasty’, you never know your luck) – and then off you go again, pounding the pavements in search of the real deal.

Even the cultured atheists among my friends are aghast. Perceptive people, they sense that this rampant materialism runs so contrary to our cultural, social and spiritual tradition that it’ll eventually spell a disaster.

The till, they acknowledge, is a poor substitute for the collection box. We must take Christianity seriously, even if no clever people can take Christ seriously. That way we can dump the outdated superstition while keeping all the good things: social cohesion, morality, spiritual content to our lives.

The agricultural equivalent of their craving would to be sever the roots of an apple tree while still hoping to enjoy the apples. Nature doesn’t work that way. Neither does life.

Christianity was able to provide such good things as social cohesion, morality and spiritual content to our lives, while creating the greatest culture the world has ever known, not because it was a clever way of keeping the masses in check. It was able to do so because it’s true. Or at least because most people believed it was.

Taking Christ out of Christianity will have the same effect on the religion as taking Christianity out of life will have on society: both will first degenerate and then die.

Unless my cultured friends believe that Christmas is the day on which God was incarnated to redeem our sins, Christianity won’t do them any good. Nor will it do any good to a society compulsively obsessed with conspicuous consumption.

A society obsessed with consumption will become consumptive. And no palliative treatment for this disease exists.

Cultured people even wish one another a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year – prosperous, not virtuous or spiritual. They don’t even sense a contradiction there, but then their minds knock off for as long as it takes my atheist friends to ponder such subjects.

Christ didn’t come into the world 2016 years ago to make us prosperous. He came to die for our sins, thereby making us good enough to be saved. Hence our popular greeting is an oxymoron or, in musical terms, a jarring, cacophonous discordance.

Oh, I know my atheist friends are too clever to believe any such superstitious nonsense. This isn’t what clever people believe.

They believe that a few molecules created themselves out of nothing in some primordial soup and then – chaotically, totally at random – came together in a larger entity called matter and decided to live according to rational laws.

Ex nihilo nihil fit? Nonsense. Of course something can bloody well come out of nothing, say my clever friends (they may not actually say it, but that’s the only thing their atheism can imply).

And that something is perfectly capable of organising itself – no outside help needed, thank you very much – according not only to rational natural laws but also according to aesthetic and moral ones. In due course, matter develops an irresistible urge to build cathedrals and write the music sung inside.

My cultured friends admire the architecture of the cathedrals; they love to listen to the music and even to play it. Sensitive souls, they detect the presence of divine reason behind these, but they can’t identify it as such.

As far as they’re concerned, all those nice things began with a random, purposeless physical event. Yes, the world functions according to universal, rational laws. But that, to my clever friends, somehow doesn’t have to presuppose the existence of a rational law-giver. Those things just happen, best not to think about it.

Those of us who do think about it must pray for those who don’t. For by denying divine intelligence they discount their own. If they don’t reconsider, eventually the discounted commodity will have to be written off altogether.

The only alternative is to put Christ back into Christmas – even if this means a smaller and less frantic traffic in the High Street.

Happy Christmas!

Britain is constitutionally a Christian commonwealth, complete with its own state religion (none of that nonsense about separating religion and state).

Our Queen – God bless her – took the oath to uphold the received confession of her realm. Her official title, Defender of the Faith, goes back to Henry VIII, when he was still a good Catholic.

Thus the constitutional (I know I repeat this word too often, but it’s rather important) remit of our monarch, regardless of any personal idiosyncrasies, is to maintain Britain as what it has been for thirteen centuries: a Christian country.

Now I hope that Her Majesty will live for ever, but, in the statistically probable event that she won’t, she’ll be succeeded by HRH Prince Charles. And the omens aren’t good.

If his public pronouncements are anything to go by, HRH is ecumenical to the point of being a rank atheist. Years ago he amended the title the Pope bestowed on Henry VIII to say that he’d be not defender of the faith, but “defender of faith”, meaning all faiths.

The thought crossed my mind then that – and I hope MI5 aren’t on my trail – HRH was so staggeringly ignorant that he simply didn’t realise that some religions aren’t so much different as mutually exclusive. Defending them all means that they’re all so similar as not to make a difference. In other words, they’re all equally irrelevant.

As a private subject of Her Majesty, Charles Mountbatten-Windsor, HRH is perfectly entitled to his opinion. As heir to the throne, he isn’t, or at least he should keep it to himself: his duty is to uphold the ancient constitution of the realm.

Anyway, one could put that pronouncement down to an unfortunate slip of the tongue, possibly influenced by overeducation in Latin: the original Latin title (Fidei defensor) didn’t feature the definite article.

Yet all such hopes were summarily dispelled by HRH’s pronouncement earlier this week, when he commanded us to think, in this festive season, not only of Jesus but also of Muhammad:

“Normally at Christmas we think of the Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. I wonder though if this year we might remember how the story of the nativity unfolds, with the fleeing of the holy family to escape violent persecution. And we might also remember that when the prophet Muhammad migrated from Mecca to Medina he was seeking the freedom for himself and his followers to worship.

“Whichever religious path we follow, the destination is the same – to value and respect the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God.”

I hope our future Charles III remains in good health, and by no means do I wish him harm, but one is tempted to recall what happened to Charles I for a considerably milder transgression against the constitution of the realm.

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton ever so slightly, Christianity and Islam are very much alike, especially Islam.

If HRH’s earlier intention to defend all faiths (Pantheism? Catharism?) betokened a sketchy command of comparative religion, this pronouncement reveals something that only respect for his office would prevent one from calling pig ignorance.

For, at a stretch, it could be said that Muhammad had preached something resembling peace and freedom before he moved from Mecca to Medina. After his migration, the period that HRH singled out, he started to preach and perpetrate mass murder.

That’s when that illiterate nomad dictated the more blood-thirsty verses of the Koran, some 300 of them. The time for talk had passed, now it was time for action.

“Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…,” dictated Muhammad (5:51), and he started his reign when, exactly upon moving from Mecca to Medina, he had 900 Jews massacred, beheading many of them with his own trusted sabre.

Within the next century or so, the cult inspired by his teaching carved out a caliphate greater in size than the Roman Empire at its peak. Since then the religion supposedly following the same path as the one started by a crucified martyr, whose birth we’re about to celebrate, has murdered the better part of 300 million people.

Contrary to what HRH believes (or claims – an important difference), the destination of all religious paths is far from the same. It’s beyond ignorance to aver that the Muslim path leads to “respect [for] the other person, accepting their right to live out their peaceful response to the love of God”.

Muslims, sir, have never accepted our right to worship God. Forget history; just follow the current events. Muslims, sir, are murdering thousands of Christians – today! – for the simple reason that they are Christians. And they kill mercilessly any apostate from their awful cult.

There’s a lot to pray for at Christmas mass tonight. But one prayer should be for the continued good health of Her Majesty. God only knows what havoc her heir will wreak.

Meanwhile, my heartfelt Season’s Greetings to all the non-Christians among my readers. I realise you can’t celebrate the miracle of Incarnation, but you may still want to commemorate the birthday of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known.

And to the Christians among you, have a blessed Christmas and a peaceful, loving New Year.