Category: Blog

A friend of mine wrote to me yesterday: “A sentence in this morning’s newspaper tells us all we need to know on this subject: ‘The RAF’s first transgendered fighter pilot is to have her own sperm frozen.’ (italics mine)”

Actually, this sentence is so multi-faceted that it works on many different levels, telling us all we need to know about more than one subject.

The obvious one is the future battle-worthiness of our armed forces in general and the RAF in particular.

As someone who has never been called upon to go into battle I’m fascinated by the men who are. What motivates them to go over the top into machinegun fire? Fight to the last bullet? Fly into one dogfight after another, knowing that the odds in favour of survival are dwindling away with each take-off?

Take Douglas Bader, for example. That RAF fighter pilot was a great ace during the Second World War. The Group Captain is credited with 20 solo victories, four shared ones, six probables, one shared probable and 11 enemy aircraft damaged.

He was a hero by anyone’s standards, but few other men have ever had such standards. For Bader was a double amputee, having lost both his legs in 1931. He was discharged then, but insisted on returning to the frontline squadrons when the war started.

Now there was a man who didn’t need an excuse to sit out that war. No one in his right mind would have accused him of cowardice had he stayed on the ground.

Yet he didn’t. Why?

Love of his country must have been the most obvious motive, but I’m sure there were others as well. Pride had to be one of them – not in the sense of hubris, which is one of the cardinal sins, but in the sense of esprit de corps, which is one of the martial virtues.

By all accounts, soldiers, and especially those in the elite branches of service such as the RAF, go into battle not just for God, king and country, but also for the proud fraternity of their comrades.

Some of them may not be believers, monarchists or even patriots, but esprit de corps alone is enough motivation. Even if unsure that heroic death will earn them immortality, they have no doubt it will earn them the admiration of their comrades, their unit, the RAF at large – and of the whole nation.

Now how do you suppose they would feel if they knew that the RAF has become the laughingstock of the nation, rather than its pride? How do you think Douglas Bader would have felt?

Yet the sentence that caught my friend’s eye goes a long way towards making the RAF a butt of silly jokes, not least my own. Soldiers can handle danger; what they can’t handle is mockery.

How willing will our future heroes be to join the RAF knowing they might fly to a likely death in the company of a freaky side show freezing ‘her own sperm’? And should some of the esprit de corps evaporate, what effect will it have on the defence of the realm?

Never in the field of human conflict was so much damage done to so many by so few words, to paraphrase ever so slightly.

As a lifelong student of language, I am in general fascinated by the capacity of words to destroy with a laudable economy of means. Float something like liberté, egalité, fraternité up in the air and a whole civilisation can go up in smoke.

As to a few words telling us all we need to know, they can do so even if we don’t understand the words.

For example, you probably don’t have a clue what on earth these nine words mean: “Ofiteri de politie in civil opereaza in aceasts zona”.

Yet, when they appear on a Metropolitan Police sign put up in Covent Garden during the Christmas shopping rush, they indeed tell us, as a minimum, all we need to know about one complex problem, that of immigration.

These words are the Romanian for ‘plainclothes policemen operating in this area’. Since the message isn’t repeated in any other language, it has to be aimed at one group only: monolingual Romanian pickpockets.

The Met clearly knows that picking pockets in London is a profession almost exclusively reserved for arrivals from Romania, our fellow member of the European Union.

Equally obvious is the fact that the same message wouldn’t have a similarly deterrent effect if it were inscribed in English, which is after all the official language of this member of the European Union.

For the Romanian Artful Dodgers have no English. What they do have is the unrestricted right to come to Britain in unlimited numbers – all to the accompaniment of even our supposedly conservative broadsheets bleating about immigrants enriching our nation.

Well, they certainly don’t enrich those members of our nation whose pockets they pick. Nor do they enrich bank ATMs and their customers: almost 100 per cent of all crime against cash machines is committed by Romanian monoglots.

Far be it from me to commit the linguistic fallacy of claiming that the sentence ‘most pickpockets and ATM criminals are Romanians’ means the same as ‘most Romanians are pickpockets and ATM criminals.’

I’m sure they aren’t, although this certainty is based on a general sense of statistical probability rather than any hard data.

But still, those nine words in Covent Garden open up all sorts of paths into all sorts of areas: our immigration policy, EU membership, modernity, a civilisation in crisis.

Mercifully, I don’t even have to tread those paths. Those few words I’ve mentioned indeed tell you all you need to know.

One question does need an answer though: how likely are those Romanian pickpockets to be transgender women freezing their own sperm?

By ruling that obesity is like any old disability, the European Court of Justice didn’t just abuse justice. It reduced man to the level of an animal, vegetable or mineral.

Discounting the minuscule number of those cursed with rare thyroid conditions, how do people become obese?

Any medical professional will tell you that the widespread abuse of bathroom scales is a result of people consuming more calories than they burn off. In other words, stuffing one’s face without exercising the rest of one’s body.

When input exceeds output, we gain weight and become fat. When we do so for a long time, we gain more weight and become obese.

The bad news is that those who have a genetic predisposition to obesity should eat less and exercise more than those miserable bastards who never seem to pile on pounds no matter what they do.

The good news is that both the input and the output are a matter of choice, right or wrong. We can choose to walk five miles a day. We can choose not to have that extra chocolate truffle.

Those are the right choices if we don’t want to become obese. Or we can choose wrong, and to hell with obesity.

This seems straightforward enough on the surface of it, but deep down it goes to the very core of humanity. For the ability to choose comes from the gift of free will we received from God.

Man is the only thing on earth whose behaviour over a lifetime isn’t predetermined by its chemical or biological composition.

A tree can’t choose to move to a sunnier clime; a man can. A lion can’t choose not to kill weaker animals, a man can. A stone can’t choose to be thrown or not; a man can choose to throw a stone, or not to.

This points at the unique status of man, which is acknowledged by any exponent of any Abrahamic religion, and certainly the one on which our European civilisation is founded.

Christianity came to Europe two thousand years ago, but has since left. Gone with it is true reason and true understanding of man, the only animal made in the image and likeness of God and therefore an animal only in the narrow biological sense, if that.

Also gone is the ability to think straight: on its way out Christianity swiped off the table the basis for all intellectual activity in the West. It was replaced by post-Darwinian fantasies, spread by those who can analyse to death everything about man, except the only important thing.

Man’s behaviour is now seen the same way as that of a courgette, a dog or a stone – something determined by his chemical, biochemical or microbiological makeup. 

This has too many practical and legal manifestations to mention here, but relevant to my theme is one: the medicalisation of addiction in general and food addiction in particular.

Hence a degenerate who gets his jollies by sticking a needle in his arm is thought to do so not because he has made a wrong choice but because he is ill. The imperative to get high on heroin is beyond his control. It’s a sort of disease, like cancer.

It’s not that the subversives who insist on this nonsense don’t realise it’s nonsense. They do. But truth doesn’t matter here.

What matters is stamping our spiritual, religious and cultural heritage into the dirt. Denying, implicitly, explicitly or through judicial action, that man is a free agent endowed with the ability to choose will serve that ignominious goal nicely.

I don’t usually like to cite myself as an example of virtue (partly not to give my friends a pretext to remind me that all too often I have been an example of sin), but I was addicted to drugs for a short period.

The addiction was indeed not a matter of choice. It was iatrogenic: I was in much pain, and doctors put me on an intravenous dimorphine drip for a month. After that I was put on another opiate, Oxycontin, a drug with much street cred.

When in due course I tried to go cold turkey, I developed withdrawal symptoms, which I recognised for what they were. I went back on my drug, then gradually reduced the dose over a couple of weeks. Having suffered some discomfort, at the end I was clean as a whistle.

I made the right choice. The wrong one would have been not to reduce the dose but to increase it, subsequently tricking the doctors into prescribing more. Barring that, I could always score some Oxycontin or ‘horse’ in King’s Cross or Brixton.

Those who make the wrong choice, and there are an increasing number of them, should be pitied, helped and guided to the right choice. What they shouldn’t be is treated as if they suffered from a disease.

The same goes for obesity. A man shot by a mugger and paralysed from the waist down is disabled: he had no choice in the matter. A couch potato who gobbles up revolting pre-processed junk isn’t disabled; he chose to be obese.

By denying this God’s own truth, the European Court of Justice has reaffirmed its credentials as a wicked, subversive setup – just like its sibling the European Union.

By issuing this obscene diktat the judges pretend they really believe that man has no free will. By submitting to it, we pretend we share this view of man.

We – or, to be more precise, our powers that be – also pretend we have no choice but to submit to it. This is a fallacy: we do have one.

Our choice, the right one, would be to get out of the jurisdiction of this legal travesty and to shake its dust off our feet.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is a default Christmas gift. It’s available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. Or else you can order it direct from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

Nicely rounded feminine curves. Jet black hair. Smooth off-white skin. Enigmatic smile. Height that doesn’t tower over men. Naughty sexual past.

Americans in particular find Kim Jong-un hard to resist… What? No, of course I wasn’t talking about Kim Kardashian, that walking fertility symbol whose jutting attractions these days rank among the highest human achievements.

The North Korean Kim is much more interesting. Granted, he doesn’t have the other Kim’s ability to make men feel weak-kneed with a flash of a buttock. He can, however, bring America to her knees simply by playing computer games.

He started with the US-run Sony Pictures. Kim’s ire was raised by the company’s planned Christmas release of The Interview, a comedy in which the North Korean dictator gets killed.

Almost immediately the company’s computers were hit by a hacking attack accompanied by a nostalgia-inducing warning to potential cinema-goers: “Remember the 11^th of September, 2001. We recommend you keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d better leave.)”

By way of a firm, resolute response Sony instantly cancelled the release of the $60-million film until future notice, which can safely be assumed to be never.

Of course abject surrender to terrorists is nothing new, but certain things about this act do have some novelty appeal.

First, rather than relying on the usual AKs and Semtex, with the odd Stanley knife thrown in, the terrorists chose your seemingly peaceful Macs and PCs as their weapons.

Second, and to me more important, unlike most Muslim terrorists, who can be claimed to be extra-national, the provenance of this lot can be unerringly pinpointed to a specific country.

Actually, developing the parallel the hackers themselves suggested, 15 out of the 19 perpetrators of 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia, a proportion that under uncountable historical precedents could have been treated as an act of war. But, considering the Saudis’ natural resource, the Americans had to pretend the terrorists had come from nowhere in particular.

Now the papers are abuzz with speculations about the attack on Sony being the first shots fired in a cyber war. Hardly the first, actually, considering that the Russians paralysed Estonia’s computers in 2007, and the Chinese like to put their finger on the mouse too every now and then.

But first, second or tenth, this indeed is an act of cyber war committed by North Korea against the United States.

Considering various aspects of cyber war, most commentators accentuate the modifier rather than the noun, which seems foolhardy. War is war, and we can take it for granted that aggressors can draw on a full arsenal of weapons, from ICBMs to tanks to cannon to, as in this case, computers.

Come to think of it, the weapons are immaterial. What matters is how the country under attack responds to the aggression.

Traditionally there are only a few possible responses.

The moderate response would be to tell the guilty party that this once it’ll be let off with a warning. But the warning is absolutely unequivocal: one more transgression, and the attacked country will respond with every means at her disposal.

The aggressive response would be to launch a counterattack immediately, keeping it commensurate with the provocation. You attack our border guards, we attack yours; you fire on our planes, we fire on yours – that sort of thing.

The extreme, and usually correct, response is to launch a massive strike that would be both punitive and preemptive: punishing the aggressor for what he has done and actively discouraging him from ever doing it again.

And then there is the cowardly response: to let it slide, limiting yourself to a few stern words. You know, the kind of response the United States has adopted.

By itself, allowing Kim to get away with this rather extreme form of film criticism isn’t the end of the world. However, showing weakness may turn out to be just that, the end of the world, and not just figuratively speaking. Next time he may try to jam the Pentagon’s computers.

Take it from someone who spent the first 25 years of his life living under communist dictators: the only language they understand is that of force. When it’s spoken with credible conviction, they, like a street bully who gets punched in the nose, tend to back off.

Showing any sign of weakness or hesitation will only encourage them, and if you don’t believe me talk to Messrs Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Putin – and Kim.

This, to me, seems the proper way of contemplating the emerging situation. Instead, the middle-aged gentlemen writing for our broadsheets impersonate the barely post-pubescent boffins writing for PC Magazine.

Chaps, leave the technicalities of cyber or any other war to those professionally trained in such matters. One likes to believe that the West has enough technical expertise to thwart cyber attacks or, barring that, avenge them in a rather cataclysmic way.

Let’s not speculate what’s going to happen when every computer screen in the country goes black. Instead let’s make sure this doesn’t happen, and words, no matter how stern, aren’t going to do it.

The Russians, Chinese or Koreans may be real high-tech mavens, and I happen to know from personal experience that the Russians really are very good at that sort of thing.

But all those potentially dangerous nations have always played catch-up with the West in high tech. They are perfectly capable of imitating, developing and improving, but so far they’ve always lagged a couple of steps behind, and I see no reason for this pecking order to change.

The very nature of their regimes discourages genuine high-tech innovation. The West is still capable of it, and so is likely to come up with electronic armour able to ward off electronic shells.

Yet the most important part of a tank isn’t armour but cannon, and replacing such old-fashioned weapons with cyber waves isn’t going to alter this general principle.

The upshot is that America, or for that matter Nato, must not surrender to Kim’s charms. We’re under attack, we know who the attacker is, so let’s hit him immediately and hit him hard.

But Obama, otherwise known as the Leader of the Free World, has no time for such actions. He is too busy surrendering to the communist dictators a few miles south of Miami to worry about those at the other end of the world.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

If there is one thing that most economists, especially those of the Keynesian variety, have in common, it’s refreshing arrogance. This, in spite of their having failed to predict every economic disaster of modernity.

Moreover, when they tried the Keynesian response to the 1929 stock market crash, they instantly turned it into the Great Depression – without, however, suffering a dent in their self-confidence.

Yet Jeffrey Sachs, with his cosmic conceit, proudly stands out even against that general backdrop. In his modest self-assessment, Jeffrey can wave a magic Keynesian wand to turn a moribund economy into a land flowing with milk and honey.

One can only wonder how, say, Singapore, starting from scratch, managed to become a major success story without the benefit of either Keynesian economics or Jeffrey’s advice. Presumably, had she sought it, she would now own the world.

Sachs’s stock in trade is applying the principles of national welfarism internationally. Along with Keynes, whom he worships with nothing short of religious piety, he believes that, when a country is in dire straits, it can steer itself out of trouble by spending money it doesn’t have.

Still, the funds have to come from somewhere, and the list of possible sources isn’t endless. Essentially it comes down to printing money, borrowing it or getting infusions from richer countries.

Jeffrey Sach’s speciality is this last solution. He believes that wealthy nations, especially the USA, should act towards poor ones the way the social acts towards idlers on the dole.

A trip to a South London council estate will show how this stratagem works at the micro level of families. Not to cut too fine a point, it destroys them, robbing them of any initiative and turning them into lifelong addicts stuck at the end of the welfare needle.

A somewhat longer trip to Bolivia, which Jeffrey, in a tastelessly self-serving article on the BBC website, cites as his epic coup, will show how destructive such economic alchemy can be at a macro level.

Since, according to Descartes, all knowledge is comparative, the Bolivian trip would be particularly educational if followed by a quick detour to Chile, a country very similar to Bolivia historically, ethnically and demographically.

At roughly the same time Gen. Pinochet sought economic guidance from the commonsensical Chicago School, the Bolivian government turned for advice to the fully paid-up Keynesian Sachs.

Sure enough, he recommended that the country should crawl to the USA, arm outstretched, palm turned upwards. In his munificence and omnipotence Jeffrey then facilitated a huge infusion of unearned capital into Bolivia.

The trick worked, in the same sense in which a second or third mortgage on your house would work – until you’ve spent all the money and now have to repay it, which you can’t do because you have no job.

By contrast Chile opted for the free market solution, with equally spectacular results. What wasn’t equal was the comparative duration of success.

In spite of its present socialist government working tirelessly to undo Pinochet’s reforms, Chile is still reasonably prosperous – and infinitely more so than Bolivia, which is reeling from the delayed action of Jeffrey’s expertise.

But he mentions Bolivia only in passing. The real point of Sach’s article is to blame the West for refusing to bail out Russia the same way it bailed out Poland after 1989.

After all, “Mikhail Gorbachev… was prepared to see Europe reunited in peace in democracy… Once again, drawing from Keynes,… I championed… international assistance… Yet I watched in puzzlement and growing horror that the needed aid was not on the way.”

By his own admission, it took Sachs the next 20 years to get his head around this inequity. Finally it dawned upon him that “the West had helped Poland financially and diplomatically because Poland would become the Eastern ramparts of an expanding Nato.”

I could have spared him two decades’ worth of soul searching by pointing out a few fundamental differences between Poland and Russia, those that would have justified the West’s bloody-mindedness towards the latter, had it indeed been displayed.

But first let’s get our facts right, for the West wasn’t as heartless as all that. Between 1989 and 1998 Western countries provided $66 billion in aid to Russia, on top of food aid loans, trade credits and debt rollovers.

Obviously Jeffrey doesn’t see such paltry amounts as worth mentioning. They simply don’t qualify as international aid, as far as he is concerned. He doesn’t cite the sum that would have satisfied his keen economic sense, but probably none of us would be able to count so high.

Jeffrey seems to realise that the West regarded Poland as a safer bet for long-term partnership than Russia, which is good. Twenty years of feverish thought bore fruit.

What isn’t good is that he regards this judgement as being grossly unfair to “the great man” Gorbachev and the only marginally less great Yeltsyn and Putin.

Suddenly, rather than merely doubting Jeffrey’s professional qualifications, one begins to wonder about his IQ.

Yes, both Poland and Russia emerged out of decades of communist rule, the most satanic regime in history. There was a minor difference though: Russian communism was self-inflicted; Poland’s communism was inflicted by Russia.

They weren’t equal partners in a love affair; they were rapist and victim. That’s why, though many individual Poles had done a Faust, Poland as a nation had nothing to repent before being admitted into the fold.

Also, throughout communist rule the country remained generally loyal to the Western confession of Christianity, which was a useful foundation to build on. And, at no point in her history was Poland either hostile or dangerous to the West.

Russia, on the other hand, has been both hostile and dangerous throughout much of her history and certainly since 1917. In 1989 Russian ICBMs were still targeted at Western cities, and the country had more tanks than the rest of the world combined.

At least twice during the post-war years Russia took the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. In every military conflict worth mentioning she found herself on the other side from the US and her allies. At least four times since the war she committed direct aggression against European nations, while fomenting anti-Western militancy all over the globe.

After the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union the West couldn’t help noticing that the post-collapse state was run by the same unrepentant operators of the previous satanic regime, be it party officials like the ‘great man’ Gorbachev and the only marginally less great Yeltsyn (both, incidentally, with lifelong KGB connections) or KGB officers, such as Putin.

This time, however, there was an extra dimension: both groups were now organically fused with organised crime – to a point where the different elements of the alloy became indistinguishable.

Under such circumstances, advancing to Russia even the $66 billion that escaped Jeffrey’s attention represented criminal folly on the part of the West.

Every one of those dollars vindicated Peter Bauer’s maxim that foreign aid is the transfer of capital from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries. Hence the ‘great man’ Gorbachev’s wealth is now in the billions; while Putin’s pilfered fortune is bigger than that by an order of magnitude.

Economists like Jeffrey do enough harm even when they stick to their own discipline, about which they are supposed to know next to everything. Let them meddle in things about which they know next to nothing, and watch them destroy the world.

 

Isn’t it annoying when it happens? In my today’s blog I made a factual error, by claiming that Malala Yousafzi was shot dead by Taliban. In fact, she survived the shooting — no thanks to the Taliban. I’ll try to check my sources more carefully.

Anyway, I’ve now corrected the error: http://alexanderboot.com/content/religion-peace-strikes-again

It’s early hours yet, but so far no Western leader has explained to a shocked world that the on-going orgy of satanic cruelty inspired by Islam is not, in fact, inspired by Islam.

I trust they will, in short order, regale us with their take on geopolitics and comparative religion:

The Koran, which contrary to all evidence such leaders have convinced themselves they have read, preaches nothing but pacific behaviour. If some of its adherents murder children en masse while laughing and screaming ‘Allahu akbar!’, it’s not their religion’s fault.

At fault here are each perpetrator’s personal idiosyncrasies, such as perhaps an insufficiently loving father or an overprotective mother. More likely, it’s the shockingly low level of foreign aid we have been sending to his country of origin.

Alternatively, he may have failed to sublimate his bubbling libido, which affected his id in a way that turns murdering children into an irresistible compulsion. Or words to that effect – I’m not quite up on modern cant.

One way or the other, he is a sovereign agent acting of his own accord with no prodding from Islam anywhere in sight. He is a ‘lone wolf’, in Dave’s apt phrase.

Well, seven of those wolves, red in tooth and claw, formed a pack that came out of the woods in Peshawar to murder 141 in a school, 132 of them children. Before they were nonchalantly shot point-blank, the pupils had been treated to the rousing spectacle of their teacher being burnt alive.

This was supposed to be a response to the Pakistani army’s attempts to prevent the Taliban from taking over their country, an internecine quarrel if I ever saw one. The ardour the army displays in this noble undertaking has been largely spurred on by the money our government extracted from you and me.

Alternatively it was the lone wolves’ way of protesting against the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Malala Yousafzi, campaigner for women’s rights to education in Muslim countries (that such a campaign was necessary teaches a valuable lesson in comparative religion, which is guaranteed to be ignored).

Incidentally, Malala, at age 17 the youngest ever Nobel laureate, was shot by another lone wolf back in 2012, for daring to offend so egregiously against the fundamental teaching of Islam… sorry, I forget. The fundamental teaching of Islam had nothing to do with it.

Many of us have at times been appalled by Nobel Peace Prizes being awarded to odd individuals, such as, to name a couple off the top, Yasser Arafat or Barack Hussein Obama. Yet in spite of much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, somehow we’ve managed to suppress the urge to murder children in protest.

Obviously such restraining mechanisms aren’t at work among the thousands upon thousands of lone wolves running wild in the Islamic world. In fact, there are so many thousands of them that one is tempted to believe that they are also driven by a collective, rather than merely individual, energumen.

Far be it from me to advocate a cull of lone wolves – the RSPCA wouldn’t wear it. But we definitely must – and, given our leaders’ stated convictions, definitely won’t – protect ourselves against those predators.

Somehow I don’t think continuing to pay off Pakistan’s government is going to do the job. The money could be better spent on such measures as … I’d better stop here, before I’m charged with inciting violence.

In any case, the situation is dire, as it always is when there is a war on, especially when we refuse to acknowledge that there is a war on. Under such circumstances shooting from the lip is always ill-advised and usually counterproductive.

It’s also unnecessary: the technicalities of how the threat is to be thwarted are best left to those professionally qualified in such matters, a category into which I don’t include myself.

But before such chaps work out the tactical details they must be given the strategic objective. In this case there can be only one: make sure nothing like this ever happens in our country and, if it still does, the proverbial wild animals are punished so cataclysmically that the Islamic threat goes dormant for a century or two.

How you do it is up to you. No holds barred. There is a war on.

 

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

And so it could. Because of the likes of him.

By the likes of him I mean the cabal of self-serving spivs promoting the dictatorial multi-culti ethos of ‘share, care and be aware’.

Once we’ve committed ourselves to obeying the diktats, we surrender the intellectual tools that alone would enable us to realise that yet another act of Islamic terrorism, this time Down Under, wasn’t a ‘lone wolf’ attack in any sense other than the purely superficial one.

The murderer did indeed act by himself, but he didn’t inspire himself. The inspiration came from his hodgepodge cult that has been waging war on the West for the last 1,400 years.

By the same token, an SAS man may be acting alone as he blows up a radar behind enemy lines. But acting alone doesn’t make him a lone wolf.

Quite apart from the specific orders he may have received from his superiors, the SAS soldier acts in accordance with the ethos he accepts as a given. This includes love of his country, loyalty to his comrades, his concept of honour, sense of righteousness and whatnot.

His alone is the hand that activates the detonator at a deadly risk to himself. But this physical hand is being moved by an interlacing complexity of metaphysical factors, without which he wouldn’t have joined the SAS in the first place.

Dismissing each act of Muslim beastliness as the private initiative of a deranged maniac, or a small group thereof, is an intellectual and, which is worse, moral copout.

In 2013 such supposedly individual terrorist acts killed 17,891 and wounded 32,577. These aren’t victims of random street violence. They are war casualties.

Yet this isn’t any old war. It’s the Phoney War revisited and made ten times worse.

Then, in 1939, after declaring war on Germany, Britain and France sat on their hands without firing a shot. But at least they did declare war.

Our spivs not only haven’t done that, but they refuse both to acknowledge that war is under way and to identify the enemy. It’s as if every Nazi soldier storming into Poland had been assumed to be acting of his own accord, with no blame to be attached to his regime.

The usual argument that very few Muslims are terrorists is another copout, another lie designed to avoid the truth. The truth is that all global calamities have always been perpetrated by a small cadre of radicalised and manipulative elite.

Not all German soldiers torching Warsaw were committed Nazis, and neither were all Soviet soldiers raping half of Europe committed communists.

Relatively few Americans saw themselves as anything other than loyal subjects of George III in 1776, not many Frenchmen were fire-eating revolutionaries in 1789, and not all Indians wanted to be independent of Britain in 1947.

In each case the tone was set by the variously wicked few, who then did to the masses what a shepherd does to his flock at the end of the day. Properly manipulated, the masses are indeed like sheep – but they are always led by wolves, running individually or in packs.

Dave, Ed, Nick and even, one suspects, Nigel are never going to talk about the dreadful dilemma facing the West in such terms.

They, along with all our politicians, face their own dilemma.

They’ve first fostered the Golem of modern ethos, then lost control over it. Now they have a stark choice: either they acknowledge that their creature is a monster devouring our civilisation or they pretend he is a cuddly puppy.

The first option will put paid to their political careers; the second will enable them to hang on indefinitely, or rather until the monster has finished his repast.

Hence the talk of lone wolves, and hence also the pathetically inadequate palliatives broached by Dave as preventive measures.

Now what if Sydney does come to London, but in the shape of single fanatic wielding not a pistol but a nuclear device? What if the subsequent casualty list includes not two hostages but 100,000 Londoners?

Five gets you ten this lot will still be talking about Islam being a religion of peace, and how unfortunate it is that not all its exponents are peaceful chaps desperately wishing to share, care and be aware.

It’s they who are the real wolves. The question is, what does it make us?

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The French poet and thinker Paul Valéry once remarked that “The only thing one can learn from history is a propensity for chauvinism. There are no other lessons.”

I’m not sure about this as a sweeping statement but, as applied to Russia specifically and my friend Vlad especially, the aphorism rings true.

I was reminded of it the other day, when I spoke to a distinguished Conservative association about Putin’s Russia, fascism in general and Russian kleptofascism in particular.

Most of my listeners nodded in all the right places, but I immediately identified two or three who were visibly tensing up.  

Sure enough, come the Q&A time, one of the superannuated gentlemen asked a question he clearly thought was rhetorical: “But you can’t deny that the Crimea is historically Russian?”

Actually, the only thing I couldn’t deny was that Putin’s propaganda was making in-roads on precisely the kind of people who ought to know better. But I didn’t say that.

Instead I said: “History is an unreliable guide to geopolitics. In this case, it depends on how far back you’re willing to go.

“Prince Potemkin annexed the Crimea in 1783, roughly at the same time Britain colonised India. Khrushchev transferred the peninsula to the Ukraine in 1954, just seven years after India declared her independence.

“The two periods are thus almost exactly coextensive. Does this mean we’d be within our right to annex a part of India’s territory or, ideally, the whole thing?

“And this is just one example. Would the Germans be justified in repossessing Alsace by force? Or Austria all of northern Italy? Or Spain and Portugal most of South America?

“Our claims to Aquitaine also have some legitimacy,” I added facetiously. “In general, if we tried to restore countries’ borders to their limits at some arbitrary point in history, we’d get a war of all against all, thereby refuting this line of thought.”

My opponent seemed satisfied with my reply intellectually, but one could tell he really wasn’t emotionally. Then again, some modern British Tories have always had a soft spot for fascism, which they’ve tended to compare favourably to our own perpetually weak and vacillating governments.

Characteristically and laudably, however, very few have ever been led by their innermost feelings to settle in fascist countries, preferring instead to rot away in decadent but still residually civilised shires.

It is to my friend Vlad’s credit that his retrospective glance at history has a greater telescopic reach than a mere couple of centuries.

This he went on to prove a few days ago, justifying Russia’s brutal aggression against the Ukraine in terms not only historical but also theological. It takes a highly nimble mind to get into such a maze and find its way out, but if anyone can do it, Vlad can.

First came a rebuke to some European nations that for the time being went unnamed: “If for some European countries national pride is a long-forgotten concept and sovereignty is too much of a luxury, true sovereignty for Russia is absolutely necessary for survival.”

Fair cop. One can see the attraction of such statements to those who, like me, detest the EU but, unlike me, don’t know much about Russia.

Then came the theological or, if you will, theohistorical bit: “It was in the Crimea, in the ancient city of Chersonesus… that Grand Duke Vladimir was baptised before bringing Christianity to Rus.”

Get it? Christianity is essential to Russian sovereignty, the Crimea has a sacral significance to Russian Christianity, hence the Crimea, as Col. Putin went on to explain, has “sacred importance for Russia, like the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for the followers of Islam and Judaism.”

Actually, even on its own terms his version of Vladimir’s baptism is only one of several hypotheses, but that’s by the by.

Let me mention parenthetically that, although Vladimir was eventually canonised in the Orthodox church, at that time his behaviour was not of a kind typically associated with saintliness.

For example, the libidinous prince, left unsatisfied by his hundreds of wives and concubines, would routinely rape the wives and daughters of his vanquished rivals. But, in all fairness, sometimes he would do the decent thing and add the victim to his regiment of wives.

That is what he did, for example, to the Polotsk princess Rogneda whom he had first raped publicly, with the girl’s parents and a few hundred of Vladimir’s troops in attendance. The warriors cheered him on; the parents probably didn’t, but their reaction wasn’t recorded.

Fair enough, many saints had a dissipated youth. St Augustine, for example, sowed enough wild oats to keep the entire population of Hippo in porridge. But, compared to Vladimir’s epic exertions, he comes across as a eunuch.

Still, it’s good to see that, inspired by Vlad I, Vlad II has apparently found God, if rather late in life. In his exuberant youth he started his KGB career in the Second Chief Directorate, responsible for the persecution of dissidents – including religious ones.

Far be it from me, however, to deny the possibility of an epiphany on the road to Lubianka. Vlad is known to be an occasional rider, so who’s to say he never fell off his horse and had a Damascene experience?

In due course he’ll learn that Russian Christians, unlike their Western counterparts, cross themselves from right to left, but such things do take time. His Western admirers wouldn’t notice the faux pas anyway.

But I do wish he broadened his already panoramic historical outlook. That way he could justify even stronger claims.

You see, St Vladimir wasn’t the first member of his family to get baptised, His grandmother Grand Duchess Olga did it first, on her visit to Constantinople, as it then was.

Now Constantinople was at that time the capital of Byzantium, the eastern Roman Empire. It was in that Byzantine confession that Olga, and subsequently her grandson, were baptised.

So forget about miserable little Chersonesus. The true Jerusalem of Russia’s Christianity is actually Istanbul, née Constantinople. If that doesn’t give Vlad II every moral and legal right to annex Turkey with her selfishly guarded straits, I don’t know what does.

Now, St Vladimir’s descendant Ivan III (d. 1505) actually married (without raping her first) the daughter of the last Byzantine emperor.

He then declared Russia as the natural messianic successor to Byzantium, ‘third Rome’ in the words of the monk Philoteus (‘and there will not be a fourth’).

Since we’ve already sorted out the legitimacy of Putin’s claim to ‘second Rome’, which is to say Istanbul and Turkey at large, what about the first Rome, now going by the name of Italy?

Surely, if Russia sits in the line of godly descent just after Turkey, while the latter was preceded by Italy, both Putin and his Western fans should demand that he occupy all of Italy, or at least her part.

May I suggest Emilia-Romagna, for starters? Brilliant food, Sangiovese is a decent wine, Bologna is gorgeous, and the first Rome is but a short tank drive away.

I hope my credulous conservative friends will second the motion. I know my friend Vlad will – Italian banks would still be a more reliable depository for his $40-billion fortune than Russia.

Oops, sorry, I forgot. He isn’t into vulgar materialism any longer. It’s all about things sacral for Vlad now. Beatification is in order, methinks.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

“Cable demands end to all-white boardrooms” appears above a short article relegated to Page 20 of The Sunday Times.

Evidently the editors didn’t attach much importance to the story. That is a most unfortunate oversight, and one I’d like to correct.

“Diversity must now be tackled in its broadest sense,” decreed Comrade Vince, adding that boardrooms reflecting ‘modern Britain’ would give the country a competitive advantage.

Hence the dispelled illusions, such as:

Illusion 1: This is still a free country.

Used in the political, rather than metaphysical, sense, freedom means, among other things, that the state doesn’t dictate to private companies how they should run their business.

Corporatism therefore is the antithesis of freedom, which isn’t merely a theoretical postulate.

The state dictating to businesses whom to hire, whom to fire, whom to promote, what and how much to produce, how much to pay their employees and to charge for their products is a feature of socialism overlapping with fascism.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Hollande’s France should have given this practice a bad name, but not as far as my friend Vince is concerned.

Note the modality of his remarks, defined by the use of such words as ‘demand’ and ‘must’. The state adopting this tone of voice in its dialogue with businesses either has already overstepped the line where socialism ends and fascism begins, or is desperate to do so.

Illusion 2: This is still an intelligent nation.

Vince and his Parteigenossen talk to us as if we were stupid. Yet these days politicians don’t utter a word without checking the focus groups first. Hence Vince’s research must have told him that we are indeed stupid.

Otherwise we’d know that the purpose of a board of directors is to run a profitable business, not to reflect the demographic make-up of the nation and pander to every idiotic perversion modernity serves up.

To that end it should elevate to management only those fit to manage, regardless of any other characteristics. If a one-legged black Muslim lesbian is a talented manager, she should climb up to the highest rung of the corporate ladder. If not, she shouldn’t.

Moreover, to say that Vince’s mandated rainbow boards running all our major companies would give us a ‘competitive advantage’ is to assume we aren’t just stupid but retarded as well.

The more restrictive the labour practices the less competitive the economy – to this simple rule there are no known exceptions. When the state rules by economic diktat, free enterprise is guaranteed to become neither, and the economy will inevitably find itself in the doldrums.  

If you want empirical proof, just compare France’s economy, with its insanely suffocating red tape, with those of les Anglo-Saxons. Having done that, ponder why London has become the world’s fifth largest French city, and why the French who have moved here represent the most economically virile stratum of the country’s population.

If we follow France’s business practices, we won’t be like France, with her still reasonably well-educated labour force. We’ll be like Greece – and Vince either doesn’t realise this or is certain we don’t. In either case, this isn’t something he cares about.

Illusion 3: One day we won’t be governed by wicked, power-hungry mediocrities.

Vince and his ilk are clearly confident of their electoral immunity. ‘Ilk’ is a collective noun, and what I mean by it is our governing elite, regardless of their party affiliation.

The elite has become smugly homogeneous, and you can bet your house that no one in the other parties will take Vince to task over this unmitigated longing for fascism. To do so would mean going against the ethos they themselves have so assiduously cultivated.

The stratagem has worked: vast blocs of voters have been brought up to think that corporatism means economic liberty, burgeoning state control over every aspect of our lives is freedom, and all those Daves, Eds, Nicks and Vinces really do know how to govern a great country.

Hence they can be sure that their hold on power won’t be challenged. How they distribute portfolios among themselves matters to them much less than the fact that they’ll have the power to distribute them.

It’s pointless to wonder how far they are prepared to go to keep this status quo. As far as it takes, is the short answer.

Extending the vote to 16-year-olds? Fine. This lot would have babies vote before they can walk, if that’ll keep them in power.

Admitting Turkey to the EU, thereby giving 77 million Muslims an automatic right to settle in Britain? Perfect, especially if private companies can be forced to staff their boards with the new arrivals.

And if you still have illusions about any of this, trust Vince to explain what’s what. Wittingly or unwittingly.

 

My new book, Democracy as a Neocon Trick, is available from Amazon and the more discerning bookshops. However, my publisher would rather you ordered it from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

“Be alert and sober of mind,” taught St Peter, but then the first Pope had no way of knowing that one day Australia would be inhabited by humans with a superhuman capacity for consuming Foster’s lager.

Taken to excess, that beverage has been known to produce a deleterious effect on individuals and also evidently on institutions.

This stands to reason: it’s hard to stay alert and retain a sober mind when the rest of you is throwing up on a friend’s car by way of a good night out.

The Australian Catholic church has set out to prove this, admittedly hypothetical, proposition by issuing what’s described as a ‘landmark report’ on priestly celibacy as a contributing factor of child abuse.

While stopping short of suggesting that the clergy must be allowed to marry, the report recommends that priests should undergo ‘psycho-sexual development training’ thereby learning to keep their grubby hands off tots.

Now what about bestiality? Shouldn’t there be another training course teaching naughty priests what Wellies are really for? One could also think of any number of other perversions that sensible tuition could discourage.

Then again, for old times’ sake, one could remind the Aussies that the Church ought to have within itself a sufficient body of moral teaching it could bring to bear on this problem – thereby obviating the need for New Age counselling.

I’d start from the Decalogue (Exodus 20) and proceed to the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) to establish the general moral framework. From there it would be a good idea to iron out the pertinent details by moving on to Leviticus (18:21-22 and 20:13), Romans (1:26-27) and 1 Corinthians (6-9:10).

Or else one could take the issue out of the scriptural context altogether, by explaining to the deviants in purely secular terms that this isn’t the right way to suffer little children to come unto you.

As to paedophilia resulting from celibacy, this is cloud-cuckoo land. Any young person, or anyone who remembers what it was like to be young, will understand how a priest may break the vow of celibacy by having a heterosexual fling.

For example, I never took such a vow, but in my testosterone-fuelled youth there were occasional periods (mercifully seldom very long) when I had to endure involuntary celibacy. This, and I know I’ll burn in hell for it, sometimes had the effect of lowering my normally rather fastidious standards of acceptability in a potential paramour.

But it would never have occurred to me to use children for that purpose. There was nothing heroic about it: I didn’t have to make a conscious effort to fight the temptation – the possibility simply never crossed my mind.

I hate to sound so hopelessly square and frightfully normal, but I’m sure that everyone I know – and billions of those I don’t know – will tell you not just a similar story but exactly the same one.

The problem with offending priests is not that they are celibates but that they are perverts. As such they ought to be locked up, with the key thrown away into the River Tiber foaming with their secretions.

Just as no court would accept as an extenuating circumstance that a paedophiliac act was caused by the defendant’s inability to score with grown women, so should the Church refrain from blaming deviance on celibacy. All else is madness.

And speaking of madness, the other day Pope Francis espied a little boy crying his eyes out in St Peter’s Square. His Holiness enquired about the cause of his grief and found out his beloved dog had just died.

Not to worry, said the Pope. “Paradise is open to all God’s creatures.”

Since no cathedra was present ex which His Holiness spoke, the presumption of infallibility doesn’t apply, and one may be permitted some ever so slight scepticism.

It was my impression, and I hope the academic theologians among you will correct me if I am wrong, that admittance through the pearly gates isn’t quite so catholic, as it were.

The price of a ticket includes certain attributes that traditionally have been regarded as the exclusive prerogative of human, rather than canine, beings.

One such attribute is the immortal soul, which dog’s don’t have and humans – even the Aussies – do. Another is God-given free will enabling people to make a choice between good and evil, virtue and sin, right and wrong. Yet another is baptism for the remission of sins.

As a corollary to that, people are capable of confessing and repenting their sins, thereby earning forgiveness and absolution – or not. Personally, I’ve never heard Fido bark out “Father, forgive me for I have sinned. Since my last confession I have relieved myself on the floor of the drawing room four times, chased three cats around the block and bit the postman on his gluteus maximus.”

I wonder how much prior thought had gone into the Pope’s pronouncement. Perhaps His Holiness was having an off day, or else he was too deeply shaken by the Australian ‘landmark report’.