Category: Blog

“Security and prosperity go hand in hand,” explained Dave and Barack Hussein in a jointly written, or rather ghost-written, Times article.

“We reaffirm our belief that our ability to defend our freedoms is rooted in our economic strength,” they added.

This belief, if they indeed hold it, is staggering in its ignorance and feeble-mindedness. Yet again I am scared out of my wits realising what kind of nonentities are leading us – all the way to calamity.

These chaps are trying to peddle the notion that our security will increase pari passu with the growth in the number of i-Pads per capita. They seem to think that the richer we become, the better equipped we’ll be to defend ‘our freedoms’.

Yet history shows that the truth is almost exactly opposite to this wishful thinking. Wealthy civilisations and countries, great or small, have regularly fallen to impoverished barbarians with lean and hungry looks.

The ancestors of today’s Germans were dirt poor compared to the mighty Romans, which didn’t prevent Alaric from sacking Rome in 410 and taking over the western empire.

Closer to our own time, the combined wealth of Western Europe was much greater than that of Nazi Germany, yet we know what happened in 1940.

Even closer to our own time, it took Obama’s partial namesake Saddam two days to devastate Kuwait, even though his own country languished at a much lower GDP per capita.

It wasn’t with billion-dollar ICBMs but with cheap Stanley knives that a handful of Muslims defeated the security of the world’s superpower to bloody its nose on 11 September, 2001.

Before putting their names to this demonstrable nonsense the two spivocrats ought to have glanced at how a more intelligent man than they are, R.G. Collingwood, explained why armed attacks from without or within carry the day:

“Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself… is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever.”

In other words, what enables a civilisation to repel attacks is its metaphysical strength, not its physical bulk or the size of its coffers. A destitute 11-stone mugger hell-bent on getting a few quid for his daily fix will easily humble a 15-stone billionaire who has no spunk to defend himself.

The West today is that billionaire, soft of spirit and therefore of muscle, whose hedonistic pursuit of luxury has rendered him incapable of putting up a fight.

Why, our illustrious co-authors, or rather co-signers, have succeeded in neutering their wills and castrating their minds to such an extent that they are even incapable of identifying our enemies, much less resisting them.

Their article was ghost-written in response to the Paris massacre, and they don’t even know who the true culprits were, or rather they know but are too craven to tell.

They hide behind the smokescreen of nebulous neologisms like ‘Islamism’, suggesting time and again that Islam as such, a ‘religion of peace’, has nothing to do with violence.

Why, Dave is even agitating for Turkey’s joining the EU, at exactly the time when Atatürk’s secularising reforms are about to bite the dust. If his tireless efforts to destroy whatever is left of Europe succeed, another 75 million Muslims will gain the right of automatic settlement anywhere here.

Assuming that the widely bandied proportion of potential jihadists among all European Muslims indeed stands at ‘only’ 10 per cent, that’ll add another 7.5 million wild-eyed vampires craving our blood.

But then of course the jihadists-to-be will be seduced and pacified by our Macs and Nokias, if you believe Dave and his co-signer. They ought to remember that such devices can be used not only to pick up one’s e-mails or to log on a porn website but also to detonate a bomb by remote control.

It’s precisely the West’s preoccupation with material prosperity, at the expense of spiritual strength, that is making it impotent to respond properly to internal and external threats.

The co-signers don’t understand that, for otherwise they would have talked not about bolstering ‘global growth’, but about bolstering Christianity, the only proven source of spiritual and moral fortitude in the West.

However, they know that electorates care about their financial, not spiritual, resources. And in our sham democracies whatever electorates want they get, or rather get to hear. These are the rules of the game in which the co-signers are professional players, and ones who believe it’s the only game in town.

This doesn’t speak highly for their intellect or rectitude. But we keep electing such spivs to the highest offices, so what does it say about us? 

 

 

 

 

Islamic terrorism is the talk of the town right now, which is understandable in view of last week’s events.

Yet few realise or, to be more accurate, dare to say that large, and largely radicalised, Muslim populations don’t just produce armed terrorists who kill people. They also excrete cultural toxins that poison the air.

Of these toxins anti-Semitism is one of the deadliest, mainly because antidotes to it are historically weak in Europe.

It’s not the Muslims who pioneered hatred of the Jews. Europeans can legitimately claim priority rights, which claim they re-emphasised in such a convincing manner at the time when my parents were young.

However, the sheer horror of the Holocaust shocked Europeans and strengthened the efficacy of the antidote.

A passing remark that the Jews collude to control the whole world as they already control the banks was no longer seen as innocent banter. It was seen as a first step on the road to Auschwitz.

Hence such remarks got to be regarded as infra dig in polite society, and for the next 70 years Jews had a relatively quiet time in Europe. No one thought anti-Semitism had disappeared. Yet everyone felt relieved it was dormant.

Anti-Semitism was hibernating like a bear in winter. Just like that animal it could be awakened by a prod with a long stick. That came in the shape of the burgeoning Muslim populations.

Once their size reached a certain critical mass, they formed a formidable electoral bloc and began to exert a powerful political influence. In our sham democracies it doesn’t take long for political influence to become a mighty cultural force or even, if the influence is strong enough, a dominant one.

Politicians in search of easy votes began to cater to Muslim attitudes, and Muslim attitudes to Jews are largely informed by a line in the hadith (record of Mohammed’s words and deeds):

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

There are other lines in Muslim scriptural sources that take a kinder view of the Jews, but these days Muslims tend to heed this one above all others. No doubt the presence of a Jewish state in the mostly Islamic Middle East has something to do with it, but Muslims themselves could explain this phenomenon much better.

What interests me here is facts, and they are disturbing. Both physical and verbal attacks on European Jews have been growing exponentially for the last decade or so, while a revolting combination of political correctness and political expedience prevents our ‘leaders’ from stamping out the emetic nastiness.

London police report that between April and Christmas last year the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes doubled compared to the same period in 2013.

According to the latest poll, more than half of British Jews (58 per cent, to be exact) doubt they have any future in Britain and are seriously considering moving elsewhere.

One can say with certainty that they are unlikely to use continental Europe as a possible refuge. For, compared to their continental co-religionists, the Brits have it easy.

Within one month last summer eight synagogues were attacked in France, with one firebombed by a 400-strong mob. While last week four Jews were butchered in a Paris kosher supermarket, another such emporium was smashed and looted last year, to the accompaniment of a mob braying “Death to Jews”.

Jewish cemeteries and synagogues are being desecrated throughout Europe with various verbal messages and graphic images, of which swastikas and porcine heads seem to be favoured.

In Germany Molotov cocktails were last year tossed into a synagogue previously destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht, while imam Bilal Ismail asked Allah to destroy Jews “to the very last one”.

Anti-Israeli rallies throughout Germany were inductively expanding the object of their hatred from Israelis specifically to Jews as such. Their slogans also testified to finely honed poetic sensibilities, with this one my particular favourite: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

Catchy slogans tend to have an inspiring effect, and a wave of attacks on Jews, Jewish shops and restaurants, along with a brushfire spread of anti-Semitic graffiti, have been reported throughout Europe. 

In Rome, dozens of Jewish business owners came to work one morning to find their windows decorated with swastikas and graffiti saying “Jews, your end is near”.

In Amsterdam two Jewish women committed the egregious offence of displaying Israeli flags on their balconies. The punishment was swift: one was beaten up, the other was the victim of arson. In Belgium, a Jewish shopper was informed that her custom wasn’t welcome.  

In Spain a popular playwright explained that Jews have only themselves to blame because they are incapable of living peacefully with others: “No wonder they’ve been so frequently expelled.”

Maccabi Haifa footballers were assaulted in Austria, and their match with SC Paderborn had to be cancelled.

In France incidents of anti-Semitism have increased seven-fold in the 2000s compared with the 1990s. The government refuses to let Jews defend themselves with firearms, and it won’t defend them itself, for any such defence would have to start with the acknowledgement of the dominant Muslim component in the anti-Semitic attacks.

Jews, their ability to sense danger honed by the events of 70 years ago, are leaving in droves. By some reports, 100,000 of the 500,000 French Jews have fled the country, with many settling in Israel.

In a way they are fortunate in that they have somewhere to run. The rest of us aren’t so lucky, and many of us don’t even sense the danger, which is a shame.

Europe hasn’t seen anything like this since it was ruled by Nazi gauleiters, and, though ostensibly out to murder only isolated groups, mostly Jews, those chaps were in fact killing our whole civilisation.

The Nazis weren’t diabolical because they murdered Jews; they murdered Jews because they were diabolical. The other satanic regime, that of the Soviet Union, was also virulently anti-Semitic, and only Stalin’s death prevented Soviet Jews from suffering the red answer to the brown Holocaust.

Anti-Semitism is a disease, but it’s also a symptom of a much deeper underlying malaise. None of us is immune to it, and only all of us together can inoculate our societies.

Decadence isn’t just sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll and homomarriage. It’s also anti-Semitism, and it doesn’t just threaten Jews. It threatens the whole society. Us all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a sixtyish man is habitually called ‘Peaches’ by any woman other than his wife, he isn’t just courting the woman. He is courting trouble.

It’s not just ‘Peaches’ either. At that stage of his life a man shouldn’t acquire, within however limited a circle, any nickname deriving from fruit, domestic pets or the more ferocious animals.

If he does find himself with a name other than the one his parents gave him, the ensuing trouble may come in different forms.

Since the female name-caller typically tends to be younger than the gentleman in question, he risks cardiac arrest trying to keep up with her sexual vigour.

If the young lady widely spreads her affections beyond her elderly swain, he risks contracting the kind of disease that, while merely a nuisance for a younger man, would make him the laughingstock of the clinic.

If he is married, and the affair becomes public knowledge, he risks losing his wife, along with much of what he has amassed during decades of tireless toil.

If he occupies a sensitive position, especially one with access to classified information, a scandal may jettison him onto a life on the lecture circuit.

Gen. David Petraeus, the ‘Peaches’ of my story, successfully avoided the first kind of trouble over his affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell and, one assumes, the second.

Mrs Petraeus hasn’t left him either, and neither has half of their communal property. He lost his job as Director, CIA, but, if anything, that gave him a chance to increase the size of the communal property with lucrative consultancies and speaking engagements.

The tawdry details of the affair did make Gen. David ‘Peaches’ Petraeus look frankly ludicrous, and that seemed to be the real downside at the time.

All sorts of details came out, including the more intimate ones of his trysts with the muscle-bound Paula Broadwell. Apparently she and the super-fit general would turn it on under the desk in his Langley office, presumably to the accompaniment of jangling sounds made by the silver-coated frames enclosing the pictures of Mrs Petraeus and ‘the kids’.

Personally, I’ve always assumed that in order to produce a kid one has to have sex with a goat, rather than Mrs Petraeus, but then we must make allowances for the Americans’ peculiarities of language, custom and morality.

Referring to a child as a ‘kid’ is one of their many linguistic quirks, now being exported to our shores along with sugary drinks, baseball caps worn backwards and verbs made out of nouns.

One of their more quaint customs is insistence on displaying on office desktops triptychs of family photos, augmented if necessary by additional frames to accommodate extra ‘kids’.

That is de rigueur for any self-respecting American executive, while miniature copies of the American flag are optional but highly desirable, especially for an executive in a government job.

The photos are there to demonstrate unswerving devotion to family values, which is why they are usually turned to face the visitors’ chairs. The flags’ function is to reconfirm the office-holder’s allegiance to the constitutional and moral values of the good old US of A.

Both sets of values may justifiably be deemed to have been compromised when the desktop symbols thereof are rocked as if in an earthquake by what’s going on under the desk.

But at least the general did do it under the desk rather than on top of it, which would have meant knocking the symbols off with a mighty sweep of an arm, or else risking an injury to Paula if parts of her body came in contact with the metal frames.

Americans’ sexual morality, as professed rather than practised, is still largely informed by the dubiously Christian sects that insist on the literal reading of the Seventh Commandment and Jesus’s subsequent expansion on it.

Hence a little foray outside marriage vows that would be regarded as a forgivable indiscretion in England and par for the course in France, in America is seen as a sacking offence for anyone in a position of public trust.

That’s what happened to Petraeus when the affair made the papers. The disclosure came as a result of Paula’s continual harassment of another woman, a putative rival for Peaches’s affections. The woman went to the police, the police intervened and harvested a rich crop of pornographic messages in the e-mails the lovers had exchanged.

That brought into question not just the general’s moral fibre but indeed his suitability for the top intelligence job in the world. After all, even a rank amateur untrained in spying tradecraft knows not to leave a paper or electronic trail when cheating on his wife.

Hence Petraeus’s enforced resignation was justified, if only for the incompetence he had demonstrated in the skills of his new profession.

Unfortunately, however, the e-mails revealed more than just the general’s ability to express himself romantically in the language of porn magazines.

For a search of Paula’s e-mails showed a wealth of classified material she had apparently received from the general, including access to CIA communications. Suddenly what started out to be naughty began to look criminal.

Under such circumstances the FBI and Justice Department are usually rather quick on the trigger. However, since a celebrated four-star general was involved, it has taken them two years to recommend that felony charges be brought.

Yet recommend it they have, and Gen. Petraeus is in danger of losing more than just his wife’s good graces. If charged, tried and convicted, he faces a long prison term.

The general denies any culpability in the matter, and has let it be known that he won’t accept any plea deal. This may be a bluff or a profession of genuine innocence.

I hope it’s the latter, and I wish Gen. Petraeus every luck in the world. This, however, doesn’t prevent me from having nightmares about the kind of people on whom the security of the world depends.

Yesterday Paris, along with many other cities around Europe, fell victim to a nauseating display of mandated sentimentality.

It was as if Diana, or rather her mangled body, had come back to whip up a frenzy of public sorrow.

Candles, flowers and other paraphernalia of grief were everywhere. I didn’t see any teddy bears, but some of the 1.5 million mourners must have brought a few. Anguish just isn’t complete without fluffy toys.

One almost expected to see an expertly saddened Tony Blair declare to the Paris mob that the victims of the Muslim atrocity were ‘people’s cartoonists’. One almost expected the London mob to harass the Queen with shrieks of ‘Show us you care, ma’am!’

In reality, the French tricolore was projected on the building of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, as if the battle after which the square is named had gone the other way. ‘Je suis Charlie’, screamed the crowd of people few of whom are Francophones and many of whom can’t even speak English properly.

But of course Paris claimed pride of place for the unprecedented scale of mawkish mourning. You ought to remember, mes amis, that grief is at its most poignant when it’s private and dignified. A single tear sliding down an otherwise stony face betokens sorrow. A crowd screaming Je suis Charlie! betokens a human herd.

Still, the spectacle would have been almost bearable if my old friends hadn’t acted in the capacity of shepherds. There they were: Angie and Dave, François and Junk (as Jean-Claude Juncker likes to be called by his mates), marching at the head of the herd and indulging in public foreplay for the cameras.

I was especially moved by the picture of Angie, her head on François’s shoulder, his arm embracing her warmly.

Isn’t Angie aware of the chap’s track record? A girl puts her head on François’s shoulder and before long his motorcycle helmet will turn up at her doorstep. Perhaps Angie feels she’s past the age of consent and therefore on safe grounds. A false sense of security, that, if you ask me – François abhors discrimination.

I really think yesterday’s grief was a misplaced and largely faked emotion for everyone other than the victims’ friends and families. A much more appropriate sentiment, as discrete from sentimentality, would have been rage.

Instead of ‘Je suis Charlie’, the demonstrators should have been shouting ‘J’accuse’.

And the objects of appropriate rage were all there, at the head of the rally, putting their heads on one another’s shoulders and looking oh so statesmanlike.

They should have been pinned to the wall and asked, fists at their noses, how they allowed this tragedy to happen and what they are going to do to make sure such tragedies don’t happen again.

Those 17 people didn’t die in an Alpine avalanche or a car accident. They were monstrously murdered by the enemies in our midst, those born within our civilisation but committed to destroying it.

The monsters didn’t operate in a vacuum. They operated in a poisoned atmosphere largely exhaled by our political establishment. You know, Dave, Angie, François, Junk et al, with their jolly friends and illustrious predecessors.

It’s they, our governing spivs, who in pursuit of their nefarious political ends have allowed unlimited Muslim immigration to our countries.

They, who have encouraged the immigrants and their offspring to live, if they so choose, lives of isolation from, and hatred of, the civilisation that took them in.

They, who have excreted or at least fostered the cocoon of political correctness protecting the enemies in our neighbourhoods.

They, who have hamstrung our security services and emasculated our police.

They, who do nothing, and will do nothing, to rid our societies of those who have declared war on us and now regard themselves as combatants behind enemy lines.

They, who out of cowardice and fear for their own political future refuse to acknowledge that there is a war on.

They, who lead the lemmings of our inert, ill-educated, anomic masses to the edge of an abyss and tell them to march on.

Yet, if they devoted themselves less to public relations and more to public safety, there would be much they could do.

Some understanding of the scale of the looming disaster would be a useful start. One hears BBC types claim that merely 10 per cent of the Muslims sympathise with jihadists. If true, that sounds almost innocent – unless we translate percentages into absolute numbers.

There are 38 million Muslims in Europe. Ten percent of that is 3.8 million who feel that the Charlie murderers did the right thing. Among them are thousands of activists like Mizanur Rahman of Palmers Green.

Those who ‘insult Islam’, declared this London-born preacher, ‘can’t expect a different result’. ‘Britain,’ he added, ‘is the enemy of Islam’. If only. Unfortunately, it’s the other way around.

As shown by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the 1933 Nazi equivalent, it doesn’t take millions of supporters and thousands of activists to destroy a country. Thousands of the former and dozens of the latter can do the job nicely.

Once we’ve understood what is really happening, all kinds of measures could be introduced to prevent the likes of Rahman and millions of those who heed sermons of hate from inflicting upon us a repeat of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, or something worse.

Norway provides an example to follow. There anyone expressing jihadist sentiments is quickly deported without much fuss. Over 10,000 Muslims have been deported in the last few years, and the violent crime rate in the country has fallen by almost a third.

Among the deportees were hundreds of Norwegian citizens, which destroys the myth of citizenship offering an ironclad right to stay. Rather than being an unconditional lifelong licence, citizenship involves a reciprocal arrangement.

Protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio projectionem (protection draws allegiance; allegiance, protection) is an old legal principle. Applied to the situation at hand, it’s clear that, as Rahman and the 150,000 British Muslims who regularly log onto jihadist websites feel no allegiance to Britain, Britain would be justified in taking their passports away and kicking them out.

Jihadist websites should have the same (preferably even greater) stigma attached to them as paedophile websites. Anyone following them religiously, as it were, must be punished by large fines and get a criminal record, with repeat offenders imprisoned and then deported.

Any mosque in which one jihadist word has ever been preached, must be shut down and ideally razed, with the preachers themselves treated as accessories to murder and their congregations as lists of suspects.

Anyone convicted of terrorist offences, be it perpetration or planning, must go to prison for a long time and then be deported. Had the French authorities applied such measures to the Kouachi brothers, the tragedy of Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t have happened – having already served prison terms, they were on every conceivable international list of villains.

All Muslim immigration must be stopped forthwith, and every Muslim visitor treated as a terror suspect until the situation improves and Britain (or Europe, if you’d rather) has been cleansed of dangerous elements.

Should any country finance, arm and train terrorists, this must be regarded as an act of war and dealt with accordingly.

Specifically, France and therefore Nato must summarily declare war on Yemen, where one of the murderers received such competent infantry training. Some hideous punitive damage, military or otherwise, must be inflicted on the country for its rulers to realise that hostilities towards the West don’t pay.

The list of things our spivocrats should do and won’t do could go on and on. But that would be an exercise in futility, for what they actually will do is more of the same: meaningless talk, empty gestures and well-rehearsed shows of solidarity aimed at winning the next election.

Je ne suis du tout Charlie.

Sky News has treated its viewers to a deep insight while commenting on today’s newspapers.

Their format for this part of the show involves bringing together two or three variably objectionable hacks and asking them to pick a story that caught their eye.

One of the stories selected this morning came from The Times. Apparently, according to an unidentified survey, Europeans in general and Brits in particular wouldn’t fight for their country.

Sky News didn’t cite any specific figures, but they are worth mentioning. Only 27 per cent of the Brits said they would take up arms, while the corresponding proportions for France and Germany were 29 and 18 per cent respectively.

‘Oh well,’ said the female commentator who inhabits the more objectionable end of the scale. “Obviously they only say they wouldn’t want to join the army. That doesn’t mean they won’t stand up for their beliefs.”

She didn’t offer an example of beliefs that, according to her, Europeans would find worth fighting for, but contextually she probably meant such vital causes as multiculturalism.

I agree. It would be churlish to refuse to fight for multiculturalism, especially after its salient points have been so powerfully demonstrated in France over the last couple of days.

Equally impossible would it be to offer conscientious objections to another hypothetical cause probably dear to the woman’s heart: homosexual marriage.

Not even the current profusion of pictures showing a happily prenuptial Stephen Fry, whom anyone with a modicum of taste must find revolting, would dampen the martial ardour of principled Brits.

Inscribe homomarriage on the banners, blow the bugle, and millions will flock to the recruitment offices, falling over themselves in their irresistible bellicosity.

Now defending their country from its potential multicultural enemies is a different matter altogether. That’s where Europeans in general and Brits in particular draw the line.

The same poll, incidentally, says that 76 per cent of Muslims in the Middle East would kill and be killed for their countries, while for Pakistan this figure is 89 per cent, almost everyone.

If true, this is cause for alarm. It’s also grounds for questioning the Muslims’ taste.

De gustibus… and all that, but to die for Pakistan? I don’t see the point. It would be so much easier to move to the East End of London, which has roughly the same demographics as Pakistan, but a higher standard of living and a still lower chance of being stoned (to death, that is).

I don’t know what to make of this poll. Call me an incurable romantic, but I find it hard to believe that if Britain is attacked by, say, Russia, 73 per cent would be happy to let Putin’s storm troopers do to Doncaster and Lincoln what they’ve already done to Donetsk and Luhansk.

It’s more comforting to believe that the poll reflects the Brits’ feelings about not the immediate future but the recent past.

Many must find it hard to envisage hypothetical if, to me, utterly possible wars against Russia or the multi-culti multitudes. Much easier is remembering the actual foolhardy forays into foreign lands instigated by Blair who, one hopes, will one day be tried for war crimes.

Most respondents probably felt that, if that’s what modern war is like, they want no part in it. Still, as the poll left the possible casus belli open-ended, the pacifism professed by Europeans is rather worrying.

And it’s hugely worrying if juxtaposed with a similar survey conducted by the Russian Agency for Social Research.

This is to be put in the context of the unceasing, unrelenting and uncontested war propaganda assailing Russians everywhere they turn.

Putin’s Goebbelses enjoy the same tight grip on mass communications as the original Goebbels had, and they use it with the same shameless mastery. Brainwashing in Russia competes with money laundering as the country’s chosen hygienic practice.

Both succeed famously, as witnessed by Putin’s offshore billions and the results of the poll in question, which have been published by the sociologist Vyacheslav Baliasnikov.

When asked “Would you support invading the Ukraine with troops?”, 56.8 per cent of the 4,200 respondents replied in the affirmative.

The second question moved from the general to the specific: “Are you ready to be conscripted into the army to fulfil this mission, or to send your child to war?”

Yes, answered 52 per cent, we are ready “both to kill our brother Slavs ourselves and to send our children into the meat grinder,” reports Baliasnikov.

“Invasion of which country by Russian troops,” pressed on the survey, “would you support?” The Baltics came at the top, immediately followed by the USA and Japan.

Amazingly, Israel came close to the bottom. Judging by the reported exodus of France’s Jews, Israel might do better in similar French polls, but I’m not aware of any.

However, here is how Baliasnikov, comments on the poll conducted by his organisation: “I congratulate Putin. He has succeeded in creating a state of such stratospheric scum that I’m no longer scared. I’m simply disgusted.”     

So am I, Vyacheslav. But, comparing your poll with ours, I’m scared as well.

I first arrived in New York at the time of Watergate, a few days after Nixon sacked the federal prosecutor Archibald Cox.

The city was awash with anti-Nixon posters, bumper stickers and newspaper headlines, and I was struck by both the vehemence and volume of the invective.

Some of the messages were meant to be humorous, and some of those did make me laugh.

Such as the bumper sticker ‘Impeach the Cox sacker’, which complemented my mirth with the vain pride of being able to get the naughty double entendre on my first day in an English-speaking country.

Some others made me wince, such as a large cartoon poster of Nixon being sodomised in a prison cell by a black inmate. ‘Justice at last’, said the caption, and I felt that sometimes freedom of expression went a bit too far.

Now, almost 42 years later, the Paris massacre brings back those memories and those thoughts.

For freedom of speech has to be balanced by freedom from speech. Your right to call me a fat bastard must exist in some kind of equilibrium with my right not to be called a fat bastard, even (especially?) if both parts of the designation may well be true.

One man’s freedom is another man’s licence and yet another man’s anarchy. My different reactions to the New York sticker and poster sprang from a knee-jerk choice of where the lines ought to be drawn.

Because I thought it funny and clever, the sticker was to me a worthy exercise of irrevocable freedom. Because I thought it unfunny and crude, the poster represented what I saw as revocable licence.

I was entitled to that view, just as someone else would have been entitled to its opposite. But a successful society can’t possibly accommodate every possible taste: it must decide where to draw the same line for all.

And a line must be drawn, for no freedom, be it creative or political, can exist without some discipline.

For example, free trade is wonderful but, when exercised without discipline, it can easily become gangsterism or at least double dealing. Every game must be played by the rules, and the injunction against, say, insider trading or price fixing is one of the essential rules of this particular game.

Even creative freedom can’t exist, or at least produce anything worthwhile, outside some disciplinary restraints, ideally self-imposed. Disciplined art produces Giotto’s saints and Vermeer’s women; undisciplined art produces unmade beds and animals pickled in formaldehyde. 

Yet even when imposed externally, reasonable restraints don’t demonstrably hurt the quality of the creative output – quite the opposite. For example, most of the world’s great literature was produced in conditions of some censorship, and next to none in the absence of such conditions.

Following the outrage perpetrated in Paris, it’s tempting to say that freedom of speech must not be restrained in any way, but one should resist that temptation. What is undeniable that this or any other freedom should be restricted by law, not by assault rifles.

Moreover, freedom of speech is already restrained everywhere, without raising objections from even the staunchest libertarians.

To use a popular example, everyone agrees that creating a stampede in a cinema by screaming ‘Fire!’ for fun ought to be punished. Similarly, it seems reasonable that, while newspapers shouldn’t be banned from criticising government officials, they mustn’t be allowed to call for their assassination.

The question is where the watershed lies between reasonable restraints and tyranny. In other words, what restraints are reasonable in each case?

With literature, the answer is easy. Proscriptive censorship, telling writers what they mustn’t write, has no noticeable deleterious effect on literary output. Conversely, prescriptive censorship, telling writers what they must write, kills literature stone dead.

Hence, for instance, the Russians produced one of the world’s greatest literatures under the tsars’ proscriptive censorship, and one of the puniest under the prescriptive censorship imposed by Col. Putin’s Bolshevik colleagues.

Since the monstrosity in Paris was provoked by cartoons lampooning Mohammed, it’s specifically religious freedom that has come into focus.

All religions are fair game for the most savage of attacks, say the libertarians, along with those who are so appalled by the massacres that they adopt the libertarian position ad hoc.

No religion must be insulted, say traditionalists, not only Islamic but also Christian. For example, many Russian Orthodox priests and laity have declared that the staff of Charlie Hebdo have only themselves to blame, and let it be a lesson to all blasphemers.

They have their own agenda, based on the gross mistake of lumping all religions together. I never tire of saying that there is no such thing as religion in general, and hence there can be no blasphemy in general.

There are only specific religions, each with its own relationship to God and man, each with its own philosophy, ethics and aesthetics. To say that they all merit equal treatment is only to say that they are all equally irrelevant.

I firmly believe that we must have some blasphemy laws, but they should only protect our founding religion, which is Christianity, or Judaeo-Christianity if you’d rather.

Unrestrained and savage mockery of it represents a sledgehammer taken to the cornerstone of our civilisation – knock it out, and the building collapses. This would spell, has practically already spelled, the end of the West in any other than the geographical sense of the word.

Machiavelli did write that “there is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rights of religion held in contempt”, but rest assured he was talking specifically about Christianity, not Islam or Buddhism or any other creed.

Freedom of speech is essential, but it’s not a suicide pact. Society has the right to protect itself, and surely defending its founding faith from abuse is essential to such protection, especially when both the faith and society are under threat.

Islam, to name an obvious example, shouldn’t be entitled to protection under our law. Tact, good manners and taste should be the only factors restraining the vigour of criticism or satire directed at Islam and its icons.

That’s why I find it abhorrent that the British government has no guts to say that while the wearing of a cross publicly is fine, wearing, say, a burka is not. Instead it issues a wishy-washy ban on religious symbols in general.

In terms of Charlie Hebdo, I may find their cartoons of Mohammed unfunny and tasteless, but I’m prepared to defend their right to publish them – to the death if need be, and I’m shocked that for the magazine’s staff this turned out to be not just a figure of speech.

Conversely, I’d be prepared to limit their right to insult Christians and Jews the same way. I’m afraid that in this matter, as in most others, égalité is the enemy of liberté.

The state shouldn’t put self-expression into a straitjacket, but neither should it issue a licence for the lunatics to run the asylum. This proposition seems fairly straightforward, except that no proposition is straightforward in the muddle of our terribly confused society. 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Here, some 100 miles south of Paris, things are peacefully quiet. In Paris itself there is no peace and there is no quiet. Yet another lot of innocent blood has been spilled by Muslim terrorism; yet another well of typographic paint has been uncapped.

I can’t really add much to the profusion of indignation so eloquently expressed by so many since the rampage of atrocities in Paris.

All I can offer is a few comments on the commentators, of whom some are right, some righteous, some self-righteous, some utterly predictable and some predictably hypocritical.

In that last category one ought to mention the front-page headline in the Communist newspaper L’Humanité: “What they murdered is liberty.”

It isn’t, comrades. The Kouachi brothers merely pinpricked liberty, but it will recover – such as it can ever be in today’s West dedicated to the values of care, share and be aware.

The real murder of liberty would have occurred only if the cause championed by the paper since 1917 had triumphed. For throughout the existence of the Soviet Union this Stalinist rag toed the Soviet line with canine fidelity.

This is understandable, considering that it was wholly funded by the KGB, and its circulation defied the usual understanding of this publishing term.

Using Soviet blood-stained money, L’Humanité would print lorry-loads of copies that few would read and fewer would buy.

Most of the unused circulation would then be circulated to Russia, there to be pulped. The resulting paper would then be shipped back to Paris for L’Humanité to print more copies. Then, in an early foretaste of responsible recycling, the process would be repeated. 

The rag’s founders and pundits, most of whom were Soviet agents, not just sympathisers, were desperate to bring to France the Soviet version of liberty, complete with enslaved population, nonexistent free press, concentration camps, torture and mass shootings.

In compliance with Stalin’s directives, L’Humanité hailed the Nazi-Soviet pact and openly agitated against France’s resistance to the Nazi attack, thereby contributing to its success – only to change its tack on 22 June, when the Nazis attacked the rag’s real owners.

To watch this paper shed crocodile tears over the blow suffered by freedom of the press is like reading laments about homosexual marriage in PinkNews.

Not to be outdone, Libération also bemoans this attack on freedom of expression, screaming “We are all Charlie” from its front page. Of course Libération preaches its devotion to the abused liberal virtue only because it has to function in a country where its raison d’être hasn’t yet triumphed.

Rather than being Stalinist, like L’Humanité, Libération is Trotskyist which, in the context of freedom of the press, is a distinction without a difference.

Both papers, along with their marginally more temperate colleagues at Le Monde and indeed Charlie Hebdo, are largely responsible for fostering the climate of anomic ‘liberalism’ in which Muslim terrorism grows in the soil fertilised by millions of Muslim immigrants.

Assorted lefties, in France and elsewhere, are only too happy to import vast and vastly alien populations, to be used as battering rams of the new order. Then they feign distress when the imports act in character.

Charlie Hebdo itself belongs to the extreme left of French journalism. As such it doesn’t discriminate: it attacks with equal venom Christians, Muslims and especially Jews, for which diatribes the paper has been charged with anti-Semitic propaganda in the past.

The Muslims, of course, tend to take the law in their own hands, which they did a few years ago when attacking Charlie Hebdo’s offices with petrol bombs. Since then the paper has been under police protection, and the assigned police officer was killed in yesterday’s assault.

After the first attack Stéphane Charbonnier, the paper’s editor, refused to surrender to terrorist threats. “It’s better to die standing up than to live kneeling,” he said at the time.

The statement is undeniably noble, but its provenance isn’t. Originally uttered by the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, the saying gained wide currency in Europe’s leftwing circles after it was used during the Spanish Civil War by the communist chieftain Dolores Ibárruri, nicknamed La Pasionaria.

La Pasionaria acquired her nom de révolution for biting through a priest’s jugular vein, and there have to be better ways of quenching one’s thirst. This monster’s words clearly resonated through Charbonnier’s mind.

His cause wasn’t heroic, but his death was, and even those who detested his politics are mourning his death at the hands of Islamic murderers.

Then of course one reads, and hears in the broadcast media, a constant flow of predictable assurances that the atrocity had nothing to do with Islam.

Yet since the murderers were manifestly not Lutheran and, while shooting up Charlie Hebdo’s editorial meeting, they screamed “Allahu akbar!” and “We’ve avenged Prophet Mohammed!” rather than singing Stille Nacht, one is tempted to think that the Muslim faith had a teeny something to do with it.

Not so, according to the British Muslim scholar pontificating on this morning’s Sky News that the religious link is tenuous to the point of being nonexistent.

There is, he acknowledged, one sentence in Hadith, the collection of Mohammed’s sayings, to the effect that anyone offending the Prophet must be killed. But the current thinking is that whenever Hadith contradicts humanitarian values the latter must take precedence.

Obviously this point hasn’t been communicated with sufficient clarity to ISIS, Hamas, al-Qaeda or to the murderous Paris-born Muslims who took such exception to a few cartoons in Charlie Hebdo.

The scholar further explained that real Muslims don’t behave in such a barbaric fashion. They dedicate their lives to living peacefully, the way Mohammed lived.

The poor chap doesn’t have much sense of humour. That faculty alone would have prevented him from making such patently ludicrous remarks in the full knowledge that this is exactly what they are.

For the role model of his religion set rather unpeaceful examples to follow.

Thus his first act after moving from Mecca to Medina was to murder hundreds of Jews with his own hand. This is how the earliest Muslim biographer of Mohammed describes this 627 AD event:

“When [the Jewish Qurayza tribe] surrendered, the Prophet confined them in Medina… Then he sent for them and struck off their heads… as they were brought out to him in batches… There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900… This went on until the Prophet made an end of them.”

Note that his victims had surrendered – just as the victims of the Kouachi brothers meekly went to their death. Hence the brothers were doing exactly what the Sky News expert suggested all faithful Muslims ought to do: imitate Mohammed.

The French police will probably catch the fleeing murderers, but it’ll take some doing. For, after shooting another surrendering policeman, the brothers fled in the direction of Saint-Denis, the Muslim ghetto in the north of Paris, which has become a virtual no-go area even for the police.

It’s there and in other such neighbourhoods beyond the Périphérique ring road that thousands of cars are burned every year by rioters screaming “Nique la France!” (F*** France!).

One gets the impression that the programme of multi-culti assimilation hasn’t been an unequivocal success in France. Murderers on the run find a natural home in Saint-Denis, where they are surrounded by thousands of admiring fans.

We aren’t short of such support in Britain, as witnessed by the London preacher of hate Anjem Choudary who blamed the French government for “allowing” the offensive cartoons to be published, “thereby placing the sanctity of citizens at risk.”

What the French government, along with the British and other Western European governments, shouldn’t have allowed is the burgeoning of vast communities of those who are institutionally and religiously conditioned to hate everything the West stands for.

And they should be blamed not for upholding freedom of the press but for refusing to acknowledge that there is a war on – and we are losing.

Few things are as polarising as debates over the taking of human life.

By now the Augustinian concept of just war has caught on, and soldiers killing for their country aren’t widely regarded as murderers.

When the state says that the war it is fighting is just, youngsters aren’t supposed to struggle with moral choice. They are expected to go and kill or be killed.

When they exercise their own moral choice, the state punishes those whose moral choice it finds wrong. The issue is more or less clear-cut.

Not so with other forms of homicide, such as the death penalty and abortion. One observes that those in favour of the former are almost always opposed to the latter and vice versa, with both sides invoking the argument that human life is sacred.

Since even intelligent atheists acknowledge that Western morality derives from Judaeo-Christianity, it’s worth mentioning that religious views on such matters are unequivocal. The death penalty doesn’t contradict our religion; abortion does.

The religious argument must be made. Yet the same case can be argued rationally, without taking God’s name in vain.

Executing a murderer doesn’t so much deny as assert the value of human life. By having the courage to kill the killer, the state expresses society’s abhorrence of murder.

Human life, the state says thereby, is sacred. Whoever takes it wantonly thus strikes out against not just his victim but against every moral foundation of society.

A murder sends out destructive waves into society, and their amplitude can never be attenuated if the crime is left unpunished, or punished inadequately.

No punishment other than death is in this case adequate specifically because human life is sacred.

Its value can’t be measured against any length of imprisonment. Society can no longer protect the victim, but imposing the death penalty is the only way for it itself not to be victimised.

Therefore the death penalty was never regarded as cruel and unusual punishment anywhere in the West until the last few decades.

At that point the Judaeo-Christian underpinnings of our society were destroyed  and society was cast adrift – into oblivion.

Since, as Margaret Thatcher once explained, society no longer exists, it can no longer be threatened, and suddenly the death penalty becomes unacceptable. We are atomised individuals now, each with his own view of right and wrong.

This inevitably creates morally troubled waters in which any tyrannical, which is to say modern, state can then fish by turning itself into the unifying moral authority.

Rather than referring to an appropriate scriptural verse, as the erstwhile moral authorities used to do, the state can impose its own laws that seem moral but are in fact self-serving.

The state’s principal objective is not to enforce immutable moral laws but to self-perpetuate by putting forth regulations aimed at destroying the laws that have for ages been considered immutable. Any surrogate will do, provided the state can throw the might of its formidable propaganda machine behind it.

Hence Western states one by one abolished the death penalty, and hence also they’ve allowed abortion on demand. This somehow is no longer seen as the arbitrary taking of a human life.

Forgetting for a second any moral or, God forbid, religious considerations, the logic of it has always defeated me, as if to serve a reminder that modernity, allegedly devoted to the triumph of reason, ends up stamping reason into the muck.

The only way not to regard abortion as killing is not to regard a foetus as human. But, having written this sentence, the state refuses to put a full stop at the end of it.

It acknowledges that a foetus is indeed human, which is why it’s wrong to kill it when it’s close to climbing out of the womb. Until that moment, however, it’s just a part of the mother’s body, like an appendix.

The logical chaos begins when the state attempts to pin down the beginning of life to a specific point during pregnancy. Generally speaking, most states agree that a foetus is already human during the second and third trimester.

One has to infer that, when the clock strikes midnight on the ninety-third day of pregnancy, a miracle occurs. A magic wand is waved and an appendix becomes a person.

Since those who operate our states tend not to believe in miracles, they must have a more rational explanation for this transformation, though so far they have modestly refrained from offering it for public consumption.

One can understand their reticence, for no logical explanation exists. If a foetus is human at 93 days, it has to be just as human at 92, 62 or 22.

Logically speaking, only one indisputable moment can be accepted as the beginning of a human life, that of conception. Therefore abortion constitutes a killing at any time during pregnancy, be it at 150 days or 15.

Being a reasonable sort, I’m willing to accept – strictly for the sake of argument – that the issue is in doubt.

But surely any doubt must be treated as a certainty: it’s the sacred human life we are talking about here. If it’s even remotely possible that life already exists, then it must be assumed to exist for sure.

Yet we can no longer be rational about such things. The state has trained us to be sanctimonious instead, because it can use our sanctimony against us.

All similar considerations apply to euthanasia. Since sentiment has been replaced by sentimentality, we are supposed to jump up and salute at the state’s supposedly humane permission to kill those whose lives are so full of suffering that they are no longer worth living.

Again logic interferes. Exactly who decides that a life is no longer worth living? Who establishes the point at which suffering becomes intolerable?

It could be the sufferer himself, which is usually the case. But people in pain will often do or say anything to get relief, which incidentally is used as an argument against torture.

The poor chap may feel that death is his only salvation, but we’ve all heard of many miraculous recoveries. If he indeed recovers, don’t you think the patient will be glad he didn’t opt for euthanasia, or that the option didn’t exist in the first place?

Sometimes the death-defining moment is established by doctors, who thanks to their training are more likely to decide correctly that the suffering is irreversible.

Yet more likely doesn’t mean guaranteed, and we have all heard of doctors making horrendous mistakes in writing patients off prematurely.

The only rational solution to the problem is the same as in abortion. Because we can’t know for sure one way or the other, we must err on the side of the sanctity of human life. Only he who gives life can take it, and neither doctors nor patients themselves fall into that category.

Yet, just as with abortion, sanctimony rules. And, just as with abortion, the goalposts are pushed all the way towards the corner flags.

At first abortion was seen as allowable only when the mother’s life was in danger. Then, as diagnostic techniques became more sophisticated, when the foetus couldn’t be expected to grow up at least as modestly intelligent as Ed Miliband. And then – whenever the woman felt like it.

Euthanasia, and its close relation assisted suicide, was first deemed appropriate only when a clearly terminal patient suffered intolerable and unrelievable pain. Eventually it got to be considered not just allowable but desirable for anyone who no longer felt like living.

When modern sanctimony comes in, reason walks out. Witness the latest bout of madness, in Belgium.

Some 30 years ago a 22-year-old man went on a rampage of rape and murder, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Last week the villain complained he could no longer stand prison life and demanded that doctors kill him.

And – are you ready for this? – Belgium’s Federal Euthanasia Commission agreed. The man was to be put to death next Sunday.

Only yesterday’s last-minute intercession by psychiatrists put this egregious act on hold for the time being. Yet again I feel baffled.

Belgium, along with most formerly civilised countries, has banned capital punishment. In spite of that a criminal was to be judicially killed in a grotesque fusion of euthanasia, assisted suicide and the death penalty.

Modernity has abandoned God in the name of reason, and God’s morality in the name of the secular kind. But an odd thing happened: it turns out that without God there is no reason and no morality.

We ignore the evidence showing that God’s laws aren’t just more righteous but also infinitely more rational than man’s laws. One only hopes it won’t take an apocalyptic calamity to drive this point home.

At the beginning of the film In Bruges, a gangster speaks with his tongue slightly in cheek: “What have the Belgians ever given us? Nothing but child abuse and chocolates. And they only use the chocolates to get at the kids.”

This wasn’t supposed to be serious analysis, yet the analytical methodology behind it can boast divine endorsement: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”

Applying this proven way of thought to Belgium, one has to admit that she isn’t among the most accomplished of European nations. Still, from van Eyck, Memling and Rubens to Franck, Magritte and Maeterlinck, Belgium has more to offer than just chocolates and their possible illicit uses.

Flemish urban architecture doesn’t have much to apologise for either, with Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp generally believed to be among Europe’s most beautiful cities.

Admittedly Brussels is justly believed to be among Europe’s ugliest cities, but that makes it an ideal capital of the European Union. I mean, would you rather have Paris or Rome befouled by thousands of denationalised bureaucrats on fat expense accounts?

All in all, Belgium wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to live, but then it wouldn’t be the last one either. Not with so many Muslim countries around.

Applying the same methodology to assessing Islamic civilisation, one has to acknowledge that the fruits it has borne have mostly been either poisonous or nonexistent.

In its earlier days of violent expansion, some scholars bearing quills travelled the world in the wake of riders brandishing swords. Just as the riders bridged Asia and Europe with their conquests, so did the scholars act as conduits of knowledge flowing back and forth.

Thus the Arabs brought to Europe algebra and Aristotle, the former from India the latter from Greece. But, unlike the Indians and the Greeks, they made few indigenous contributions to the world.

These days the Muslims criticise the West for its decadence, and much of their criticism is justified. What isn’t justified is their right to offer such criticism.

One should suggest they use the critical methodology that came from the same source as the analytical methodology I mentioned earlier: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Much is being made these days of the violent advances made by Muslim fanatics in the Middle East, along with the seemingly peaceful demographic advances made by so-called moderate Muslims in Europe.

The target of these two prongs is clearly and with laudable honesty enunciated by Muslim leaders: the creation of an Islamic caliphate destined to rule or at least to dominate the whole world.

My imagination isn’t vivid enough to see the resulting world order in my mind’s eye. But, judging by the Muslims’ record in the countries they already possess, this prospect isn’t much to look forward to with eager anticipation.

The world’s scientists number only one per cent of Muslims in their ranks, with Israel alone having more scientists than all Islamic countries combined.

This is hardly surprising for Arab countries’ collective investment in scientific research is but one-seventh of the world’s average.

Only 300 foreign books are translated in Arab lands every year – one fifth of the number translated in Greece.

Twenty per cent of the world’s population live in Muslim countries, yet their combined GDP is smaller than that of France, although this may change if François Hollande sticks around for a while.

Add to this the rich contribution that Muslims make to Europe’s crime rate, and one would think our governments would do all they can to limit, or better still reverse, the spread of Islamism.

One would hope they’d see the existential menace provided by the implantation of an alien and historically hostile civilisation into an admittedly decadent but still residually western Europe.

Such hopes would be forlorn. Waving the false flag of liberalism in the air, while keeping the dagger of destruction for political gain up their sleeves, European governments seem to be competing with one another as to which one can cede the most ground to Islam the fastest.

As is increasingly becoming the norm, governments and societies no longer see eye to eye on most issues, and this one especially.

People care less and less about which party is going to be in office after the next election – witness the growing apathy of the electorate across Europe and the unprecedented uncertainty of outcome in most precincts.

But they care more and more about their national identity, which they increasingly see as under threat from alien implants. In response European governments, emphatically including ours, foster the tyrannical spread of liberal cant increasingly backed up by the force of the law.

When people express even the mildest of resentments against their own countries being yanked out from underneath their feet, they are declared to be neolithic racists and troglodyte xenophobes. When their resentment goes one notch above mildest, they are routinely charged with ‘hate crimes’.

This newfangled legal category may include not only physical attacks on Muslims but even some publicly expressed dismay over, say, the number of mosques in Britain having grown from 60 to 1,600 in the last 50 years.

European governments and people are clearly at cross-purposes, and so far the governments have had the upper hand. Yet there are indications that this situation is being reversed.

Even our sham democracies can’t afford to ignore the swell of public opinion for ever, and the opinion is indeed swelling. It’s slowly becoming possible to voice a concern about uncontrolled immigration in general and Muslim immigration in particular without being equated to Hitler.

But slowly is the operative word, while the burgeoning of Islam in Europe is anything but slow. Feeling impotent to do anything about it by appealing to their representatives, people are beginning to act in the only way still open to them: taking to the streets.

If in the past such actions were the preserve of various extremist groups, today’s political mainstream is beginning to swing that way too.

Witness the tens of thousands who took part in yesterday’s protests against the creeping Islamisation of Germany. Most of the participants in the rallies indeed came from rather radical groups, but only because the action had been poorly organised.

A poll conducted by Germany’s impeccably liberal Stern magazine shows that one in eight Germans would join an anti-Islam march if it were organised close to home. How long before one in eight becomes one in three?

The British tend to trail behind the continentals in the ardour of political activism. But this side of The Guardian pages and HMG press releases, one hardly hears anything other than anger about the continuing Islamisation of our country.

The people of Europe clearly don’t want their countries to become branches of an Islamic caliphate, and they are prepared to confront their governments over this issue.

I can’t say I blame them. Who’d want to live in an Islamic or even quasi-Islamic country? To paraphrase W.C. Fields, all in all I’d rather be in Belgium.

 

 

 

Paul Valéry must have had Russians in mind when he wrote that “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism.”

Well, fine, not all Russians – one shouldn’t generalise. But chauvinism is certainly the only lesson learned by many Russian descendants of White émigrés, most of them living in France.

One has to reach this melancholy conclusion on the basis of their open letter Solidarity with Russia in the Hour of the Ukrainian Tragedy.

Written by Count and Countess Shakhovskoy, the missive includes among its 100-odd signatories members of some of Russia’s oldest families.

A Bobrinsky, a Tolstoy, a Bariatinsky, a Sheremetiev, a Pushkin et al all signed this proof that they must have played truant when history was taught. Especially that part of history that went beyond chauvinism.

Their ancestors were the lucky ones. They managed to get away when Putin’s ancestors raped Russia.

The unlucky ones were culled en masse, for no crime other than belonging to an undesirable class. Actually, culled is perhaps a wrong word, suggesting as it does a quick death visited without much imagination.

Yet many murders were quite imaginative, as documented in Sergei Melgunov’s book The Red Terror, published in the west while Lenin was still alive.

Melgunov cites thousands of instances of such niceties as skinning people alive, rolling them around in nail-studded barrels, driving nails into people’s skulls, quartering, burning alive, flailing, crucifying, stuffing people alive into locomotive furnaces, pouring molten pitch or liquefied lead down their throats.

White Russians who ended up in Paris kept their lives, but they all lost something else. Those who had large families, lost some of their members. Those who had estates, lost them. Those who had money, lost it. Those who had libraries and musical instruments, lost them. Those who had jobs at universities, lost them.

Above all, they all lost their country, and many swore to regain it by ousting the blood-soaked degenerates who took over in 1917. Yet there was always a growing group, infiltrated or otherwise corrupted by the Bolsheviks, which began to claim that the Soviet Union was the same old Russia, albeit painted red.

For all their professed internationalism, they’d say, the Bolsheviks expressed the national Russian idea. Hence they must be supported.

They didn’t know much about what was going on in Russia, and what they did know they blanked out. Many went so far as to beg forgiveness and implore the Soviets to take them back.

The Soviets would oblige, typically welcoming the repatriates with executions and concentration camps.

But even many of those who knew better than to go back still took out Soviet passports as a symbolic gesture. They’d go to the Soviet embassy, drink to Stalin’s health and gorge themselves on free caviar few of them could afford at home.

Step by step, in their minds Soviet Russia ceased to exist as a real and quite awful country, now painted such a dark hue of red that it looked almost brown.

She was replaced by a legend, a sort of secular verbal icon depicting a pristine mother cradling baby émigrés in her arms. With each passing decade, chauvinism indeed became the only lesson they learned from history – and the only one they passed on to their descendants.

Not long ago, a young Frenchman whose Russian father was born in Paris explained to me that the very earth of Russia is sacred. “What makes it any more sacred than the earth of, say, England or France?” I asked – in French, for the youngster doesn’t know a single Russian word except ‘vodka’, wrongly stressed on the last syllable.

He looked at me as if I had questioned the heliocentric nature of our universe. For both him and even his father (who does speak some Russian, reasonably well for a Frenchman) the saintliness of Russia is axiomatic.

To them every Russian regime, be it Grand Prince Vladimir’s, Stalin’s, Gorbachev’s or Putin’s is part of the same blessed continuum, which they idealise in defiance of any widely documented facts.

Russia to them can do no wrong – even if it’s ruled, as it is now, by the spiritual and institutional heirs to the same chaps who flailed and quartered their ancestors, those who didn’t manage to get away to Paris.

This explains why, rather than being appalled by Putin’s frankly kleptofascist regime, they lash out against those who dare criticise it – and especially those who try, however meekly, to resist its aggression against the Ukraine. 

Hence the letter, written by Their Highnesses from the height of their fire-eating jingoism. One paragraph will suffice to get across the essence of this message ad urbi et orbi:

“In the face of increasing tensions, both in Donbass and in international relations, one conclusion is inescapable: the aggressive hostility currently unfolding against Russia is devoid of any rationality. The politics of double standards goes beyond the scale. Russia is being accused of all crimes and found a priori guilty without any evidence, while other countries are offered amazing latitude, specifically in the area of observing human rights.”

One would be tempted to say that every word in the paragraph, as in the whole letter, betokens either ignorance or stupidity. But that’s not the case, at least not the primary case: the letter is animated by unadulterated chauvinism. Those cursed with it are indeed bound to sound ignorant and stupid, but this is a side effect only.

Facts can never make inroads on Russian chauvinism, especially its strongest, vicarious variety afflicting those Russians who have wisely refrained from living in the mythical land of their morbid imagination. The rest of us, however, should be reminded of the facts.

Such as, I am not aware of any country serially violating civil rights that is given ‘amazing latitude’ in the West. Neither apparently are the authors who fail to cite any such place.

One can guess that they refer to Israel’s attempts to protect her citizens against terrorist attacks, but this is only conjecture based on this group’s long history of, putting it mildly, ambivalent feelings towards the Jews.

In that case all I can suggest to the authors is that they read The Guardian or, closer to home, Le Monde. They’ll find plenty of evidence that Israel is never short of Western detractors. No ‘double standard beyond the scale’ is there to be seen.

What they mean by ‘irrational hostility towards Russia’ is neither irrational nor hostile. It’s simply the West’s attempt to use sanctions to mitigate Russia’s rabid aggressiveness towards her neighbours, this time towards the Ukraine.

Russia happens to be the only European country currently attempting a conquest of another European country. This is indeed a crime of which Russia is accused, but she is ‘found guilty’ neither ‘a priori’ nor ‘without evidence’.

Do the authors think that it’s Martians who have occupied parts of the Ukraine? If so, they should by all means continue to hold that view, at least until they have received some competent psychiatric treatment.

The rest of us know that the culprit is Russia or, to be more specific, her ruling regime or, to be even more specific, Putin. This knowledge is strictly a posteriori, with enough evidence to convince the jury and convict the culprit.

But the authors don’t sit in judgement of Russia. For these vicarious chauvinists Russia is God, and God is only to be worshipped, not judged.

Perhaps they ought to read Paul Valéry’s essays – in the original language, which they know a whole lot better than Russian.