Category: Blog

New York, 25 September, 2015.

In a move that surprised most observers, Pope Francis has delivered a fiery oration calling the West to arms in defence of our civilisation against an increasingly militant Muslim world.

In the part of the speech dealing specifically with the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, His Holiness said:

“If it were announced to you that the enemy has invaded your cities, your castles, your land; had ravished your wives and your daughters, and profaned your temples – which among you would not fly to arms? Well, then, all those calamities and calamities still greater, have fallen upon your brethren, upon the family of Jesus Christ, which is yours. Why do you hesitate to repair so many evils – to revenge so many outrages? Will you allow the infidels to contemplate in peace the ravages they have committed on Christian people? Remember that their triumph will be a subject of grief to all ages and an eternal opprobrium upon the generation that has endured it. Yes, the living God has charged me to announce to you that He will punish them who shall not have defended Him against His enemies.

“Fly then to arms; let the holy rage animate you in the fight, and let the Christian world resound with these words of the prophet: “Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood!” If the Lord calls you to the defence of his heritage, think not that His hand has lost its power. Could He not send twelve legions of angels or breathe one word and all His enemies would crumble away into dust? But God has considered the sons of men, to open for them the road to His mercy. His goodness has caused to dawn for you a day of safety by calling on you to avenge His glory and His name.

“Christian warriors, He who gave his life for you, today demands yours in return. These are combats worthy of you, combats in which it is glorious to conquer and advantageous to die. Illustrious knights, defenders of the Cross, remember the example of your fathers who conquered Jerusalem, and whose names are inscribed in Heaven; abandon then the things that perish, to gather unfading palms, and conquer a Kingdom that has no end.”

It didn’t take you long to detect the hoax, did it? Of course not. The speech was indeed delivered, but I used a wrong attribution.

The speaker wasn’t Pope Francis but St Bernard of Clairvaux. The place wasn’t the American city of New York but the Burgundian town of Vézelay. And the date wasn’t 25 September, 2015, but  31 March 1146.

Bernard had been asked by Pope Urban II to preach a Second Crusade. So he did, outside the St Mary Magdalen Basilica overlooking the town from the top of a steep hill.

A huge crowd, including Louis VII of France and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, gathered and, looking down from St Bernard’s vantage point, the basilica close and the hill slope must have looked like a sea of human heads. The sea was still: everyone was hanging on to every rousing word.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m not wishing for another Holy Crusade – and I’m certainly not going to advocate anything like that in print.

It’s just that… well, don’t you wish sometimes that our civilisation were still animated by the same indomitable spirit, still led by the same type of men?

Instead we have an utterly corrupted populace enthusiastically applauding Pope Francis’s sermons of political correctness, multiculturalism and nonviolence – whatever the provocation.

Well, that’s progress for you. St Bernard didn’t even know the word. It probably didn’t exist in his backward time. And if it did, it certainly didn’t mean a civilisation cutting its own moral and spiritual throat.

 

 

 

It has been a dozen years since the Americans (with us in tow) set out to introduce democracy in the Middle East. Twelve being a round number in the non-metric Anglophone world, it’s time to draw up the interim tally of what this noble expedition has achieved:

A death toll of at least 2,000,000. Some will say it’s a fair price to pay for democracy. Others will argue that this mass slaughter is then a fraud: the product paid for was never delivered.

Injecting passion into the Islamic world and making it universally committed to jihad.

Getting rid of tyrants who alone managed to keep a lid on said passions and prevent the region from sinking into a blood-soaked chaos, which it has since done.

Creating ISIS, a well-armed, well-financed and well-trained gang, at present 250,000-strong and growing fast.

Having Europe inundated with masses of migrants of whom some have a good reason, and most a good pretext, to move to sunnier economic climes.

Turning to Iran for assistance. Lifting, as a fair price for it, the economic sanctions, thereby giving the ayatollahs new billions to spend on global trouble-making. More crucially, in effect giving Iran a cart blanche to develop nuclear weapons.

Glorious achievements all, but one takes the baklava: inviting Putin’s kleptofascist regime to become a powerful, potentially dominant, force in the Middle East.

Western observers, even those who lament this last achievement, don’t think it as towering as the others. In fact, however, it may well shift the strategic balance in Europe towards its most evil regime.

Back in the 19^th century, when Russia was infinitely more benign than she is now, Britain and her allies fought the Empire’s southward expansion several times, in the Balkans, the Black Sea and Central Asia.

In the 20^th century it was understood that Western bases south of Russia would have a restraining effect on Soviet ambitions, in the Middle East and elsewhere, while Soviet bases there would present a strategic danger to Western interests in many areas, including Europe.

In 1940 Britain used the RAF base at Mosul to prevent Russia from occupying Finland at the end of the Winter War. The threat was simple and direct: stop or we’ll take out the Baku oil fields, then the principal source of Russia’s hydrocarbons.

Russia, on the other hand, perfected the strategy of establishing military bases in a region and then using them as the spearheads of conquest. That’s how the three Baltic republics were incorporated into the Soviet Union: Soviet bases came first, invasion second.

Putin seems to have learned the lessons taught by his role model Stalin. Faced with the West’s meek but still annoying opposition to Russia’s attack on the Ukraine, he decided to check the offensive and get entrenched in the parts already occupied.

To that end, Russia is busily creating in Eastern Ukraine and Kaliningrad a network of heavily armed bases. At the same time, Putin has issued an ultimatum to Belarus to accept Russian air force bases on her territory.

Hence Belarus may be next in line for Russia’s bases-first-conquest-second treatment, but Syria may just beat her to it. Russia has established several bases there, filling them to the brim with jets, tanks, artillery and soldiers.

Although no official agreement has been published, it’s clear that America has struck a Faustian deal with Putin, selling her soul (and commitment to sanctions against Russia) for the chance to leave the Middle East with a portion of her face intact.

Putin is all too happy to pose as the intrepid fighter for Christian interests (as represented by the KGB junta he fronts) against the Islamic threat (as represented by ISIS) – and, revoltingly, the West plays along.

Meanwhile confusion reigns. ISIS threatens Assad, who has always been Russia’s client. Hence for Putin stopping ISIS also means defending Assad.

On the other hand the West, while wanting to stop ISIS, also wishes to get rid of Assad. Fair is fair: what’s sauce for the Saddam goose is also sauce for the gander of his ideological Ba’athist twin.

In fact, before ISIS acquired its name Dave was ready to commit British troops on its side, and only a last-ditch stand by Parliament prevented that criminal idiocy.

Now John Kerry hypocritically objects to Russia’s military build-up in Syria because it may lead to clashes with Western forces there, presumably as they leave. “These actions could provoke a further escalation of the conflict,” declares Kerry, conveniently forgetting that it was America that invited Putin in.

Even more hypocritically, or else ignorantly, Kerry allows that Putin might only want to safeguard Russia’s naval base at Taurus, her sole foothold on the Mediterranean.

Yes, and Stalin only attacked Finland because he wanted to safeguard Leningrad, occupied the Baltics to safeguard Russia’s western borders and raped Poland to safeguard her Ukrainian and Byelorussian minorities.

Chalk this up as the West’s crowning achievement: Putin is on the way to becoming the principal Middle Eastern warlord. Our leaders should be pleased with themselves. Twelve years well spent.

 

Now that Ashcroft’s book has come out, everyone and his brother is talking about Dave Cameron’s youthful indiscretions, throwing stones as if they themselves were without sin.

Being a kind, liberal and forgiving man, I feel like saying to them, come on, fellows.

Who among you wasn’t a bit wild during your university years? Who didn’t drink like a whole school of fish? Who didn’t trash the odd restaurant or two? Who didn’t use every known drug, either naturally or synthetically derived? Who didn’t try to score some of those drugs off two KGB officers on a Crimean beach?

Who, I ask you, didn’t copulate with everything that breathed – and a few things that didn’t, like a dead pig’s head (I assume Dave didn’t go the whole hog)? Rather than ganging up on Dave, you should praise him for his necrophiliac prudence.

Let’s be honest, if a young man bursting with testosterone has to corrupt someone’s morals, a dead pig is preferable to a live girl. After all, 50 years later the girl could, at the same time, complain to the police and sue her abuser for zillions, something a dead pig won’t do because a) it’s dead, b) it’s a pig and, most important, c) it won’t have the money to instruct a shyster lawyer.

Actually I’m inadvertently slandering Dave by suggesting that the porcine episode had something to do with amorous gratification. In fact, it was at base social rather than sexual.

Doing that to a dead suckling (not to be confused with a live sucking) pig was part of the initiation ritual at some quasi-masonic Oxford student society, not dissimilar to Yale’s Skull and Bones.

There the aspirant is supposed to masturbate publicly in a coffin surrounded by Skull and Bone members. I always picture that ritual when looking at the list of famous Boners, which includes both Bush presidents and the current Foreign Secretary John Kerry. And no one in the States bats an eyelid! How come we are so prudish?

Who among you… Well, actually, on second thoughts I’m sure that most of you have not done all the things Dave is alleged to have tried in his young days. Specifically those things, that is.

Yet most of us did all sorts of wild and crazy things in our salad days – and those indiscretions don’t even show as much variety as Dave can boast. We all did roughly the same stupid things.

The difference is that some of us still managed not to grow up as total nonentities and some, like Dave, didn’t. And that, rather than his drinking, drugs and dead farm animals, is what we should be talking about.

The question we should be asking is not ‘did he or didn’t he?’, but how is it that a man so openly devoid of any qualifications, be it those of intellect, morality or character, is in a position to lead a nation caught at the crossroads of a dying civilisation.

What is it about our system of government that allows this particular substance to rise to the top with unfailing regularity, only once interrupted in the post-war years by the emergence of Margaret Thatcher? One could say all sorts of negative things about her, but what she definitely wasn’t was a self-serving, spivocratic featherweight.

So what have we done to deserve all those subsequent Johnnies, Tonies, Gordies and Daves? I try to answer such questions in my book How the West Was Lost, the second, paperback, edition of which is coming out in a couple of weeks.

You can either read it or, better still, come up with your own answers. What none of us should do is dismiss the question as inconsequential. It isn’t. It’s a matter of life or death.

 

 

 

 

 

I was sorry when the great Pope Benedict XVI retired. So much so that I actually questioned whether this is the kind of job in which retirement should be allowed.

However, Benedict’s successor, Pope Francis, has made me warm up to the notion on several occasions. The last time was yesterday, when His Holiness saw fit to thank Fidel Castro for “his contribution to world peace in a world saturated with hate and aggression.”

Yes, and I’d also like to thank Hitler (posthumously) for his contribution to race relations, Lenin (posthumously) for all he did for Russia, Pol Pot (posthumously) for having solved the problem of overpopulation and Jeremy Corbyn for his staunch royalism. Thanks all around.

One wonders if Pope Francis has any advisors to point out in advance that certain things he plans to say are not just ridiculously ideological but factually incorrect.

Probably not, for otherwise he would have been reminded that back in 1962 Castro aided and abetted Khrushchev’s efforts to bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster. Or else that Castro is a mass murderer. Or that he created his own GULAG. Or that he can be credited with originating the concept of boat people. Or that he sent Cuban troops to Africa to act as the Soviets’ proxies in their attempt to dominate the continent. Or that, in general, Castro’s negative contribution to world peace is rivalled by few of his contemporaries.

On second thoughts, perhaps the Pope didn’t need advisors to point out these universally known facts. I’m sure that he praised Castro not in spite of his crimes but specifically because of them.

You see, after the Second World War the Soviets no longer spoke about their mission to bring about world revolution, or in other words to conquer the world. That remained their goal, but they now gave it a different name: struggle for peace.

The underlying canard was that the West was trying to unleash a world war, and only the valiant efforts of Soviet concentration-camp keepers managed to avert a global catastrophe. ‘Struggle for peace’ became the new Soviet term for their campaign to spread concentration camps all over the world.

The campaign was conducted through the most gigantic propaganda machine in history, putting Dr Goebbels’s amateurish efforts to shame. The machine was operated by hardened professionals, but it was helped along by millions of volunteer supporters around the world, of the type to whom Lenin had ungratefully referred as “useful idiots”.

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as he then was, grew up as a leftie even by the standards of his generally left-leaning continent. To him the notion of communist Russia fighting for peace was an article of faith, possibly as firmly ingrained as the articles of the faith to which he pledged his professional life.

I don’t know if he used to spread Soviet propaganda, but it definitely affected him the way propaganda does at its best: not by appealing to reason but by conditioning reflexes.

It must have been by pure communism-equals-peace-struggle reflex that the Pope blurted out his plaudit for the mass murderer who has done as much as any man alive to undermine world peace.

Accidents do happen, even though one wishes that the world’s greatest Church were at this turbulent time led by a man whose reflexes are different. One also fears that, barring the Pope’s premature retirement, the Church won’t remain the world’s greatest for long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Suppose for the sake of argument that back in 2003 the US powers-that-be, with their British counterparts in tow, did some soul-searching and set themselves ten long-term goals.

Goal 1: Removing or at least destabilising every Middle Eastern government that has a sporting chance of keeping the region under control.

Goal 2: Turning the region into a blood-soaked chaos, with the rule of heavily armed mob as the sole discernible authority.

Goal 3: Making sure the chaos expands rapidly, threatening to engulf the West’s allies in the region and beyond.

Goal 4: Injecting murderous passion into the whole Islamic world, giving them a common sense of purpose that may eventually trump their internal strife and unite them against the West.

Goal 5: Creating the right conditions for Iran to develop nuclear weapons and use them to blackmail, and possibly attack, Israel first and the West second.

Goal 6: First washing their hands of the region, then not just allowing but positively begging Putin’s fascist regime to take charge, establish a massive military presence, create puppet states and found a naval base compromising Nato in general and its southern flank in particular.

Goal 7: In exchange for Putin’s generous agreement to accept a huge strategic advantage, taking steps towards removing Western sanctions and thereby perpetuating Putin’s brand of kleptofascism at a time it looks wobbly.

Goal 8: Inundating Europe with a flood of Muslim immigrants, thereby drowning the continent’s historical demographics, culture and social order.

Goal 9: Creating every precondition for a series of murderous terrorist attacks by Muslims on the West, with the use of nuclear devices a distinct possibility.

Goal 10: Making Israel’s existence ever more precarious.

Now imagine the same powers, with a slightly different cast of characters, rubbing their hands with glee as they go over the above list, item by item: done… sorted… accomplished… achieved… fulfilled… attained… tick… tick… tick… another tick… Congratulations! We’ve managed to do everything we set out to do.

No, I hear you say. No such meeting ever took place, and nor could it possibly have taken place. The suggestions that it did could only have come from a deranged mind.

To which my answer is, how do you know? I base my supposition on hard evidence, analysis of every step taken by the USA, with Britain in the capacity of the proverbial poodle, since it embarked on the criminal venture going by the name of nation-building and democracy-installing.

What do you base your counterarguments on? General belief in the goodness and wisdom of Western governments run by assorted Dubyas, Tonys, Baracks and Daves? Really.

In fact, my view of these lads is a great deal more optimistic than yours. I give them credit for planning every detail of the ensuing global catastrophe and executing the plan with unwavering commitment and ingenuity.

You, on the other hand, seem to suggest that they are so stupid and immoral that they plunged into these troubled waters without even considering the consequences.

Shame on you. And congratulations to them.

 

 

 

If this title caught your eye, it’s because such a scenario isn’t just implausible but impossible.

Americans are perfectly able, indeed almost guaranteed, to elect nonentities to variously high public offices. But they’ll never allow anyone to uphold the constitution who is ideologically committed to undermining it.

For better or for worse, the USA is a republic. Hence no one who, like me, believes that hereditary monarchy is the only form of government consonant with our civilisation, will be allowed to play an active role in American politics. That’s how it should be. Fair is fair.

Now let’s cross the ocean and land close to home. Her Majesty’s opposition is now led by a communist who hates Her Majesty and everything she (and her realm) stands for, whose chosen newspaper is the Morning Star, founded and financed for decades by the Soviet secret police, who voices support for Britain’s enemies, who is committed to destroying the world’s oldest – and best – constitution.

And who doesn’t mind advertising all that by demonstratively refusing to sing the national anthem.

Should we react the same way as Americans would in my far-fetched hypothetical situation? More specifically, how should our conservative pundits comment on Corbyn’s ascent?

Certainly not the way some of them do.

Dominic Lawson, he of the family where daughters are named after their fathers, thinks there’s nothing wrong with Corbyn’s vocal strike. Our national anthem, he says, is “an uninspiring dirge” that, “unlike the anthems of other constitutional monarchies… praises neither the nation nor people.”

Tastes differ, and I find God Save the Queen to be supremely inspiring. But that doesn’t really matter, for it’s crass stupidity to discuss the melody and the lyrics of the anthem in this context. Does Lawson think Corbyn refused to sing it for aesthetic reasons? Of course he didn’t. He thumbed his nose not to the words but to everything they represent.

“It is a repugnant idea,” continues Lawson, “that someone should be bullied into uttering words he doesn’t believe.” Absolutely. But I’d still be tempted to make the point that someone who doesn’t believe those particular words shouldn’t sit in Her Majesty’s Parliament and have a shot at becoming her prime minister.

Lawson then quotes approvingly an RAF veteran who admires “Mr Corbyn for sticking to his principles… That is what democracy is all about and what we all fought for in the war.”

Now an RAF veteran may be assumed to be a hero, but being an intellectual giant isn’t his job requirement. He may not realise that sticking to one’s principles is praiseworthy only if the principles are. He may not be aware of the fine constitutional nuances of British politics or of the fundamental difference between constitutional monarchy and democratic republic. That’s why it’s a columnist’s duty to explain those things to him. Instead this particular columnist actively encourages ignorance.

The RAF fought the war not for democracy but for God, king and country – for the sovereignty of the realm whose divinely anointed head reigns through Parliament. This is what we all should still be fighting for, in our own ways. And fighting for it logically presupposes fighting against those who wish to destroy the realm from either without or within.

That doesn’t mean that Comrade Corbyn isn’t entitled to hold his perverse beliefs, or that he should be harassed for holding them. It only means that we are equally entitled to protect ourselves from the cannibalistic ideology he espouses.

Peter Hitchens, who shares Corbyn’s Trotskyist temperament if no longer his views, is even more emphatic: “To hell with all the superpatriots who condemn Jeremy Corbyn for not singing God Save the Queen. What are they patriotic for, exactly, if not for the freedom to dissent, the crown of all our liberties and our greatest achievement.”

He then praises Corbyn for being “open and honest”, much as Hitchens himself disagrees with his ideas. But hey, “nobody is right all the time.”

I never tire of saying that Lenin and Hitler, the most evil politicians of all time, were equally “open and honest” about their ideas. I’d rather have statesmen who enunciate and act on the right ideas insincerely than those who honestly state their intention to destroy this country, as Comrade Corbyn does, if not yet in so many words.

Oswald Mosley also exercised his freedom of dissent, which is why he was interned for the duration of the war. A clear understanding existed at the time that commitment to that particular freedom mustn’t be tantamount to a suicide pact.

The realm was in grave danger then, but who in his right mind wouldn’t see that the danger is as great if not greater now, even if it doesn’t take the shape of Luftwaffe bombers? The constitution is being steadily eroded, not to say subverted, and without her constitution Britain isn’t Britain any longer.

Let the likes of Corbyn expand on their evil ideas in pubs or at home. And is it too much to ask that those who write for our papers have a modicum of intelligence and a firm grasp of their subjects?

 

Are you cultured? I am not, judging by the 40 questions asked by a recent survey. Then again, 29 of them have nothing to do with culture, as I understand it.

Surveys in this genre must be taken with a grain of salt and, ideally, also with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila. However, they do reflect the popular perception of the area under investigation and, when it comes to culture, the popular perception is frankly idiotic.

For cultured people, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual pursuits define their personalities. For today’s lot, they are an aside, something to chat about at a party once food, money and DIY have been exhausted.

For our philistines, culture denotes what tasteless vulgarity used to mean to civilised people. At best, philistines identify with culture something that has nothing to do with it, such as preference for some TV shows over others or being obsessed with food.

In fact, 11 of the 29 silly rubrics have nothing to do with food. To wit, you aren’t a cultured person if you don’t: host dinner parties; know about cheese; know about cuts of meat; visit farm shops; drink ‘proper’ coffee (not instant); grow your own fruit and vegetables on an allotment; know how to pronounce ‘quinoa’; use chopsticks over a knife and fork; only eat local produce; get food from supermarket ‘finer’ ranges; drink herbal tea.

None of these has anything to do with culture, properly defined, and some reflect nothing but tree-hugging faddism, with a slight leftward slant.

For example, show me a man who drinks herbal tea, and I’ll show you a man who can talk seriously about alternative lifestyles. And, much as I’d like to establish my cultural credentials by keeping an allotment, doing so in London would mean an expenditure of time that can be more profitably used writing, reading and listening to music.

One of my most cultured friends would fail on all those foodie criteria, except using chopsticks – and then only because he plays concerts in the Far East. Conversely, it’s easy to imagine a rank philistine ticking every one of those boxes with a flourish of his Mont Blanc pen.

Then we have several TV rubrics supposed to separate the cultured wheat from the barbarian chaff: watch documentaries; watch Question Time; don’t skip the news when it’s on TV; watch tennis or cricket; watch Antiques Road Show.

I watch tennis and some of my friends watch cricket, but we wouldn’t lay a claim to culture on that basis. It’s just some mindless entertainment a busy mind needs as much as sleep. I also know ignoramuses who devote their lives to watching sports.

TV news, Question Time and Antiques Road Show are the antithesis of culture, while any decent book will tell you more than any documentary about any subject. And some refined people I know don’t own a TV set at all, which presumably places them in the culture stakes below any council-estate dweller.

Then there’s ‘cultured’ entertainment: go to the ballet; go to the theatre; read a book before the film comes out; watch films with subtitles; go to music festivals.

As the low end of high culture, ballet has more to do with entertainment. Some people have no access to ballet performances, some have no money to pay the extortionist prices – and some of them are infinitely more cultured than any ballet master I’ve ever met.

Going to the theatre is also difficult for people who live in the country or those whose budgets don’t stretch to £50 a ticket. Reading a book before the film comes out betokens ignorance of the incompatible difference between the two genres.

If a film is based on a classic, cultured people would have read the book anyway. If it’s based on trash, as most are, then the book isn’t worth reading. In either case a film should be assessed on cinematic merits, not faithfulness to the book.

Stressing films with subtitles presupposes that any foreign film is better than an Anglophone one, which is nonsense. Most French films I’ve seen in the last 20 years are pretentious rubbish, and I could name dozens of superb English and American films produced during the same period.

Music festivals, especially nowadays, are designed not for music lovers but for philistines who need to be seen or have nothing better to do on holiday.

Our reading habits are tested by only two useless rubrics: own a library card; read Wikipedia articles. I doubt any one of my well-read friends owns a library card. And though Wikipedia is a useful source of reference, its effect on culture is more negative than positive.

A cultured person is also supposed to be characterised by his shopping habits: go to vintage markets (why on earth?); collect music on vinyl (what kind of music, and what’s wrong with CDs?); wear bow ties and brooches (not many people wear both, some wear one or the other, and some of them are cultured, with no causative relationship anywhere in sight.

Then there are miscellaneous items, such as: enjoy crosswords or Sudoku (?), get the conundrum on Countdown (I’ve no idea what Countdown is) and – my favourite – put on an accent to pronounce foreign words.

This is tolerable only when someone is a native speaker or at least fluent in the language. Otherwise it’s nauseatingly pretentious, as in the case of broadcasters who insist on replacing every ‘z’ in a Spanish name with a ‘th’, often incorrectly.

So there you go: I’ve been put to shame. My only consolation is that I’m in good company.

 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley got the ball rolling when he apologised for saying that white lives matter as much as black ones.

I don’t know how closely you follow US politics, but saying something like that could end the career of any presidential candidate. By ‘something like that’ I mean anything that in any way, no matter how inoffensive, may be perceived as ‘insensitive’.

Insensitive, that is, to any faddish passion consuming any mob, provided that said passion is febrile, widespread and, above all, politically correct.

In this instance the politically correct passion wasn’t just febrile but downright explosive. It was set off by the activist movement Black Lives Matter, meaning the lives of black criminals shot by white policemen.

An officer may be returning fire, saving a hostage’s life, trying to protect himself from a knife thrust – the circumstances of each such case are unimportant. If the policeman is white and the criminal is black, America will be consumed by fiery riots expertly whipped up and stoked by professional rabble-rousers – such as the Black Lives Matter group.

Speaking at a rally of leftie (‘liberal’ in American political slang, where words tend to mean their exact opposites), Mr O’Malley was greeted with the thunderous braying of “Black lives matter!”

The candidate, erroneously feeling amply protected by his impeccably ‘liberal’ credentials, decided to expand the notion. “Black lives matter,” he agreed – and then added the potential career-ender: “White lives matter. All lives matter.”

You what!?!? White lives?!? All lives?!?!? Who do you think you’re talking to? Where do you think you are, you insensitive whitey? This is a LIBERAL gathering! Context, man! In this context ONLY black lives matter, and if you don’t apologise you won’t get away with your own white life, at least its political incarnation.

Following a nation-wide fit of hysterics, a grovelling apology ensued. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or to communicate,” wept O’Malley, “that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to the issue.”

Especially those of us who seek the Democratic presidential nomination, which Mr O’Malley can now kiss good-bye. Upholding the sanctity of human life, whatever the colour of the body housing it, isn’t just insensitive or archaic. It’s borderline criminal.

Our lot wouldn’t be outdone in the apologies stakes. We have our own context, much more advanced than the Yanks can boast. There the typological answers to the Black Panthers and the Weathermen of yesteryear provide the deafening din to accompany politics, but they don’t yet control either major party.

In Britain, our second largest party, Labour, officially called Her Majesty’s Opposition, is already in the hands of the extreme, loony Left. Obviously, in the course of their distinguished careers, all its senior figures have said publicly things that a civilised person wouldn’t even utter at a boozy dinner party.

A short catalogue of their aphorisms would make the party unelectable even in the likely conditions of a financial meltdown come the next general election. Hence it’s important to get the mendacious apologies in early.

Shadow Chancellor (Labour’s second in command) John McDonnell led the way. He didn’t mean to say back in 2003 that IRA terrorists should be “honoured” for their “armed struggle”. Presumably he meant to say they should be hanged, but his tongue committed one of those Freudian slips that can be ever so embarrassing.

Neither did Mr McDonnell refer to Bobby Sands, him of the chicken supper fame, as a hero. Or, if he did, it was another slip of the tongue for which he apologises most abjectly, “from the bottom of my heart”. He was actually giving his recipe for a hero sandwich, and Bobby’s name came up inadvertently.

While at it, Mr McDonnel also apologised for his “appalling joke” about Margaret Thatcher. The humorous aside had been an expression of his heart-felt desire that he could go back in time for the sole purpose of murdering Mrs Thatcher, as she then was.

What he really meant was that he wanted to perform this unlikely backward leap in order to honour Mrs Thatcher and rebuke those IRA consumers of hero sandwiches who almost succeeded in murdering her with that Brighton bomb in 1984, which was one thing you can’t pin on Bobby Sands, who died in 1981, but wasn’t a hero anyway, while Margaret Thatcher was.

The joke, said Mr McDonnell (or should one call him ‘Comrade’?) has “ended my career in stand-up”. He really shouldn’t give up so easily: I’m sure his full economic programme will be a laugh. And if he ever becomes our Chancellor, we’ll all be rolling in the aisles – of the airliners taking us as far away from The People’s Republic of Britain as one can get.

Now, in the spirit of the time, I’d like to apologise unreservedly yet insincerely for any offence my remarks might have caused. I don’t know what came over me.

 

Do you ever get the feeling you haven’t lived? I do, every time I read yet another sex-crime story in the papers.

I’ve never considered myself particularly prudish, and I’ve probably done enough in the area of romance to earn the fires of hell in eternity.

What gives me some consolation is the hope that repentance does work, and the thought that quite a few others are bound to be ahead of me in the post-mortem queue to the frying pan. Just witness this morning’s story.

A lesbian university student (let’s call her LUST for short) groomed her silly classmate (SIC) on the net and the phone by pretending to be a man. The SIC girl went along enthusiastically and immediately started sending LUST nude pictures of herself, as one does these days.

Before long the couple began having sex, and you’d think it would be hard for LUST to continue to pass for a man in close quarters. But human ingenuity knows no barriers.

LUST came up with a cock-and-bull story, as it were, that ‘he’ had been disfigured in a car accident and couldn’t let ‘his’ lover see ‘him’. Hence for two years SIC had to be blindfolded during sex. LUST would strap her breasts down, wear a cap concealing her long hair and consummate the mutual passion with a prosthetic penis.

After two years of such amorous activity, SIC got suspicious, removed her blindfold and recognised her indefatigable lover as her female classmate. She screamed and, again as one does these days, went to the police.

At the ensuing trial LUST maintained that SIC had been aware of the charade all along, and the two had been playing an elaborate sex game by mutual consent.

SIC, on the other hand, insisted that she was heterosexual and could cite many sexual encounters to prove it. On balance, she claimed, she’d rather be raped by a man – it would have been less traumatic.

LUST’s defence team tried to convince the jury that SIC’s version was totally incredible, but to no avail. LUST was convicted of sexual assaults, with sentencing put off until a psychiatric examination.

Now, even though I’ve never been on the receiving end of either a prosthetic penis or a natural one, I still can’t help feeling that a sexually experienced woman this side of clinical retardation would be able to tell them apart over two years of non-stop blind trials.

But that’s not the most salient argument against the conviction. Just consider SIC’s behaviour throughout the ordeal. (In our progressive times focusing on the victim’s contribution to sexual assault may itself be an imprisonable offence, but I promise not to tell anyone.)

A university student, a girl from a decent family, is contacted by a stranger and, after a few electronic exchanges, sends him nude shots of herself. She then agrees to have blindfolded sex with the man she has never seen.

Call me a stick-in-the-mud coward, but I wouldn’t accept a similar proposition from a strange woman. What if she’s a murderer? Sadist? Castrator? Cannibal? I mean, I don’t really know her, do I?

One would think that a woman would feel even more vulnerable and demur from such a blind encounter. SIC, however, didn’t. Hence I’d say she has only herself to blame, or at least also herself to blame, and please don’t report me to the cops.

Then again, no physical assault took place. SIC was tricked, not forced, into sex, and was a willing, if misled, participant for two years. LUST was doubtless immoral, but was she criminal?

What happened to the old notion of all being fair in love and war? Open any collection of bawdy Renaissance stories, say by Aretino or Boccaccio, and you’ll read all sorts of stories about an aspiring lover using the cover of darkness to pass himself for a lady’s husband.

Those stories were mostly heterosexual, but in this one the principle is the same, although the details are more Baroque than Renaissance. Even if we, along with the court, accept SIC’s story on faith (which I must admit I don’t), she should have been told to go home, not to be so stupid again and never to plunge headlong into kinky sex with strangers she can’t see.

But we don’t live during the Renaissance, a period that was naughty but still residually sane. We live in a madhouse called modernity, and old certitudes no longer apply.

Everybody is entitled to victimhood and can claim it at the drop of a hat or, in this case, a blindfold. And modern jurors are conditioned by our brainwashing feminist propaganda to accept a victim’s definition of her status, no matter how improbable or insane.

I’d suggest that the sheer improbability of picking at random twelve persons impervious to the moral and intellectual perversions of modernity is coming close to invalidating the jury system. No one can mete out justice without a clear understanding of what justice is.

Nowadays the prosecution can get convictions, or the defence acquittals, by invoking the shibboleths of feminist, racial, homosexual or any other fashionable propaganda as extenuating or even exculpating circumstances. Our adversarial court system is being increasingly reduced to a contest between two fads, not two evidential cases.

Whoever wins or loses such sham trials, the ultimate losers are all of us. You – and a hopelessly square me.

Luke 8:17 reads like a current report on the West’s failure to protect classified information: “For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”

Some 500 years before Jesus prophesied the West’s lax security, the Chinese strategist Sun Tsu talked about the need to “mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy”, a tripartite task that presupposes secrecy.

Actually no great strategic talent is required to reach the same conclusion. Common sense would suffice – and this is a faculty woefully absent in Western governments.

Just look at the Manhattan Project, the super-secret American programme to produce nuclear weapons during the Second World War.

One would assume that no scientist even remotely seen as a security risk would be allowed anywhere near the Project, an assumption that the US government quickly dispelled. The Project was filled not only with left-wing sympathisers but even with known members of communist organisations.

One such was its head Robert Oppenheimer, who was self-admittedly “a member of just about every Communist front organisation on the West Coast.” Amazingly Oppenheimer was eventually given a security clearance, and only lost it, along with his career, a few years later.

Numerous scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were suspected of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. The Italian communist Bruno Pontecorvo turned a suspicion into certainty by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1950. Others, such as Fermi and Szilard, were probably also involved, though this was never proven. One way or the other, it’s hardly surprising that American atomic secrets didn’t stay secret for long.

This was hardly an isolated incident. Fast forward to 1999, when Eastern European nations began to join Nato. The military and security officers of these countries (not to mention the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union) were trained in the Soviet Union or at least under close Soviet supervision.

Professional training was only part of the process. At least as important was political indoctrination, whose objective was to brainwash trainees into unwavering loyalty to the common anti-Western cause.

There’s little doubt that some Eastern European officers didn’t really feel the loyalty to their Soviet masters they had to profess. However, there’s even less doubt that some did.

Suddenly, over the next few years, they all found themselves at the heart of Nato, with full access to its classified information. Sun Tsu probably spun like a top in his grave.

The spinning must have reached its red-line RPMs in 2008, when Nato appointed the Hungarian Sandor Laborc to lead its Committee for Security and Intelligence.

Gen. Laborc is a career KGB man and honours graduate of the KGB Dzerjinsky Academy in Moscow. Throughout his seven-year course, he was constantly vetted by his Soviet superiors who were rather adept at the art of interrogation.

They were satisfied with Laborc’s loyalty to his spiritual motherland. And Nato’s powers-that-be were equally certain that their secrets were safe in Laborc’s hands. One finds it hard to imagine how differently Nato would have acted had it been committed to self-liquidation.

This brings us to today’s news that Jeremy Corbyn has graciously agreed to take his place on the Queen’s Privy Council, to which he is entitled as the new leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. With this post comes access to top-level security briefings – this though even some in his own party regard Comrade Corbyn as a security risk.

Now the concept of Her Majesty’s Opposition doesn’t mean opposition to Her Majesty and everything she represents. Yet Comrade Corbyn has throughout his career made no secret of his visceral hatred for the monarchy.

His loyalty is cordially pledged to Her Majesty’s enemies: IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS terrorists, Putin at his most aggressive, the international brotherhood of Trotskyists and other anti-Western fanatics.

In his new position he’ll campaign for the dissolution of Nato, the abolition of the Trident and nuclear weapons in general, the de facto disbanding of our armed forces. As a symbol of his ideas on national defence, Corbyn has announced he’ll wear a white ‘peace’ poppy to the Cenotaph this year, rather than the traditional red flower of the Royal British Legion.

This creature will now be able to lay his hands on most of Britain’s and Nato’s secrets. Are we sure he won’t use them the way Manhattan Project communists used the atomic secrets?

It should be self-evident that the right to participate in the British political system must be contingent on loyalty to it. A manifestly subversive fanatic should be allowed to scream off a soap box, but any nation not bent on suicide would keep him a ranting distance away from top political offices.

Yet our democracy run riot is no longer capable of keeping at arm’s length those who, given half the chance, would destroy it. Nor can we any longer keep our secrets out of the grubby hands of men whose loyalty is manifestly pledged to our enemies.