Category: Blog

On 11 February I wrote a piece titled Communism Does Funny Things to Tennis, pointing out that 10 out of the 16 top players accused of match fixing came from either Russia or Eastern Europe.

The reason for this is fairly obvious: communism corrupts – surely and enduringly. A country may call itself something else now or it may actually (and counterintuitively) become something else. But her whole system has been poisoned by the toxin of the most cannibalistic politics in history, and – even if all the good intentions are there and all the right moves are made – it’ll take generations to produce effective antibodies.

This explains why Russia is home to 70 per cent of the murders committed in Europe. Going down the scale of criminality and corruption, it also explains why most doping scandals in sport involve Russians or Eastern Europeans.

So, when Maria Sharapova called a press conference yesterday to announce that she had failed a drug test, only those who ignore the geopolitical factor in corruption were surprised.

To be sure, the desire to get ahead in life isn’t limited to former denizens of the Warsaw Pact countries, and neither is the propensity to cut the odd corner in pursuit of the good life. But the maniacal, almost universal amorality of such a pursuit is surely more endemic in Russia than in, say, Finland.

Solzhenitsyn writes about the concentration-camp mentality pervading every pore of Russian society: you die today, I’ll die tomorrow. When survival is in peril, people toughen up in direct proportion to their moral standards loosening up.

Extreme circumstances do produce more heroes than one would expect from the conditions of comfort and security. But they produce infinitely more amoral scrappers, ready to use tooth and claw to fight their way to the top.

Maria Sharapova left Russia when she was 15, technically after the ‘collapse’ of communism. But ‘technically’ is the operative word. The moral decrepitude of the Soviet Union seeped into Sharapova’s genetic makeup, turning her into a fanatical pursuer of success, defined – as it almost invariably is in that supposed paragon of selfless spirituality – in crassly material terms.

Since then she has parlayed her tennis talent, commercial acumen and good looks (personally, I’m turned off by her harsh, thin-lipped, cruel face, but my taste is neither here nor there) into a £130-million fortune, of which only £25 million has come from tournament prizes. The rest came from endorsements and flogging her personal brand of sweets.

You might think that the urge to get ahead would abate when one is already so far ahead of the game, but avarice isn’t like hunger for food: it’s never satisfied. Hence, since Sharapova’s success off court is partly contingent on her performance on it, and since modern tennis places a particularly high premium on endurance, she was taking meldonium, a stamina-enhancing drug.

When she was caught red-handed, Sharapova used the trick recommended by Putin and common to all Russian street brawlers: strike first. She called a press conference and offered a few pathetic excuses.

She didn’t know meldonium was declared illegal in January. She had been taking it for 10 years as a prophylactic therapy for angina and diabetes.

Such conditions must be pandemic among professional athletes, for 182 of them (mostly from Russia and Eastern Europe) have been caught taking meldonium since it was banned. Those poor souls must have been unaware of the drug’s endurance-boosting properties.

As to her supposedly being unaware of the ban, two points are worth mentioning. First, ever since Roman law was thought of, one of the guiding legal principles has been ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

Second, Sharapova isn’t just a basher of yellow balls. She’s the leader of a vast team of coaches, trainers, masseurs, doctors, racket stringers, marketing consultants, investment consultants – and lawyers.

It’s inconceivable that no one in that team would have caught the news of the ban. And even should that have happened, surely the grapevine of the tennis circuit was abuzz with the latest development in anti-doping laws.

However, the same mentality that tells amoral thugs like Putin or Sharapova to land the first blow also teaches them that no such thing as truth exists. They’ll say anything they find expedient at the moment, even if it’s the most transparent of lies.

Sharapova will probably get a ban, a year at least, possibly longer. Some commentators mention a lifelong ban, which is just as well for her health. Playing professional tennis must be hard on the poor thing suffering from cardiac problems.

No one dares suggest a multi-million fine, depriving Sharapova of some of her ill-gotten gains. More important, no one dares ascribe her malfeasance to her origin and early upbringing.

This is a shame because such benevolence will prevent the public from learning a valuable lesson that goes well beyond tennis, pharmacology or unscrupulous athletes. It’s the lesson in the terrible moral blight afflicting half of Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day I quoted Paul Valéry (d. 1945) who said that lessons of history are never heeded. He probably meant times olden, but in our own time history is compressed and accelerated.

Never mind learning the lessons of centuries ago – we today are so advanced that we can successfully ignore the didactic value of the economic crisis that supposedly ended in 2008-2009.

Oh we know exactly what caused it: a bubble of public and personal indebtedness, burgeoning money supply taking reality out of currency, irresponsible banks flogging unsecured mortgages and piling layers of derivatives sometimes amounting to 10-15 times the underlying market value of the collateral. In 2008 the combined value of outstanding derivatives equalled three times the GDP of the whole world.

But learning the aetiology of a disease isn’t tantamount to treating it, or preventing a relapse. It’s in this sense that the lessons of 2008 have never been learned.

Personal indebtedness in Britain is growing at the same pace as in the run-up to that calamity. So is our national debt: it has grown from about 80 per cent of GDP then to over 90 per cent now (so much for austerity).

Banks are dangling unsecured low-interest loans before people’s eyes, which predictably light up with acquisitive zeal. New cars, exotic holidays, expensive consumer goods are all being bought on credit with nary a thought for tomorrow. This isn’t just us: in the 10 years preceding the 2008 crisis, personal expenditure in the US had run at three times personal income.

In Britain households are borrowing over £1 billion each month. In total, household debt stands at almost £200 billion, excluding mortgages. Actually, most people don’t take mortgages into consideration, seeing them as sound investment because house values always go up. This ignores Isaac Newton, with his sound observation of things that go up only to come down in due course.

The economic problem is so obvious that even economists, whose crystal ball tends to be murky, are talking about a new bubble swelling and a new crisis looming. Yet the way they put it shows that they don’t understand the situation well enough to offer a practical solution.

For, just like its predecessor, the looming crisis is neither new nor economic. In the sense that it’s woven into the very fabric of modern society, it isn’t new. In the sense that its causes are moral and existential, it isn’t economic.

Because economics is really a study of human behaviour, it’s closer to the humanities than to natural science or maths. It’s human nature, when it’s unfettered by moral restraints, that causes crises, not any immutable economic laws or government policies.

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost eschatology, the realisation that life has an ultimate meaning that extends beyond our earthly existence. Hence it’s the process of life that illogically has got to be seen as its meaning.

Rather than preparing ourselves for eternity, we try to cram as much comfort and pleasure into every waking moment. America’s Founders called this process ‘the pursuit of happiness’, while today we more accurately refer to it as seeking instant gratification.

Just as our progenitors pursued their ultimate goal, so are we pursuing ours, sweeping all obstacles aside. One such obstacle is the lamentably gaping chasm between our incomes and our appetites, and all modern economies are designed to bridge this gap.

That’s why most Western governments manage their finances on the same pyramid-scheme principles that a few years ago landed Bernie Madoff in prison for a surreal term. That’s why they run up national debts that can never be repaid (servicing our debt already costs more than we spend on defence). That’s why individual Westerners pile up debts driving them into bankruptcy and insolvency. That’s why bankers lend irresponsibly, trying to drive their bonuses up.

As always, economists try to explain the world in the terms of their own profession. But the world can’t be squeezed into such narrow confines. It stubbornly refutes theories and rejects remedies. It keeps reminding us that the economy is merely an aspect of human behaviour, and not the most important aspect at that.

With apologies for self-quoting, this is how I put it in my 2011 book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis:

“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness, dignity with amour propre – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures. We now live in a virtual world – so is it at all surprising that we live on virtual money?”

We already know that the economic crisis is systemic, not symptomatic, and its next act is just round the corner. We don’t know how calamitous it’ll be, but such crises tend to outdo their predecessors. Meanwhile, back to the really important news of Leonard DiCaprio finally winning an Oscar.

As any true Russian worthy of the name will tell you, Russia towers over the materialist West in every respect that matters. And the respects in which it doesn’t tower over the West don’t matter.

Unlike Westerners who only care about scented loo paper, the Russians are animated by their mysterious souls, and hence are positively bristling with spirituality. This is just as well, because in every down-to-earth respect the country finds herself in the lower reaches of the Third World.

Russia’s characteristic disdain for physical life, much vaunted by her great writers, inspires the Russians to take literally the biblical advice “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.”

Hence Russia comfortably leads Europe in bodies killed. According to UN data, 70 per cent of all murders on Europe’s territory are committed in Russia, home to only 19 per cent of Europeans. The country’s murder rate is 20 times higher than in Norway, which makes one wonder if perhaps soulless materialism isn’t without its advantages.

Russia comes in at 51 out of 56 countries rated for quality of life, behind Pakistan and Egypt, but then true Russians, living as they do off the legacy of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, don’t care about such quotidian nonsense (until they come to the West, that is, where they are seduced into soulless materialism while still clearing passport control).

Alas, however, the country doesn’t do much better in the more spiritually elevated categories either.

For example in the freedom of the press rating compiled by Freedom House, Russia stands at 181 out of the world’s 199 countries, below Sudan, the Congo, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Burundi and Chad.

At 195 out of 198 countries in the Verisk Maplecroft corruption rating, Russia also finds herself in a similar neighbourhood, next to Sudan and Burma.

The country’s democracy rating of 129 puts her below that famous bastion of political pluralism Saudi Arabia (!), but – and here one must doff one’s hat – just a whisker above Somalia.

I won’t bore you with any more statistics, but just take my word for it: every survey one cares to look up shows that Russia’s domestic life comfortably fits the cliché of hell on earth.

Her international behaviour doesn’t evoke many serene images of paradise either. During Putin’s tenure Russia has launched unprovoked attacks on Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014.

Currently Putin’s army is busily vaporising Syrian schools and hospitals. The kind of collateral damage that for Nato members can only result from unfortunate accidents, for Russia represents deliberate policy aimed at terrorising the country into submission to Assad, who’s rapidly turning into a Russian puppet.

Russia’s aggressive forays into Turkey and non-stop violations of other Nato members’ air space are pushing the world towards the devastation of another world war. Hardly a day goes by that either Putin or his mouthpieces don’t threaten the world with nuclear extinction, a threat that’s getting more credible by the day.

And still Col. Putin’s kleptofascist regime produced by a fusion of the KGB and organised crime finds its champions in the West, across the whole political spectrum.

Fascists, swelling the membership rolls of France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party have for Putin that warm feeling politicians reserve for those who bankroll their movements – which a newly pious Putin does with nothing short of Christian generosity.

Conservatives, especially those of a slightly authoritarian inclination, praise Putin for being a strong leader who takes no nonsense from liberals and won’t allow homosexual marriages in his own backyard. We should have such a leader, bleat the Hitchenses and Bookers of our press.

(Presumably they’d also be happy to accept as an inevitable corollary routine political assassinations, arbitrary justice dictated by the state, money laundering as the principal economic activity and suppression of the very press in which they make a living. One can only applaud such selfless devotion to public good.)

Businessmen hail Putin’s disdain for environmental red tape, his dispensing with casuistic legality and treating the taxation system as merely a statement of intent.

Lefties adore Putin’s anti-Americanism, along with his constant diatribes against the West’s decadence and materialism. Being lefties, they aren’t bright enough to weigh the fascist alternative in the balance, for Putin offers no other.

In fact the unreconstructed KGB colonel enjoys as much benefit of the doubt today as Hitler did in the 1930s. The ghoulish führer too was admired by fascists like Mosley, assorted anti-Semites, leftie liberals like Lloyd George, businessmen like Henry Ford, conservatives like Lady Astor’s Cliveden set, some of the more prominent royals and, between 23 August, 1939, and 22 June, 1941, while the Nazi-Soviet Pact was in effect, even the communists.

This climate of benign toleration mixed with adulation created by way of precipitation a demob, appeasement mentality across Europe, which in turn had well-publicised consequences, expressible in millions of corpses.

History is never short of such useful, often life-saving lessons. But then, as the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry correctly observed, we never learn them.

 

The Nazi poison infecting most of Europe in the 1940s had a longer half-life than we like to claim. It left a legacy of all sorts of sinister ideas and practices.

For example, the current idea of a European federation revolving on a Franco-German (or, to be precise, Germano-French) axis goes back to the fruitful cooperation between Nazi, Vichy and other European bureaucracies during the war.

Still in its embryonic state, the notion of a single pan-European state was pithily expressed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who during the war served as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands: “The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed.” My friends Angie and Jean-Claude would readily sign their names to this heartfelt statement.

A Nuremberg noose prevented Seyss-Inquart from seeing his dream come true in the new guise of the European Union. But the political philosophy he so ably brought to life in the Low Countries left more than one poisonous legacy.

The Nazis firmly believed that individual lives had nothing but utilitarian value. The extent of their usefulness to the state was determined by, well, the state. If the value was perceived as negative, the state felt it had the right to take the useless life away the better to maintain the spiritual health of society.

Gypsies and especially Jews had to be expelled, exterminated or otherwise removed from the Aryan body brimming with spiritual health – that much was instantly obvious not only to Nazi leaders but, at the time, to most Germans.

But Jews and Gypsies weren’t the only offensive groups. Also blocking the way to achieving the Nazi muscular ideal of mankind were homosexuals, cripples and the mentally ill. By virtue of their deformities they forfeited their right to life, which point was driven home by the cyanide-loaded syringes wielded by German doctors.

That medical procedure was called ‘euthanasia’, which means ‘good death’ in Greek. Indeed, what could possibly be better than killing a few thousand for the noble goal of producing a GM race of unbounded mental and physical health?

The underlying belief that it’s neither God nor the person but the state that has the ultimate sovereignty over human life is common to every brand of socialism, national, international or ‘democratic’ (‘democratic socialism’ is the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). The wording will differ, as will the scale on which this principle is implemented. But the principle will remain the same.

Hence in 2002 Seyss-Inquart’s former bailiwick became the first European country to legalise euthanasia, albeit only for terminally ill patients expressing a “voluntary and well-considered request” to be done in.

Without going into the philosophical and – God forbid – theological aspects of that cannibalistic law, suffice it say that many so-called terminal cases are marginal. Even when all the doctors involved agree that the patient is on his last legs, miraculous recovery may still happen. (Much as I hate using myself as an example, doctors thought my Stage 4 cancer was terminal. Since then you’ve been exposed to 10 years’ worth of my vituperative prose.)

The issue of “voluntary and well-considered request” becomes even murkier when the patient suffers from a mental, rather than physical, illness. By definition, his competence to issue such a request has to be doubted – as should be the ability of psychiatrists to agree on an unequivocal diagnosis in this notoriously obscure branch of medicine.

Yet nothing would hold back the irrepressible Dutch. Between 2011 and 2014 the Dutch state put to death 110 mental patients, of whom some were only diagnosed with autism. (Altogether 5,036 patients were put to ‘good’ death there in 2014 alone.)

Analysing 66 of those 110 cases, psychiatrists from the National Institute of Health concluded that in many instances consulting physicians disagreed on how precisely the legal criteria had been met. Moreover, doctors proceeded with euthanasia in the 37 cases where patients had refused potentially effective treatments.

No one was bothered by the logical inconsistency of it all. If the patients were so mad that they had to be put down for their own good, and ultimately for the good of the state, how could they be deemed sufficiently compos mentis to decide on accepting or rejecting treatment?

This is the thin end of the wedge being driven into the very heart of our civilisation. If there is one founding principle that can be regarded as its cornerstone, it’s the certainty that every human life is sacred – and only God can decide when it ends.

Remove this understanding, and the ostensible differences among all those socialisms, state, national, democratic, international or Soviet pale into rhetorical triviality. They are distinctions, not differences.

The primacy of the state over the individual underpins all modern states – whatever modifiers they attach to their names. We have Holland to thank for continuously reminding us of this fact.

May I suggest that, if at times you act eccentrically, as many Englishmen do, you watch yourself very closely when visiting Holland, especially if you’re of a certain age. By getting off the plane at Schiphol, you may implicitly forfeit personal sovereignty over your life.

My friends will probably find it hard to accept me as a champion of temperance, and in fact I’m slightly hung-over even as I write this.

Having thus established my residence in a glass house, I’d nevertheless like to throw a stone or two – though not at drinking as such, and not even occasional heavy boozing. Few of us are without that particular sin, and this has been thus ever since Eve left some fruit juice out in the sun, for Adam to taste it a few days later and find the effect unexpectedly pleasant.

Not even Jesus held a dim view of drinking in an appropriate context. If he had, he would have turned that water into Ribena, not wine, much to the chagrin of the Cana newlyweds and their guests.

It’s only when endemic drinking stops being a problem in se and becomes instead a symptom of a catastrophic social and cultural malaise that it provides a fit subject for serious contemplation. Such, I’m afraid, is the situation in Britain now.

The story making the rounds at the moment is of a middle-aged female QC, regarded as a top legal mind, caught in flagrante delicto with a 51-year-old solicitor. The pair had had a boozy lunch and decided to consummate the resulting affection against the wall of Waterloo station at the height of the evening rush hour.

The top legal mind had her knickers around her ankles and the solicitor was similarly exposed when the lawyers were arrested for outraging public decency. They were held overnight and issued a caution, which both accepted.

However, six weeks later the top legal mind applied to have her conviction quashed, claiming she had been a victim of sexual assault. This status, unlike that of a willing participant in hanky-panky, entitles her to lifelong anonymity, and the top legal mind must have cottoned on that having her name splashed all over the papers might hinder her assent to damehood. The example of Graeme Stening, her partner cum would-be assailant, is vivid enough.

This sordid incident wouldn’t be worth talking about if it weren’t so depressingly symptomatic of the cultural catastrophe under way in Britain.

I can’t for the life of me imagine a top Queen’s Counsel, say, in the 1970s allowing herself to behave so swinishly no matter how much she drank. Nor do I recall seeing even in the 1980s scores of middleclass professionals throwing up along the whole 2.5-mile length of King’s Road (one of the city’s most upmarket streets, for the out-of-towners among you) every Saturday night.

Neither did many restaurants on the continent exhibit ‘No British groups’ signs in the their windows, as they nowadays do in, for example, Prague. The practical Czechs must have figured out that the profits they might realise from British stag or hen parties won’t cover the inevitable cost of a clean-up possibly followed by refurbishment and fumigation.

The footage of British proles turning places like Ibiza into hell on earth is depressing enough, but booze-fuelled anomie evidently transcends class divides – as anyone can testify who has seen photos of our young royals staggering out of nightclubs in the wee hours. They too talk about ‘going clubbing’, and there I was thinking it was a transitive verb demanding the question ‘Whom?’.

The English are a drinking race, and always have been. But in the past they didn’t drink with the aggressive purpose of smashing to bits the civilisation that makes them English. For civilisations are mainly defined by the inhibitions they impose on human behaviour.

When those inhibitions go out of the window, so does the civilisation. When a middle-aged woman fast-tracked for a damehood gets so blotto that she’s arrested for copulating in a crowded public place, she isn’t just breaking the law. She’s avidly breaking her civilisation.

I remember those office parties (I retired from that nonsense 11 years ago) when we had to send girls from good families home in taxis and tell the drivers where to go because the girls themselves couldn’t remember where they lived. The drivers were also pre-paid for cleaning out the likely vomit.

These weren’t unfortunate accidents. The girls (and of course the boys) actually planned to drink themselves unconscious in front of their colleagues; this was the effect they were after. Before they passed out, some sex play often ensued, as if a drunken stupor was a precondition for passion.

It saddens me to have to chart a route bypassing pubs whenever driving home on a weekend night. When central London throws more drunks under car wheels than central Moscow does nowadays, it’s not drinking as such that’s the problem any longer. So please join me in a mournful glass to commemorate a great civilisation fallen victim to modernity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At Easter, 2013, six Russian jets carried out a simulated attack on Stockholm. Sweden, proud of her two centuries of peace and getting fat on the ‘peace dividend’, failed to scramble any of her interceptors. Had the attack been for real, Stockholm would now lie in ruins.

This was far from an isolated incident. Russian warplanes routinely violate Sweden’s airspace. At the same time, Russia conducts regular naval exercises in the Baltic Sea, with an accent on landing and supporting units of marine infantry.

The Swedes have finally cottoned on to the possible consequences of pacifism. They’re going through the motions of rebuilding their army, but it’s a long way to go.

For example, they’re increasing their contingent on Gotland, the country’s largest island, to 300 soldiers, equipped with 14 German-made Leopard tanks. Yet at the height of the Cold War the Gotland garrison numbered up to 20,000, which goes to show the size of the gap to fill.

It’s not only Sweden but also the rest of Europe, particularly its eastern half, that has reasons to worry. In 2015 Russia carried out about 4,000 military exercises, compared to NATO’s 270.

A recent US war game showed that Russia would take less than three days to occupy Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. The opposing NATO force wouldn’t be strong enough to resist.

Not only do the Russians use their Kaliningrad (née Königsberg) contingents effectively to surround the Baltics, but they back up this strategic advantage with a prohibitive numerical superiority.

Opposing Russia’s eight airborne fleets and 27 manoeuvre battalions, each equipped with main battle tanks, are merely 12 NATO battalions – with no tanks. Seven of those battalions are native to the Baltics, and their training levels are uncertain.

The overall situation in Europe is even more dire. The three biggest European armies, French, German and British, have, respectively, 423, 408 and 407 tanks, including vehicles that wouldn’t even qualify as tanks in the Russian army.

By contrast, Russia officially boasts a 15,500-strong tank force in active service – augmented with thousands of older but still usable models mothballed in warehouses.

What gives NATO some hope of stopping the Russian army should it finally stop playing games is the approximate parity between NATO and Russian air forces. Modern air-launched anti-tank weapons greatly offset the danger presented by massed tank formations: if during the Second World War bombing was practically useless against tanks, today’s laser-guided missiles can pick off the tanks one by one.

Nonetheless, given the overwhelming numbers of the Russian ground forces, the best possible effect of air resistance would be to slow down the juggernaut, not stop it in its tracks.

It increasingly appears that we’re back to the 1970s. At that time only the US nuclear umbrella (and not the EU, as its champions claim so disingenuously) provided a viable deterrent to Soviet tank swarms sweeping across the Central European plain.

That military doctrine went by the name of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), the assumption being that neither NATO nor the USSR would be crazy enough to risk a full-scale nuclear exchange.

One would like to hope that Putin’s fiefdom can be counted upon to show similar sanity. Then again, there are signs diminishing that hope rather drastically.

Putin seems to have decided to resort to the traditional manner in which tyrants try to thwart economic disaster: militarisation first, war second.

The first two wars for which the Russian dictator is personally responsible, against Chechnya in 2000 and Georgia in 2008, failed to alert NATO to the danger of a KGB kleptocracy armed with nuclear weapons. But Russia’s attack on the Ukraine in 2014 began to awaken the West.

Things have escalated since then. Russia is heavily involved in Syria, with only naïve observers believing that Putin is our ally in the region. Tensions with Turkey, a NATO member, are mounting, with Russia’s violations of Turkish airspace becoming more frequent and cynical.

The tone of Russia’s shrill home propaganda is unmistakably warlike, with bugles whining and drums rattling off every newspaper page and TV screen. The West in general and the US in particular are being painted the same black colour as back in the USSR.

Some Russian commentators are talking about the possibility of an eighth Russo-Turkish war, others threaten to ‘turn America to nuclear dust’, still others are issuing open threats to the Baltics and the rest of Eastern Europe, and a first strike with nuclear weapons is mentioned as a distinct possibility.

In fact, the Russian military doctrine has been rewritten under Putin to include the possibility of such a strike, something that even the Soviets discounted, at least openly.

This isn’t supposed to be scaremongering. It’s possible that Russia is flexing her military muscle only to strike poses designed to rally flagging domestic support. Yet it would be criminally irresponsible not to prepare for the other possibility – however much such preparation could cost.

Si vis pacem, para bellum, as the Romans used to say. If you want peace, prepare for war. We want peace, don’t we?

 

One has to admire our PM’s negotiating skills. Faced with the stonewall of EU intransigence, he managed to wrench out of those boneheaded eurocrats an amazing deal for Britain, making any objection to our continuing membership sound churlish.

The complete list of reluctant concessions Dave managed to pull out of the federasts’ gnashing teeth is too long to publish in this limited space. But here are a few salient points:

·      Britain regains full sovereign control of her borders, except being able to decide who can come here, and in what numbers.

·      However, if the numbers reach an annual level in excess of a million or two (TBD at a later date), Britain will be allowed to apply ‘emergency brakes’, provided the European parliament agrees.

·      HMG will be able to prevent suspected terrorists and criminals from coming to Britain, unless they promise to be good boys.

·      Rather than showering new arrivals with full benefits all at once, we’ll be able to escalate the handouts gradually over four years and beyond, thereby prolonging the immigrants stay and giving them more time to integrate into British life. The wonderful thing about this snivelling EU concession is that it goes into effect in a mere five years – provided the EU hasn’t changed its mind by then.

·      Britain will be exempt from using the phrase ‘ever-closer union’ to describe the ultimate aim of European integration. Instead we’ll be free to say ‘loose but monolithic union’ or, if such is our wont, ‘a physically close but metaphysically loose union’.

·      Germany undertakes to ban at her party rallies, held at Nuremberg or elsewhere, any banners saying Gott strafe England or words to the same effect.

·      France, and specifically the French Academy, has agreed to issue a directive advising the French that the words les Anglo-Saxons and les putes de merde must never be used interchangeably, unless the speaker strongly feels like doing so.

·      Poland has agreed to take back those Polish plumbers and scaffolders who feel like repatriating, provided there aren’t too many of them.

 ·      The Dutch, while continuing to produce and consume mountains of mediocre cheese, undertake to pay lip service to the excellence of Stilton, stopping, effective immediately, comparing its aroma to the smell of dirty socks.

·      The Italians agree to instruct their pickpockets not to target English tourists specifically, unless the latter are asking for it by being negligent. They also promise not to pinch the bottoms of British female tourists, unless said bottoms jut too far out.

·      The Czechs will allow some British stag and hen parties to come to Prague, provided HMG agrees to compensate the city to the tune of £100,000 for every subsequent puddle of vomit.

·      The Spanish agree to rename their island Ibiffa, which is how British tourists prefer to pronounce Ibiza.

·      Britain will be allowed to fish in her own territorial waters, with the EU stipulating the types and quantities of fish to be pulled out of the sea, along with the times during which fishing is to be permitted.

·      Britain will be allowed to slaughter cattle in any way, provided it’s halal.

·      Britain will be encouraged to practise free trade, within the guidelines of the EU’s protectionist quotas. Trade outside the EU, though technically permitted, is discouraged and could be punished by quotas imposed on British goods by the EU.

·      If Britain undertakes to shut up every Eurosceptic in her government, the EU will agree to silence every Eurosceptic within the European Commission.

In fact, the deal secured by Dave is so good for Britain that he was completely justified in saying that, with this agreement on the table, Britain would jump at the chance to join the EU if she weren’t already a member.

This assertion is so indisputable that Dave should have no fear putting it to a test. Britain should withdraw from the EU by summary parliamentary vote and then hold a referendum on rejoining.

The subsequent government campaign could then stress the economic benefits of membership, singling out the negligible rate of youth unemployment in Spain, the healthy condition of Italian banks, the thriving state of French manufacturing and the negligible cost of Germany’s immigration policy. I can even propose the umbrella slogan: “We can have it as good”.

Such a step would reinforce Dave’s credibility as a true statesman in the Disraeli vein, an international negotiator putting Metternich to shame, and a man who’d rather relinquish his membership in every Pall Mall club than utter an empty phrase.    

 

 

Every Hitler needs his Goebbels. Performing this function for Putin is Dmitry Kisilyov, head of the government news agency and the host of a popular talk show on Rossiya 1, Russia’s equivalent of BBC One.

Kisilyov is more than just Putin’s chief propagandist. He’s the dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist, lip-synching things that Putin enunciates through Kisilyov, who obligingly opens and closes his mouth.

It was Kisilyov who explained a few months ago that Russia is capable of “turning America into radioactive dust”, which was an expansion on Putin’s reminder to a forgetful West that “Russia is a nuclear power”.

This time around Kisilyov delivered another revelation: Lenin, whose mummy still adorns Red Square, is being increasingly seen in Putin’s Russia in the same light as he was seen in the Soviet Union.

Russian school textbooks are already describing Stalin as a strict but fair manager who “took Russia with the plough and left her with the nuclear bomb”. Now it’s Lenin’s turn to make a comeback.

For anybody endowed with some knowledge of history and elementary moral sense, Lenin takes pride of place on the short list of the most evil, sadistic tyrants of modernity, sharing the roster with Stalin, Hitler and Mao.

Kisilyov doubtless knows enough history, but his deficit of moral sense made him deliver this panegyric on his talk show, for the delectation of millions:

“The scale of his effort and the nobility of purpose that Lenin set for himself to rearrange life on this planet are unheard of! There was nothing like it either before or after him. His romanticism, his courage alone are worth a lot. And if, while reassessing Lenin’s role, our society manages to take out Lenin’s positives and Lenin’s scale, then Lenin’s energy will work for us the way Mao’s energy is working for the Chinese. Putin too is beginning to ‘dissect’ Lenin, carefully, from afar. Even Lenin’s massacres of priests… are but a detail.”

Yes, but the detail is the place where the devil lives. This particular diabolical detail, though paling into insignificance compared to the 15 million murdered on Lenin’s watch, involves the brutal murder of at least 40,000 priests in the roughly six years that Lenin was in power.

The official version is that they were shot, but few were so lucky. Priests were crucified, flayed alive, cut to ribbons, eviscerated, turned to ice by having cold water poured over them in minus 20 weather – and I’ll spare you the more graphic stuff.

What particularly frustrated Lenin’s ‘nobility of purpose’ was the clergy’s reluctance to relinquish its sacramental valuables, lovingly assembled by believers over centuries. Gold chalices and crosses, gospels and other sacred books bound in gem-encrusted covers, precious icons – all those things had to be plundered when the right moment came.

That, in the eyes of the great romantic, happened in 1922, when the countryside was devastated by the worst famine in Russia’s history. Being a man blessed, in addition to the nobility of his spirit, with no mean intellect, Lenin calculated that people dying of hunger would be too weak to resist. This is how he put it, in that especially noble way of his:

“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds of thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless energy, not stopping at crushing any resistance. It is precisely now and only now that the enormous majority of the peasant mass will be… in no condition to support in any decisive way that handful of Black Hundred clergy… who can and want to attempt a policy of violent resistance to the Soviet decree.”

I could comment on this text, but won’t, for no commentary is necessary. Instead I’ll cite another passage from the same letter:

“At this meeting, pass a secret resolution… that the confiscation of valuables, in particular of the richest abbeys, monasteries and churches, should be conducted with merciless determination, unconditionally stopping at nothing… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better. We must teach this lot a lesson right now, so that they will not dare even to think of any resistance for several decades.”

Again, there’s no need for commentary, especially since we know how efficiently Lenin’s directives were carried out. The ‘scale of the effort’ was indeed impressive – as was the ‘nobility of purpose’.

This, I hope you realise, is a full equivalent of today’s Chancellor of Germany making, through her mouthpiece, a statement about positively reassessing Hitler’s role in the country’s history.

Say what you will about Frau Merkel, and God knows I’ve said enough about her, but she’s unlikely to do so in any immediate future. But then Germany still retains a modicum of sanity.

Now, aren’t you sorry you can’t follow Russia’s propaganda meant for internal consumption? An eye opener, that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Britain, according to Dave, is racist, which “should shame our nation”. Actually, being led by such a nonentity is a greater reason to be ashamed.

A young black man, according to Dave, is more likely to find himself in prison than at a university. To someone currying favour with the progressivist crowd there can be only one explanation: racism. Our universities are reluctant to admit blacks, while our courts are eager to send them down.

This is a possible explanation, but it’s neither the only nor the likeliest one. In fact, considering the facts Dave cited, it doesn’t add up at all.

The racism explanation would make sense only if certain premises could be factually established:

Premise 1: Universities reject qualified black candidates.

Premise 2: Such candidates are as qualified as rival whites.

Premise 3: Black people are innocent of the crimes for which they are imprisoned.

Premise 4: If found guilty, a black is more likely to receive a custodial sentence than a white defendant with the same criminal record, who’s seen as presenting the same danger to society.

Since Dave failed to establish any of these premises, his diatribe is the same bien pensant drivel that has become his trademark.

He did say that “It’s disgraceful that if you’re black, it seems you’re more likely to be sentenced to custody for a crime than if you’re white.” But without the qualifications mentioned in Premise 4, this is yet another example of hollow chattering, something further emphasised by the word ‘seems’.

When a prime minister makes such a far-reaching claim, there can be no ‘seems’ about it. Either is or isn’t, that’s the choice, to be made on the basis of facts, scrutinised and analysed.  

Dave accused his alma mater Oxford of “not doing enough” to attract black students. That softens the accusation: not doing enough may be treated as laziness or negligence, not racism. That charge would only stick if Premises 1 and 2 were established, which they weren’t.

If they could be established, Dave would have jumped at the chance. Hence one has to assume, without leaving the realm of logic, that neither of those assumptions is true. Therefore, even though universities are lackadaisical about dragging young blacks in, they don’t discriminate against them, meaning they aren’t racist.

Now what would constitute doing enough? Discriminating against more qualified white candidates in favour of black ones?

Apparently not. Since it would be nice to retain at least some conservative support, Dave hastened to add that he didn’t favour reverse discrimination.

However, in the good tradition of Islington salons he failed to state what he does favour, other than that Oxford should “go the extra mile” in search of more blacks. In which direction the extra mile should be travelled wasn’t specified.

Dave then shot himself in the foot, having first withdrawn it from his mouth. “White British men from poor backgrounds,” he said, “are five times less likely to go into higher education than others.”

I’m confused. So we’re talking not about race but family background, for poor white men don’t usually sport blackface at university interviews. Having first caught my breath after the dizzying turn in rhetoric, I must admit that finally we’ve uncovered a kernel of truth – though not the way Dave meant it.

A combination of various government policies have indeed covered Britain with a blanket of rotten council estates. While they don’t greet visitors with the sign “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, they might as well do so.

The policies responsible for this tragic situation were enacted in social affairs, education and justice.

The massive welfare state created a culture of dependency, depriving youngsters of any incentive to seek a job that in all likelihood wouldn’t match the level of their benefits. At the same time, by effectively acting as provider father and depriving the family of its vital economic function, the state made real fathers redundant. That effectively destroyed the family, with every predictable social consequence.

The annihilation of grammar schools deprived boys from poor families of any educational, and therefore social, hoists, attaching youngsters to the rotten estates in perpetuity and leaving mostly crime as a way of supplementing their benefits and attaining peer respect.

And our justice system encourages crime, rather than punishing it in a ruthless and deterrent fashion. For example, a leading sociologist has calculated that a burglar commits, on average, 50 crimes before seeing the inside of a courthouse, and another 50 before going to prison, usually for a derisory term.

The prevailing belief is that prison represents not punishment commensurate with the crime, but a chance to rehabilitate a youngster who in any case is less guilty than society at large. Justice is thus no longer justice. It’s an extension of social services, and we know how effective those are.

The salient point here is that all those destructive policies come to us courtesy of intellectual and moral cripples like Dave, who spout progressivist drivel and then act on it to stay on the right side of the Zeitgeist.

This would be almost bearable if at some point they spared us their hare-brained, sanctimonious nonsense. Fat chance, as Dave is proving.