Category: Blog

Sorry, the public-inquiry report only says that the 2006 murder was ‘probably’ approved by Putin. Now there’s a surprise.

‘Probably’ means we aren’t sure, there exist other possibilities worth considering. I struggle to think what they might be, but hey, God didn’t give man creative imagination for nothing.

Exercising mine, I propose that Litvinenko’s death might have been suicide. He was so overcome by guilt over his anti-Putin activities that life became unbearable.

First he exposed in a series of articles Putin’s profitable links with organised crime, which are so intimate that it’s no longer possible to see where the Mafia ends and Russia’s government begins.

Then, in his book Blowing Up Russia, he accused Putin of having bombs planted in Russian blocks of flats to lay the blame on the Chechens, thereby kicking off the second Chechen war and tightening his hold on power.

And then, as the last straw, Litivinenko began to gather a dossier documenting Putin’s career in the KGB that, according to some of the documents, slowed down at some point following some homosexual shenanigans.

Litivnenko took stock of what he had done, and the enormity of it all dawned upon him. There he was, besmirching the limpid reputation of a man so admired by the right, the left and Peter Hitchens. The strong, traditionally Christian leader, respected by Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen – the kind of leader Hitchens, Booker and Corbyn wished we had in Britain.

That was too much shame to bear. Even a quick bullet through the head was too easy a punishment for such calumny, decided Litvinenko. Hence he had that last cup of tea with his two Russian friends and former KGB colleagues Lugovoi and Kovtun, went to a local chemist’s, bought some OTC polonium-200, swallowed it and died, having first endured inhuman agony for three weeks.

A likely story? No? Wait, I have others up my sleeve. Two Martians… no, that doesn’t work. Upon mature deliberation, nothing does.

There is no ‘probably’ about it, chaps. Alexander Litvinenko was murdered on Putin’s orders by Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, the first now a ‘parliamentarian’, the second a ‘businessman’. (The quotation commas, in case you’re wondering, are there to say that there’s no real parliament in Russia, and precious little business outside the governing KGB-Mafia junta.)

Let’s not be surprised about it either. What if a zoological inquiry established that lions devour weaker animals and adders sting those they don’t like? We wouldn’t be surprised then, would we?

Russia, ladies and gentlemen, is governed by the KGB, the most murderous organisation in history. There are more KGB officers in the Russian government (85 per cent) than there are lawyers in the US Congress (43 per cent). Russia’s KGB rule is even more pervasive than the rule of law is in America.

And murder is encoded into the KGB’s DNA as indelibly as carnivorism is encoded into the DNA of predatory animals. For Putin, murdering Litvinenko wasn’t a likely reaction, nor a probable one. It was the most – nay, the only – natural thing to do.

The response to the report on the part of some of our media is well-nigh emetic. One detects the fear that by calling a murderer a murderer we risk losing Putin’s invaluable support in Syria.

One would have thought that even in our reduced circumstances we have sufficient capability to bomb Syrian villages flat, which is exactly what Putin is doing in the good tradition of his sponsoring organisation. Russian bombs have killed more Syrian civilians than ISIS has managed – a task to which the combined might of Nato is deemed to be inadequate.

The Foreign Office is scared of souring Britain’s relations with Russia. Perish the thought. What, spoil our friendship with a regime that regularly threatens the West with nuclear annihilation and, by way of foretaste, commits nuclear terrorism in the middle of London to murder a British subject? Who would ever want to be so unfriendly?

The only sensible way of dealing with the first kleptofascist regime in history is introducing a quarantine to limit its toxic influence on the West. Any prospective Russian visitor must be vetted and have his visa denied if there is any suspicion of any links with either the ‘klepto’ or the ‘fascist’ part.

Any Russian with KGB associations must be banned from entry as a matter of course – regardless of his current position in business or government.

Our foreign policy must proceed from the same principle on a larger scale. Rather than meekly submitting to the nuclear blackmail that has been the linchpin of Russia’s foreign policy since she was ruled by Stalin, Putin’s idol, we must build up our military muscle and confront the blackmailer with stern resolve.

In trade, we must impose a total boycott on Russian goods and persuade our transatlantic and European partners to do the same. A country must be civilised to be part of a civilised world – and Russia isn’t.

None of this is going to happen of course. We’ll make some indignant noises, perhaps impose sanctions on a few Russian officials, complain to the UN. In short, we’ll act with the same craven spinelessness we’ve always displayed towards Russia.

One does wonder though what Putin’s Western champions think of him now. What they’ve always thought, would be my guess.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few months ago the FTSE 100 stood at over 7,000. It’s now 5,707 and dropping, which is rotten news, and not just for people on fixed incomes.

The knock-on effect of the turmoil in financial markets is a slowing manufacturing output and plummeting prices of commodities, including oil, which is now 80 per cent cheaper than just over a year ago.

All this brings into question certain ironclad economic presuppositions, such as the benefits of globalisation and service economies.

Globalisation is supposed to work miracles by shifting manufacturing and services to places that can do those things most efficiently. The system is perfect, or would be if economies were run by computers rather than people. And that stubborn species tends to frustrate the best-laid economic plans with predictable regularity.

This is mainly because its life isn’t determined by economics to the extent economists, Marxist or otherwise, want us to believe. Economic performance is only one part of human behaviour, and often not the most important part.

Religion, culture, politics, social life are all vital. Each can at times trump economics individually, and they always do so collectively.

The habitation of much of the human race is in China, which is run by a communist regime. And every communist regime introduces a strong element of slave labour into the economy.

China is a prime example of that irrefutable law of history, with billions of Chinese subsisting on what used to be called coolie wages. (In Russia, whose regime is typologically still communist, 26 million live below the poverty level of a whopping £120 a month.)

Observation going back to the days of the Roman Empire suggests that slave economies can’t succeed in the long run. They’re like a house built on termite-ridden foundations – looks good for a while, but then everyone inside is buried under the rubble.

Sure enough, the Chinese economy is slowing down precipitously, especially if we make allowances for the mendacity of China’s statistics – another ever-present feature of a communist regime.

Alas, the nature of globalisation is such that China’s troubles become ours. When Chinese shares tumble downhill, ours are caught in the avalanche, bringing into question the wisdom of tying our economic destiny so closely to an evil regime.

The slowdown in the world’s second-largest economy reduces the global demand for oil and, since the law of supply-demand has never been repealed, its price too.

That alone, however, doesn’t explain the immense drop. Another explanation is the policy pursued by another evil regime, that of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis think that by bumping up their oil production, thereby driving the price of crude down, they can combat all three threats to themselves, those coming from America, Iran and Russia.

America has made a huge investment into developing cost-effective techniques for exploring the world’s almost unlimited reserves of shale hydrocarbons, thereby threatening the Saudis’ position. This is a long-term investment, but in the short term the US fracking industry is saddled with a $250-billion debt.

The speed of getting into the black depends on the oil prices: the lower they are, the less cost-effective fracking becomes, the longer it’ll take the industry to repay its crippling debt.

Following the removal of economic sanctions Iran, the Saudis’ mortal enemy, has just begun to market its own oil. Its ability to threaten Saudi interests also depends on the prices staying at a reasonably high level.

Russia’s urge to be an active player in the Middle East, in a role that doesn’t suit the Saudis, also depends on high oil prices. When they linger at around $30 a barrel, Russia’s economy becomes a basket case, and her ability to flex her military muscle is significantly downgraded.

All these factors explain the Saudi-driven drop in oil prices. They also indirectly explain why the Bank of England has reversed its planned policy of raising interest rates to the historical average of 2-3 per cent.

Conservative wisdom says that low interest rates and inexpensive fuel are good for the economy. The former makes it easier to finance research, modernisation or expansion; the former lowers the cost of manufacturing and transportation.

So it would be – in a real economy. Ours, however, isn’t real; it’s virtual.

Since we don’t make much of anything, the benefit of cheap fuel is trivial. Since our economy hugely depends on the stock market, the inevitable dip in energy-company shares hurts us for real.

Low interest rates also make it easier for the government to borrow promiscuously and drive our sovereign debt up beyond its present, already stratospheric level. Yet another adverse effect is the anaemic performance of our pension funds, which are bigger than in the rest of Western Europe combined.

Nor can we rely on the EU to bail us out. In France, a state of economic emergency has just been declared; in Germany the industrial growth rate has dropped down to zero.

Suddenly we discover that in our virtual world economic verities no longer apply. But actual reality never disappears – it lays underwater mines to blow to kingdom come virtual reality and everyone who has the misfortune of living within it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mostly scoundrels, is the answer to that one. And also Oxfam.

Caring about one’s own wealth is fine, provided one doesn’t care about it too much, at the expense of one’s soul. However, caring about someone else’s wealth betokens at least two deadly sins, envy and greed.

That’s why those who refer to socialism as the religion of envy have a point. The salient observation is that Western communicants of this creed typically don’t want to enrich the poor.

They want to impoverish the rich (however broadly this category is defined), provided they themselves can parade their flaming conscience all the way to the bank. There are all sorts of alliterative terms on both sides of the Atlantic to describe this type, such as ‘limousine liberals’ or ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’.

It’s in this context that Oxfam’s cri de coeur can be properly understood. This global confederation of poverty charities is worried about a lamentable fact that in reality is neither lamentable nor a fact.

According to Oxfam (and Credit Suisse), the top one per cent have as much wealth as the remaining 99 per cent of the world combined. For Oxfam it goes without saying that this situation is both deplorable and remediable.

The implicit belief is that a man who has to make do with a million pounds is severely disadvantaged compared to someone who has a billion. Yet such a pauper would only feel that way if he were consumed with envy, thereby forfeiting any claim to sympathy.

What should matter to a decent person is having enough for himself and his family, rather than having as much as his neighbour. But then giant corporations, especially those in the charity gig, don’t think like decent people. Their aspirations are akin to those of our governing spivocrats; their goals are mostly self-serving and destructive.

The methodology by which Oxfam arrived at that calculation is questionable: wealth is interpreted not, say, as the means of acquiring the civilised amenities of life but strictly as the difference between personal assets and liabilities.

Hence a City stockbroker earning £300,000 a year, having a £2,000,000 portfolio but carrying a £3,000,000 mortgage on a Kensington semi is dirt-poor compared to a Chinese de facto slave only earning enough to buy a cup of rice a day but not owing anyone a single Yuan.

But leaving that aside, Oxfam ought to be reminded of absolute rather than relative wealth (or poverty) as being the sole valid criterion of economic wellbeing. And more equality usually doesn’t mean less poverty: it’s always easier to equalise at the lowest common denominator.

For example, economic inequality in Victorian England was smaller than it is in England today, and yet only an intrepid commentator would suggest that there was less poverty then.

Oxfam’s business is relieving poverty, not reducing wealth, yet both methods can narrow the gap that so worries this venerable organisation. Of the two expedients, the second is easier while the first is more moral, but our top charities aren’t unduly concerned about morality.

So fine, I’m prepared to accept for the sake of argument that economic inequality is so evil that any method of reducing it is worthy, including dispossessing the offensive one per cent.

Since, as we know, charity begins at home, I propose to get the ball rolling by reducing, or ideally cutting out, the salaries of those running and operating our top charities, including Oxfam.

Charities, after all, are supposed to channel aid to its ultimate targets, not into their own pockets. Alas, both here and in the US a typical major charity appropriates between 65 and 90 per cent of all donations for its own use.

Here, for example, are the top executives’ salaries at Britain’s major charities: 

1. London Clinic £850,000 to £860,0002. Nuffield Health £770,000 to £780,000

3. St Andrew’s Healthcare £750,000 to £760,000

4. Wellcome Trust £590,000 to £600,000

5. Royal Opera House £566,000

6. Anchor Trust £420,000 to £430,000

7. City & Guilds £400,000 to £410,000

8. Legal Education Foundation £360,000 to £370,000

9. Children’s Investment Fund Foundation £350,000 to £360,000

10. Church Commissioners for England £330,000 to £340,000

Oxfam’s top executive pockets a mere £125,000 a year, which is modest by these standards but still quite far removed from the breadline. Am I alone in thinking this is outrageous?

In fact such practices are par for the course. They vindicate the main economic principle of modernity: giant organisations, commercial, governmental or charitable, operate chiefly for the benefit of their managerial elites, whatever their ostensible remit or declared goals.

Reversing this trend should be the first step the Oxfam brass could take to their coveted aim, reducing economic inequality.

I expect an announcement shortly that henceforth they’ll forgo their salaries and work solely to assuage their conscience and indulge their taste for justice. You know, the way charities used to work before socialist corruption set in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This may sound paradoxical. Surely it’s not losing but winning that takes skill and athleticism?

Technically, yes. But look at it this way: why would a player want to throw a match? For example, I’ve been playing tennis for 40 years without ever once losing on purpose.

The only possible reason for doing so would be the player or his friends betting heavily, and against the odds, on his opponent. Now, since I’m the only person who has ever bet on my tennis matches, the temptation to throw one has never arisen.

Only professionals find themselves in the privileged position of being able to cheat for money and, by the sound of it, quite a few take advantage of it. And it does take a lifelong effort to get to professional level.

A whistleblower has just released documents suggesting that 16 top-50 players have thrown matches over the last decade. The details haven’t yet been released, but in such cases detection is easy. Casinos know all about it, which is how they flush out blackjack card-counters.

What gives counters away is their irregular, seemingly irrational, betting patterns. When a croupier knows that the pack is stacked in favour of a player who then quadruples his bet, the dealer realises that the player knows it too. And the only way of knowing is to count cards.

Investigation specifically into tennis corruption started in 2008 and characteristically involved a Russian player, Nikolai Davydenko, then ranked fourth in the world.

The Russian was playing the 87^th-ranked Vassallo Arguello and, sure enough, Davydenko was coasting. He easily won the first set and was up a break in the second.

Suddenly there came such an outburst of heavy betting on Arguello that after a while bookies had to stop taking any more bets. Davydenko promptly forfeited the match, and the winners tried to collect.

However, Betfair, an online betting exchange, voided $7,000,000 in bets, the first time it had ever done so, and informed the ATP that something dodgy was afoot. Most of the winners were traced to accounts in Russia, where sports corruption stands tall even against the backdrop of a generally criminalised economy.

An investigation was triggered, but the evidence was deemed insufficient and the player wasn’t suspended. However, if you’ll pardon a cliché, the absence of evidence isn’t always the evidence of absence. It’s certainly not proof of innocence, as anyone familiar with O.J. Simpson’s first trial will confirm.

At the time at least a dozen leading players came forward complaining that they had been approached by criminals with offers (or threats) to throw matches. Again most offers and threats were enunciated in guttural Russian accents.

The present scandal hasn’t yet reached a stage at which the culprits are named. However, it’s already known that Russian criminal syndicates are behind the current round of corruption as well.

In the good tradition of English empiricism, one must respond to the perennial underlying question: ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

That’s an easy question to answer. In the good, if relatively recent, tradition we’re going to cover up the corruption wherever possible and perhaps slap a few wrists that stick too far out to be covered up.

What should be done, apart from punishing those immediately guilty, is a different matter. First, a general comment.

Any social order ought to be arranged in a way that encourages the good parts of human nature, which most of us have, and discourages the bad parts, which we all possess.

Anyone who has ever visited a race course or a casino, looked at the people’s contorted faces and heard their demented shrieks will know that betting brings out the worst traits of human character. Such activities should be banned, or at least not widely legalised, as a matter of principle.

The argument that betting will then simply go underground doesn’t quite wash. Laws exist not only to penalise harmful activities but also to express society’s attitude to them. Some laws may not be enforced, some may not be enforceable, but they all serve a social purpose, either positive or negative.

Second, the global syphilitic contagion of Russian criminality must be checked.

Russia is the first major economy that’s founded, organised and operated almost entirely on Mafioso principles. Hence it befouls everything it touches, inflicting moral damage not only within its own domain but everywhere it’s allowed to operate.

England is one such place, with our government acting on the moral dictum first formulated by Emperor Vespasian: pecunia non olet. Money doesn’t smell.

We welcome dirty Russian money (and all serious Russian money is dirty) without being overly inquisitive about its source or excessively bothered by its attendant gifts, such as corruption and a spate of Mafia-style hits all over London and the home counties.

We weigh billions pumped into our economy against a dozen corpses here or there and find the balance acceptable. The heavy, cumulative moral damage isn’t allowed to tip the scales. This isn’t something we weigh any longer.

The ball is in our court, yet we don’t even try to hit it. Careful it doesn’t hit us, where it hurts.

Before I tell you about an interesting current discovery, it’s not only Russian generals who tend to die in mysterious ways, defying every conceivable statistical pattern. In the past at least, their Eastern European colleagues used to join the fun.

For example, the last two months of 1984 saw the demise of the Defence Ministers of five (5) Warsaw Pact countries, including the Soviet Union. The generals all died of cardiac arrest.

Would it be preposterous to suggest that such a concentrated outbreak of fatalities bucked statistical odds?

Assuming that the sudden epidemic of cardiac arrests among those generals wasn’t entirely coincidental, one is entitled to ask questions, such as why and who.

The historical context helps in venturing a guess or two. For the mid-eighties was the time when power in the Soviet Union was passing from the Party to the KGB, a process later called glasnost and perestroika.

The Soviet army was the KGB’s traditional rival, not to say mortal enemy. ‘Mortal’ isn’t a figure of speech here, for both sides played for keeps.

For example, in 1937-1940 the secret police killed tens of thousands of army officers, including three out of the five marshals. The army won the next round, by purging the secret police in 1953-1955, with tanks bringing Moscow to a standstill.

In the 1980s the pressure came to a head: the KGB was reaching not just for huge power, but for all of it. This message was communicated unequivocally in 1982, when the KGB chief Andropov became Secretary General, dictator for all practical purposes.

It was he who decided to act on the ideas first put forth by his mentor Lavrentiy Beria, the secret police chief murdered in 1953 following a coup in which the army played a decisive role. Enter perestroika, developed to its logical end by Andropov’s protégé Gorbachev.

For obvious reasons the army felt uneasy about that development, and of course what happened in the Soviet Union was faithfully mirrored in its satellites. The armies throughout the communist bloc were restless, the secret police typically ruthless.

The spate of 1984 cardiac arrests among Defence Ministers must have been a visible result of that invisible struggle, at least this is the only way I can make sense of the attendant statistics.

And now the Russian political scientist Andrei Illarionov has released some captivating new data.

He tabulated every death of a Russian general from 1991 to 2015, and the pattern rings 1984 bells. Altogether 42 generals died during that period – with only three of the deaths possibly attributable to natural causes.

The rest are mostly suicides, along with traffic and other accidents, all easy to stage. What leads to this subversive thought is the curious distribution of those deaths from year to year, with statistical probabilities again fleeing for their lives.

In the first 11 years of the observed period, from 1991 to 2001, only nine Russian generals died, less than one a year. Yet in the very next year, 2002, the curve peaked to nine dead generals – as many as in the previous 11 years combined.

In the subsequent five years, to 2007, only one general died, but then the tempo picked up noticeably. In 2008-2013 15 generals went to that great battlefield in the sky, an average of 2.5 a year.

Then, in 2014, another peak came, with six generals dying that year. Another three deaths followed in 2015.

Why such statistically improbable peaks in 2002 and 2014?

The first of these years saw the culmination of the Second Chechen War, started by Putin to consolidate his power, or rather that of the KGB junta he fronts.

One could assume that those generals died in battle, but that assumption would be wrong. For 2002 was the year when the army ceased operations in Chechnya, with the relay baton passing to the KGB and Interior Ministry special units. Putin’s storm troopers, in other words.

Thus the KGB (under its new moniker) was superseding not only all civil authority (at present 85 per cent of Russia’s top government officials come from the KGB/FSB), but effectively military authority as well.

It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of the possible to imagine that fighting generals resented that development, and that Putin resented their resentment. A conflict was in the air, which by the looks of it Putin either preempted or won.

The second outburst of senior officers’ mortality, in 2014, coincided with the predatory war against the Ukraine, with the army again playing second fiddle to FSB troops and paramilitaries. Again it’s easily conceivable that some generals were unhappy, and the unhappiest of them couldn’t be allowed to live.

It’s a truism that statistics often lie. That may be, but at times they do hint at the truth. In this case, the truth is gruesome.

And yes, 2016 is only a couple of weeks old, but Colonel-General Igor Sergun, head of Russia’s military intelligence, has already died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 58.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following a meeting of Anglican primates at Canterbury, the US Episcopal Church has been drummed out of the Anglican communion.

Said communion thereby lost almost two million communicants, which has to be a serious matter. The reason for the split was also serious: homosexuality or, to be more specific, the Episcopalians’ permissive attitude to it.

This is the culmination of an old problem that became apparent in 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated a practising homosexual as Bishop of New Hampshire. The Anglican Church doesn’t require celibacy from either prelates or parish priests, but an open practice of perversion was hard to swallow, as it were.

It has taken the Anglicans 12 years to muster sufficient resolve, but now the Episcopal Church has been suspended.

In the process, the primates also refused to endorse homomarriage, constituting as it does a “fundamental departure from the faith and teaching” of Christianity. Marriage to them is still unfashionably a union between a man and a woman, not any two or more mammals of the male, female or other sex. So far so good.

Then the fun started. For Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, saw fit to apologise to the homosexual ‘community’ for the measure and the meeting’s general tenor, of which contextually he disapproved.

“I want to take this opportunity,” he grovelled, “to say how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, the church has caused.”

Without pointing fingers or naming names, the Archbishop blamed the hurt and the pain on the conservative African bishops and some British fossils, who remain uncomfortably stubborn in their upholding of Christian doctrine:

“[This] makes us look out of line in the US and UK… but not in many other parts of the world… there are different views in different places.”

Different people in different places are indeed entitled to their own views. But they aren’t entitled to their own doctrine, which, for old times’ sake, is supposed to be universal.

His Grace doesn’t seem to realise this, as he fails to understand a few other fundamentals too. Exactly what line is the Anglican Church out of in the US and UK?

The line drawn in the sand by homosexual activists and our governing subversive spivs who crave the image of leftie, populist ‘cool’? If so, and this is the only line that fits the context, the world’s top Anglican prelate clearly thinks the Church must take its cue from every secular fad, no matter how pernicious and perverse.

Not everyone has to be a believing Christian, but one would think this a job requirement for an archbishop. Hence His Grace is institutionally required to follow the reactionary entreaty first enunciated on that Jerusalem hill:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

His Grace must feel that, if Jesus had the good fortune to occupy the honourable post of Archbishop of Canterbury today, he’d doubtless phrase differently: “Let men, especially homosexual men, so shine their light before you, that you may see their good works, and glorify everything they do in or out of wedlock.”

Yet it’s not the secular world that’s supposed to teach morality to the Church but the other way around. However, when this was undoubted, the Anglicans were led by great pastors and theologians, not jumped-up oil traders, the ecclesiastical answer to our politicians.  

Trying to kowtow to the more objectionable secular fads, the Anglican Church has already forfeited most of its tenuous claim to being an apostolic confession – ordaining women as priests and consecrating them as bishops took care of that.

If His Grace Welby and like-minded hierarchs have their way, lighting the path to perdition, the C of E will soon forfeit its claim to being a Christian church altogether. Perhaps it could then be rolled into the Department of Social Services, or else the Ministry of Diversity.

Meanwhile, I expect reciprocity from the leaders of the homosexual ‘community’. If prelates are apologising for not allowing homosexuals to marry in church, those activists ought to apologise for waging war on family, common decency and the institution of marriage.

I’m not holding my breath though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s how many European Jews have fled to Israel in 2015, almost 80 per cent of them from France.

It’s one thing when Jews emigrate to Israel because they want to. It’s quite another when they run for their lives because they feel they have to.

The Holocaust made the previously unthinkable possible. The current, overwhelmingly Muslim, anti-Semitic attacks make it likely.

Having lost half their population to the previous outburst of racial hatred, the Jews are understandably alert to the slightest signs of a brewing repeat performance. They aren’t being oversensitive, for assaults on Jews have become a daily event in Europe.

Synagogues vandalised, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Jews abused – it’s not quite Kristallnacht yet, but the signs are worrying for those who can read them.

The other day, after a Muslim fanatic attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete, the Marseille Jewish authority told the Jews not to provoke assaults by wearing skullcaps in public.

Now France has the highest Muslim population in Europe, and the link between such demographics and anti-Semitic incidents is causative.

Except that saying so out loud isn’t the done thing, just as covering up Muslim rapes all over Europe is. A modern tongue, twisted out of shape by the PC dicta, can’t utter the simple words: more Muslims, more crime – including anti-Semitic attacks.

That most Frenchmen aren’t anti-Semitic is as true as it’s irrelevant. Most Germans weren’t anti-Semitic either, but that arithmetic wasn’t much consolation to the six million victims.

It wasn’t just they who died during the war; the total count was closer to 50 million. The difference between the two numerals ought to suffice to make an observation that holds true irrespective of time or place:

A society that fails to nip anti-Semitic escapades in the bud doesn’t just acquiesce in the suffering of Jews. It signs its own death warrant.

It’s true that most outrages are perpetrated not by the indigenous population but by Muslims – most of whom aren’t part of the indigenous population even if native-born.

But that doesn’t exculpate anyone else personally or society collectively. Millions of Muslims should never have been allowed to settle in the West, for they’re viscerally and doctrinally hostile to everything the West stands for.

True, the Holocaust was perpetrated without much Muslim participation. But anti-Semitic violence on that scale was an aberration both to Western morality and religion. Since, unlike the Koran, the founding documents of our civilisation don’t prescribe violence towards Jews, the West was able to lick its moral wounds after the war.

The wounds have now reopened because the West has proved too weak to protect itself against an influx of aliens first, and their propensity for criminal behaviour second. We’ve failed to inform the newcomers that our civilisation isn’t just different but also better than theirs. More important, it’s indeed ours, we like it and intend to keep it by any means at our disposal.

These could include deportation of undesirable elements, stiff sentences for any crimes, especially Islam-inspired ones, ending any Muslim immigration, summary closure of any mosque in which a single anti-Western or anti-Jewish word is uttered.

Alas, a civilisation needs to have self-confidence to act with such resolve, and in the West today that commodity is lacking. That’s why anti-Semitic violence shames us all, not just the Muslims in our midst.

That’s why also we must brace ourselves to face the consequences of our frailty. For it’s not just the Jews who find themselves at the receiving end of Muslim violence.

If Marseille Jews are told not to wear skullcaps today, tomorrow all women will be told to cover themselves head to toe in shapeless black garments (ideally masking the face too) not to provoke rape.

And then people will start taking the law in their own hands. Street battles, like those between the fascists and the communists in pre-war London or Berlin, are far from impossible today.

This could well create troubled waters in which assorted extremists will then fish, and we’re already witnessing the strengthening of the extremists’ electoral muscle all over Europe.

An economic crisis, something certain to happen in the next few years, can provide an ideal backdrop for violent anarchy to descend on Europe.

Though history teaches everything but complacency, complacency seems to be the only lesson we’ve learned. That’s a mistake, for a society unprepared to defend its civilisation doesn’t deserve to keep it.

 

Daniel Finkelstein, The Times Associate Editor, doesn’t think so. In another fulsome encomium to the late David Bowie, he writes: “…pop, with Bowie at its head, saw that consumerism isn’t base and philistine. It can be the ally of artistic endeavour. Commerce, liberty and art, arm-in-arm. That was the great David Bowie.”

Earlier in the piece, Finkelstein opines that Bowie was “undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years”. Chaps like Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Glenn Gould or James MacMillan don’t get a look in. The genius slot is occupied.

That Finkelstein knows about art as little as he does about football (about which he writes a regular column), and understands even less, is evident. That he doesn’t even understand the words he uses, equally so.

For consumerism is indeed base and philistine when it’s applied to the higher reaches of the human spirit. For example, when love equates consumerism, it’s reduced to the base level of a Soho whorehouse.

However, Finkelstein’s meaningless waffle wouldn’t merit a comment if it didn’t reflect a wider problem, a malaise that has both afflicted and defined the modern world: a catastrophic loss of mind and soul.

Finkelstein kindly provides an exhaustive illustration of this tragedy, which he however doesn’t see as such: “The most revealing… was his [Bowie’s] response to the question ‘Who are your heroes in real life?’… Bowie replied, truthfully and insightfully: ‘The consumer’.”

If Bowie’s ‘insights’ had been meant to mock Bach, he could have inscribed his CDs with ‘The glory is the consumer’s’, just as Bach inscribed his scores with ‘The glory is God’s’. The difference in motivation is obvious, as is the difference between real art and its modern, philistine perversion.

Anyone needing further persuasion of the difference between art and non-art could do worse than compare a recording of anything at all by Bowie (or any other purveyor of pop) with anything at all by Bach, say his aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion.

The former is a lewd, primitive caricature of art; the latter, art produced by a genuine creative impulse emulating the outburst of divine energy that brought the world into existence. It’s not for nothing that both Judaism and early Christianity frowned on non-verbal artistic creativity.

A man assuming the role of a creator seemed to them a hair’s breadth away from usurping the role of the Creator – an unspeakable heresy. For example, Clement of Alexandria (d. circa 215) wrote that art contravened not so much the second commandment as the eighth: by displaying creativity, man was stealing God’s prerogative.

Even in pre-Christian times music was seen as something more than just a product to be consumed. Thus Plato: “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

This isn’t the right medium to ponder the philosophical, theological and moral implications of music, or art in general. Suffice it to say that referring to pop effluvia by the misnomer ‘music’ testifies to nothing but the paucity of language.

We often use the same words to describe phenomena that have nothing in common. One man loves God, another loves a woman, a third loves fish and chips – language lags behind the notion it designates or else races far ahead of it.

Hence the likes of Lord Finkelstein see no contradiction between describing Bowie as ‘an artistic genius’ and quoting his cynically crass comment on the identity of his heroes.

Do you think Bach would have answered the same question with ‘Duke Johan Ernst’, Mozart with ‘Prince Lichnowsky’ or Beethoven with ‘Archduke Rudolph’? Yet those were the ‘consumers’ of the most sublime music ever written, the greatest testimony to the divine origin of man.

Pop, on the other hand, supports Darwin’s slapdash theory by only testifying to the simian origin of man, or rather some men. Bach proves the ape isn’t our past; pop proves it’s our future: by severing all links with divinity, man is rapidly forgoing his humanity as well.

Believing, as Finkelstein does, that art can be mass-produced exclusively for commercial purposes betokens woeful ignorance and semantic confusion. Both conditions are lamentable, but not nearly as much as the disease of which they are merely symptoms.

 

P.S. In the spirit of crass commercialism that so fascinates Lord Finkelstein, may I remind you that such issues are pondered at depth in my book How the West Was Lost, now available as a paperback from Amazon or directly from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Church of England hasn’t been into canonisations for a while but, judging by the front-page eulogies in the press, an exception may be made in David Bowie’s case.

Allow me first to declare a personal interest in David Bowie: there is none. When he was alive I knew he had something to do either with pop music or the drug trade, not that there’s much difference between the two.

Now he’s dead, I’ve found out he was actually some kind of singer of, putting it kindly, ambivalent sexuality and a strong propensity to snort cocaine. In short, he possessed perfect credentials to be eulogised as ‘a legend’ and ‘a great musician’.

Obeying the dictum of speaking no evil of the dead, I shan’t say much else about his personality, especially since even the panegyrics fail to portray it as anything other than trivial. I’m interested in Bowie not for what he was but for what he represents.

Judging by the scraps of his songs one can’t help hearing on every broadcast channel, he wasn’t a great musician. He wasn’t a musician at all. His ilk are merely both the totems and the shamans of a pernicious, toxic cult.

The purveyors of this cult overtly or implicitly favour satanic paraphernalia to dress up their rites, a cross between a Nuremberg rally and an orgy. Typically they perform in clouds of billowing smoke, hinting at hell with little subtlety.

Their puny musical content is drowned in the clinically deafening din of electric and electronic instruments, belting out the same three chords on which the whole structure of pop ‘music’ rests.

The accompanying roar coming from thousands of throats doesn’t reflect fine musical sensibilities. It’s a hateful chant of cult worshippers, the battle cry of victorious barbaric modernity.

Pop music expresses the true nature of modernity, which is more or less circumscribed by its hatred of Western tradition. Both the shamans and the worshippers of the cult seek, wittingly or unwittingly,  to destroy our civilisation, even though they don’t mind availing themselves of the riches it can deliver.

In fact, pop has become big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of culturally inept audiences in a particularly effective way. They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, oblivious to the paradox, perhaps even unfamiliar with this three-syllable word.

At the beginning pop remotely resembled music, but that was quickly lost. More and more, it began to acquire overtly satanic characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp concealed underneath it. Pop went the weasel of our civilisation.

Pop’s appeal is quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus died on the cross to redeem our sins, the apostles of the new cult would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course of AIDS. At a pinch even cancer, of the kind that killed Bowie, can qualify as a trampoline to redemptive immortality. 

Improbably, the dead shamans are portrayed as a kind of innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who contextually can only be ‘the establishment’. Worshippers of the new cult pretend not to realise that they themselves are the establishment now. Iconoclasm always lives on even after the icons have been smashed.

Hence all those Jimmy Hendrixes, Freddie Mercuries, Amy Winehouses and David Bowies gave their lives for a good cause. They are martyrs at the altar of anomie and hatred.

Amazingly, even our formerly reputable newspapers not only praise the cultish martyrs but claim they set a great example for Christian churches to follow. Hence Hugo Rifkind, whose idiocy stands out even against the generally abysmal level of The Times, says the late Bowie could teach the Anglican Church the meaning of tolerance towards LGBTI people:

“LGBTI stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex’. Bowie, at times, appeared to be at least three of those things, and arguably four. Still… those whom the church left ‘abandoned and alone’, he championed and made his own.”

Tolerance means accepting with equanimity something one dislikes. You and I may be tolerant of cannibals, but a cannibal wouldn’t be. He’d be one of them.

Thus those who practise sexual perversions find it easier to be tolerant of such practices than would those who find them distasteful. Obviously, Mr Rifkind is so carried away by his own anomie that he’s unable to notice that he’s talking in logical solecisms. He’s just dying to state his credentials as someone who belongs.

That the Bowies of this world find mass adulation indicts not so much them as all of us. A society that can see them as anything other than an unpleasant sideshow fails aesthetically, culturally and philosophically. Above all it fails morally, and that is a truly serious matter.

Still, those of us who know how must pray for David Bowie’s soul – which will be a true test of tolerance.