Category: Blog

According to quantum freaks, there exists a parallel, timeless, self-multiplying universe into which all dead people move to live on in perpetuity.

Epileptics, they say, are envoys from that universe, which is why they supposedly can see the future as clearly as the rest of us see the present.

One may ask why, if so, they never win the lottery, and this is just one way in which that madcap theory can be mocked. Yet reading the news makes one take just about any madness seriously – so-called reality outpaces them all, carrying us into a parallel universe.

For example, saying that there just may be something wrong with homomarriage will soon become a criminal offence under the government’s new Extremism Disruption Orders.

Ostensibly the Orders are being introduced to curb the propaganda of Muslim terrorism in mosques and Islamic schools. Now who, other than aspiring suicide bombers, could argue against this?

Nobody. We all feel the urge to prostrate ourselves before Dave and thank him for doing this for us. But the urge subsides when we remind ourselves that, by doing a lot for the people, a modern government will inevitably do a lot to them as well.

Just look at the victors in the last big war and ask yourself which of them became freer as a result of their triumph. Russia? America? Britain?

None, is the answer to that one. Forgetting Stalin’s Russia as an irredeemably evil place, even the supposedly virtuous governments of the UK and the USA, while ensuring victory against Nazism, also scored one against their people’s liberties. For a modern state a war or any other extreme situation isn’t just a cause but also a pretext – to increase its own power at its citizens’ expense.

Another all-out world war hasn’t quite arrived yet, but in its absence terrorism will do nicely. In that sense all modern governments are alike. They all act according to the inner imperative to increase state power at any cost, and the personalities of specific leaders don’t matter.

Margaret Thatcher, for example, was made of much sterner moral fibre than any subsequent PM, yet she didn’t hesitate to knock out one of the cornerstones of Englishness: the right not to give self-incriminating evidence. Her stated reason was an upsurge in IRA terrorism, but in its absence she or some other PM would have found another pretext.

Then in 2005, when IRA murderers had been elevated to the rank of statesmen, the government of the ghastly Tony Blair abandoned another lapidary law, that of double jeopardy. That time it used not terrorism but newly fashionable sex crimes as a pretext, but anything else could have done just as well.

Our self-admitted ‘heir to Blair’ spied with his little eye the green light turned on by his predecessors and floored the accelerator. 

First he shattered the very institution of wedlock by shoving homomarriage down the throats of a thoroughly brainwashed and dumbed-down public. Now, under the pretext of combating terrorist indoctrination, he’s equating any opposition to homomarriage with ‘hate speech’.

And hate speech is one of the tautological ‘hate crimes’ (I’ve never heard of a ‘love crime’, have you?). The concept is based on secular ‘equality’, that evil Enlightenment simulacrum of equality before God.

In the past – in England, a very distant past of 800 years ago – this was extended into equality before the law. A little sleight of hand, and the concept has been larcenously shifted to mean the equality of everything: vice and virtue, normality and perversion, good and bad, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly.

Right and wrong are deemed to be relative – that is, relative to whatever the state is saying at the moment. No absolutes based on our religious, moral or political history, or even on good old common sense, shall be allowed.

Codify this subversive idiocy into law, and suddenly anyone who observes that, say, one ethnic group is more prone to criminality than another, or that Christianity has more to do with England than Islam, which is why Christian education isn’t the same as Islamic propaganda, is thereby breaking the law.

By the same token, to the state – our state, ladies and gentlemen! – a suggestion that a marriage can only be a union of a man and a woman is as criminal as propaganda of mass murder and inducement to terrorism.

Both are classified as hate crimes to be punished, and ‘equality’ demands, or will soon demand, that both be punished with the same severity.

Tastes differ but, if the fight against terrorism is being used this way, I’d prefer not to fight it at all. Terrorists can only kill a few people, while the modern state can use anti-terrorism to kill England and Englishness.

Can we please leave the phantom of parallel universes and go back to reality? We used to be so comfortable there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regardless of their party affiliation, politicians say little but talk a lot. And the more they talk, the greater the statistical likelihood that they’ll say something that makes sense.

The odds of that happening improve en route to the right end of the political spectrum, but even a left-wing demagogue may surprise you by sounding reasonable for a second or so.

That’s how long it took Jeremy Corbyn, the likely future leader of the Labour Party, to suggest that Tony Blair’s 2003 foray into Iraq ought to get him tried for war crimes.

For those of you who are as unfamiliar with Corbyn as I had been until a couple of weeks ago, he’s our leftmost MP whose political views place him somewhere between Harold Wilson and Kim Jong-un.

Corby is a bit like Gorby in other words. By comparison, Ed Miliband comes across like Attila the Hun’s military advisor, but Ed is no longer the party leader.

The party is in the throes of a leadership contest, and Comrade Corbyn (he addresses his audiences as ‘Comrades!’) has appeared out of nowhere to find himself so far ahead of other contestants that his appointment is practically a cinch.

The Tories are jubilant: Corbyn, they say, will move his party so far left that it’ll stay out of power for the next century and eventually disintegrate. Some intrepid Tories are even tricking their way into voting for Corbyn in the Labour contest, to make sure he gets to lead Labour to perdition.

That, to me, looks like a total misreading of the situation, for Corbyn is at least as likely to destroy the Tories. He has clearly united every strand of the hard left by enunciating views they all share but for the last 20 years have been afraid to make public.

That one of Britain’s two main parties is about to be led by a rank communist is a national problem, not a Labour one. This development suggests that the whole political spectrum in the country is shifting leftwards, and it takes rather lamentable naivety to believe that the Tories will benefit.

It’s a political truism that it takes the ownership of the middle ground to win a national election. Yes, but the site of the middle ground isn’t fixed – it’s constantly shifting.

For example, the middle ground Margaret Thatcher claimed in 1979 would these days look like extreme right, while Attlee’s all-out welfarism would today place him left of the middle.

If history is anything to go by, Dave’s focus groups will confirm the tectonic leftward shift, and he’ll respond the only way he knows how: pushing his party in the same direction, although one hesitates to see what more he could do to achieve that goal.

Possibly completing Britain’s unilateral disarmament could do the trick, or perhaps legalising interspecies marriage, post-natal abortions and enforced euthanasia would send the right, or rather sufficiently left, signals.

Meanwhile, by attacking Labour’s most successful election-winner ever, Corbyn has made clear that Labour no longer has to pretend being Tory in disguise.

“We went to war,” he said, “that was illegal, that cost us money, that lost a lot of lives, and the consequences are still played out with… refugees all over the region.”

All true, while Tony’s defence makes no sense at all: “Saddam Hussein,” he says, “wasn’t exactly a force for stability, peace and prosperity for his country.”

No doubt. But neither are the leaders of at least 100 other countries. Does this constitute casus belli, as far as Tony is concerned? Should we attack them all even if such belligerence goes against our national interests?

The Hague clearly beckons, though my personal preference would be to try Blair not for war crimes, and not in international courts, but at the Old Bailey for treason.

In evidence I’d submit Lord Mandelson’s frank admission that Blair’s government deliberately imported hundreds of thousands of Muslims to skew elections the Labour way. That subverted the electoral process and, much worse, dealt a blow to our social fabric from which it may never recover.

Iraq and Afghanistan, where 633 British soldiers died and many more were wounded, could be latched on to the indictment to guarantee a long custodial sentence. But I’d prefer the charge of manslaughter, rather than war crimes. Let’s wash our dirty linen at home, shall we?

However, that Corbyn said one thing that’s both intellectually sound and aesthetically gratifying shouldn’t obscure the fact that his ascent creates the danger of Britain falling in the hands of the hard left.

As PM, Corbyn would destroy every traditional institution, from the monarchy to the House of Lords, from free trade to the rule of law. And make no mistake about it – if the cookie crumbles a certain way in five years’ time, he may well find himself at 10 Downing Street.

All it may take is a timely collapse of our phoney prosperity created by exactly the same methods as those that culminated in the 2008 crisis. Combined with at least half the population already resenting Tory ‘austerity’ (which is also phoney, but most voters don’t realise this), this may well create a wave on whose crest Corbyn will surf to power.

By all means, let’s shout ‘Hear, hear’ when the possibility of sending Tony down is mooted. But let’s pray at the same time that we’ll be spared a hard left state run by Corbyn. To avoid that I’d even agree to see Tony at large, much as it pains me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At his wedding last week Putin’s spokesman Dmitri Peskov was photographed wearing a Richard Mille wristwatch, one of 30 ever made.

This has drawn a torrent of comments, some irate, some sympathetic, some of the ‘so what?’ variety. However, no one displayed intimate familiarity with the genre of the detective story, with its reliance on a tiny piece of evidence as the clue to solving a heinous crime.

For this £385,000 timepiece tells you everything you need to know about Russia’s kleptofascist regime. Start with this one detail, and nothing will remain unravelled.

You’ll probably agree that no Western politician would be seen in public wearing such an item even if he could afford it. Such ostentation would send wrong signals to a population whose average annual income is, say, £26,000, as it is in Britain.

Yet in Putin’s Russia, where the average annual income is under £4,000, Vlad’s mouthpiece doesn’t mind showing off bling worth almost 100 times as much. What does this tell you?

First, that neither Peskov nor his boss cares about the signals this sends for the simple reason that the population doesn’t matter. It’s so thoroughly brainwashed that few will see something wrong in a government official indulging in a vulgar display costing four times his annual salary.

Second, since Putin’s gang are all upstart Mafiosi, it’s predictable that they should display the kind of taste that’s traditionally associated with that group. The salient principle is that cornerstone of bad taste: if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

What the ‘it’ stands for is immaterial. It could be diamond and ruby rings on every finger. Or £10,000 suits worn badly. Or inordinately long fingernails, designed to show that their possessor doesn’t stoop to physical labour. Or indeed a grossly vulgar watch.

Whatever it is, the item falls into the same category as prison tattoos and underworld slang. Its role is to communicate belonging to an elect group, an elite perceived as such by its members. The overall message is “I’m the alpha male who’s above any law that doesn’t originate within the group.”

That bling worth £385,000 can’t be legally afforded by any public official is part of the message. According to Russian law, an official can’t even accept it as a present, for any gift worth more than £30 pounds must be declared, which Peskov hasn’t done.

Hence he, acting as dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, is effectively saying “I’ve broken the law and I don’t care. What are you going to do about it, you worm?”

Then again, wristwatches occupy a particular place in the Russian psyche. Because before the war most Russians had never seen, never mind owned, such a luxury, it held endless fascination for them.

When war fortunes took millions of Russians into Germany and hence to an orgy of rape and pillage, watches, most of them Swiss, were looted first. This was actively encouraged by the high command and, because there was no shame attached to it, even otherwise decent people helped themselves.

Fascination with watches must have been coded into the Russian DNA, for even today’s Russians spend much of their wealth, ill-gotten or otherwise, on their wrist decorations.

Hence the criminal powers that be, and all power in today’s Russia is criminal, proudly flaunt their wealth by letting their shirt cuffs ride up.

Putin himself owns a £500,000 collection of watches, and that’s just those we know about. And even the ecclesiastical branch of the mob isn’t far behind. Of course the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church have to be monks, which is why their wrist wealth is modest. That is, it’s modest comparatively but not absolutely.

Thus Patriarch Kiril, previously known as Vladimir Gundiayev in the lay world and as ‘Agent Mikhailov’ in KGB files, once caused a bit of a stir when photographed sporting a £19,000 Breguet under his cassock sleeve.

Since many felt that such ostentation contravened the time-honoured principles of monasticism, the same picture was hastily re-released with the offensive item airbrushed out. However, what was left intact was the reflection of the watch on the polished table in front of His KGB Holiness.

Such laxity betokened chronic Russian negligence in paying attention to detail and, more important, the height from which Russian rulers, ecclesiastical or secular, spit on the ruled.

I have an intentional pun for them: watch out. When the Russians master the investigative techniques popularised by Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, they’ll eventually piece the case together.

Then they’ll throw this vile gang out – without, if history is anything to go by, displaying boundless mercy in the process. That will be a sight to behold, though I for one tremble to think what they’ll come up with next. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For those of you who don’t follow such things closely, Daniel Barenboim is a musician who’s much better at tooting his own horn than playing the piano or conducting.

Having failed to develop his natural gifts into serious musicianship, he has instead devoted all his inexhaustible energy to developing his unrivalled talent for self-promotion, that sole guarantor of success in the modern musical world.

As a result, rather than becoming the great musician he could have been, Danny has become something much more lucrative: a musical celebrity. And nowadays celebrity of any kind demands expansion into adjacent, or not so adjacent, areas.

Hence Danny Boy has been pretending for quite some time that he could single-handedly put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is basically the Palestinians trying to kill all Israelis, with the latter trying to prevent such an outcome.

To emphasise that he carries Middle Eastern peace in his own breast, Danny has taken out dual citizenship in Israel and Palestine, which is an amazing achievement considering that, though Israel is a state, Palestine isn’t. It’s more or less a combination of eternal refugee camp and terrorist base.

But Danny vowed to change this lamentable situation by founding the Divan, a so-so orchestra featuring Israeli and Palestinian musicians. “Once young Israelis and Arabs agree on how to play just one note together,” explained Danny Boy, “they will not be able to look at each other in the same way again.”

By ‘they’ he didn’t just mean the musicians themselves, who tend not to be particularly bellicose anyway – he meant that the anodyne sounds produced by his orchestra would force Palestinians to stop killing Israelis, and Israelis killing Palestinians in self-defence.

This would be idiotic if accepted at face value. But Danny Boy didn’t mean it literally. The purpose of the exercise was to promote not peace but Danny, and in that it has been a success, having failed miserably to achieve its declared goal.

But Danny isn’t the type to be deterred easily. “My point,” he persisted, “is that when Israelis and Palestinians play the same music… in the end we don’t give a damn whether we are enemies or not. But will that bring a solution to this conflict? No.”

I’m confused. I thought solving the conflict was the whole purpose. If that isn’t, what is? Surely the world has enough second-rate orchestras already.

Then Danny proceeded to utter the kind of drivel one doesn’t expect even from him: “I still think the idea of combining social engineering with music is wonderful. It gives music a real place in society.”

English isn’t Danny’s first language, and probably not even his second, but he knows it well enough to realise that ‘social engineering’ is a pejorative term.

First introduced at the very end of the 19^th century, it refers to refashioning traditional society and forming ‘the new man’, one divested of any traces of our Judaeo-Christian civilisation.

Predictably social engineering is the ideal pursued by all totalitarian regimes of modernity. The assumption is that, since mankind is a machine, its working can be influenced by elect mechanics, specialists endowed with the ability and authority to tweak the mechanism as they see fit.

This is fascism at its purest, whatever the theoreticians and practitioners of social engineering call themselves, and their chosen monikers run towards ‘progressive’, ‘socialist’ or ‘humanist’.

It’s also staggering to hear from someone who fancies himself a musical guru that, unless music is used for the purpose of social engineering, it has no “real place in society.”

Such a utilitarian view of music would have appalled Bach, Mozart or Beethoven, though it would have been welcomed by Lenin, Hitler or Stalin.

Music’s real place in society is to express the highest spiritual and aesthetic reaches of our civilisation – not to act as the battering ram of modernity. By music, in case Danny misunderstands, I mean Messrs Bach, Mozart et al, not the Internationale or the Horst-Wessel-Lied so beloved of Danny’s fellow social engineers.

I was about to sign off by suggesting that Danny stick to what he does best, but then it occurred to me that talking such self-serving gibberish is exactly what he does best. And people listen!    

 

 

 

Following the news these days makes one feel not so much like a viewer or reader as a psychiatrist, trying to come to grips with a pandemic of madness.

What’s going on in Calais proves that, while paradise on earth is unachievable, hell on earth isn’t. All it takes is British home and foreign policy to come together with French labour relations, and there you have it – a creditable reproduction of hell, complete with clouds of black smoke.

The smoke comes from the tyre fires started by disgruntled French union members, but people from all sorts of downmarket countries also do their best to enhance the image. They throw themselves into and under lorries and cars, attach themselves to a train’s undercarriage and get crushed to death, charge into clouds of tear gas.

When they deign to speak to journalistic vultures circling around Calais, they prove they’re ready to become modern Brits. They may not quite walk the walk, but they certainly talk the talk.

“We know our rights!” they scream, and among those rights is the one involving residency in Britain. I hate to disappoint our African friends, but no such right exists.

What does exist is the modern tendency, going back to the pernicious American and French revolutions, to confuse wishes with rights. To be fair, this fallacy is strictly of Western provenance, but the Africans seem to have absorbed it thoroughly, doubtless in preparation for their exodus.

Forgetting about bogus rights for a second, the numbers don’t add up either. It’s fair to assume that at least half of the world’s seven billion inhabitants would rather live in Britain than in their own native hellholes.

Even if we round the number down to three billion, it’s clear that our small island can’t accommodate them all. There has to be a limit, even though Ed Miliband didn’t think so when asked just before the general election.

Both the limit and the criteria for admission have to be set by HMG, which still retains this prerogative in relation to Africans – even though it has criminally relinquished it in relation to Europeans.

Our government has not only the right but indeed the duty to turn back in any numbers those it doesn’t wish to admit. How it does so is irrelevant. There’s only one requirement for any method of expulsion: that it works.

Instead even those who break through our flimsy cordon illegally are treated as welcomed guests. They are put up at hotels, given three meals a day and some walking-around cash – all at the taxpayer’s expense.

Perhaps, and it’s a very remote possibility, HMG spivs are feeling pangs of conscience, for their own policy is responsible for much of this blazing inferno.

A dozen years ago, immediately after Tony ‘Yo’ Blair joined the foolhardy American foray into the Middle East, I was trying to explain how ill-advised that was to one of Britain’s leading neoconservatives.

“We feel,” he said, his ‘we’ referring mostly to American neocons to whom he was tied by a tighter bond than to any properly British group, “that it’s still a good idea to poke the hornet’s nest.”

Well, the nest has been poked and the hornets are flying all over Calais and Kent, threatening to sting Britain out of existence. Our social fabric, already threadbare thanks to decades of inept spivocracy, provides a highly insecure protective net.

I hope my neocon friend, who has since our conversation embarked on a glittering journalistic career, is happy. Judging by his current output, he isn’t, but then neither does he feel any remorse. Neocons on either side of the ocean seem to be impervious to such humble feelings.

The Calais hell is but one symptom of the madness pandemic. Another is the public response to two major tragedies: the alliterative deaths of Cecil and Cilla.

My understanding is that Cilla Black was some kind of entertainer, who, according to Sky TV, “deeply touched us all”. Well, she didn’t touch me, deeply or otherwise, for the simple reason that, though I had heard the name, I didn’t have a precise idea of who she was.

Since I’ve only lived in England for less than 30 years, I’m keenly aware of my limitations in the knowledge of the lore. Hence I asked my wife, English born and bred, whether she could fill the gaps in my ethnographic education. She couldn’t. “Some sort of entertainer,” she explained, but then I already knew that.

Don’t get me wrong: unlike Cecil, Cilla was human, which is why her death at a statistically premature age of 72 is no doubt a tragedy to her family, friends and fans. But it falls far short of being the international disaster and irreplaceable loss to mankind it’s depicted to be in the media.

Then of course she was that cultural fulcrum of modernity, a Celebrity (capitalisation always implied). Being human isn’t an ironclad requirement for this status, as proved by Cecil the Lion, shot dead by some trigger-happy American dentist.

I’ve seen a picture on the net of Cecil tearing an antelope apart limb from limb. The picture shocked me: there I was, thinking that Cecil was a cuddly, thoroughly anthropomorphised kitten, the best pet a man could wish for. Turns out he was a savage beast devoid of the free will it takes to live down his DNA.

Apparently Cecil was shot illegally, which sort of thing ought to be punished and discouraged. But making him one of the top news items for a week is as reliable a symptom of collective mental illness as one can think of.

One gets the impression that we live in a lunatic asylum that isn’t run by anybody, not even by its inmates. It’s sheer deranged anarchy, with normal life going up in the black smoke of Calais.

 

 

 

  

 

  

One must compliment Vlad for making no attempt to embellish his impressionable youth. And his grown-up life makes it hard to doubt the veracity of this particular recollection.

The ongoing inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko has already established Putin’s complicity, and the in camera part is still to come.

Speaking for the victim’s family, Ben Emmerson, QC, called Putin an “increasingly isolated tinpot despot” and a “morally deranged authoritarian”, who, “beyond reasonable doubt”, ordered the murder.

Mr Emmerson added that Putin and his cronies are “directly implicated in organised crime”, and it was for his investigation of those activities that Litvinenko was ‘whacked’, to use the term Vlad favours.

In response, the Kremlin called the investigation “biased and politicised”.

Well, if there was a certain bias it could have been put straight by the testimony of Lugovoi and Kovtun, Vlad’s two KGB colleagues who dropped polonium 200 into Litvinenko’s tea.

Neither gentleman, however, took advantage of this glorious opportunity to clear their names and that of their paymaster. Kovtun originally agreed to testify via a video link, but then he, or rather Vlad, thought better of it.

As to the inquest being politicised, it pains me to admit that this is exactly what it is. What’s politicised about it isn’t its findings but its timing.

The findings are hardly earth-shattering. Everyone has known from the word tea that the two KGB thugs ‘whacked’ Litvinenko. The esoteric weapon they used, the old cui bono principle and the knowledge that such a high-level action in the middle of London had to be ordered by Putin left little doubt as to the culprit.

The use of polonium, in the first act of nuclear terrorism against the West, is particularly telling. Had Messrs Lugovoi and Kovtun ‘whacked’ Litvinenko with their service Makarovs, doubts would have been possible.

But radioactive isotopes aren’t as easily available as Soviet-issue automatics. The polonium had to come from a state laboratory, and even in Russia such materials are kept under lock and key. Thus Putin had deliberately telegraphed the murder – pour encourager les autres.

However, the murder took place in 2006 and every fact mentioned in the inquest has been known since then. Why then has it taken nine years to point an accusing finger at Putin?

The truth has been suppressed until now because our powers that be didn’t want to upset Vlad. Justice has been held hostage to political expediency.

It’s only when Putin attempted to do to the Ukraine what he had done to Litvinenko, threatening the West with nuclear weapons in passing, that the nature of political expediency changed. And there I was, thinking Britain is ruled by law, rather than by spivs playing their little political games with the truth.

Now, one hopes, Western governments will release the information on Putin and his gang siphoning hundreds of billions into Western banks, information that’s already in the possession of the FT and The Wall Street Journal.

Speaking of the Ukraine, last week my friend Vlad made a valuable contribution to jurisprudence. He created the precedent of a criminal vetoing the investigation of his crime.

The UN Security Council gathered to establish an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17.

The plane carrying 283 passengers and 15 crew was shot down over the Ukraine a year ago. The AA missile was evidently fired from a Russian BUK launcher either by Russian soldiers or by their proxies, the so-called Ukrainian separatists.

In the manner of a thief screaming ‘Stop thief!’ the Kremlin came up with an alternative and manifestly mendacious version of the airliner having been downed by a Ukrainian missile – or even possibly a Ukrainian fighter plane.

Hence the need for an independent tribunal, an international body authorised to identify and prosecute the guilty party. Vlad, however, has been saying all along that convening such a tribunal would be ‘untimely’ and ‘counterproductive’.

The Security Council put the matter to a vote, receiving 11 affirmative votes, three abstentions (Angola, China and Venezuela) – and one decisive and predictable veto cast by Russia’s representative Vitaly Churkin.

Mr Churkin was a perfect man for the job for he had form. In 1983, in his capacity as Press Secretary to the USSR embassy in Washington, the young KGB diplomat Comrade Churkin (as he then was) solemnly declared that the Soviets had had nothing to do with a similar accident befalling Korean Airlines Flight 007.

The airliner carrying 267 people, explained my new friend Vitaly, had committed suicide by veering off course and plunging into the Sea of Japan west of Sakhalin.

A few days later the Soviets admitted that an SU-15 interceptor had lent the Koreans a helping hand – and Churkin’s career was launched to culminate in his present ministerial post.

Amazingly, over half of the Russian population disagree with the veto that to any halfway intelligent person is tantamount to an admission of guilt.

On the contrary, they want a tribunal to take place because they’re certain that Russia will be exonerated. The tribunal, they believe, will establish the guilt of either the Ukraine or – are you ready for this? – the USA.

One has to congratulate Vlad yet again: his propaganda is more effective than anything the Soviets could muster. In 1983, even before the Soviets admitted responsibility, not a single Russian had doubted their guilt.

Some welcomed the action, some didn’t, most were indifferent – but not a single Russian in command of his faculties doubted the Soviets had done it.

Soviet propaganda made Russians cynical; Putin’s propaganda makes them idiotic, which is a much greater achievement.

One can only wonder why Vlad’s approval ratings still languish at a mere 86 per cent. Then again, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s last rating stood at 95 per cent. Three days after the poll he was shot like a mad dog in a gutter – and overjoyed crowds danced in the streets.

 

  

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Warm waves of euphoria are wafting over George Osborne, whose crack-papering budget is being hailed as the apex of sagacity.

Actually its chief feature is that it’s less damaging than Ed Ball’s would have been had he been in a position to draft one.

While improving Tory ratings and paving the way to George’s personal ascent, his budget doesn’t mend the structural flaw of our economy: having to service a national debt inexorably heading towards two trillion, if at a slightly slower rate than under Labour.

The only way to alleviate the problem is to halve our public spending, which effectively means eliminating the welfare state. This George hasn’t done, and neither he nor any other Chancellor will ever do it.

The prosperity we seem to be enjoying is phoney and therefore transient. The major reason we have it at all is that our ties with the moribund EU aren’t quite so strangulating as they would be had we joined the euro.

Young George’s talents are held in such high esteem that, now our economic woes seem to be over and some of his time has been freed up, he has been given an additional role: renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU.

George outlined his goals in a recent interview, in which he demonstrated he has every quality required in a modern PM: mediocre intellect, a rubbery elasticity of conscience and a single-minded devotion to power for its own sake.

He sees his new mission as “convincing ourselves that it is right for Britain to remain in the EU”. ‘Ourselves’ meaning whom? George and Dave are already convinced they want a sizeable piece of tangible power, which in Europe resides in the EU.

What George means is that he wants to convince those who aren’t sure that Britain’s best interests lie in becoming a cross between a German gau and a French département.

Only one trick has worked historically: lying that we’d be wealthy inside the EU and destitute outside it. This lie must be set up by another one: claiming that the EU is devoted to the economy above all else. Yet those even remotely familiar with EU history know that it’s a political project, not an economic one.

This is proved by the existence of the euro, a mechanism by which the economies of 19 countries have been to various extents sacrificed for a political cause: the creation of a European superstate run by an unaccountable, seemingly supranational, bureaucratic elite.

‘Seemingly’ is the key word there, for the hub around which the EU revolves is the Franco-German partnership cemented at Vichy circa 1943.

Germany is clearly the senior partner in this Vichy-washy arrangement, with France still reeling from the collective Stockholm syndrome she suffered in 1940. Like Patty Hearst falling in love with her SLA rapists, France is now eager to bring up Germany’s rear, kissing it as she goes along.

Hence any claim that the EU pursues purely economic goals is mendacious. And George can do mendacious with the worst of them: “But for Britain I always felt that the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one.”

When 40 years ago I joined my first tennis club, its chief attraction was scantily dressed girls one could ogle and, at a braver moment, try to pick up. However, I discovered that ultimately that wasn’t what the club was about.

“I prefer to talk about [the EU] as a single market of free trade,” said George, as I preferred to talk about the tennis club as a pick-up place until realising that one had to play tennis.

“It’s free trade with the rules that enable the free trade to be a real success,” continued George. This suggests there was something unreal about Britain’s past success built solidly on the free trade the country more or less pioneered – amazingly without abandoning her sovereignty.

George’s remark sounded as if he foresaw Britain’s relationship with the EU becoming a purely economic one, and the interviewer asked if that understanding was correct.

A modern politician’s answers to such question are a Möbius strip, not a straight line. Hence George answered neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but merely paraphrased what he had said before.

That merry dance continued throughout, with the interviewer paraphrasing the same question and George paraphrasing the same answer, adding the odd irrelevant bit, such as “the security work that we do with the French” (I’d be embarrassed to mention this in the present situation, but I am not the PM-in-waiting).

The only way to have a purely economic relationship with the EU is to be outside it. It’s no more possible for a member to have such a relationship with the EU than for, say, Armenia to have had it with the USSR.

George knows this of course – and doesn’t care. The purpose of his and Dave’s machinations is to keep Britain in the EU at any cost, thereby perpetuating their own power and that of the wicked elite to which they pledge allegiance.

By George, the man’s ready to be our next PM. One just hopes that, when he occupies the post, it won’t be called ‘gauleiter’.

 

 

Our true opinion formers are neither politicians nor businessmen nor even pundits, though some of them may have a bit of influence.

But not nearly as much as ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’. It’s possible to define those in either category as people I’ve never heard of, but this definition isn’t precise. After all, many of those who are unknown to me are also unknown to everyone else, other than their own families, friends and colleagues.

Even though I’m stuck for a tight definition, I can easily discern certain qualities ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’ have in common. They, with probably some exceptions of which I’m lamentably unaware, are stupid, immoral, photogenic and devoid of any talent or attainment recognised as such throughout the first 5,000 years of recorded history.

Since Katie Hopkins is both a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’, she possesses all those fine qualities to a hypertrophied extent, a fact she has to keep advertising in order to remain a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’.

Her latest gem came in a Radio Times interview. When asked what she’d do if she ruled the world, Katie came up with a masterpiece.

She’d solve the world’s most pressing problem, she replied, which is that “We just have far too many old people. It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.”

One can accept that Katie’s frank self-assessment has led her to believe that some people are in no way superior to dogs intellectually or morally. What has escaped her attention is that, for old times’ sake if nothing else, human beings do enjoy a special status in the animal world.

So special in fact that some sticks-in-the-mud still believe – and the law still grudgingly accepts – that human life is so valuable as to be sacred, while dogs’ lives aren’t.

Moreover, the memory of two satanic creeds of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism, still hasn’t been expunged. Some – one hopes most – people may be put off by the prospect of killing 20 million people, which is roughly the number of those who may be classified as ‘old’ in Britain.

No such problems for our TV personality. The solution, she explained, is easy: “Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – they would come to your home… They might even have a nice little tune they’d play… I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans.”

Alas, Katie’s chosen solution to all our troubles lacks novelty appeal. It was the Bolsheviks who pioneered the use of such vans as a solution to pressing problems, in their case political rather than demographic ones. The design was as simple as all things of genius.

A hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and routed into the back of the van, which was hermetically sealed. The vehicle was then densely packed with political undesirables and locked up.

The driver would start the engine, those inside would begin banging against the van walls. After a few minutes the noise would die down. The driver would wait a while longer to make sure, then the van doors would be opened and the operators would unload the blue corpses, their faces distorted by the kind of grimaces Goya depicted in his Capriccios.

The innovation was so effective yet simple that it found a broader use when the Nazis took over. Cooperation between the NKVD and Gestapo started immediately, long before the world was treated to the spectacle of the Pact.

The SS and Gestapo knew they had a lot to learn. After all, by the time Hitler came to power the Soviets had been practising mass murder for 15 years, and the Germans respected their accumulated know-how.

As part of the friendly exchange, the technologically-minded Germans presented their Russian colleagues with a state-of-the-art machine for pulling fingernails. The Soviets in their turn taught the Germans how to save valuable ammunition by using ‘euthanasia vans’.

The idea caught on, and the Germans put it to wide use in Eastern Europe. In time they abandoned the practice in favour of one that utilised the advances of their chemical industry, and ‘euthanasia vans’ went the way of all outdated gadgets.

But now our own ‘TV personality’ has revived the concept, so far only in theory, as an ideal but alas still unattainable goal towards which we must strive.

It’s comforting to observe how euthanasia fans and birth-control enthusiasts converge in their longing for mass murder. Margaret Sanger, for example, the founder of Planned Parenthood who coined the term ‘birth-control’, was capable of uttering pearls like “Coloured people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.”

Sanger, who in her day was even more of a celebrity than Katie is now, didn’t mind letting wrinklies die a natural death. But modernity is nothing if not progressive, and it fell upon our own ‘TV personality’ to take Sanger’s idea to the next level.

What kind of society would allow such deranged monsters a public platform and an adulating audience? The single-word answer can be found in Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph: Circumspice.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repeat after me, 10 times: NOTHING unspeakable done by any ethnic or religious group comes from its character or history.

Good, now you’re ready to be a modern person, for you’ve just enunciated the core belief of PC modernity.

Though applicable to any group, these days it’s most widely practised in relation to Islamism, as Islam is fashionably known.

Hence Muslims regale us with videos of thieves having their hands chopped off because it sounds like a good idea on the spur of the moment – not, repeat NOT, because they take on faith Koran 5:36: “As to the thief, male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in power.”

Similarly, if you listen to any Russian chauvinist, Bolshevism had nothing to do with the Russians.

Never mind peasant revolts, ranging from local Jacqueries to full-scale wars, that started a few years after Russia became Russia and continued non-stop throughout the country’s history.

Never mind the aristocratic uprising of December, 1825, the attacks on the government throughout the 19^th century, the murder of the reforming Tsar Alexander II by predominantly Russian terrorists, the escalating bloody war between government and society throughout Nicholas II’s reign – indeed anything showing any Russian roots of the Bolshevik nightmare.

No, all Bolsheviks were Jews and other aliens who landed from Mars in such huge numbers that, without any support from the native population, they managed to kill about 15 million people while Lenin (his grandfather a baptised Jew!) was still alive and before Stalin – Georgian! – got going.

As to Nazism, I once had an entertaining conversation with an American Germanophile professor of political science. The good professor indignantly denied my suggestion that Nazism had something to do with the German character.

Trademark Germanic bellicosity, first mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic Wars? Nonsense!

The obsession of German mythology with sylvan mysticism, all those witches, hobgoblins and blood-thirsty Erlkönigs? Rubbish!

General propensity for paganism, which makes the Reformation intelligible? Claptrap! 

German Romanticism, as typified by Wagner, glorifying all of the above and adding a touch of virulent anti-Semitism to spice things up? Nothing of the sort!

Having run out of possibilities, I had to ask if, in the professor’s learned opinion, Nazism actually happened and, if so, what if anything had caused it. He reluctantly answered yes to the first question and refused to answer the second.

Nothing caused Nazism. It just happened. Out of the blue (or brown, as the case may be).

As a believer in the First Law of Thermodynamics, expressible in layman’s terms as ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes out of nothing), I disagreed and we left it at that.

Then recently I came across Joachim Raff.

In 1863 this German-Swiss composer won a prestigious prize from the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde for his 70-minute symphony To My Fatherland.

Frankly, I haven’t heard this work and nor am I ever likely to do so. What caught my eye was the composer’s programme notes:

“First movement: Allegro. Image of the German Character: ability to soar to great heights; trend towards introspection; mildness and courage as contrasts that touch and interpenetrate in many ways; overwhelming desire to be pensive.

“Second movement: Allegro molto vivace. The outdoors: through German forests with horns-a-winding; through glades with the sounds of folk music.

“Third movement: Larghetto. Return to the domestic hearth, transfigured by the muses and by love.

“Fourth movement: Allegro drammatico. Frustrated desire to lay a foundation for unity in the Fatherland.

“Fifth movement: Larghetto – allegro trionfale. Plaint, renewed soaring.”

Now try to replace the word ‘German’ with ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘Italian’ or any other adjective denoting nationality, and you’ll instantly find out how futile such an exercise is. Nothing but ‘German’ fits.

There we have it, the German character in a nutshell. A useful illustration to my argument with the American professor, wouldn’t you say?

The rattle of jackboots and the Sieg Heil!!! roar of millions of throats can be heard loud and clear. Or else my ear is oversensitive, my taste for historical causality overdeveloped, and my sensibilities hopelessly retrograde.

My American friend probably thinks so. 

Obama’s triumphant tour of the African half of his roots was marred by Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate.

Now I dislike any politician of a certain age who insists on being known by the diminutive version of his Christian name. However, Mr Huckabee’s ability to rile Obama entitles him to calling himself even Mickey if he so chooses. This is what he said:

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history… he would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven.

“We forget Iranians have never kept a deal in 36 years… There’s no reason to think they will suddenly start doing it.

“The Iran deal is a bad deal, bad for America and bad for Israel.”

Obama was so incensed he had to interrupt his Kenyan tribal dance in mid-step. The drums fell silent, and only the president’s voice was heard once he had regained command of it.

That statement, said Obama, “would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad…” And his acolyte Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mr Huckerbee’s statement as “grossly irresponsible”.

This is good knockabout stuff, but it falls short of being a cogent argument. Trying to offer one, Barack Hussein proved he is as hard of hearing as he is hopeless at rhetoric.

“I have not heard another argument [against] that holds up.” That makes the president deaf, for every conceivable medium all over the West has been screaming devastating arguments against the deal.

These come from strategists, armament experts, political analysts, weapon inspectors – not all of them in the pay of the Republicans, Mossad or aliens from the planet Islamophobia.

But hold on, Obama has an argument of his own: “99% of the world thinks it’s a good deal.”

I congratulate the president on the proficiency of his polling service. Surveying a population of six billion in such a short time is a feat of monumental proportions.

So monumental in fact that one is tempted to think that no such poll has been conducted, and Obama’s calculation was pulled out of the portion of his anatomy he shakes when whirling to the sound of African drums.

But do let’s suppose for the sake of argument that what he said is true. In that case, his statement is a classic rhetorical fallacy, known as argumentum ad populum (if many believe it, it’s true.)

Of course modern, and especially American, politics is based on fideistic worship of majority opinion, which is one thing that’s wrong with modern politics.

But forget generalities of rhetoric or politics. Forget even Mr Huckabee’s oratorical flourishes that are as hyperbolic as to be expected from a politician in the throes of a campaign. Forget also the variously disparaging adjectives used by Obama and his retinue to describe Mr Huckabee’s statements.

Let’s just look at the points he made and, rather than calling them (and him) names, see if they’re true or false. Mr Huckabee believes this is a rotten deal because:

1) Iran has been trying to get nuclear weapons for decades.

2) Iran’s leaders honestly say such weapons will be used to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, presumably killing every Israeli.

3) Since Iran is a major sponsor and perpetrator of global anti-Western terrorism, her acquisition of nuclear weapons presents a danger not just to Israel but to us all.

4) Contrary to what Obama claims, the deal involves a great element of trust, for its provisions for verification are inadequate.

5) However, Iran is untrustworthy in view of her record of breaking or sabotaging every agreement she has signed since 1979.

6) Judging by the Iranian leadership’s publicly expressed belief that the deal constitutes America’s surrender, and huge Iranian crowds celebrating it with ‘Death to America’ chants, Iran’s view of it is different from Obama’s.

7) Hence the deal is awful first because it puts at the ayatollahs’ disposal billions that may be used for nefarious purposes and, second, because it practically guarantees their acquiring a nuclear capability within a decade.

8) Therefore Obama’s deal with Iran may well lead the world to nuclear holocaust.

These eight points, unchallengeable factually or intellectually, unpack the epigrammatic brevity of Mr Huckabee’s statement. Obama may call it what he wants, but I’ll call it what it is: true.