Category: Blog

Boris Johnson, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, has committed a sin that never goes unpunished in today’s politics. He displayed some knowledge of history and common sense.

Not much, mind you – he merely said something any average schoolboy knew when I was young: that the EEC/EU isn’t the first attempt to force Europe into a single state.

Following the example set by the Roman Empire, quite a few individuals, most of them unsavoury, have tried to recreate what they erroneously saw as the ideal towards which to strive.

The Holy Roman Empire, which Boris didn’t mention, was one such attempt and, contrary to Voltaire’s typically lightweight quip, it was indeed holy, Roman and an empire. The Carolingian dispensation represents the only benign attempt I’m aware of to glue Europe together. It was benign because the adhesive it used was Christianity, not nationalism, internationalism or any other ideology of conquest.

Another attempt Boris left out was that by the Soviets, which is a serious omission. The national escutcheon of the Soviet Union showed its institutional symbols superimposed on the whole globe, with no national boundaries anywhere in sight. That was more than just artistic licence.

The goal of global conquest was formulated by Lenin, and he tried to put it into practice by attacking Poland in 1920. Even now historians sometimes describe that war as a local conflict, ignoring the famous Order No.1423 issued by the Red Army commander M. Tukhachevsky: ‘Soldiers of the proletarian revolution! Direct your eyes towards the west. It is in the west that the fate of the world revolution is being decided. The way towards a world fire lies through the corpse of White Poland. On our bayonets we are taking happiness and peace to workers of the world. Westwards – march!’ So Poland was a step along the way, not the final destination.

That particular mission failed, but Stalin picked up the banner of world conquest and ran with it. By enslaving, terrorising and starving the whole population, he managed to create an army that outgunned in most categories the rest of the world combined.

In 1941 the Soviet force of 23,000 tanks, for example, not only outnumbered all the belligerents put together in the sheer number of tanks but also was two generations ahead of them in the machines’ characteristics. The same can be said for the Red artillery and air force – to say nothing of the numerical strength of the army.

All that was put together for the explicit purpose of striking at Stalin’s Nazi allies from the rear and conquering all of Europe, to begin with. Only Hitler’s preemptive strike, which beat Stalin to the punch by days and downgraded the Soviet army dramatically, made Stalin eventually satisfy himself with only the eastern part of Europe.

However, Boris did mention Napoleon and Hitler as Angie Merkel’s typological predecessors, which was enough to cause an apoplectic fit on the Left of the political spectrum, where the Remainers reside. The shrill shrieks of protest are breaking through newspaper pages, tearing them, and our eardrums, to shreds. How dare he!

How dare he what exactly? Draw historical parallels? Nothing wrong about that, as far as it goes. No one, and certainly not Boris, has suggested that Angie is like either Napoleon or Hitler in every detail.

But Germany does dominate the EU, and the EU is indeed an attempt to erase all the national frontiers under the aegis of a single state dominated by the Union’s most virile member – in this sense Merkel is an exact replica of Bony, Adolph and those other megalomaniacs Boris didn’t mention.

Hence the parallel is entirely legitimate, provided one doesn’t run to the other extreme of claiming that Angie plans to recreate Auschwitz and start murdering Jews en masse. In choosing the methods of uniting the continent, that objectionable woman follows not Hitler but an earlier, smaller-scale model established by Prussia in the 19^th century.

Seeking to unite all German principalities under their aegis, the Prussians created a mechanism called the Zollverein, officially a customs union but in fact a way of either bribing or blackmailing the weaker provinces into compliance. Military force saw the light of day only once, when Schleswig-Holstein proved recalcitrant.

But the Zollverein taught an historical lesson that the Germans have learned well: the mark, whether it’s called Reichsthaler, simply the mark, Reichsmark, Deutschmark or the euro is an effective weapon in a campaign for European unification. The bank can succeed where the tank can’t.

This is all demonstrable and verifiable fact, but the Remain hysteria isn’t about facts. It’s about ideology fuelled by latent hatred for what Europe traditionally is. Unfortunately our population has been house-trained to respond to hysterical sloganeering with nothing short of lemming alacrity.

So off with Boris’s head, along with the heads of those who have read a history book or two and learned to draw legitimate parallels. As Descartes once said, all knowledge comes from comparing two or more things.

Boris did just that, but his opponents aren’t about Cartesian epistemology. They’re about enforcing an ideology that’s best conducive to their dreams of self-aggrandisement. Prepare yourself for more hysterical gasps in the run-up to 23 June.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The madness of the EU rubs off on both those who love it and those who hate it. The latter group, driven to hysteria by the foul federalist obscenity thrust down their throats, sometimes thinks that anything is better than the EU, and the more unlike the EU it is, the better it is.

By and large, these people correctly draw the line on ISIS. Where they make a potentially fatal error is in believing that Putin’s Russia is good because the EU is bad.

The syllogism doesn’t work – the EU is evil, but Putin’s Russia is even more so. Not seeing that betokens either ignorance (not being in possession of facts) or stupidity (being unable to interpret the facts) or ill will (being Peter Hitchens).

Actually, when it comes to Russia, Hitchens meets the other two criteria as well. For example, in his today’s offering (A Clear Message from Moscow) he claims that “the real fault-line in Europe lies between Germany and Russia.”

This displays both ignorance and stupidity, with ill will as the animating spirit behind the two. Hitchens, as an echo of his recent Trotskyist past, has a soft spot for Russian tyrants. Lacking psychiatric training, I can’t presume to analyse this condition properly.

It may be caused by an erotic craving for muscular chaps who don’t think twice before resorting to violence. Alternatively, it could be a latent reluctance to renounce his Trotskyist past completely, which is indeed a hard thing to do. Such convictions come not from intellectual but from visceral predisposition. The former is subject to change; the latter lingers for ever.

Hitchens has enough education and brains to know that there are many fault-lines in Europe, and the one between Germany and Russia is less prone to fissure than some others. If he says otherwise, it’s because his viscera have overridden his brains and education.

The situation in Europe is never as primitive as Hitchens’s inflamed mind seems to think. And it’s cloud cuckoo land to claim that “all our present misfortunes began when we foolishly took sides in the great Russo-German war of 1914.”

Entering the First World War was indeed foolish, but describing that conflict as a ‘Russo-German war’ is either ignorant or mad, take your pick. Surely Hitchens must have heard about French revanchism ever-accelerating following the 1870-71 disaster. He may have heard of the Kaiser’s striving for dominance in continental Europe. Why, he might even have caught the whiff of Britain’s historical commitment to preventing the emergence of any dominant power on the continent.

Hence referring to the Great War as one strictly between Germany and Russia is a cue for the men in white coats to make an appearance. In fact, all the belligerents were equally complicit in what’s justifiably called Europe’s suicide. That war, more than any other, put paid to Europe as a cultural entity formed by the fusion of Christianity and Hellenism.

That war gave rise to two satanic regimes of modernity: Russian Bolshevism and German Nazism. The EU is indeed to some extent “the continuation of Germany by other means”, as Hitchens describes it. This means that the traditional German desire to spread its Bildung is discernible in the toings and froings of the EU.

But Hitchens’s Trotskyist instincts don’t let him see that, to a much greater extent, Putin’s Russia is a continuation of the Soviet Union by other means. The principal fault-line in Europe isn’t one between the EU and Russia, but between what’s left of our civilisation and the deadly threats to it, coming from both the EU and Russia.

Hitchens is worried about the EU’s “swelling and spreading eastwards, abolishing frontiers and gobbling up territory as it has so many times before”. By contrast, Russian expansion westwards and southwards causes him no problems whatsoever.

Well, at least the EU expands by voluntary association. Putin’s Russia expands by banditry, as she has done three times since the country was taken over by the kleptofascist KGB junta: in Chechnya, Georgia and the Ukraine.

At least the EU doesn’t threaten nuclear annihilation of the world, which Putin and his mouthpieces do with metronomic regularity. At least the EU lets its military muscle weaken to atrophy, whereas Putin’s is bristling with testosteronal strength.

At least the EU doesn’t display Nazi insignia and ‘We Can Do it Again’ posters, which Putin’s Russia does (with Bolshevik insignia partly, though not completely, replacing Nazi symbols).

That’s why it takes that unholy trinity of stupidity, ignorance and ill will to describe the nauseating sabre-rattling in Red Square as “increasingly spectacular celebrations of [Russia’s] 1945 triumph over Hitler”.

Some triumph! Two predators, Hitler and Stalin, combined to devastate Europe and kill 60 million people, half of them Soviets. Since circumstances forced Britain and America to side with one predator, he emerged victorious – with dire consequences for millions of people.

Hitler’s concentration camps were put to the same use by Putin’s predecessors – is that the triumph Hitchens hails? Talk to the families of Germans killed trying to escape across the Berlin Wall, Hungarians massacred in their thousands, Czechs squashed to death by Soviet tanks – see what they think of that ‘triumph’.

Hitchens obviously sees the sickening flexing of military muscle on 9 May as a sign that Russia has had enough of Western expansionism. It is, in fact, a sign of something else – that the Bolshevik spirit has come back in the body of the murderous KGB colonel.

Mr/Miss/Other Jenner is making my head spin, and I haven’t had a drop to drink since last night. Having first turned Bruce into Caitlyn, he/she now wants to turn Caitlyn back into Bruce, thereby restoring the status quo ante.

Since modern democracy cum consumer-oriented free market is all about freedom of choice, one has to commend Bruce/Caitlyn for upholding this uniquely important tenet of Western modernity. He/she is also striking a telling blow for progress, especially in the areas of medical science and surgical techniques.

Surgeons specialising in such procedures and their patients do what they do for the same reason a dog licks a certain part of its anatomy: they do it because they can. Anything modern science can do must be done, and if you don’t believe this you’re a hopeless reactionary unfit to live in our brave new world. Why, before long you’ll start objecting to human cloning.

Being one of those sticks-in-the-mud myself, the question I’m always likely to ask first isn’t ‘How?’ but ‘Why?’. Hence what fascinates me about Bruce/Caitlyn’s current volte-face is the reason for it.

You see, having become Caitlyn, he/she lost some bits and pieces but retained a most Bruce-like roving eye for women. One would think that a person progressive enough to have a vagina inserted where his penis used to be, wouldn’t see that as a problem. Our society being as progressive as he is, it won’t just turn a blind eye on a bit of lesbian hanky-panky but will positively encourage it.

Homosexuality, after all, has long since left the confinement of sex to enter the broad arena of liberal politics. Having started out as a mortal sin, it first became a tolerable eccentricity and then a sort of cross between sexual democracy and homosocialism.

Such is the vector of our secular world, but Caitlyn, née Bruce, has a problem with it. He/she wants no part of our secular world because he/she is a pious Christian. Hence, for old times’ sake, Caitlyn/Bruce won’t consummate his/her urges in the way first popularised on the charming Greek island of Lesbos. Such an act would go against Bruce/Caitlyn’s religious beliefs, specifically those prescribed by Leviticus and Romans.

Far be it from me to criticise any demonstration of Christian faith, wherein the commitment to living a Christian life plays a key role. One might suggest that Bruce/Caitlyn draws the line in some funny (and unmentionable) places, but he/she would win the theological argument hands down – and please, no more double entendres.

When all is said and done, while both Testaments take issue with homosexuality, there exists not a single scriptural injunction against round-trip transsex operations. Neither the scribes who put the scripture down on parchment nor indeed God who inspired it possessed enough foresight to envision such a possibility. They simply weren’t progressive enough by the standards of our scientifically advanced society.

In fact, our society is so advanced that I’m sure a medical solution to Caitlyn/Bruce’s problem can be found. Why not reattach Bruce’s bits without removing Caitlyn’s ones?

In that way Caitlyn/Bruce could add a whole new meaning to the notions of bisexuality, swinging both ways and autoeroticism. The latter would be a doddle for a former world-class athlete who must have retained some of his/her erstwhile flexibility. And, by way of culmination, he/she could then marry each other.

He/she would thus be able to practise his/her peculiar take on some aspects of Judaeo-Christian sexual morality, while ignoring numerous Biblical proscriptions against fornication. It does stand to reason that hermaphroditic sexuality should conform to hermaphroditic theology uniting the old and the new into one ungodly mess.

Old Bruce/Caitlyn could also open up a whole new world of entrepreneurial opportunities by pitching his Double Your Pleasure tent at county fairs, next to those housing a bearded woman and a man with breasts. I’d pay good money to go in, wouldn’t you?

One matter that still remains unresolved is lavatorial rectitude, as mandated by America’s laudably progressive president Barak Hussein. O’Bummer, as he likes to be called by his friends of whom I’m one, says transsexual pupils should be allowed to use those lavatories that befit their current, as opposed to original, sex.

Since within a year or two the same philosophy will be applied in all public buildings, Bruce/Caitlyn will be able to reaffirm our sacrosanct freedom of choice by opting for either facility, depending on how he/she feels today. That’s what consumer society is all about, although those of us whose choice in this matter is limited may feel slight discomfort at this particular manifestation of consumerism.

That Mr/Miss/Other Jenner is a deeply disturbed individual in need of aggressive psychiatric treatment goes without saying. What’s perhaps worth saying is that exactly the same thing can be said about a society that actively promotes such freakish sideshows.

Have we all gone mad? Don’t answer this one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The US has activated Aegis Ashore, a NATO missile shield in Romania, and the Russians are up in arms. I don’t mean this as a figure of speech: Putin and his spokesmen are incandescent, frothing at the mouth and dropping sinister hints about deploying nuclear weapons in Kaliningad, née Königsberg, the part of East Prussia the Soviets claimed as their own.

It’s not immediately obvious what their problem is. Aegis Ashore is a sophisticated defence system of radars, communication devices and surface-to-air missiles designed to intercept and destroy incoming nuclear missiles before re-entry.

Officially its purpose is to protect Europe from missiles fired by rogue states, such as Iran. Unless Putin sees Russia as one such, what’s his problem?

Let’s put it in the context of my quiet residential neighbourhood. Suppose my next-door neighbour, worried about the spate of burglaries in the area, had razor wire put on top of his fence. I might wince at the unsightliness of it, but otherwise I’d have no valid objections – after all, I’m not planning to break into his house, so his prudence, even if I regard it as paranoid, is really none of my concern.

Now if I were in fact contemplating a career switch into burglary, then I’d feel aggrieved. What am I supposed to do, get cut to pieces climbing his fence? Some people simply have no regard for good neighbourly relations.

Even assuming that Aegis is designed to protect Europe against not only Iranian but also Russian missiles (some experts doubt it’s capable of the latter), Russia should only feel threatened if she intends to launch such missiles. If Putin and his kleptofascist KGB junta have no such intentions, rather than protesting they should be rubbing their hands with glee over NATO wasting all that money (about £1 billion).

Of course Aegis may have a less benign purpose, that of protecting NATO against Russia’s retaliation following a NATO first strike with nuclear weapons. Does Putin seriously think this is on the cards? If so, he’s a madman and his foreign-policy advisers are mountebanks.

Yet here he is, talking about “how to neutralise emerging threats to the Russian Federation”, with his spokesman Peskov reiterating the same theme (now there’s a surprise): “Without doubt the deployment of [Aegis] really is a threat to the security of the Russian Federation”.

It was a Russian Foreign Ministry official who inadvertently put his finger right on it: “It is part of the military and political containment of Russia.” It probably is just that.

But a country or a military alliance would only be out to contain a potential aggressor, not a nice country peacefully going about her business. The doctrine of ‘containment’ was first formulated by the US strategist George Kennan in 1947, when the Soviet Iron Curtain had come clanking down, and every word in the Soviet press was a sabre rattling with deafening noise.

“The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,” Kennan wrote, “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” This, Kennan predicted, would “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”

Well, Soviet power might have broken up, but it has come back as post-Soviet power wielded by history’s most murderous organisation fronted by Col. Putin. Hence the purely defensive doctrine of containment is back on the agenda.

My neighbour isn’t going to leave his doors and windows open and put up a ‘Burglars Are Welcome’ sign. If he’s worried about a break-in, he’s going to put up razor wire instead or perhaps, in a more sophisticated mood, have an up-to-date alarm system installed.

That’s exactly what Aegis Ashore is, an alarm system linked to law enforcement designed to inform about burglaries and stop them in their tracks. Only criminals would take offence at it, and I’m happy Putin has publicly identified himself as one. On, regrettably, a vastly greater scale.

 

 

George Osborne said house prices would collapse should the calamity of Brexit befall. But Dave explained that house prices won’t collapse because houses will. They’ll be swept away by a Third World War, directly Britain reclaims her sovereignty.

These two statements make a valuable addition to the long list of guaranteed disasters: Britain will become a pariah state; no tourists will ever come to see the Tower of London again; the NHS will be no more (is that a threat or a promise?); the Scots will leave (ditto); we’ll never again see Juliette Binoche in our theatres, nor hear Beethoven performed in our concert halls; the City of London will move lock, stock and barrel to Frankfurt; there will be no more Premier League; unable to buy either food or energy abroad, we’ll be left hungry and freezing in the dark; the pound will collapse; we won’t be able to travel to Amsterdam whorehouses; Britain will be inundated with undesirable aliens; and, oh yes, according to our retired spooks we won’t be able to share intelligence information with other European countries, which will lead to a pandemic of terrorism and espionage.

On this last one, the logical inference is that no intelligence data had ever been exchanged before John Major signed our independence away at Maastricht – not through INTERPOL, not through NATO, not even through the Old Boys Network. This sounds a tad counterintuitive but, hey, who are we to argue with retired professionals, or to doubt their integrity?

And who are we to argue with our PM, especially when he illustrates his predictions so convincingly? For example, he cited the conflict in the Balkans as an example of how the EU prevents or shortens wars. Personally, I’d steer clear of that one if I were Dave, but he’s privy to classified information that must be dramatically at odds with what’s in the public domain.

Poor yokels like us only know what they read in the papers, and the picture that emerges from those reports is that of cosmic ineptitude on the part of the EU in handling the bloodshed in Yugoslavia. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that the presence of EU observers and UN troops made the situation far worse than it would have been otherwise.

But Dave wasn’t talking just about the danger of local conflicts. It goes without saying that, if we vote Remain on 23 June, those will sink into oblivion. What the Remain vote will also prevent is nothing short of a global nuclear catastrophe.

This isn’t so much a new theme as a variation on an old one. I’ve heard it from my French friends a thousand times if I’ve heard it once that only the good offices of the EEC/EU have prevented the extinction of all biological life in Europe over the last 70 years.

It was the menacing military might of Luxembourg and Belgium that kept those 50,000 Soviet tanks at bay during the ‘70s. But for the 2,000 tanks that Europe could field at that time, the Soviet steamroller would have stamped Europe into the ground.

And there I was, thinking that NATO, specifically the US nuclear umbrella, had something to do with that, however tangentially. Turns out I was wrong: what saved us was the corrupt bureaucrats in Europe linking arms and issuing a stern NIMBY warning to the corrupt bureaucrats in Russia (for the benefit of the outlanders among you, NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard).

Now we must relieve ourselves of – and on – 2,000 years of British political tradition, for otherwise we’ll never be able to combat the growing threat of what Dave called a “newly belligerent Russia”.

Russia has been belligerent towards Western Europe since at least Elizabethan times, which is to say since she became Russia, as opposed to the Duchy of Muscovy. Putin’s great-great-grandparents weren’t even born when Russia was called ‘the gendarme of Europe’ and ‘the prison of nations’. In fact, British foreign policy was for at least two centuries focused on containing Russia’s aggressive expansion, mainly southwards.

So ‘newly’ doesn’t quite work for me, but ‘belligerent’ does. Putin’s Russia does present a real danger, which needs to be countered. By the same token, a ‘newly belligerent’ Germany presented a real danger throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Dealing with that threat cost us millions of lives, but the people felt that defending our sovereignty was worth such sacrifices.

One doesn’t recall offhand any suggestions put forth at the time that we must relinquish our sovereignty the better to protect it. It was felt that an ad hoc wartime alliance would work better, not to say less self-refutingly. Hence in both World Wars Britain managed to find herself on the winning side without succumbing to the urge to become a French province or an American state.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: how pathetically weak must the Remain case be for its proponents to resort to such moronic, ignorant and cynically mendacious arguments. But let me tell you, if these creatures carry the day, that’ll prove that we as a nation don’t deserve to stay independent – or indeed alive.

 

 

The Donald gets up the noses of exactly the kind of people whose squirming gives me such joy. Specifically the neocons sputter spittle and rant incoherently at the very mention of Trump’s name. He must be doing something right.

The other day Niall Ferguson, the Briton who has discovered that buttering up US neocons butters his own bread on the right side, produced the article Trump Won’t Wreck America – the Rest of the World is Another Matter.

Reading it brought back fond memories of 1980, when I lived in Texas. I was having a beer at the tennis club with my doubles partner Ross, whose politics were rather to the left of mine. We chatted about the upcoming presidential election, which Ronald Reagan looked like winning. That, opined Ross, would be a global disaster. We’d have World War III a month after his inauguration.

Now the same scaremongering is in full swing about Trump, with Prof. Ferguson doing his bit in England, by long distance. One can see droplets of spittle all over his piece in The Sunday Times, with no thought worthy of the name to be seen anywhere.

Prof. Ferguson generously accepts that presidential power in the US is limited by other branches of government, such as Congress and the Supreme Court. Hence every planned attempt by the Donald to reduce the good old US of A to cinders would be frustrated by vigilant legislators, especially the neocons among them.

Having thus demonstrated his intimate knowledge of the US Constitution, Prof. Ferguson then undoes all his good work by implying that, though limited domestically, presidential power suffers from no such restrictions in foreign policy. Therefore President Trump would be able to perpetrate singlehandedly such calamities on the outside world that it will be, well, wrecked.

Congress, especially if the Democrats regain the Senate, would be able to block such diabolical Trump initiatives as slapping punitive tariffs on China, building a wall along the 2,000 miles of the Mexican border and banning Muslim immigration.

Actually, these particular initiatives don’t strike me as all bad. Punishing China is a good idea – not to protect US industry but to express moral outrage at the communists’ use of de facto slave labour.

A wall to keep illegal immigrants out may be ill-advised, but one doesn’t hear of any competing ideas with a sporting chance of success – all one hears is bien pensant waffle. Yet the problem of illegal Mexican immigration is real, and already was when I lived in Texas. At that time the entire length of the border was patrolled by 200 officers – one for every 10 miles (!). Surely any country has a right to protect its borders… oops, sorry, I’m not writing about the EU referendum.

Trump’s idea of keeping Muslims out strikes me as praiseworthy. I wish someone in government seriously proposed a similar measure here.

Anyway, Prof. Ferguson trusts Congress to paralyse Trump’s presidency domestically, while mysteriously relinquishing its influence on foreign policy, including its constitutional prerogative to declare war. Left unfettered, the Donald will then unleash hell on the world.

Prof. Ferguson’s sole justification for such a macabre prognosis is that Putin seems to like Trump, and Trump says he quite likes Putin: “The prospect of Donald and Vlad consummating their bromance in Moscow next year freezes the blood.” (A word of avuncular advice to Niall: avoid jarring portmanteau coinages. And the whole thing about a bromance is that it remains unconsummated.)

One assumes that by consummation Prof. Ferguson means a treaty akin to the Soviet-Nazi pact dividing the world. By waving his magic wand, Trump will then get around the need for congressional ratification, customary – nay mandatory – with international treaties.

Anyway, I wouldn’t take Trump’s protestations of love for Putin too seriously. A few days ago, for example, the Donald vowed to shoot down Russian jets approaching American planes should Putin fail to heed calls to stop. That could hardly have been regarded as a friendly overture, and Putin didn’t take it as such.

What Putin likes about Trump, opines Prof. Ferguson, is that his “foreign policy would… break the transatlantic alliance”. I’d suggest that this alliance is more under threat from Dave, who once suggested banning the presidential candidate from ever entering the UK. And world peace, presumably to be wrecked by Trump, is in far greater danger from the aggressive policies promoted by Ferguson’s neocon friends.

Now – are you ready for this? Trump expresses “his enthusiasm for Brexit”. Crikey. Is there no limit to the man’s evil? Why, he’s almost as wicked as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Ian Duncan Smith and about half of all Brits – and far less virtuous than the neocons who, true to their Trotskyist DNA, are all confirmed internationalists.

No one knows exactly what a Trump presidency would bring, which broad group includes both Prof. Ferguson and me. Unlike him, however, I refrain from mouthing manifest nonsense inspired by party loyalty, of which I have none and he has plenty.

In the same article Prof. Ferguson gives himself a piece of flirtatious advice: “stick to history”. I second the motion, with a small amendment: “…or ideally not even that”.

Today is Russia’s Victory Day, which more appropriately ought to be called Russia’s Aggression Day. For, contrary to a common misapprehension, Russia wasn’t a victim in the Second World War. She was its instigator.

Ask any Russian youngster (or intellectually challenged adult) when the Soviet Union entered the war, and you’ll get the same reply every time: 22 June, 1941, when the USSR fell victim to the Nazi offensive. This means that the hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers killed before that date didn’t die in the war. So what did they die of? Heart attacks?

Following its criminal Pact with Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union entered the war as Hitler’s ally on 17 September, 1939, by stabbing Poland in the back.

By that time, again contrary to a misapprehension, the German offensive had slowed down, and their army was running out of ordnance, especially bombs. The Russians replenished those stocks, with enough left over for London (did you know it was Soviet-made bombs that rained on England?). And then they struck from the east, Poland collapsed, and the two predators held a joint victory parade in Brest-Litovsk on 22 September.

In the process the Russians violated four international agreements: the 1921 peace treaty signed after the Russo-Polish war, the Eastern Pact denouncing war, the 1932 Russo-Polish Non-Aggression Pact and the 1933 London Convention defining aggression.

That was just the beginning. On 30 November, 1939, the Russians attacked Finland, violating the 1933 Non-Aggression Treaty. As a result, Finland lost 10 per cent of her territory, while the Russians lost 500,000 lives. Some 10,000 of those belonged to the Soviet POWs returning home after the war. In the good tradition going back to Ivan the Terrible, they were all shot pour encourager les autres.

As a result, the Soviet Union was expelled from The League of Nations, but that had no effect. On 15-17 June, 1940, Soviet troops annexed Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. On 28 June they added a huge part of Romania to their tally.

All the new areas were purged, with 25-30 per cent of their populations killed or deported (which often amounted to the same thing). While the murders of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere have been widely publicised in the West, the other victims of Soviet aggression haven’t received similar coverage.

Stalin’s plan was to wait for the Germans to land in England and then launch his own offensive across the common border formed by the joint aggression against Poland. That required such a massive concentration of troops that keeping those plans a secret was impossible. Hence Hitler had to plunge into what every German schoolchild knew would be catastrophic: a two-front war.

This is castigated in historiography as a stupid mistake, but in fact Hitler had no choice: he had to beat Stalin to the punch because, had Stalin’s haymaker landed, it would have been deadly for Germany and all of Europe.

What followed was a national tragedy: Soviet peasants, who made up the bulk of Stalin’s army, wouldn’t fight for Stalin. The memory of millions of them being robbed, murdered, starved to death by Stalin’s stormtroopers wasn’t just fresh but current.

Once the Germans struck, the Soviets began to desert and surrender en masse, often joyously marching into captivity to the sound of regimental bands. By the end of 1941 the Nazis held 4.5 million POWs.

Stalin made the army fight by unprecedented violence against wavering soldiers and their families. “There are no Soviet POWs,” declared Putin’s idol, “there are only Soviet deserters.” Retreat was also equated with desertion, with predictable results. All in all, 157,000 Soviet soldiers were shot during the war following tribunals’ verdicts – and at least twice as many without even such slapdash justice.

Once the Soviets advanced into Europe, their aggression resumed. Contrary to every international protocol, they installed puppet Communist governments in the countries of Eastern Europe, effectively turning them into their colonies. Along the way, Soviet soldiers were committing acts of diabolical brutality towards civilian populations – not only in Germany, but in Eastern Europe too.

Here’s one snippet, from the memoirs of Lieutenant L. Riabichev: “We entered the house. Three large rooms, two dead women and three dead girls, their skirts up, each with an empty wine bottle stuck between her legs. I walk along the wall, another door, corridor, another door leading to two adjoining rooms with three beds altogether. Dead women on each, with open legs and bottles.

“Fine, they were all raped and shot. The pillows were drenched in blood. But whence this sadistic desire to stick bottles in? Our infantry, our tankers, lads from our towns and villages, with families, mothers, sisters…”

Is that the meaning of We Can Do It Again posters proudly displayed by Russian ‘patriots’? Is this why Russia is filled with portraits of Stalin, the monster who combined the war against Germany with one against his own people?

One would think this would be an occasion for tearful sorrow, silent contemplation and kneeling prayer. In a decent country, it would be. But in Putin’s Russia the world is treated to a shrilly militaristic, jingoistic show in Red Square, an obscene pagan rite celebrating one aggression and threatening another.

Nominal Tory Zac Goldsmith lost the London mayoral election to Sadiq Khan, and all hell broke loose. Not only his party but even his sister accused poor Zac of having run a negative campaign, which supposedly cost him the election.

His sister Jemima wondered what had happened to her “nice, eco-friendly” brother. How dare he be so intolerant to the very idea of London having a Muslim mayor? Jemima herself is commendably tolerant to Islam – so much so that she actually converted to it in order to marry a Pakistani cricketer whom she has since divorced.

That degree of tolerance is hard to expect from anyone without a personal stake in the matter, and in any case Zac had said nothing about being opposed to the very idea of a Muslim mayor. He merely pointed out that this particular Muslim had shared the podium with known ISIS supporters, such as Sulaiman Ghani.

Mr Khan also supported groups promoting Islamic terrorism and in 2009 gave a speech with the black flags of jihad flying all over the place. And, by way of adding international flavour, he had links with the American-Muslim extremist Louis Farrakhan.

There’s also the small matter that, when Mr Khan became a privy councillor, he swore an oath of allegiance to the Queen on the Koran, which should have invalidated the ceremony there and then, but of course didn’t.

Surely Londoners have the need to know such things about their future mayor? Zac would have been grossly irresponsible had he not brought such facts to public attention.

Now let your imagination run wild. Picture a Labour candidate revealing that his UKIP opponent once was a member of the BNP. Can you see the outcry? Do you think many people would accuse the Labour chap of running a negative campaign? And BNP members haven’t so far blown up any public transport in London, while the Muslims… Well, you know about them.

And speaking of negative campaigns: London tends to incline towards the Labour end of the political spectrum, and Muslims in particular tend to vote Labour as a bloc. But blocs come in different sizes and in this election the Muslim bloc was as huge as it was monolithic.

Methinks such enthusiastic uniformity had something to do with the party’s anti-Semitic credentials, now firmly established and widely publicised. Mr Khan’s links, however tangential, with jihadists enhanced his credibility even further, and not many people would think of jihad as something positive.

So much for London Burning. Now, if you still don’t think our political scene is surreal enough, for that other song.

Having lost that critical election in London, the Tories came back strongly in Scotland, doubling their number of seats, pushing Labour into third place and becoming the official party of opposition in Holyrood.

So far so good, except that the Tartan Tories are led by Ruth Davidson, who’s now seen as the rising star of the true-blue firmament and a serious contender for 10 Downing Street in the near future.

That’s all good and well, except that Miss Davidson is ever so slightly eccentric. She’s an open lesbian living with a series of girlfriends, which fact she doesn’t mind emphasising by wearing masculine suits and cutting her hair shorter than mine (admittedly hers is denser).

I know we live in enlightened times, we none of us are bigots or, God forbid, homophobes, it was Dave who pushed homomarriage through, and there’s no reason to suggest that a hard-core lesbian can’t be an effective politician. She can be, no doubt about that.

But an effective Conservative politician? Of course the ‘C’ word is now desemanticised and has little to do with either uppercase or especially lowercase conservatism. Led by our ‘heir to Blair’, the Tories occupy the ground formerly owned by New Labour, with Old Labour pursuing a communist agenda sans concentration camps, for the time being.

But still, for old times’ sake, shouldn’t aspiring Tory PMs conceal their homosexuality, if only not to alienate the hopelessly retrograde grassroots more than they are already alienated? Could it be that the Labour landslide in London is at least partly due to the low turnout of real Tories who feel disfranchised and therefore disillusioned?

I’m talking about decorum here, not anything more substantial. I mean, everyone knew that Edward Heath was, in the coy phrase of the time, a confirmed bachelor, but he didn’t wear his sexuality on his sleeve. Hence he became Tory Leader in 1965, when homosexuality was still a crime in the UK, and PM five years later.

Miss Davidson, regardless of her proven vote-winning ability, is the stuff of which broad off-colour jokes are made, and God knows the Tories are already risible enough. Yet they don’t seem to mind.

Oh well, actual reality is being ousted by the virtual kind in double time. And the process seems to have an accelerator built in. I’m sure that, rather than being tolerated, homosexuality will soon become an ironclad selection criterion for politicians. Provided they aren’t Muslims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may think Russia’s religion is Orthodoxy. So it is, technically speaking. In the same sense in which Anglicanism is England’s creed.

Even less so, actually, if judged by church attendance, which in England is roughly twice that in Russia. But before we get smug about it, ours is still less than two per cent of the population, which hardly testifies to fervent piety.

Yet most Englishmen routinely write ‘C of E’ in the ‘religion’ rubric of various questionnaires. And most Russians write ‘Orthodox’ even if they’ve never seen the inside of a church.

That, however, doesn’t mean they have no religion – only that their cult has nothing to do with Christianity. The greatest cause for annual celebration is neither Easter nor Christmas. It’s 9 May, Victory Day.

The Russians celebrate victory over Nazi Germany a day later than the rest of the world because the Reims Protocol establishing Germany’s capitulation to the Allies, which went into effect on 8 May, wasn’t graced by Soviet signatories.

The real capitulation, Stalin declared, had occurred on 9 May in Berlin, when Field-Marshal Keitel had officially surrendered to Marshal Zhukov. Those dastardly Anglo-Americans, who for all intents and purposes hadn’t even fought the war, were scheming to preempt the triumph Russia had won single-handedly.

Then the strangest thing happened: Stalin refused to officiate the victory parade on 24 June. The honour of acting as parade inspector was bestowed on Zhukov, with Marshal Rokossovsky commanding the marching troops.

Since Stalin was Commander-in-Chief, such reticence was odd. Surely it wasn’t only his right but indeed his duty to inspect the 40,000 troops crowding Red Square. Instead he simply watched as soldiers were tossing Nazi flags on the wet cobbles at the foot of the Lenin Mausoleum.

Then another odd thing happened. Though declared a holiday, 9 May remained a regular workday until 1965, 12 years after Stalin’s death. If the Russians felt like celebrating in their own inimitable fashion, they had to do so in the afterhours.

The reason was simple: to Stalin, 9 May was only a half-victory. And half-victory spelled half-defeat – as in that half of Europe that didn’t fall into Stalin’s hands.

His whole life was devoted to a single goal: spreading his nightmarish empire over all of Europe, to begin with. It’s to that end that in the 1920s and especially 1930s he had sacrificed millions of lives to create an armament industry churning out more murderous kit than the rest of the world combined.

It’s to that end that he had helped Hitler to rearm Germany. It’s to that end that he had signed a criminal pact with the Nazis to redirect their juggernaut westwards. It’s to that end that he had attacked Poland from the East when the Nazi offensive from the west began to slow down. It’s to that end that he had amassed 15,000 tanks on his western border (with another 8,000 held in reserve), waiting for the Nazis to get bogged down in England before unleashing his own juggernaut.

By launching their suicidal preemptive strike on 22 June, 1941, the Nazis spoiled all the best-laid plans. They lost the war in the end, but, to Stalin’s mind, Russia didn’t quite win it either. Hence, as far as he was concerned, those 30 million Soviets had died half in vain. The best they rated was half a celebration.

To be sure, both he and his heirs used the half-victory as a self-legitimising factor. That’s why post-war Soviet children were so inundated with wartime propaganda that many thought the war was still going on. They were weaned on a steady diet of cinematic ‘Halt!’ and ‘Hende Hoch!’ lore, with angelic Soviet soldiers slaughtering satanic Germans or, failing that, dying with the heroic words ‘For Motherland! For Stalin!’ on their lips.

When Stalin’s immediate entourage either died out or, like Khrushchev in 1964, got the elbow, the flipside of the great victory was forgotten, and the propaganda became downright cultish, with 9 May finally gaining its non-labour status a year later. But those Russians who thought the hysteria had reached its peak were sorely mistaken.

After a roughly 10-year hiatus during the 1990s, the KGB junta fronted by Col. Putin began to steer a steady course back to Stalin, except that they had to go the monster one better. With militarisation à la 1970s back on the agenda, the so-called Great Patriotic War became an all-year-round pagan festival, with 9 May its Walpurgisnacht.

People born decades after the war wear guards’ ribbons in their lapels, cabbies fly them out of their cars, every newspaper screams militaristic propaganda, slogans ‘We can do it again!’ are everywhere. And Novosibirsk, a city of 1.5 million souls, is adorned with hoardings proudly displaying Stalin, the cannibal who killed twice as many Russians as Hitler managed.

The war has been fully sacralised because Stalin’s plans are back on the agenda. Thus the Russians have found a religion, one accompanied not by church bells but by bugles and drums.

Putin’s Church of Holy Chauvinism boasts the kind of attendance Christianity can only dream of. In due course all those parishioners wearing guards’ ribbons may go to their deaths in apocalyptic numbers – while high priest Putin enjoys his purloined billions.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I suggested that the evil of two lessers is the only choice available to voters in modern democracies run riot. T.S. Eliot referred to this as “licensing the opinions of the most foolish”, while Churchill suggested that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

I was reminded of those wise epigrams when voting in the London mayoral election yesterday morning. The choice was hardly inspiring: Zac Goldsmith, nominally a Tory MP but in fact a fanatical environmentalist, or Sadiq Khan, nominally a Labour MP but in fact a rabid Muslim.

As I write this, Sadiq Khan is leading the tree-hugger by a margin big enough to suggest he’ll be our next mayor. He’s usually described as a ‘democratic socialist’ (as opposed to a Nazi or a Bolshevik?) and a ‘moderate Labourite’. That he may be, but he’s certainly not a moderate Muslim, if there is any such animal.

Mr Khan is on record referring to his insufficiently fire-eating co-religionist as ‘Uncle Tom’, a locution gratefully borrowed from the 1960s US Black Panthers. When I heard this, I was truly appalled.

How could he? I thought. How could he commit such a treasonous act? Why use a black American term when we have an impeccably British equivalent: Bounty. That sweet is basically coconut paste covered in chocolate, making it dark outside and white inside… well, you get the picture.

I know I’ll brand myself as a racist (racialist, in proper British usage), fascist, bigot and, even though Mr Khan is neither a homosexual nor a child, quite possibly also a homophobe and paedophile: but here comes. A man who feels so strongly about Islamic rectitude is unfit to be Mayor of the world’s greatest Western, meaning vestigially Christian, city.

Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t be such a critical issue, but our circumstances are far from normal. Islam is clearly impassioned at the moment, and its adherents tend to express their religious fervour by blowing up public transportation, with people and assorted bits thereof landing on the roofs of nearby buildings.

There’s every indication that any time now London will be hit by another 2007, but ten (100?) times worse. Since it’s a dead certainty that the perpetrators will be neither Mormons nor even Calvinists, much hostility between the Muslims and non-Muslims is likely to ensue, requiring a resolute and, if need be, brutal response from the city government.

Are we sure that a Muslim mayor, especially one who liberally uses Americanisms like ‘Uncle Tom’, is going to respond the right way? Are we sure he’s capable of doing what it takes to forget political correctness, ignore the shrieks of ‘discrimination’ and try his best to prevent such an outrage – even if that means following the age-long police practice of concentrating resources on the highest-risk groups? Well, I’m not.

Now, apart from his mild but nonetheless laudable Euroscepticism and equally mild but deplorable support for government by plebiscite, Mr Goldsmith doesn’t seem to stand for any serious political beliefs other than global warming. The issue is indeed political rather than scientific, for the science supporting this great hoax is puny to the point of being nonexistent.

If, on the strength of a similar corpus of evidence, a scientist came up with a theory saying that smokestack industry and high-emission engines are good for the environment, he’d be laughed out of town or, most likely, committed to an institution. No such fate awaits those who concocted the idea that cars are destroying our planet – partly because it came not from scientists but from the UN.

Now London has the best part of 3,000,000 licensed cars, not counting other vehicles. I’d suggest that replacing each one of them with a horse would create a much worse pollution problem, but this simple thought never occurs to Zac.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong with responsible environmentalism. For example, the fabled London fogs were actually smog produced by thousands of smokestacks. Once those were pushed out, the ‘fogs’ disappeared, while the incidence of pulmonary diseases went down drastically.

But ‘responsible’ is the operative word. Like any other heresy, compulsive tree-hugging is a matter of emphasis. There’s nothing wrong with a chap who likes trees well enough to express his affection in a tactile fashion – provided this mild eccentricity is lodged at the periphery of his philosophy of life. When it moves to the centre, he’s no longer eccentric. He’s, at best, an intellectual lightweight (I won’t tell you what he is at worst).

Such was the choice I faced yesterday morning when contemplating the ballot box the way Aristotle contemplated the bust of Homer in a Rembrandt painting. This being a secret ballot, there’s absolutely no way I’m going to divulge that I actually wept, wailed, gnashed my teeth and voted for Goldsmith.

It’s that evil of two lessers again. Isn’t one-man-one-vote democracy wonderful?