Category: Blog

Rowan Atkinson based his Mr Bean character on his brother Rodney. And, having met Rodney, I can testify that, though devoid of Rowan’s talent, he’s fully his match in creating make-believe.

He exercises this ability in supposedly serious articles, whose stock in trade should be truth, not fantasy. Specifically, he writes hysterical pro-Putin pieces wholly based on KGB/FSB propaganda.

Mr Bean’s ignorant rants are only worth debunking because some cleverer people than him also act as Putin’s useful idiots, a concept first popularised by Lenin. Alas, unlike the syphilitic dictator, Putin recruits that group mainly on the right.

In Mr Bean’s virtual world the West is in the grips of unaccountable and unprovoked Russophobia. For example, he writes “…a Syrian or Iraqi hospital bombed mistakenly by Russia is called a war crime but when US aircraft bomb a hospital for hours it is called a mistake!”

Yet both claims are true. Just look at the ordnance used by both parties.

The Americans mostly deploy guided projectiles designed for precision strikes. Obviously, bombing paramilitary forces using civilians as live shields will cause collateral damage. But only a liar will claim that mass murder is the Americans’ aim.

By contrast, the Russians widely use high-altitude bombing with free-falling fragmentation blockbusters first developed in 1956. Each explodes into 11,500 fragments, creating a killing zone of 14.5 square miles. This explains why the Russians have already killed more civilians than ISIS has managed.

Segueing from ignorance to madness. Mr Bean then accuses the Ukraine of belligerence towards Russia. Yes, and Poland was belligerent towards Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.

Russia committed criminal acts by invading the Crimea and two Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. What better proofs of Ukrainian belligerence would one want? Yet Mr Bean obligingly provides them:

“Banning communist deputies.” One could argue that a party committed to destroying parliaments must be denied parliamentary representation. Moreover, communists murdered millions of Ukrainians, at least five million in Holdomor, the artificial famine organised in 1932-33 specially for that purpose.

Can you explain why banning heirs to those crimes constitutes belligerence against Russia? Mr Bean can.

“Overturning a democratically elected Government”. ‘Government’ shouldn’t be capitalised in English, but Mr Bean’s prose does read like a translation from German. Nor does he understand the situation in the Ukraine.

The country gained independence from Holodomor murderers 25 years ago. Yet Putin refuses to regard the former Soviet republics as anything other than parts of the ‘Russian space’ to be reclaimed.

To that end, the Russians put in place puppet regimes wherever they can. One such was Yanukovych’s government. Referring to it as ‘democratically elected’ is either mendacious or stupid. In places with no democratic tradition, but with a long experience of institutionalised lies and corruption, it’s impossible to take elections seriously.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that ousting Yanukovych wasn’t nice. What business is it of Russia? The Ukraine is an independent country that can run its affairs as it sees fit.

“Banning the Russian language”. Judging by Mr Bean’s command of his own tongue, I’m not surprised he can’t tell Russian from Ukrainian. Yet Russian remains the dominant everyday language east of the Dnieper, including Kiev. However, all official business is indeed transacted in the country’s official language. Awful, isn’t it?

“Bombing civilians in East Ukraine”. Meaning the bandit units, armed and augmented by Putin’s army, that occupied the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Interestingly, most Russophone refugees from these areas flee west, not east. They want to remain in the Ukraine, not become chattels of Putin’s junta.

Mr Bean then demonstrates his command of Google by stating that the Crimea was “Russian for over 220 years”, which supposedly justifies Putin’s invasion. Now India was British for almost the same 220 years – should we annex a part of it on that basis?

He then reconfirms his unshakeable trust in the ballot box by informing us that “the retrieval of the Crimea is backed by an unambiguous vote of the Crimeans themselves”.

What made the vote definitely ambiguous was the presence of Putin’s armed invaders at every polling station. Also the large Tartar community, decimated by Putin’s precursors, boycotted the election altogether: they know what to expect from a KGB-run Russia.

Those Western Russophobes shout about the danger of further Russian aggression against the Ukraine. Specifically, “NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Sir Richard Shirreff, takes his madness into the realm of pseudo fiction.”

‘Pseudo’ fiction means it’s not fiction, but Rodney writes his own English. And, in addition to understanding matters martial better than Gen. Shirreff does, he also has his own facts.

Russia has deployed 40,000 armoured troops on the Ukrainian border, including the elite First Guards Tank Army, comprising, among other units, two of the country’s best divisions: the Taman and the Kantemir.

Hardly an hour goes by that one of Putin’s mouthpieces doesn’t brag about being able to take Kiev in a few hours and Warsaw in a few days. All Gen. Shirreff wrote was that NATO should take such a possibility seriously and prepare for it.

Mr Bean must be privy to Putin’s innermost thoughts. He knows that Putin has no hostile intentions, which is more than he can say for NATO and its dastardly aggression against “the post Soviet” space.

Rodney is as dismissive of facts as he is of hyphens. Otherwise he would have offered examples of NATO’s annexation of ‘post Soviet’ countries or portions thereof. But useful idiots are useless when it comes to truth.

 

 

 

As a lifelong champion of progress, I welcome any new expansion of old and tired concepts. Unfortunately, some fossilised dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries still cling to their outdated notions.

Just ask them to define the sex (gender?) of a person who has a man’s testosterone count, testes, deep voice and general appearance, while lacking such old-fashioned attributes of womanhood as ovaries and a womb. They’ll reveal their rotten core by saying that such a person is a man, dread word.

Then they look at the South African Olympic gold medallist Caster Semenya, who answers the description above, and hiss (reactionaries always hiss, they don’t just say) it’s unfair that she should compete against persons who do possess a womb, ovaries and a third of Caster’s testosterone count.

And that’s not all! Wait a minute, I need some time to compose myself, I’m so enraged… Because Miss Semenya is black, these troglodyte yahoos are guilty not only of sexism (genderism?) but also of racism. Should a white man crash a women’s competition, they wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But just because Caster is black… well, you get my point even if I myself don’t.

It’s time those cavemen learned that sex or, as champions of progress now call it, gender is neither absolute nor objective. It’s relative and subjective, meaning that every person is whatever sex he/she/it says he/she/it is.

Not only that, but no one can contest such a self-definition without being branded a sexist (genderist?), racist, homophobe, agist, misogynist, misandrist, fascist, xenophobe, Brexiteer and all other things progressive people like me condemn.

Such people deplore the blatant violations of her human rights that Miss Semenya has had to suffer throughout her distinguished running career. To name one, after her well-deserved triumph at the 2009 world championships Caster was brutally subjected to a sex (gender?) test, which found the abnormalities…

There, see what I mean? That’s what brainwashing over many centuries does. Even a lifelong champion of progress like me has let slip this revolting word. There’s no such thing as abnormalities because there’s no such thing as norms. Repeat after me: There’s no such thing…

After Caster’s human rights were so egregiously stamped into the dirt, she degradingly was made to take tablets to get her testosterone down to the level normally encountered among women, which she claims to be and therefore is.

To the delight of all lifelong champions of progress, in 2015 the IAAF reversed its shameful policy on what in the medical parlance is called hyperandrogenism (a woman being too much like a man, putting it in the language even we can understand). The new ruling states that there’s insufficient evidence that testosterone increases athletic performance.

Actually, androgens include not only testosterone but also anabolic steroids, which – as any lifelong champion of progress must now accept – don’t increase athletic performance either. All those athletes who pop them like Smarties do so simply because they like the taste.

Androgens also increase the body’s muscle mass and reduce its capacity to produce fat, making men look different from women much to the delight of sexist homophobic fossils who, for old times’ sake, still enjoy some of the more jutting fat deposits of a woman’s body.

However, we must deny on pain of richly merited ostracism or even, in the near future, criminal prosecution that men’s higher muscle mass, lower fat content and greater aggressiveness (another androgen function) make them stronger, faster and more competitive. It’s a pure coincidence that men outperform women in every sport (they also outperform women in chess, but let’s not go there).

In defending her case, Miss Semenya invoked the deified memory of Nelson Mandela. History’s greatest man once told her something of superhuman profundity: “sport is meant to make people feel united”.

I couldn’t agree more, even though my modest intellect can’t plumb such demiurgic depths. In any case, like many scriptural sayings, this one can work on many different levels.

Perhaps people should feel so united that they abandon sex (gender?) divisions in sports altogether and let men, women and any intermediate specimens compete against one another. After all, if men and women can use one another’s lavatories, why should they run separate races? No, not a good idea?

Fine. Then I’d like to quote another godlike champion of progress, Vladimir Lenin: “Before we unite we must firmly and decisively separate”. Applying this wisdom to the task at hand, perhaps the world’s governing sports bodies should introduce a third sex (gender?) category: Other. That would obviate the need for any testing and shut up reactionaries for good.

For the time being, all lifelong champions of progress should unite in offering Miss Semenya heartfelt congratulations on her 800m triumph. In conclusion I’d like to ask a question that’ll no doubt betray my naivety, nay ignorance, in matters hyperandrogenic:

Can Miss Semenya actually marry herself?

 

 

 

 

 

 

One is often concerned about the mental health of some of our hacks. With Christopher Booker, concern becomes a certainty.

Here’s the symptomatic title of his today’s article: Leaving the EU Can Cost Us Even More Than Staying In.

There would no grounds for contacting a psychiatrist had this piece come from a Guardian ideologue. Yet Mr Booker has for years been one of the most vociferous campaigners for leaving the EU.

Has he changed his mind? Or has he, as an honest man, revised his position in line with new facts? Have his convictions been overridden by the calculator?

He certainly does a lot of sums in his piece, which infuriates me whenever the EU is discussed. Mr Booker ought to know that the EU isn’t so much an economic as a political and ideological project.

Hence number crunching can be no more helpful in assessing Brexit than it would be in pondering good and evil, vice and virtue or justice vs. tyranny. An issue of vital political, constitutional and moral import ought to be neither decided nor even argued on such petty concerns.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we’ve allowed arithmetic to take the upper hand. What do the relevant numbers tell us?

Even accomplished economists, of whom Mr Booker manifestly isn’t one, can’t possibly calculate the long-term economic effects of Brexit. Certain suppositions can be made on first economic principles, but these are well-nigh impossible to express in precise numerals.

Any attempt to do so should make any intelligent person smell a rat. And even trying to figure out the apparently obvious short-term sums is a futile task.

Mr Booker makes this patently obvious by trying to reshuffle numbers with the dexterity of a three-card Monte player. First, he singles out one economic variable only: the amount of money we pay into the EU coffers every year.

His argument is that we won’t get to keep much or any of it when we finally leave. Uninteresting if true, I’d suggest – and even if true, which it isn’t, such calculations certainly don’t justify the article’s title.

Serious economists consider not one variable but all of them, such as trade opportunities gained and lost, the cost of having to comply with regulations vs. not doing so, the benefits vs. disadvantages of setting an independent economic policy, the effect on taxation, reduced pressure on social services including medicine and education – well, I may name many such variables, but I’m not sufficiently informed to pull them all together into a cogent equation. My point is that neither is Mr Booker.

Unlike me, he doesn’t seem to be aware of his limitations. He forges ahead, putting together an argument that is holey to the point of being dishonest and primitive to the point of being inane.

First he whips out his trusted calculator and subtracts £4.9 billion (our rebate) from our annual £17.8 contribution to the EU. The difference of £12.9 billion is Mr Booker’s point of departure.

“Of this… we shall continue to spend the further £4.5 billion that goes on subsidies to farming…,” he proceeds. This statement is meaningless unless he suggests that we’ll still continue to subsidise mostly French farming, which we do under the terms of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Since that won’t be the case, most of the £4.9 billion will subsidise our own agriculture. We may argue about the advisability of such practices, and valid points could be scored on either side, but that would be a different argument.

Next. “Equally guaranteed is the £1.5 billion which goes to private bodies such as universities for research.” Same argument: whose universities? New argument: when we finally leave, we won’t have to be bound by any agreements into which we entered as an EU member.

Then, “It would not be wise to discontinue spending most of the £2 billion we give to 27 EU agencies, such as that which regulates medicines, because it would be more costly for us to duplicate their work ourselves.”

But we’re already duplicating this work, by regulating medicines through homespun agencies, such as NICE, MHRA and a whole alphabet soup of others. Has Mr Booker factored in the extra cost of also complying with the regulations imposed by the European Medicines Agency? Thought not.

“And if we are sensible enough to remain in the European Economic Area, giving us continued full access to the EU’s single market, we would be bound to continue contributing the £2 billion a year…”

This is a time-dishonoured logical fallacy called petitio principii (begging the question) – using what is the conclusion of the argument as a premise. We don’t necessarily need ‘full access to the EU’s single market’, and we certainly don’t need it at any price. If Mr Booker wishes to argue the opposite proposition, then by all means he should do so. Instead he presents as a fact what needs proving, which is neither grown-up nor clever.

Doing flip-flops can be fun, but care must be taken not to land on one’s head causing adverse cerebral effects. Mr Booker has neglected this simple truth.

President Obama has struck a blow for diversity by ruling that all federal buildings shall have ‘transgender’ lavatories. Yet anything the Americans can do, the Russians can do better.

To prove this unassailable truth, Ismail Berdiyev, the mufti of North Caucasus, and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have taken diversity one step further. Berdiyev believes that “all women should be circumcised, to have less debauchery in the world, less sexuality.”

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is practised in some villages of the mufti’s native Dagestan, but he deplores its spread being so narrow: “The Almighty created woman to bear and raise children. And circumcision has nothing to do with that. Women won’t stop giving birth because of that. But there would be less debauchery.”

All this is par for the course – one expects that sort of thing from Muslims. While in Islam FMG is still mostly tribal rather than universal, it naturally flows out of the Muslim’s somewhat utilitarian view of women.

Yet the Christian view is different, isn’t it? Well, yes. This side of ROC.

Enter Archpriest Chaplin. Fr Vsevolod isn’t any old priest and nor is he even any old archpriest. For many years he was ROC’s official spokesman, mainly on the strength of his intimate relationship with Vladimir Gundiayev, aka Patriarch Kiril, aka (in KGB dossiers) Agent Mikhailov.

Though Chaplin has been removed from his official post for tactical reasons, he remains Gundiayev’s confidante and mouthpiece, even as Gundiayev acts in a similar capacity for the KGB junta, aka the Russian government.

Ever since Peter I brought the Church under secular control, ROC has been an extension of the state. However, under the tsars most priests refused to collaborate with the secret police, resisting, for example, all pressures to divulge secrets vouchsafed in confession.

Bolshevism changed all that. First all the recalcitrant priests, 40,000 of them on Lenin’s watch, were massacred in all sorts of creative ways (I’ll spare you the lurid details). Then, when parishioners were starving to death and therefore, according to Lenin’s astute observation, too weak to resist, ROC was robbed of its valuables.

After that it was driven underground, where it stayed until the war, when Stalin came in for a rude awakening. Soldiers just wouldn’t fight for bolshevism. Instead they surrendered and deserted en masse. Hoping the people would fight for Holy Russia, Stalin then took ROC off the mothballs and wheeled it out.

A small, truly Christian, part of it remained underground, but the ROC hierarchy effectively became a department of the secret police. This fine tradition continues to this day.

Writes Lev Ponomaryov, Russian MP and Executive Director of the Russian National Movement For Human Rights: “Specific research concerning the relationship of the Church and KGB was professionally led by a member of our commission… Gleb Yakunin… [who] found the documents proving that all (!) top functionaries of Russian Orthodox Church were recruited by the KGB…”

It’s against this background that Chaplin’s bow towards diversity must be assessed. For he came out in support of the mufti’s initiative, expressing his “sympathies for the mufti, and I hope he doesn’t retreat from his position because of the howls and hysterics which will start now”.

Fr Vsevolod shares the mufti’s view on women’s purpose in life, and he agrees that FMG is a valid way of boosting the world’s morality. Chaplin does believe, however, that Russian Orthodox women should be allowed to keep their clitorises “because they don’t fornicate anyway.”

As a celibate monk, Fr Vsevolod holds a somewhat idealised view of Russian womankind, which isn’t widely shared by those with, as it were, hands-on experience in that area. Nor is it shared, say, by the Holy Fathers of Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery, who’ve turned its premises into a highly profitable bordello.

It isn’t even shared, de facto, by Chaplin’s patron and ROC’s head Gundiayev who, in spite of his celibacy, openly lives with a woman he passes for his distant cousin, a kinship for which no documentary evidence exists.

“We Orthodox Christians have different traditions – but that never stopped us respecting the traditions of neighbouring peoples,” writes Chaplin on the subject of FGM. Neither has it stopped them from bombing “neighbouring people” flat, specifically in the mufti’s region.

While commending Chaplin’s tolerance, one has to remark with some chagrin that he displays it selectively. For example, when still ROC’s official spokesman, he wrote “thank God, war is coming soon!”

His view on Stalinism is equally robust. “Some people,” explains the Holy Father, “may and must be killed,” and not just the odd criminal. “A certain proportion must be killed to educate society.” Such is “the will of God and the people, which coincides with the will of the state.”

This clarifies matters. ROC espouses not Christianity but the pagan nationalist myth of the Third Rome, which happens to be the ideology underpinning Putin’s rule.

Such sacralisation of evil secular power should give second thoughts to Western ‘useful idiots’ hailing Russia’s religious revival. There are indeed some good Christians there, if not as many as useful idiots believe. But they aren’t to be found in ROC’s hierarchy or its sponsoring organisation, Putin’s KGB junta.

 

We may be one democratic election away from the end of democratic elections, possibly for ever.

Like Hitler, who used and then eliminated the ballot box, the hard left fronted by Comrade Corbyn is close to taking over the Labour Party first and Britain second.

The same strategy almost succeeded in the 1980s, when the Labour hard left, then fronted by Ken Livingstone, came close to gaining control of the party, with the general election up for grabs.

This type of infiltration is called ‘entryism’, an idea first concocted by Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Corbyn’s idol.

Back in 1988 Corbyn was one of the backbench MPs who petitioned Parliament to demand that the Soviets restore his role model’s sterling reputation. This is what they wrote:

“That this House, in the light of the special conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in one week’s time, and of the judicial rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Pyatakov, demands that the Russian Government goes further and gives complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky…”

According to a Labour source, Corbyn’s sympathies haven’t so much changed as consolidated over time: “Jeremy Corbyn has clearly been fixated by the political ideology and tactics of Leon Trotsky for some time.”

Let’s throw some light on the situation, if any is needed. All the gentlemen mentioned in 1988 are among the most monstrous ghouls ever thrown up by Satan. They, along with Lenin and Stalin, drowned Russia in blood, enslaved her whole population and tried to do the same to the rest of the world.

In 1920, having barely scraped through their own civil war, the Soviets thrust westwards, with the intention of going all the way to the Channel. But for the Poles’ heroic fight-back at Warsaw, they would have done just that, for the demob-happy West had run out of fight by then.

Trotsky, the principal inspiration behind that foray, was easily as monstrous as Lenin and Stalin. His idea of a ‘permanent revolution’ called for the Soviet state to keep pouncing on all its neighbours with the ferocity of a rabid dog. And Trotsky’s concept of domestic policy was solely based on unrestrained violence, something he practised on a scale never before encountered in history.

After Lenin’s death Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin and thrown out of Russia. When in exile, he tried to organise opposition to Stalin, who, according to Trotsky, was neither radical enough nor sufficiently flexible. Eventually the debate was settled with an ice axe, and I am not shedding any tears.

It was in exile that Trotsky enlarged on Lenin’s original idea which the syphilitic ghoul called ‘legalism’. Trotsky’s ‘entryism’ was based on the same principle: infiltrating and using civilised institutions the better to destroy them.

This devious plan was adopted and developed by others, starting with the Italian communist Gramsci, who advocated a gradual hard-left takeover of the press and cultural institutions. Coming into prominence later were Adorno, Marcuse and all the other Frankfurters who fell out of Trotsky’s buns.

Now their spiritual descendants are conspiring to ensure that Corbyn is re-elected as party leader next month, which will then enable him to purge Labour of the ‘moderate’ (marginally less subversive) elements. The stated purpose is to “pull society to the left”, presumably into the margin where Trotsky would have felt at home.

Much pull-through is coming from the loony fringe expelled from Labour but now clamouring for readmission. One such group, the Socialist Workers Party, urges industrial strife to boost Corbyn: “Strikes hit the Tories and the bosses where it hurts. We need more of them. Such a working-class movement can pull society to the left. It’s the only thing that can really defend Corbyn.”

The coalition of hard-left groups supporting Corbyn is called Momentum, which is an appropriate term, considering that the old Trotskyist has already won 83 per cent of local party nominations, more than he did when elected party leader last summer.

Momentum includes various fragments of the Militant movement of the 1980s, such as The Socialist Party of England and Wales, which demands that “The Labour Party needs to be much more welcoming to all strands of opinion, particularly on the left.”

Such fragments also include the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and even the good old Communist Party, which is touting a six-point plan encouraging their people to join Labour as individual members and boost Corbyn.

Comrade Corbyn, who inherited Comrade Trotsky’s urge to orate if not his gift of the gab, is rabble-rousing with the best of them, trying to galvanise the hard left. On Monday he shared a platform with members of the Socialist party, preaching the delights of immigration at a black, Asian and ethnic-minority rally.

Labour’s Blairites are quaking in their boots. We too should be afraid.

For a clear path has opened up for the communists (whatever they call themselves) to destroy Britain in line with Trotsky’s blueprints. Should a recession, possibly promoted by paralysing general strikes, coincide with the next election, this lot may well find themselves in power.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” as the saying goes. So what are we going to do?

The results of a recent study give me that nice, warm feeling the Germans call Schadenfreude, a word Anglophones use too for lack of their own.

Not only does the study show that vegetarians are less healthy than carnivores, but it also puts a dent into many claims touted by health junkies. If such claims were true, vegetarians would be walking pictures of health.

They consume less cholesterol and saturated fat. They eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. They drink less and exercise more. They’re less likely to smoke. Few of them are overweight. And yet the study concludes that vegetarians “are less healthy (in terms of cancer, allergies and mental health disorders), have a lower quality of life, and also require more medical treatment.”

Can’t say I’m surprised, especially about the mental health part. Purely empirical observation does suggest that many vegetarians are prone to depression, or at least mood swings, and they tend to be morose loners.

Not being a psychiatrist, I can’t even speculate what causes eating disorders, of which vegetarianism is clearly one. Yet, displaying the self-confidence of an untrained amateur, I’m convinced that most incidences of this particular disorder do fall into the domain of psychiatry – depression and vegetarianism just may be different manifestations of the same underlying cause.

That’s nothing to be ashamed of: most of us have our own quirks. For example, I have a fear of heights, while one of my best friends develops facial tics whenever he’s contradicted, which means most of the time we’re together.

However, there’s a difference between my friend and me on the one hand and vegetarians on the other. We don’t use my acrophobia and his NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) to claim a high moral ground, while they use their eating disorder for just that purpose.

Not all of them do so blatantly. Most offer seemingly rational explanations, such as having watched abattoirs on television or actually visiting them. In the first case, one wonders if their TV sets had only one channel and couldn’t even be turned off. In the second case, one wonders what morbid interest made them visit a slaughterhouse in the first place. I mean, abattoirs aren’t everyone’s idea of a tourist destination.

Some others claim health benefits, which is why we should applaud the results of the study, hoping they’ll be confirmed by further research. Still others say they simply don’t like the taste of meat, poultry and game, which would suggest an atrophy of taste buds and an underdeveloped aesthetic sense.

Most Western vegetarians I’ve met are either atheists or fans of some dubious Eastern creeds (which amounts to the same thing). That’s hardly surprising either, because Judaeo-Christianity precludes anthropomorphism, which is an essential part of many Eastern faiths.

In our anthropocentric civilisation, killing animals doesn’t constitute murder, as the more crazed vegetarians claim. In fact, the Western position on carnivorism was manifestly laid down in Genesis: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

We no longer follow Biblical prescriptions, but they’ve seeped into the genetic make-up of our civilisation. Therefore even those unaware of the scriptural origin of their everyday practices unwittingly follow them every day. Vegetarians don’t, not this practice anyway, implicitly denying the spiritual provenance of our civilisation.

Some of God’s creatures are herbivorous, some are carnivorous, and man is both. Only man has the ability to choose which he wants to be, but exercising it means throwing half of what God so kindly gave us to eat back into his face. Those who do so have no claim to any moral ascendancy.

St Paul explicitly denied that vegetarianism occupies a higher moral ground than meat eating: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.”

Some saints, notably St Augustine, did become vegetarians as part of their overall asceticism. But the practices of the greatest saints in history aren’t something even they themselves expected most people to follow. Those who can’t even approach the spiritual or intellectual heights reached by St Augustine ought not to single out his asceticism, the least consequential part of his heritage. Let’s start with The City of God, shall we?

St Francis stands apart from other saints in his attitude to fauna. He preached to animals and called them ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, which is why most painters from Giotto onwards depicted him surrounded by every manner of beast. However, in spite of his eerie anthropomorphism, St Francis wasn’t a vegetarian. So even regarding animals as man’s relations in God doesn’t necessarily preclude having some protein in our diet.

Today up to a third of all pupils in Britain’s top public schools cringe at the thought of eating meat. They’ve been brainwashed by history’s greatest propaganda campaign called modernity. Like most such campaigns it’s primarily destructive.

The purpose is to wipe out the traditional presuppositions of our civilisation, creating a tabula rasa on which modernity can inscribe its incendiary message. Vegetarianism is a small part of it, but a part nevertheless.

 

 

 

 

 

The originator of this deep insight used it as a justification for murdering millions and turning millions more into what he so robustly called ‘camp dust’.

HMG hasn’t quite graduated to such measures but, to borrow an aphorism from their other apparent inspiration Mao, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a small step.”

The small step our Conservative (!) government is about to take is vetting applicants for government jobs to make sure they don’t come from the upper classes. Rather than fighting class war with bullets, torture and barbed wire, HMG has come up with a questionnaire designed to bar what the Bolsheviks called ‘socially alien elements’ from senior positions in the civil service.

Over 4,000 people already holding such posts will have to take the test first, to give HMG an accurate demographic picture of Whitehall. No indication has so far been given whether those testing at above the common-as-muck level will be summarily sacked, but that would be the logical inference. HMG did indicate they’d recommend that the same standards be applied to senior jobs in the private sector too.

Now I don’t hold a senior public job and nor do I intend to apply for one. However, supposing that I did, would I qualify? Here are their questions and my answers:

Did you spend time in care? No.

Have you ever held refugee or asylum status? Yes.

Were you a carer as a child? Occasionally.

What type of secondary school did you go to? The type where most boys carry knives and try to rape most girls.

What was the name of that school? Moscow Secondary School No 123.

Did your parent or guardian complete a degree? Yes.

What are your parents’ highest qualifications? MS and MA.

What was your postcode when you were 14? None.

Were you eligible for free school meals? No.

What was your parents’ occupation? Father, engineer; mother, librarian.

What kind of home did you live in – owner occupied or rented? Neither. Social housing, seven of us in one room, five other families sharing kitchen, bathroom and lavatory.

How would you assess your own socio-economic background? Indefinite.

Well, I don’t know. The schooling and residence answers are right up (or rather down) there, but some others are iffy. Touch and go, I dare say.

However, I don’t think the questionnaire probes deeply enough. Hence I’d like to offer 20 additional questions of my own, to wit:

1) Does your Mum ever charge for sex? 2) If yes, how much? 3) How many tattoos, if any, does she have? 4) Were your parents a) married? b) shacked up, c) so pissed they didn’t know how they ended up shagging? 5) Actually, do you know who your Dad was? 6) Does your Mum? 7) How many criminal convictions and/or ASBOs do your Mum and Dad (if known) have? 8) Do your Mum and Dad (if known) drink more than 15 units of alcohol a day? 9) Do they do drugs? 10) How many cigarettes do they smoke a day? 11) Do your Mum and Dad (if known) move their lips when reading? 12) Can they read at all? 13) How many books, if any, do you have at your place? 14) Do your Mum and Dad buy lottery tickets? 15) What did you call your main meal a) dinner, b) lunch, c) tea, d) nonexistent? 16) What kind of car, if any, did your family have a) owned, b) leased, c) stolen? 17) Are you a) male, b) female, c) other? 18) Are you a) white, b) black, c) other, d) Don’t have a clue, mate? 19) Are you a) Christian, b) Jewish, c) Muslim, d) other, e) You f***ing what, mate? 20) Are you a) straight, b) gay, c) other, d) bit of everything?

Correct answers: 1) yes, 2) a fiver or 10 Bensons, 3) too many to count, 4) b or c, 5) no, 6) no or the bitch won’t tell, 7) who’s counting?, 8) yes, 9) yes, 10) as many as they could nick, 11) yes, 12) not really, 13) none, 14) every week, 15) c or d, 16) c or none, 17) a, b or c, 18) b, c or d, 19) b, c, d or e, 20) b, c or d)

This questionnaire may be expanded or condensed, but in either case those providing correct answers must be hired on the spot – regardless of any other qualifications. This will guarantee we’ll have the best possible standards in our civil service or, in any case, the kind of civil service we deserve.

Actually, there are a few serious questions I’d like to ask. Do our governing spivs think the civil service is the right battlefield for class war? Do they think those giving the right answers to their real or my imaginary questions will be better qualified than those giving wrong answers? Do they realise, or indeed care, that they’re destroying the last vestiges of sanity in government?

Above all, do they realise they are but a small step removed from the kind of thinking that animated Messrs Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot?

 

 

 

 

Former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker didn’t say that in so many words. But he said it nonetheless.

Lord Baker observed correctly that a degree in useless humanities is no longer a ticket to “a nice house in a nice area”, which, as we all know, is the only conceivable purpose of higher education.

“I haven’t seen the passing up of a Russell Group university yet but we will eventually see it,” predicted Lord Baker with clairvoyant certainty. In other words, Britain’s top universities will become extinct like dinosaurs and other species jettisoned by evolution.

At £9,250 a year, a degree in history or philosophy isn’t worth the money, explained Lord Baker. It makes more sense to join an apprenticeship programme at an IT company, where a youngster can be paid up to £15,000 a year to learn how to push buttons with greater dexterity.

Such a youngster would be £24,250 better off than a drudge burying himself in useless Plato or Thucydides. Simple arithmetic, really. Open and shut case.

Now I often write vituperatively about our soulless, materialistic modernity. Yet nothing I’ve ever written at my most jaundiced condemns modernity more devastatingly than Lord Baker’s affable comments.

He said, effectively and possibly unwittingly, that Western civilisation is dead, a view I share. However, Lord Baker sounds as if he sees nothing wrong in this demise. Just the way the cookie crumbles, old boy. Yes, but this one has crumbled so much that there’s no cookie left.

Ever since the first university was founded 928 years ago in Bologna, everyone has understood that its function is to point students, and through them society, towards the path approaching eternal truths. Such truths weren’t to be found in crafts, useful as they might be.

It was subjects like theology, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, history and so forth that led to absolute truth. Because any civilisation is defined by its understanding of absolutes, they were by far the most important academic disciplines.

In those backward days no one doubted that absolute truth was transcendent, residing higher than man and ultimately beyond his reach. However, it was a university’s task to lead man up to the closest possible approximation of truth, thereby lifting society to new moral, spiritual and intellectual heights.

Modernity tossed transcendence overboard like so much ballast preventing progress from staying afloat. Truth was yanked off its absolute perch and internalised within each man. Since all men are self-evidently created equal, all are therefore deemed equally able to perceive truth.

Truth was no longer one and absolute; it became fractured and relative. In other words, it effectively ceased to exist. Our civilisation lost its soul, and consequently its intellect.

Intellect was no longer needed as a recipient and processor of verity. Modernity declared that truth is whatever is perceived by the senses, not by the mind or, God forbid, intuitive inspiration.

Since the senses perceive mostly material things, our society became grossly materialistic. It no longer needed to ponder the intellectual threads of which the fabric of our civilisation was woven in the first place. It needed training in acquiring material things as expeditiously as possible.

Few people noticed that the resultant intellectual catastrophe spelled social disaster as well. Every Western country has become an aggregate of atomised individuals, each either a depository of his own version of truth or, more typically, not bothering about anything other than pursuing happiness, as defined with the greatest possible vulgarity.

The calamitous consequences of this ‘progress’ are too numerous to mention. The most immediately obvious one is politics. It’s also one with the greatest potential for destroying the world not just spiritually but also physically.

Abolition of truth has produced a society of moral and intellectual idiots, unable to wield the most basic mental tools and incapable of distinguishing among emotions, opinions, judgements and arguments. Such men, observed Chesterton, “do not believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

They have no intellectual training to realise that almost everything they hear from politicians is meaningless waffle replete with non sequiturs, demagoguery and every rhetorical fallacy in the book (the kind of book no one reads any longer).

Whenever by some quirk of nature a politician appears who talks sense, he’s either drummed out of politics or forced to toe the line. In fact, it’s becoming exceedingly unlikely that such a politician can appear: an electorate of moral and intellectual idiots will unfailingly choose similarly inferior leaders. In a cannibal tribe only a cannibal can be chief.

Except that our cannibals wield not spears but weapons capable of wiping out the world. The weapons aren’t just of the explosive variety: some of them are economic, likely to destroy the very material happiness in whose name they were deployed.

Lord Baker is therefore right. The very concept of university has already been debauched, and even in this diminished form universities are no longer needed. They’ll either disappear or transmogrify into trade schools.

Those who will know the difference won’t think it matters one way or the other. Few will ever realise that the ensuing catastrophe isn’t just academic but also existential.

Before I get irate letters from Swedish women and all those who abhor generalisation, this isn’t an attempt to impugn the morals of Nordic womankind. It’s merely a quote.

The belief quoted is almost universally shared among the Muslim population of Sweden, a nation more hospitable to aliens than any other in Northern Europe.

Five per cent of the country’s population is Muslim (or more, if we include second-generation immigrants, as we must) and, coincidentally, Swedish women also suffer the greatest number of rapes and sexual assaults.

Or rather I’d want this to be coincidental. After all, I am, as I keep mentioning in the hope of attracting a greater following, the founder, president and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism.

Therefore I’d never point an accusing finger at any downtrodden group that has suffered for so long from Western colonialism, imperialism and all sorts of other isms. Nor will I dare suggest that the sentiment in the title has anything to do with this inexplicable situation.

Actually, Sweden is relatively free of blame, since I can’t recall any instances of Swedes venting their colonialist urges on Muslims. Then again, Swedes must share in the collective guilt of all white people, especially since they look whiter than most.

However, even though I refuse to accuse Muslims, statistics do that for me. And these say that Muslims dominate the group of rape suspects. According to these statistics, most perpetrators are immigrants, and most immigrants are Muslims.

This is the case not only in Sweden but in the rest of Scandinavia too. In Oslo, immigrants, mainly Muslims, are involved in two out of three rapes. In Copenhagen, this figure is three out of four.

But Sweden takes pride of place both in absolute and relative numbers. The absolute numbers are easy enough to explain: the country has by far the greatest population in Scandinavia and therefore the greatest number of targets.

The relative numbers aren’t exactly mysterious either, owed as they are to the nation’s aforementioned hospitality. Of all convicted rapists there, 85 per cent were born abroad, and an overwhelming majority are Muslims.

Yet those who demand that decisive action be taken clearly don’t understand the concept of cultural diversity. The Swedish police do, as shown by their attempt to throw light on the macabre situation in their report “The Current Situation of Sexual Molestation and Proposals for Action.”

Sweden’s finest grudgingly admit that the majority of attacks are against girls under 15, and most are committed by Muslims. However, this has nothing to do with… well, anything it isn’t supposed to have anything to do with.

It’s all simply a case of cultural differences. Islamic culture, which is self-evidently at least equal to ours, dictates that any woman wearing revealing clothes (that is, not draped head to toe in a black Halloween costume) is a whore.

Now, even supposing that every female Swede is indeed a lady of easy virtue, it still doesn’t follow that she should be fair game for rape. Whores are still entitled to offer or refuse consent, and Swedish policemen agree.

That is, they agree for appearances’ sake. One still detects their general feeling that any raped woman who wears short skirts (or, given the tender age of most victims, pinafores) has only herself to blame.

She also has something else to blame, her “Nordic alcohol culture and non-traditional gender roles”. Now, according to those downtrodden Muslim migrants, the traditional ‘gender role’ for a woman is solely to act as a spittoon for a man’s discharge, in which capacity she may even be allowed to divest herself of the Halloween costume.

When a blonde Valkyrie is espied not acting in that role, she must be forced to conform. “Control is exercised over women through violence,” explains the report, “thus shaping her according to the man’s idealised vision of femininity.”

Those Muslim idealists also suffer from traditional Nordic intemperance. They “can’t handle the alcohol” and as a result “feel horny”. In other words, it’s the victims’ own fault for belonging to a degenerate culture that, unlike the highly moral Islam, countenances the consumption of booze.

Now I grew up in Russia, a country that easily rivals Scandinavia in ‘alcohol culture’. When I and my friends were young and filled to the brim with bubbling hormones, we drank a lot, and most of us couldn’t handle alcohol either. And yes, we too ‘felt horny’ as a result. Yet we always asked the girl’s permission before having sex – it was just something one did.

Those Russian rapists who didn’t ask permission were savages, and so are those Muslims who make Swedish women scared to walk the streets. If a culture predisposes men to sexual violence, then it’s not so much culture as condoned savagery.

No doubt those Swedish Valkyries are ecstatic about the news that 190,000 more Muslims will have arrived in Sweden by the end of the year. I can think of only one solution: they should all convert to Islam and don Halloween costumes.

And if you can think of any other solution, don’t bother to apply for my Charles Martel Society for Multiculturalism. You’ll be blackballed.

The EU is like the intimate portion of canine anatomy: it locks a member in and holds on tight.

Tempting though it may be to expand this simile, I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before. The main problem with the EU isn’t that it’s undemocratic but that it’s evil.

A political structure doesn’t have to murder millions to justify such a description. It’s enough that it should be built on wicked principles and propped up by wicked practices.

Vindicating this observation, the EU, abetted by quislings in the national governments, has so far been able to reverse every referendum that has gone against it. Each time it acted like a stern teacher telling a hapless pupil to think again: “You got it wrong, Johnny. Keep doing it until you get it right.”

As far as the EU is concerned, British voters got it wrong when voting to leave. They must be made to think again, and federasts are banging their heads together to find the best way.

The simplest way would be to repeat for the umpteenth time that referendum results aren’t legally binding. So thank you, Mr Voter. We’ll take your concerns into account when working out an improved arrangement with the EU.

Alas, such a straightforward approach would be politically suicidal, and the idea of killing their own careers is repugnant to our ‘leaders’. More subtlety is required.

Thus we’ve always been told that leaving the EU takes a lot of planning, negotiations, renegotiations, horse trading and whatnot. Those things take time; one can’t rush into decisions headlong.

Fair enough. But how much time? How long before we activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty? What are the reasons for not doing so immediately?

Here one is reminded to one’s chagrin that the top two positions in HMG are occupied by Mrs May and Mr Hammond who both supported remaining. It’s not therefore inconceivable that they may be assisting the EU’s efforts to keep Britain locked in its womb.

The noises they’re making add weight to such suspicions. Specifically, we’re told that we must wait until the French and German elections to invoke Article 50. “You can’t negotiate when you don’t know who you’re negotiating with” is the party line.

But this is nonsense. First, since we’re leaving the EU and not France or Germany, their electoral shenanigans shouldn’t make any difference. We’ll be negotiating with EU institutions, mainly the Commission, which isn’t subject to electoral vagaries for the simple reason that it’s unelected in the first place.

Second, invoking Article 50 doesn’t mean a summary exit or immediate negotiations. It only means that HMG is formally notifying the EU of its decision to leave. Negotiations start after that, to be concluded within two years. Since bureaucratic procedures always extend to the outer limit of the time available, should we invoke Article 50 now, we won’t actually leave until autumn, 2018.

This seems to be sufficient time to negotiate the details – and to staff the Whitehall departments set up for this purpose. Such departments don’t have to be at full strength to extend the notification. However, if they’re as desperately understaffed as they claim, I’m hereby offering my pro bono services in drafting the appropriate text:

“Her Majesty’s Government wishes to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, thereby notifying the European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from membership in that organisation.”

Job done. However, a proverbial highly placed source is claiming that: “Ministers are now thinking the [Article 50] trigger could be delayed to autumn 2017. They don’t have the infrastructure for the people they need to hire. They say they don’t even know the right questions to ask when they finally begin bargaining with Europe.”

That makes our ministers even dafter than one would expect. So allow me to offer my unsolicited services yet again. Don’t ask them any questions, chaps, not at first. Just tell them we’re definitely leaving. The Q&A can wait until the nitty-gritty has to be sorted out, and even that should be done from a position of strength, not supplication.

Otherwise people might think that HMG is trying to soft-pedal Brexit until it topples into the ditch. For three years is a longer time in politics than even Harold Wilson’s infamous week. A lot can happen.

Here’s one plausible scenario. It’s probable, nay guaranteed, that we’ll have a recession during that period. This will have nothing to do with Brexit but everything to do with the nature of our economy, which is an Origami arrangement spun out of the printing press.

When this comes about, economically literate people may scream themselves hoarse proving that the recession has happened not because of Brexit but in spite of it. They’ll be easily outshouted by the we-told-you-so chorus of Remainers.

Brexit, they’ll say, shouldn’t be a millstone around our necks. The people are allowed to change their mind. After all, Brexit is human, Breversal divine.

The only way to avoid this likely development is to compress the time our governing spivs have at their disposal. So let’s take to the streets and march (peacefully!) through Whitehall, shouting “Invoke Article 50 now!” Or, better still, “Let my people go!”