Category: Blog

On the face of it, anyone who likes our constitution and dislikes the EU should jump up and salute.

Theresa May is about to unveil her ‘Great Repeal Bill’. If enacted, it will overturn the 1972 European Communities Act, which paved the way for Britain to join the EU.

How a British PM, especially a Conservative one, could sign that treasonous document in the first place is beyond me. The Communities Act destroyed Her Majesty’s sovereignty through Parliament by stating that European laws took precedence over our own.

I suppose Edward Heath had too many distractions, of the Grosvenor House variety, to ponder the ramifications. The salient one was that, when he signed the Act, Britain effectively stopped being a sovereign nation.

The Act must be repealed. It’s the first step towards Brexit, to which Mrs May’s government seems to be committed. However, we must make sure we don’t put a foot wrong, and I’m not sure Mrs May is all that sure-footed.

Her announcement is tainted with reassurances that the Repeal Act will function thermodynamically. EU laws won’t disappear. They’ll merely become British laws.

Granted, Parliament will regain the authority eventually to ditch whichever laws it doesn’t like. Yet each such step will be put to a vote, and the government only holds a slender majority of 12.

As a matter of fact, the whole Repeal Act will require parliamentary approval in both Houses, which is far from guaranteed, especially in the Lords. What will happen in the event of a nay vote? Or a filibuster in the Lords?

The government is aware of such possibilities, which is why both Mrs May and Brexit Minister David Davis make a point of stressing that EU laws concerning ‘employment rights’ will remain in place, if under new management. This is clearly designed as a sop both to the opposition and Brussels.

Mercifully, our ‘employment rights’ aren’t as subversive as those in, say, France. That makes our labour market more flexible and therefore sexier in the eyes of foreign investors.

Hence it’s a bad idea to issue blank promises, especially if they’re accompanied by Mrs May’s plan to have workers represented on every corporate board. If she wants to hear horror stories of what that policy does on the continent, I’ll be happy to get her in touch with the French businessmen among my friends.

That the government is preoccupied with such niceties suggests not so much its preference for ‘soft’ Brexit as its commitment to soft principles. For neither Labour nor the EU needs to be mollycoddled.

Labour resistance can be downgraded overnight by calling a snap election, something Mrs May is reluctant to do for dubious reasons. The assumption seems to be that the Tories will get their landslide in 2020 anyway, so there’s no need to be distracted by elections.

I’m not going to say that this assumption is false, but it’s definitely optimistic. If the political picture remains the same four years from now, then yes, the Tories will increase their majority. But political pictures are a kaleidoscope, not crusted pigment on canvas.

Since our economy is fundamentally as unsound as that of the richer EU members, it’s not only possible but likely that before 2020 we’ll have some downturn, not to say crisis. That will create dissent within the Tory party, making a Labour victory possible. Brexit, rather than decades of promiscuous tax-and-spend, will be held up as the scapegoat to be slaughtered.

Considering the current disarray within Labour, a snap election now would deliver a majority of 50 at least, enabling the government to breathe more easily. In the face of such a Commons majority, the Lords would be hard-pressed to sabotage Brexit.

As to the EU, it’s like any other bully. Anyone who grew up in a bad part of town will know that meek compliance only emboldens thugs. If you want them to back off, a punch on the nose works much better.

As it is, some EU members, mostly but not exclusively from the low-rent part, are threatening to torpedo any Brexit deal they don’t like. The EU Charter, requiring approval by a “qualified majority” puts them in a position to do so.

In pushing Brexit through, the last thing we should be is soft-talking supplicants. If that’s what we are, Brexit will be tied up in knots for years, which may well mean for ever.

Mrs May must act hard-boiled, not half-baked. We shouldn’t ask but tell, and do so in no uncertain terms. And we should stop resorting to weak-kneed copouts of comparing ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ Brexit.

The choice isn’t between hard and soft. It’s between hard and none. Procrastinate long enough, and the grass into which Brexit will have been kicked will grow too tall to wade through.

Yes, taking an intransigent stance may make us suffer economically, as Christopher Booker pontificates with his customary know-all smugness. But should we put a price tag on our sovereignty?

I don’t know how many Battle of Britain pilots are still with us, but we should ask their views. When taking off in their Spitfires, did they contemplate the economic downside of freedom?

The Dutch report is unequivocal: on 17 July, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was criminally shot down by Putin’s KGB junta.

The day before, the 9M38 BUK missile that killed 283 passengers and 15 crew had been moved from Russia into Pervomaisky, the village controlled by ‘Ukrainian separatists’ (the Putinesque for Russian paramilitaries). After the missile was fired, the launcher went back into Russia.

The investigators interviewed 200 witnesses, analysed 150,000 intercepted phone calls and gathered 500,000 photos and videos to reach their verdict: there’s no doubt, reasonable or otherwise, that the responsibility for the crime rests with the Russians.

Now, anyone aware of how such decisions are made in Russia will know that the missile wouldn’t have been launched without Putin’s explicit order. The Russians can lie all they want, and they’ve been doing that for two years, but whodunit is no longer the question.

Even Putin’s press secretary Peskov inadvertently let it slip that the findings “may be true”. By KGB standards, that’s a resounding mea culpa.

But one critical question still hasn’t been answered, nor even asked: Why? Actually, it isn’t one such question but several.

Why did the KGB junta openly brand itself as evil? Why did its leaders risk prosecution at the Hague tribunal? Why did they use the BUK modification that only the Russian army has? Why did they fire from their controlled terrain?

Here we enter the area of conjecture, but it isn’t very difficult, given the facts and general understanding of how the KGB works. They may not always do things for a good reason, but they always try.

What did they have to gain by shooting down an airliner full of Dutchmen? If they wanted to blame it on the Ukraine, why didn’t they use the older BUK modification the Ukrainians have and fire from some terrain nominally under Ukrainian control?

A mistake must have been made. The Russians clearly wanted to bring down some airplane, for otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble. But Flight 17 wasn’t their intended target.

What was? There were no Ukrainian warplanes in the area and, even if there had been, the Russians wouldn’t have needed that charade to fire at them. They had been doing that for weeks, openly and without using BUKs.

The solution to this puzzle is simple for people who understand the evil ways of totalitarian regimes, those serving as Col. Putin’s role models. A bit of history is in order.

On 31 August, 1939, the SS launched a false flag raid on a Gleiwitz radio station in Silesia. They shot up the premises and left behind some corpses dressed in Polish uniforms. This was used as a pretext for invading Poland the next day.

The Nazis’ Soviet allies were suitably inspired. Following their criminal pact with Hitler, the Soviets occupied eastern Poland, the Baltic republics, Bessarabia and, while at it, even Bukovina, which went beyond the terms of the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Then came Finland’s turn, and there the Soviets knew they’d run into some resistance. And, unlike their other victims, Finland was likely to have allies possibly and sympathisers definitely. Sweden could be expected to be displeased, and even Britain was making threatening noises.

Hence, just like the Nazis in Poland, the Soviets were desperate for a casus belli against Finland. Mercifully, the Nazi patent was in the public domain.

On 26 November, 1939, the Red Army shelled its own post at Mainila, on the Finnish border. The Soviets declared that the fire had come from Finland and therefore they were victims of a heinous aggression. That defied not only logic but also physics. It was easy to establish that the shells had come from the south, not north: shell fragments disperse in the direction of the trajectory vector.

In March, April, 1940, the Soviets executed 20,000 Polish officers and high-ranking officials at Katyn and elsewhere. Again false flag methods were used: the murderers used German-made Walther handguns. When the corpses were dug up, the Soviets blamed the massacre on the Germans and persisted in that lie for the next 50 years.

Another false flag operation brought Putin to power in 2000. The FSB/KGB blew up several blocks of flats in Russia and blamed the crime on the Chechens. That kicked off the second Chechen war and adumbrated the entry of the strong leader so admired by Messrs Trump, Hitchens, Booker et al.

This circuitous route brings us back to Flight 17, which clearly wasn’t the intended BUK target. Another plane was.

Indeed there was such a plane overflying the area, a Russian airliner with a profile similar to that of the MA’s Boeing 777. It must have been the real target, in a false flag operation similar to those I’ve outlined.

Had the op succeeded, Putin would have had his casus belli for invading the Ukraine without having to resort to the subterfuge of ‘separatists’. And, since the downed airliner would have been Russian, it would have been Russian investigators on the scene.

While Putin’s tanks rolled towards Kiev, the ‘investigators’ would have hastily concluded that Russia had no choice: Ukrainian ‘fascists’ had to pay for their crime. As it was, the tanks didn’t roll: Putin got cold feet imagining the ensuing global outrage.

Watching him squirm in the Hague dock would be a pleasing sight to all decent people, which category obviously doesn’t include the new UKIP leader Diane James, who describes the KGB colonel as one of her “political heroes”.

Don’t count on my vote, Madam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The EU clearly recognises that terrorism presents a problem, mainly because it turns people off the EU.

It must also realise that its immigration policy has something to do with the problem. After all, the amount of terrorism is known to be directly proportionate to the number of Muslims – and the EU has in its munificence admitted millions of those cultural aliens.

Having established that cultural alienation promotes suicide bombings, EU bureaucrats have set out to alleviate the problem. They’re going to spend €1,000,000 on the “promotion of EU values through music”.

The project is so fascinating that I don’t know where to begin. As a first tentative step I’ve looked those values up. The EU lists them as “respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”.

It isn’t immediately obvious how this generic melange will solve the problem at hand – and some of its components, especially the last one, are only likely to make matters worse. But even admitting the curative effect of such worthy desiderata, one is still puzzled how they can be communicated through music.

Moreover, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, used as the EU anthem, contains lyrics that are offensive to Muslims: “She [Nature] gave us kisses and the fruit of the vine.” Try sampling ‘the fruit of the vine’ in Saudi Arabia and see what happens.

One suspects the bureaucrats simply used their stock knavish trick of equating ‘EU’ with ‘European’, thereby implying that the two notions are coextensive and inseparable. Let’s forgive them this lexical felony and accept that Western music does communicate Western values.

When it comes to culture, especially music, I use the words ‘Western’ and ‘Christian’ interchangeably. Western music was born in the church and seldom left home until Descartes first suggested that music was capable of evoking secular sentiments.

Since God who is love permeates even ostensibly secular Western music, one would expect it to have an ennobling effect. It’s counterintuitive to think that an avid listener of, say, Bach’s Passions could blow himself up on a crowded bus.

Alas, history shows that a man has to be predisposed to perceive the ennobling effect. Great music doesn’t occupy a separate compartment in such a man’s soul – it largely forms, enlightens and elevates his whole being. He and music are one.

However, the same institution that created Western music teaches that evil exists. And history confirms that even those evil men who like music are immune to its effects.

Lenin, for example, rationed his exposure to his beloved Appassionata. “Music,” he said, “makes us want to stroke people’s heads whereas we need to hit them without mercy.”

The great humanitarian indulged in both activities, albeit on a different scale. Soviet newsreels, for example, show Lenin stroking the heads of children, whom he allegedly loved. However, he definitely hated adults, which is why at least 10 million of them were killed on his watch.

Lenin’s successor happily combined love of music with hatred for people. While murdering another 50 million, Stalin personally compiled programmes for Kremlin concerts, showing a particular bias towards the pianist Emil Gilels.

Stalin even dabbled in musical criticism. For example, it’s widely acknowledged that he was the author of the Pravda article describing Shostakovich’s opera as “muddle instead of music”. And Stalin’s hangman-in-chief Beria listened to Mozart before and after torturing his victims personally.

The Nazis not only loved music but openly acknowledged that German Romanticism, Wagner in particular, had a formative effect on their ideology. Hitler regularly attended symphony concerts and, when he was in his box, Karajan arranged the audience in the swastika shape.

Not only consumers of music but also its practitioners happily harmonised Nazism with classical themes. Karajan, for example, joined the Nazi party twice, first in his native Austria, then in Germany.

Also implicated in collaboration with the Nazis were conductors Mengelberg and Furtwängler, composer Richard Strauss, pianists Cortot and Gieseking, singer Schwarzkopf and other sublime musicians. Say what you will about them, but they were all exposed to music rather a lot.

Now if classical music didn’t prevent Lenin, Stalin and Hitler from committing satanic crimes, one is hard-pressed to see how it’ll have such a restraining effect on feral Muslim youths who study jihad at their schools and worship it at their mosques.

In any case, European music has a deep effect only on people imbued with European (EU?) culture. For example, all Western music sounds like march tunes to the Chinese. And Islam bans instrumental music altogether, only allowing nasheeds, unaccompanied sacral songs.

Compare those with our cantatas or, for that matter, heretically secular Islamic music with, say, Chopin’s preludes, and you’ll understand how alien Muslim culture is to our music.

At least Daniel Barenboim, who brings Israeli and Palestinian musicians together to foster peace in the Middle East, does it strictly for self-promotion. Danny Boy neither expects nor produces any noticeable effect on anything other than his own popularity.

But those EU bureaucrats seem to be serious about this idiocy. Well, perhaps their economic policies are so resoundingly successful that they can find no better use for €1,000,000.

This is your classic love story, a marriage made in modern heaven and consummated in Ecuador. Boy (Fernando Machado) who used to be a girl meets a girl (Diane Rodriguez) who used to be a boy.

According to English grammar, ‘used to be’ implies they no longer are. Mr/Miss Machado is no longer a girl, and Miss/Mr Rodriguez is no longer a boy.

Fair enough. All of us progressive people are proud about modern advances in medicine, and we’re no longer surprised at transsex operations. Routine stuff, that.

The man has something cut off and is shot full of oestrogen. The woman has something sown on and is shot full of testosterone. That’s basically it, although I’m well aware that the whole procedure is infinitely more subtle and complex than my untutored mind can fathom.

However, unless medical science has progressed even more than has been reported, a newly converted man can’t impregnate a newly converted woman – for all sorts of technical reasons that needn’t detain us here.

Hence the newspaper story announcing that the happy couple have produced a child presents a puzzle that beats any Sudoku I’ve ever seen. The title above points at the difficulty, nay impossibility, of the conundrum.

Such utterly modern, newly normal, couples tend to adopt children, who then grow up happy if slightly confused who’s the Mummy and who’s the Daddy. I’ve also read (and written) about an ex-man acquiring a brand-new uterus and getting impregnated with her/his preserved sperm – the first case of human parthenogenesis, and yet another testimony to both the ingenuity and nature of our progressive modernity.

Yet nothing of the sort has been reported in this case, which it would have been had our scientists struck another such impressive blow for progress. All right, I give up. Another clue, please.

Here are a couple, which are quotes from the newspaper report. “Mr Machado soon made the discovery he was expecting.” “When he discovered he was pregnant, he ‘started crying with happiness, fear and dread.’ ”

Neither sentence would have been stylistically possible just a few years ago, so it isn’t just medical science that has made giant forward strides but also the English language.

Lost in guesses, each hitting an impasse, I’ve taken a lazy man’s way out and read the rest of the story. Turns out, Mr/Miss Machado had nothing sewn on, and Miss/Mr Rodriguez had nothing cut off. They changed their sex without losing their original bits.

The bits then mated in the old-fashioned way, and a conventional impregnation ensued. Hence Miss/Mr Rodriguez is perfectly justified to say “We are the same as other families. Even though we might not have the same rights, we’re the same.”

On balance, the happy couple may not be like most other families, not yet at any rate, but I can both see their point and sympathise with their plight.

Free will is an essential part of our founding doctrine, which implies the inalienable right of free choice. I like dark socks, he likes Argyle, they like polka dot – and all of us are free to choose whatever design we fancy.

Similarly, those who still espouse our founding doctrine tend to abhor determinism of any kind. Therefore, in order to enforce our free choice we must be able to choose our sex, regardless of the one determined at birth – or at conception, if you’d rather.

I might have skipped a few intermediate steps in this logical chain, but the final link is indisputable. Someone who was born male has a God-given right to have himself cut into a woman and vice versa.

However, and I’m only trying to be logical here, the cutting part is de rigueur. It’s like a membership fee required to join a club. If you haven’t paid to join, say, the Carlton Club, you aren’t a member, and, if you pass yourself for one, you’re a fraud.

As I was writing this, I realised how hopelessly retrograde that line of thought was. There’s a fine line between logic and pedantry, and I’ve overstepped it by being such a stickler for surgical detail.

“The law before demanded that to be recognised as a woman you had to be castrated,” complained Miss/Mr Rodriguez, who obviously shares my joy over the long overdue legal change.

All that gory stuff is no longer necessary. A simple declaration of the new sex identity suffices – a person is what he/she/it says he/she/it is. That’s all there is to it.

Hence I’m proud of Mr/Miss Machado and Miss/Mr Rodriguez for having made the sentence in the title possible. I’m also proud of the Ecuadorian authorities who kept pace with progress by conferring a legal status on the happy couple.

Just to think that some sticks-in-the-mud still refer to countries like Ecuador as the Third World. There’s no such thing. We’re all one happy, globalised, uniform world united in our commitment to progress.

Rejoice.

 

How does one become a secular saint? As Gandhi shows, enmity to the West is sufficient even in the absence of any other qualifications.

Even Gandhi’s racism doesn’t put off his Western admirers. Perhaps it should.

When he lived in South Africa, Ghandi declared that “respectable Indians” shouldn’t have to share facilities with “raw Kaffirs”. Following his petition, Durban’s authorities introduced a separate entrance for natives to the post office. Later that practice was called apartheid.

To continue the quotation in the title, yes, Hitler may perpetrate “a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities [by the Allies]”. But that’s fine because death doesn’t matter – we’ll be reincarnated anyway.

“This manslaughter must be stopped,” continued the saintly personage. “You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man…”

These days, many young Indians share Gandhi’s view that Hitler wasn’t a bad man – to judge by the enduring popularity of Mein Kampf, published by dozens of publishers and bought in hundreds of thousands.

Gandhi’s views on Britain’s fight for survival sprang from his dim-witted notion of nonviolence.

In that spirit he advised the British how to wage war: “Invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions… If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered…”

At home, Gandhi’s propaganda of nonviolence was an extension of his fanatical use of devout Hinduism for political ends, specifically the dismemberment of the British Empire. As a by-product, this created much bad blood between Muslims and Hindus, with much good blood spilled during the resulting partition: up to two million were killed and 10 million displaced.

That’s what nonviolent demagogues like Gandhi tend to do: they thunder away and then somehow, unwittingly as they’ll later claim, pass the relay baton to their violent followers. Then they sit back and feign horror as heads roll. Unable to believe in a real God, they don’t even believe in consequences.

The same indifference to consequences permeates Ghandi’s perverse propaganda of celibacy in and out of marriage. In the tradition of Eastern solipsism, he internalised the whole concept without giving any thought to the social and demographic ramifications.

“It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. [If he has to marry], he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife,” wrote Ghandi. Had he bothered to withdraw his head from his own rectum, he would have seen that within one generation his pet idea would spell the end of India.

His Western admirers, few of whom are particularly bright, don’t understand how fundamentally alien – and incomprehensible – this sort of thing is to our civilisation. We seek salvation of the flesh, Hindus seek salvation from the flesh: the former is vectored towards eternity; the latter only towards self.

At the age of 38, Ghandi took a vow of brahmacharya. That meant living a spiritual life, which for Hindus is bizarrely incompatible with even marital hanky-panky.

To test his fortitude, Ghandi liked to sleep with two naked girls, whom he claimed he didn’t touch, other than cuddling them in his arms. They did give him naked massages, which he claimed were chaste.

Even taking his word for it, somewhat reluctantly, one still has to be dismayed by some things he did admit to, such as exchanging enemas with his young bed mates. With friends like Gandhi, a girl did need enemas.

That, along with drinking one’s own urine, is among the more revolting practices of Yoga hygiene. Being a committed Occidental, I’ll have malt whisky any day – and I can’t for the life of me see the spiritually purifying aspect of an enema.

While supposedly abstaining from embracing naked girls, Gandhi prided himself on embracing poverty. To advertise that he began to wear primitive folk garb, which bit of histrionics had been prompted by Gandhi’s idol Tolstoy. However, his take on poverty was rather peculiar.

For example, on his ocean voyages Ghandi insisted on carrying huge vats of water from the Ganges, which alone was fit for washing his saintly body. That must have cost a pretty rupee, but what’s a few thousand here or there for a chap professionally committed to poverty?

The problem any reasonable Westerner ought to have with Gandhi’s ‘religion’ isn’t that it’s ungodly, but that it’s inhuman, not to mention hypocritical.

For example, he let his wife die of pneumonia rather than allowing a life-saving shot of penicillin to be administered. However, when Gandhi himself came down with malaria soon thereafter, he changed his views on alien medicines and graciously allowed doctors to save his life with quinine.

Our multi-culti barbarians, the dominant cultural type in today’s West, do choose odd personages for their idols. Gandhi got the ball rolling, which was then picked up by Nelson Mandela, who led a mass-murdering party that ran torture camps.

One could suggest more appropriate role models, but it’s no use. Things have gone too far.

There exist different approaches to pondering life’s quotidian problems.

A thinker identifies a problem without necessarily proposing solutions. A philosopher identifies a problem in such a way that solutions propose themselves. An empiricist proposes solutions without first identifying the problem. And an English empiricist acts on solutions to a problem not yet identified.

There is running across the English character a deep distrust of first principles and last things as starting points of ratiocination. “What are we going to do about it?” is a question a typical English mind often asks before properly understanding what ‘it’ is.

Aristotelian first principles are axiomatic assumptions acting as the foundation on which any subsequent intellectual structure can be built. Yet, with notable exceptions, the English mind has no time for the normal building sequence. It forgoes the intellectual foundation, disdains the walls, then makes the roof and hopes it will stay up.

The English lexicon is variously rich in ‘was’, ‘is’ and ‘will be’, but proudly poor in ‘ought to be’. It is not for nothing that the action word, the verb, is central to the structure of the English language. A German sticks the verb at the end of a long sentence, a Russian can construct a long sentence without any verb at all, but an English sentence revolves around action like a wheel on its axis.

The English are proud of their innate practicality. We take life as it is, they say, not as we think it ought to be. Our civilisation has been plunged into enough trouble by idealists pursuing abstractions.

It has not. Our civilisation has been plunged into trouble not by the pursuit of ideals as such, but by the pursuit of false ideals. True ideals do not destroy; they – and only they – create civilisations. The success of a civilisation depends on the truth of its founding ideals.

Western civilisation has become the greatest one in history only because it was founded on the greatest ideal. By contrast, cannibalistic Carthage, to name one example, did not create a civilisation worthy of the name because its ideals were false or, worse still, evil.

Yet the English mind eschews delving into ideals and contemplating which ones are true and which ones are false. It is too busy figuring out what to do in the next minute, hour, possibly year. There is no point thinking of eternity. Eternity is infinite, but we are after finite results.

I know many extremely intelligent Englishmen whose eyes glass over the moment first principles come up in conversation. First principles are the last things they wish to discuss. Their minds, displaying a contortionist’s agility when discussing the mechanics of life, instantly turn inert when made to ponder the meaning of life. It is as if an iron gate comes clattering down: “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.”

Britain, say such intellectual self-limiters, was made great by warriors, seafarers, colonisers, scientists, engineers, businessmen, financiers and statesmen, all men of action averse to abstract thought. We managed to do without idealistic navel-gazers in the past and we shall do very well without them in the future.

Both parts of the last sentence are wrong. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries England indeed made giant strides in organising the practical side of life. But it rode to success on the coattails of a great civilisation built on a true ideal.

The intellectual vacuum formed by forward-looking doers locked in the present and future was then filled by idealistic thinkers who looked to the past and, defying geometrical possibility, arrived at some understanding of eternity. They answered the Why and What For questions, leaving the practical men to tackle How.

It is men of thought who made men of action not only successful but indeed possible. It is not only words but also actions that without thought never to heaven go.

Marginalise or, worse still, remove men of thought with their ideals from the dynamics of life, and English empiricism begins to look crass, vulgar and self-destructive even on its own terms.

When idealists exit pursued by the bare empiricism of practical men, they take true ideals with them, leaving a void. That is inevitably filled with false makeshift ideals expected to tide us over for the time being. The time being is all that matters because tomorrow we shall die.

Yet a falsehood cannot produce a lasting truth, nor even an ad hoc truthlet. It can only produce another falsehood and then explode into a myriad of them. The gods of a civilisation on its way out are replaced by the demons of a civilisation on its way in. But demons cannot create; they can only destroy.

Men of action gradually become like a rudderless ship cast adrift without navigational tools on a starless night. They do not know where they are and where they are going, but they begin to suspect they are in deep trouble.

Civilisations, wrote Davila, perish when they begin to ignore their founding ideals. Civilisations perish even faster when they begin to despise their founding ideas, along with those who try to preserve them.

English practicality becomes very impractical indeed when operating in a spiritual and intellectual void. English empiricism may yet destroy the English civilisation, if it has not done so already.

 

One thing you could say for Muslims is that they don’t scare easily. We nowadays aren’t made of such stern stuff, and it’s really the West that’s supposed to be scared by Putin’s scare tactics.

There’s a Russian slang word bespredel. Roughly translated as a ‘no limiter’, it denotes a chap who can respond to gentle jostling by sticking a pencil into your eye, hit you with a brick for an askance glance, push you under a bus for not stepping out of his way.

Anyone, especially a smallish lad, growing up in an inner-city Russian street, learns how to steer clear of ‘no limiters’ – and also how to look like one himself. Even a bigger brute wouldn’t want to mess with someone whose brutality knows no bounds.

By his own admission, Putin grew up as “a common Petersburg thug”, and that’s how he survived in a world dominated by bigger and stronger thugs. This explains the bespredel brutality of his bombing campaign in Syria.

A week ago a UN aid convoy was attacked from the air and destroyed, killing 20 people. Stephen O’Brien, the UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, said that “if this callous attack is found to be a deliberate targeting of humanitarians, it would amount to a war crime.”

Putin’s Goebbelses immediately disclaimed any responsibility, and they were supported by his Western poodles, who immediately declared that there was no proof that the war crime was committed either by the Russians or their Syrian allies.

Yes, there is, gentlemen: two fragments of Russian-made bombs were found and identified on the site. These are fin parts of the fragmentation blockbuster OFAB-250-270, the unguided bomb produced in the Soviet Union and now in Russia.

Wide use of these bombs by both Russians and their Syrian allies is amply documented. NATO air force doesn’t drop such weapons from either its piloted aircraft or Predator drones.

Thus the only question still unanswered is whether the responsibility lies with Putin or Assad, which in this context is a distinction without a difference. “It’s definitely not the coalition,” said John Thomas, US Air Force spokesman, and there isn’t a shadow of doubt that he’s right.

Such crimes aren’t meant to achieve military objectives. They’re designed to scare the world into submission or at least acquiescence. Putin is acting out Lenin’s helpful pronouncement that “the purpose of terror is to terrorise”.

To that end the Russians are using munitions, most of them banned by international conventions, designed to make the world shudder first and then tremble. Napalm, phosphorus and cluster bombs serve that purpose nicely, as do thermobaric weapons such as the TOS-1A, which have also seen the light of day in Syria.

Putin must reserve a warm spot for the TOS, a giant flame thrower. It was mainly this weapon that wiped out Chechnya’s capital Grozny in 1999, during the war that announced Putin’s arrival on the world stage, and indeed was started specifically for that purpose.

As a pretext, the KGB blew up several blocks of flats in Russia and blamed the explosions on the Chechens. Those interested in the details should read the book Blowing Up Russia: the Return of the KGB. Its co-author Alexander Litvinenko drew literary criticism in the form of Polonium-210, which indirectly proved his point.

It was then that the more perceptive Russians knew that the reign of bespredel was again upon them. If the KGB junta could blow up innocent people in their flats, imagine what it could to those who have the temerity to resist them. There’s no limit.

Such is the origin of Putin’s popular support that so impresses his Western fans. Such also is the origin of his subsequent emboldened conduct, something he learned as a “common Petersburg thug”: see what you can get away with first and then up the ante gradually.

It has taken Western observers longer to cotton on, and some still haven’t done so. But even those who realise that Putin’s aggression is being ratcheted up aren’t sure what can be done about it.

Yet the same street that teaches the advantages of coming across as bespredel also teaches how to counter the thug. Reason and negotiations won’t work – only a punch on the nose will, followed by as many other punches as it takes to get the message across.

The West has a bigger stature than the street thug that’s Putin’s Russia – it must also show that it has a bigger heart. We must build up not only our muscle but also our morale. Only this can prevent cataclysmic conflict, showing the ‘no limiter’ that he has reached his limit. Like Job, we must say “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further”.

But first we must understand what we’re dealing with: bombs kill Syrians to scare us. If we do show fear instead of resolve, the bespredel thug may well plunge the world into catastrophe.

Martin and his namesake Hans, the affable Nazi sergeant in Hogan’s Heroes, are different and similar at the same time.

They’re both bungling Germans, but Martin isn’t affable. Both are corrupt, Hans personally, Martin institutionally. Hans oversaw a POW camp, Martin oversees the European ‘parliament’, a setup founded on similar principles.

Hans’s stock phrase was “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing!” Martin, however, believes he knows everything. It’s in that spirit that he elevated political science to stratospheric heights.

The Brexit referendum, he declared, was divisive. He left it for us to extrapolate that exactly the same thing can be said about all elections. Extrapolation complete, one begins to comprehend the bottomless depth of Papa’s insight.

Whether the electorate chooses between two candidates or two propositions, the outcome will surely divide those who voted one way from those who voted the other. Only elections like those in Stalin’s or Putin’s Russia have no such detrimental effect.

Stalin’s elections featured only one candidate, ‘the bloc of communists and non-party members’, which guaranteed landslides. Putin bars meaningful opposition but employs hordes of volunteers to stuff ballot boxes just in case. A landslide again ensues, marginally more modest than Stalin’s but just as assured – with no divisiveness anywhere in sight.

No doubt Papa’s ideal of democracy gravitates towards one of those models, what with their unifying effect. Who’d argue that togetherness is better than alienation?

Having made that seminal contribution to political science, Papa doffed his philosopher’s hat and donned Sherlock Holmes’s deerstalker. In that new capacity he solved the murder of Jo Cox, the MP killed a week before the referendum.

The simpletons among us thought she was murdered by a madman, Thomas Mair, who gave his name to the magistrates as ‘death to traitors, freedom for Britain’. But Papa would have none of that.

‘Death to traitors’ might have pulled the trigger, but he was acting as a humanoid robot. The real culprit was the “damaging and dangerous” rhetoric of the Brexit debate. It hardly needs saying that this outrage was committed by one side only, those wanting to leave. Jo Cox’s blood is on their hands, intimated Papa.

One has to congratulate Papa on his moderation. While confidently identifying the provenance of the homicidal animus, he kindly refrained from naming specific names.

Putin’s chief mouthpiece Dmitry Kisilev, affectionately described by some Russians as ‘Putin’s Goebbels’, wasn’t so reticent. He directly accused Dave Cameron of murder – and he converged with Papa by also accusing our then PM of divisiveness.

According to Kisilev’s investigation, Dave tried to prevent Brexit by “a sacral sacrifice: the murder of MP Jo Cox… And what now? He divided the country, even spilled blood, but lost ignominiously.”

The dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist didn’t clarify whether Dave murdered Jo personally or by proxy, Putin-style, but in either case it’s a shame that the British media failed to inform the public at the time that Russia was openly accusing the British PM of violent felony.

Emulating his Nazi namesake, Papa then issued some empty threats. Britain’s export of goods and hedge funds to Europe, he growled, would be vetoed should Theresa May be so bloody-minded as to limit the influx of foreign workers.

“There will be no à la carte menu,” thundered Papa. Go the whole hog or go hungry. No country can control its borders and still expect to trade with the EU.

One has to assume that, say, the US and China satisfy the free-movement requirement. After all, they export more to the EU than we do. And they don’t even have the good fortune of belonging to the single market. Surely Papa isn’t suggesting Britain should be singled out for punitive detail?

Papa’s animadversions were neatly harmonised with the background noise coming from different quarters. Some came from various European countries, especially those whose GDP would be severely dented if their nationals weren’t able to send home the money they make in Britain.

If Britain insists on being bloody-minded, they’ll block Brexit, they threatened. Even Papa didn’t go so far: he merely said the EU would block British exports.

One wonders how the recently communist chaps are planning to stop us leaving. Fences of electrified razor wire? Guard dogs? Watch towers complete with machine guns? The camp gates could be painted brown or red, but that’s the general idea.

Other noises sounded not so much threatening as threatened. They came from European manufacturers, many of whom live or die by exporting to Britain. Would the camp guards led by Papa be prepared to cut off their manufacturers’ noses to spite Britain’s face?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but we can’t be prevented from leaving. All we need to do is activate Article 50, then walk out in an orderly manner not at all reminiscent of a daring escape.

We could then negotiate with the EU all sorts of deals, covering trade, cooperative law enforcement, travel requirements and whatnot. All in good faith and with no divisiveness whatsoever.

Then we could get on with our life, gleefully watching from outside as Papa’s bailiwick falls to pieces. Nothing personal, Papa. Just business – in fact, very just.

One of my best friends has sent me a Guardian article by a ‘member of the Ukrainian Opposition Bloc’ who laments that “my country has not had the European breakthrough that was promised.”

He then lists some human rights violations, in which one journalist got injured. And the author is appalled by the state of the Ukrainian economy, which is indeed less buoyant than Norway’s.

The conclusion is predictable: “It’s high time the friends of Ukraine in the west disavow their support for those in the Ukrainian government who promote bigotry, intolerance and warmongering.”

If your Ukrainian’s a bit rusty, this means those who oppose Putin’s aggression and his clearly stated objective to return the Ukraine into Russia’s servitude.

The language could have come from Putin’s press: “Ukraine’s government relies heavily on continuing western support to stabilise the withering economy and assist the country in its confrontation with Russia.”

‘Confrontation with Russia’ means refusal to submit to naked aggression, you understand. As to needing Western support, the Ukraine isn’t alone. Since the introduction of derisory Western sanctions, Russia’s GDP has shrunk by 40 per cent (US GDP lost only about two per cent during the Great Depression).

My friend sounded worried, and not just about the Ukraine. We both know quite a few British Putinistas, and he probably thought the article would add grist to their mill. “What should we make of this?”, he asked. This is what I wrote back:

“Nothing, would be my reply.

“I keep repeating that no ex-communist country is ever wholly ‘ex’, and won’t be for generations to come, if ever. The corrupting effects of history’s most enduring evil penetrate the nation’s DNA, and it would take decades to purge the bloodstream.

“The strength of such effects and the time required to get rid of them are directly proportionate to the lifespan of the communist regime. Thus Poland has a better shot at it than Russia, and, say, Estonia a better one than the Ukraine.

“The Ukraine suffered horribly from communist oppression. Grandparents, millions of them, of today’s Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death in the early thirties. Previous and subsequent purges drowned the country in blood. Ukrainian culture and language were systematically oppressed. It’s not for fun that Ukrainian patriots fought the Soviets throughout the war and well into the fifties, when guerrilla warfare was incinerating the forests.

“That the Ukraine can’t be readily confused with Norway is God’s own truth. Its government is corrupt, though less so than Russia’s, and it’s run by people some (as opposed to all) of whom are typologically similar to their Russian counterparts.

“That point is worth making in many contexts, but not in the context of Putin’s aggression. Good, bad or indifferent, the Ukraine is an independent country that can run itself as it sees fit – provided it doesn’t endanger its neighbours or the world at large. The Ukraine answers this criterion. Putin’s Russia doesn’t.

“Ukrainian economy is indeed in dire straits (as is Russia’s), but one must remember that the country is at war. Wartime economies seldom thrive: witness the state of our own during the 1940s (and for several decades thereafter).

“Some of its less democratic practices are also caused by the war – as was the case in the US and Britain during the forties, when people of Japanese and German origin, respectively, were interned en masse.

“The same argument can’t vindicate Russia. For its massive army, the Ukrainian excursion is strictly a local conflict and a protracted training exercise. However, the Ukraine is fighting for its survival, with every sinew strained to breaking point. They had 70 years of satellite status in the Soviet empire, and they’re prepared to fight to the death not to return to it.

“Having said that, the Ukraine is much freer than Russia. Opposition papers are published, opposition TV programmes are shown – in stark contrast to Russia, where the controlled press has a higher emetic quotient than even in Brezhnev’s time.

“Dozens of Russian journalists, those who share our view of the world, are emigrating to the Ukraine fearing for their lives, with no one moving in the opposite direction. That fear isn’t unfounded: 250 journalists have been killed on Putin’s watch, many more roughed up, crippled or at least threatened.

“The author of this article is an MP from ‘the opposition bloc’, meaning a Putin fan or, putting it less kindly but more accurately, agent of influence. This doesn’t mean the facts he cites are incorrect – only that their selection is tendentious. The very existence of such a bloc is a ringing endorsement of the Ukraine, as compared to Russia, where no real opposition exists.

“We should support the Ukraine not because it’s paradise on earth but because Putin is turning Russia into hell on earth – and threatening to do the same to what he claims to be Russia’s sphere of influence, meaning the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European colonies.

“Hence we have a vested geopolitical, not to mention moral, interest in supporting the Ukraine as best we can, while lamenting some of its questionable practices.

“I hope this answers your question, as I understand it.”

Before my French friends take umbrage, I hasten to disclaim that I’m using the newly offensive word in its original meaning, merely to denote someone from a different civilisation.

The Romans, who weren’t known for their heartfelt commitment to multiculturalism, used this Greek word to describe someone who didn’t have the good fortune of growing up in Hellenic culture.

There was an element of supremacism there as well, but not a huge one. If queried, those Romans who were vaguely familiar with, say, Persian culture would probably have acknowledged its good points, if only grudgingly. ‘Barbarian’ was mainly a differentiating, rather than pejorative, term.

It’s hard for me to put myself in the sandals of a Roman talking to a Persian, assuming that such discourse ever took place. But I suspect he must have felt that the chap with whom he was sharing an amphora of Falerno was interesting, in a quaint sort of way, but different.

That, I must admit, is how I sometimes feel when sharing a bottle of Burgundy with my French friends, all cultured, intelligent and superbly educated. Far be it from me to suggest that the French civilisation is weak or inferior to ours. At a kind moment, I’m even willing to admit it’s superior. It’s just different.

This I sense keenly even when we talk about things like art, literature or music, where the difference in our cultural baggage is slight, although not unnoticeable. However, when politics comes up, I feel like an SPQR Roman must have felt when talking to a Persian.

My understanding of political theory and practice was wholly shaped in the Anglophone civilisation, which in turn was formed by England. Rather than presenting a set of ready-made solutions to all quotidian problems, this background is like an intellectual edifice propped up by the three pillars on which, according to Edmund Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from common experience.

The French have an edifice of their own, but theirs was designed by architects who had all gone to a different school. The resulting structure is almost as different from ours as a ziggurat is from the Parthenon.

Since we proceed from diverging assumptions, we naturally arrive at different destinations. They have no intuitive dislike of big central government; I do. They have no problems with laws being created by a few clever men and then passed down to hoi polloi; I have. They’re comfortable with the idea of the state being an active player in the economic game; I’m not. They only profess to detest the French Revolution; I really do detest it. They see only a few mechanical faults with the EU; I reject it as evil. And so forth, ad infinitum.

This, although both my friends and I broadly reside on the political right, if such terms have any meaning, which they probably don’t. Yet their right and mine differ as much as south of the Seine differs from south of the Thames.

We’re talking here about the political cultures of England and France, two countries 20 miles apart, whose histories have been not so much parallel as intertwined.

Parts of France used to belong to England, all of England used to belong to France. The two countries have the same religion and, for much of their histories, espoused the same confession. The two languages are closely related, with a vast corpus of shared vocabulary. French political emigrants tended to choose England as their refuge and vice versa. Though the countries used to fight each other a lot, they’ve been allies for 200 years.

And yet – the French come across as barbarians to us (in the Greek sense of the word), and they probably see les Anglo-Saxons as barbarians too (in every sense of the word). I’d like to re-emphasise that this isn’t the view of a Little Englander but that of someone who loves France, spends half his time there (just under, Mr Taxman, relax) and has as many French friends as English.

Now if the political cultures of two commonwealths as close to each other as England and France are well-nigh incompatible, what about creating a single political entity out of dozens of countries further apart by orders of magnitude?

Romania and Sweden. Poland and Holland. Italy and Germany. Bulgaria and Ireland. Portugal and Estonia. France and Slovenia… well, you get the picture. Whose fevered imagination could have conceived such a utopian abomination?

Chimera, a monster made up of parts of a lion, goat and snake, looks positively homogeneous by comparison. Figuratively, that’s what the European Union is, a chimera. One fears that before long it’ll start resembling that creature literally as well.

Homer described the monster as “snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire”. The EU is moribund, but it has no provisions for peaceful dissolution. When it explodes, as it surely will, there will be plenty of ‘terrible flame of bright fire’. One just hopes that by then we’ll be far enough away not to get singed.