Category: Blog

In a globalised world, Britain’s disasters will rebound on everyone, and make no mistake about it:  Corbyn’s elevation to Labour leadership is disastrous.

To Marx the spectre haunting Europe was that of communism, but he was only partly right. Communism is only a facet of a larger entity: evil. 

At the heart of all evil regimes, regardless of what they call themselves, lies the desire to destroy everything good in Western tradition and push everything rotten to its extreme. Hence they’re less different than they’re the same.  

If you question such a lack of taxonomic discrimination, consider those around the world who hail Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent.

Putin’s propaganda praises Corbyn for his hostility to Nato, affection for Russia and opposition to the West’s sanctions over the rape of the Ukraine.

Jerry Adams, the IRA murderer-in-chief, describes Corbyn as “a friend of Ireland and the Irish peace process”. This means a friend of the IRA murderers to whom Blair’s government surrendered.

The French Trotskyist newspaper Libération is ecstatic: Corbyn’s election is “a turning point”. France is spinning on a similar turning point, with Hollande turning the most productive Frenchmen away.

Argentine president Kirchner praises Corbyn for his support of Argentina in her struggle for “human rights”, “equality” and “political sovereignty”. In other words, Corbyn wants Argentina to annex the Falklands, which in a sane Britain would be regarded as treasonous.

Hamas extols Corbyn for voicing “solidarity with the Palestinian cause”, i.e. the extermination of Israel and everyone in it.

Greece’s ruling party Syriza is happy that Corbyn’s election “sends messages of hope to the people of Europe” – the same messages, presumably, as those sent by Syriza itself.

For Spain’s Podemos Corbyn represents “a step forward towards a change in Europe for the benefit of the people.” Specifically of the people who’re still grieving that it wasn’t Stalin who won the Spanish Civil War.

Different parties, different nations – but they all share the same loathing for Britain. This isn’t a xenophobic ethnic distaste; it’s the hatred of everything Britain represents in their eyes.

They detect the same animus in Corbyn, thereby displaying greater perspicacity than some of our pundits, including the supposedly conservative ones.

For example, Peter Hitchens, like all apostates, must be feeling latent guilt towards his erstwhile Trotskyist comrades. Thus he praises Corbyn who “obviously believes what he says”. (Neither Lenin nor Hitler was particularly duplicitous either.)

“Ken Livingston is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage,” continues Hitchens. “Ukip appeals to the same impulse.” With one minor difference: Ukip wants to preserve Britain; Corbyn yearns to destroy it.

Before you decide that Hitchens is completely, rather than partially, off his rocker, what he means is that people are dissatisfied with mainstream politicians. That’s true, and they have every reason to be.

Similarly, Germans had every reason to be dissatisfied with the Weimar Republic. Yet not all of them became Nazis or Communists. Those who were neither fools nor knaves remained conservative, aghast at both the red and brown extremes.

Hitchens allows that he dislikes “many of Mr Corbyn’s policies – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU.”

It follows contextually that he doesn’t dislike those of Corbyn’s policies he left unmentioned: wholesale nationalisation, abandoning our nuclear deterrent, encouraging unlimited immigration, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, getting rid of the monarchy, uniting Ireland, leaving Nato.

Even if this inference isn’t wholly correct, and Hitchens dislikes some of those policies as well, he redeems Corbyn “for the honest way he states them.”

Hitler was equally honest when he stated his intent to murder all Jews, and there’s something sinister about Corbyn’s announcement that, given the chance, he’ll introduce a Ministry for Jews.

New government bodies are required when new problems arise that can’t be handled by existing institutions. There are no such problems with British Jews, who neither are nor perceive themselves to be anything less than an integral part of our nation.

The problem exists only in the minds of virulent anti-Semites, such as Corbyn, who lists Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists among his friends.

The Ministry he proposes will serve the same purpose as similar organisations served in Nazi Germany: isolating and marginalising Jews. The Nazis graduated to genocide, but I doubt Corbyn will go so far. He’ll just encourage evil-doers in the Middle East to do the job for him.

Corbyn, with honesty so appealing to Hitchens, unites in his personality the red and brown ends of political evil. And, contrary to what one reads in the papers, he’s not a throwback to the past.

Evil, either brown or red, is on the march everywhere in Europe, from Italy to Hungary, from France to Germany, from Russia to Spain, from Greece to – evidently – Britain.

Hence Corbyn is merely a symptom of a pandemic threatening the world. One fears it may be like tuberculosis: when symptoms appear, it’s too late to do anything about the disease. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The spectre of evil is haunting Europe

 

In a globalised world, Britain’s disasters will rebound on everyone, and make no mistake about it:  Corbyn’s elevation to Labour leadership is disastrous.

 

To Marx the spectre haunting Europe was that of communism, but he was only partly right. Communism is only a facet of a larger entity: evil. 

 

At the heart of all evil regimes, regardless of what they call themselves, lies the desire to destroy everything good in Western tradition and push everything rotten to its extreme. Hence they’re less different than they’re the same.  

 

If you question such a lack of taxonomic discrimination, consider those around the world who hail Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent.

 

Putin’s propaganda praises Corbyn for his hostility to Nato, affection for Russia and opposition to the West’s sanctions over the rape of the Ukraine.

 

Jerry Adams, the IRA murderer-in-chief, describes Corbyn as “a friend of Ireland and the Irish peace process”. This means a friend of the IRA murderers to whom Blair’s government surrendered.

 

The French Trotskyist newspaper Libération is ecstatic: Corbyn’s election is “a turning point”. France is spinning on a similar turning point, with Hollande turning the most productive Frenchmen away.

 

Argentine president Kirchner praises Corbyn for his support of Argentina in her struggle for “human rights”, “equality” and “political sovereignty”. In other words, Corbyn wants Argentina to annex the Falklands, which in a sane Britain would be regarded as treasonous.

 

Hamas extols Corbyn for voicing “solidarity with the Palestinian cause”, i.e. the extermination of Israel and everyone in it.

 

Greece’s ruling party Syriza is happy that Corbyn’s election “sends messages of hope to the people of Europe” – the same messages, presumably, as those sent by Syriza itself.

 

For Spain’s Podemos Corbyn represents “a step forward towards a change in Europe for the benefit of the people.” Specifically of the people who’re still grieving that it wasn’t Stalin who won the Spanish Civil War.

 

Different parties, different nations – but they all share the same loathing for Britain. This isn’t a xenophobic ethnic distaste; it’s the hatred of everything Britain represents in their eyes.

 

They detect the same animus in Corbyn, thereby displaying greater perspicacity than some of our pundits, including the supposedly conservative ones.

 

For example, Peter Hitchens, like all apostates, must be feeling latent guilt towards his erstwhile Trotskyist comrades. Thus he praises Corbyn who “obviously believes what he says”. (Neither Lenin nor Hitler was particularly duplicitous either.)

 

“Ken Livingston is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage,” continues Hitchens. “Ukip appeals to the same impulse.” With one minor difference: Ukip wants to preserve Britain; Corbyn yearns to destroy it.

 

Before you decide that Hitchens is completely, rather than partially, off his rocker, what he means is that people are dissatisfied with mainstream politicians. That’s true, and they have every reason to be.

 

Similarly, Germans had every reason to be dissatisfied with the Weimar Republic. Yet not all of them became Nazis or Communists. Those who were neither fools nor knaves remained conservative, aghast at both the red and brown extremes.

 

Hitchens allows that he dislikes “many of Mr Corbyn’s policies – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU.”

 

It follows contextually that he doesn’t dislike those of Corbyn’s policies he left unmentioned: wholesale nationalisation, abandoning our nuclear deterrent, encouraging unlimited immigration, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, getting rid of the monarchy, uniting Ireland, leaving Nato.

 

Even if this inference isn’t wholly correct, and Hitchens dislikes some of those policies as well, he redeems Corbyn “for the honest way he states them.”

 

Hitler was equally honest when he stated his intent to murder all Jews, and there’s something sinister about Corbyn’s announcement that, given the chance, he’ll introduce a Ministry for Jews.

 

New government bodies are required when new problems arise that can’t be handled by existing institutions. There are no such problems with British Jews, who neither are nor perceive themselves to be anything less than an integral part of our nation.

 

The problem exists only in the minds of virulent anti-Semites, such as Corbyn, who lists Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists among his friends.

 

The Ministry he proposes will serve the same purpose as similar organisations served in Nazi Germany: isolating and marginalising Jews. The Nazis graduated to genocide, but I doubt Corbyn will go so far. He’ll just encourage evil-doers in the Middle East to do the job for him.

 

Corbyn, with honesty so appealing to Hitchens, unites in his personality the red and brown ends of political evil. And, contrary to what one reads in the papers, he’s not a throwback to the past.

 

Evil, either brown or red, is on the march everywhere in Europe, from Italy to Hungary, from France to Germany, from Russia to Spain, from Greece to – evidently – Britain.

 

Hence Corbyn is merely a symptom of a pandemic threatening the world. One fears it may be like tuberculosis: when symptoms appear, it’s too late to do anything about the disease. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A teenage pupil of a C of E school set out to address a terrible injustice: her school A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, of whom – are you sitting down? – all are MEN.

I don’t know how well they teach music at her school, but their standards of indoctrination in the fine points of PC jargon are highly advanced.

The silly girl (and all teenagers are silly by physiological definition) must be a star pupil, for she wielded terms like ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’ with nothing short of grown-up fluency.

Now any grown-ups in a position of power ought to have told the PC twit not to bother her empty little head with stupid ideologies and concentrate instead on her studies. But hey, it’s the 21^st century we’re living in, remember?

Hence the twit’s campaign was avidly supported by The Girls’ Day School Trust, leading academics and even some composers. As a result, the school issued an abject apology and vowed to amend its ways.

The twit gloated with indecent joy: “They automatically saw the need to rectify this and are making changes as soon as possible for the new course. They are also reviewing their other qualifications to ensure they are diverse and inclusive.”

Now on a roll, she submitted a list of female composers whose omission formed a gaping hole in her musical education: “I’d like to study Clara Schumann to learn about her piano music. That would be interesting.”

Now Clara, one of the best pianists of her time, herself didn’t consider her compositions to be interesting enough. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her recitals, as was then a common practice. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

This she realised and stopped composing, dedicating her life instead to performances, mainly of the music by two towering geniuses: her husband Robert and her admirer (probably also lover) Johannes Brahms.

But of course a little girl whose brain isn’t yet even wired properly can judge such matters better than Mr and Mrs Schumann. She’s armed with a progressive ideology denied 19^th century musicians, and that gives her deeper insights.

Judging by some Radio 3 programmes, the twit is actually quite precocious, for plum-voiced announcers also seem to think that Clara’s compositions were every bit her husband’s equal. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times that Clara, a victim of her pre-PC time, didn’t have proper recognition because as a woman she was denied her basic right to be taken seriously.

I haven’t been privy to the twit’s full list of unjustly ignored female composers, but I do know that, in addition to Clara, it also included pop musicians Annie Lennox and Carole King, who have about as much to do with music as they do with Grand Prix racing.

But can you imagine the ensuing hysteria if our educational boards were to announce that only classical music would be taught academically, because no other music is a proper academic subject? My imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

Anyway, having read the article, my concert pianist wife, my professional mezzo-soprano friend and I tried to compile our own list. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, we came up with only two composers of note.

One was the sublime 12^th century composer Hildegard von Bingen, a Catholic nun. The other is an interesting contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Putting me to shame, the girls also managed to name half a dozen others, mostly sub-minor 19^th century figures filling the timeline demarcated by Hildegard at one end and Sofia at the other.

But the two names worthy of study could teach the twit quite a few things about fields other than music, and dollars to doughnuts, as Americans say, they probably didn’t even make her list.

Hildegard von Bingen, named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI, lived in an era not known for its commitment to women’s rights – quite the contrary.

Yet Hildegard didn’t complain about this injustice. She was too busy founding Benedictine monasteries and convents, writing poems, liturgical songs, scientific works, philosophical tracts – and some of the most moving music ever written.

If she lived in a misogynist (to use modern jargon) time, Gubaidulina lives in a misogynist country, Russia. As an ethnic Tartar she has probably suffered a fair share of double-whammy discrimination.

Yet she didn’t complain either, and anyway Russia hasn’t been blessed with Equal Opportunities Commissions instituted to process such complaints. Instead she wrote her spiritual, mystic music profoundly alien to the regime both in its content and modernist form.

True talent will out no matter what, and these two women must be studied in any serious music course not because they are women, but because they are serious musicians. Primary sexual characteristics just aren’t a sufficient qualification.

Would I be able to explain this to the PC twit hung up on ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’? Probably. But not so she’d understand: the cancerous corruption of modernity has in her case reached Stage IV.

 

 

I don’t mind atheists – we all have a right to moral and intellectual aberrations. Such as eschewing revealed religion for a silly superstition based on neither revelation nor scientific evidence.

What’s less acceptable is people spouting hostile, militant nonsense at the top of their lungs, especially if they try to pass harangues for a serious argument.

This brings me to Philip Collins’s article Ignore the Slippery Critics of Assisted Dying. Obviously to Collins and other haters of religion, anyone unwilling to knock out every cornerstone of our civilisation only deserves pejorative designations, of which ‘slippery’ is one. Hence the title is par for the course.

As is the half-witted ‘philosophy’ Collins uses to justify his support for the cull of the crumblies. “Life is the capacity to realise certain capacities,” he writes, and it’s good to see that his style is in harmony with his crepuscular thinking.

Any sentence that starts with the words ‘life is…’ is suspect. Whatever follows is almost guaranteed to be gibberish. For example, one could say that life is a cucumber: today’s it’s in your hands, tomorrow up your rectum. Or else life is a hotel: we arrive, stay for a while and then check out.

However, these and a million other silly possibilities one could think of would still be preferable to what passes for the meat of Collins’s argument:

When a person no longer has the capacity to mobilise his capacities in realising the full range of certain capacities he would otherwise have the capacity of realising, doctors should kill him with his consent.

The rest is Collins’s attempt to couch his visceral hatred of religion in quasi-intellectual terms, and he lets his febrile emotions overrun his already modest intellectual ‘capacities’.

Thus he takes issue with Archbishop Welby’s objections to assisted suicide being merely “pastoral”, as opposed to “religious”. In the next sentence the confused reader realises that by pastoral Collins means secular, but then one doesn’t expect terminological precision from the likes of him.

One is almost led to believe that, had His Grace expressed his objections in more theological terms, Collins would jump up and salute. Yet considering that he lists God among “some implausible things”, it’s rather unlikely that a theological argument would sway Collins’s ideological hatred of the founding tenets of our civilisation.

One also gets the impression that Collins sees the line of demarcation between philosophy and theology as being sharper than it actually is. The bill to legalise assisted dying, he says, “should attract the support of philosophers just as it is drawing the opposition of theologians.”

Knowing something about the subject on which one pontificates is clearly no longer a professional requirement at The Times. If it were, his editors would have pointed out to Collins that an atheist philosopher is very close to being an oxymoron.

A real philosopher, whatever his immediate interests, can’t avoid asking himself ontological questions about the nature and origin of being, as distinct from existence. Such philosophical questions can only have two types of answers: theological or unsound.

For the theologian the existence of God is the beginning of the argument; for the philosopher, the end. But sooner or later they’ll always converge, at least partly.

The theologian will maintain that, outside of God, questions of being can be neither answered nor indeed asked. The philosopher will try to do both and will only agree with the theologian after many a futile attempt. But agree he will, out of professional integrity if nothing else.

A philosopher, even if he himself doesn’t espouse the Judaeo-Christian understanding of life and the attendant ethics, will know that in the West the only alternative to Judaeo-Christian morality isn’t some other morality. It’s none.

That’s why a philosopher will begrudgingly agree with the theologian that, when society sees a man as the sole sovereign of his life, such a society will start by endorsing suicide and will end up countenancing murder.

The eternal barrier to murder is the same as to suicide: the realisation that human life is sacred. Remove the barrier, and assisted suicide will become first advisable, then legal and then compulsory. The already tenuous difference between assisted suicide and murder will disappear.

Collins mocks “some mysteriously redemptive purpose for which suffering is a surrogate”. This purpose is only mysterious to ignoramuses like him. Even educated atheists know that redemptive suffering was the starting point of our civilisation – and treat it with the same reverential respect they feel for the civilisation.

Collins feels no such respect, partly because he knows little about our civilisation and its heritage, including rhetoric. Hence instead of a coherent argument he treats us to a soppy story about his father, whose suffering at the end of his life could have been prevented by a lethal injection.

“Unlike religion,” clamours Collins, pressing his atheist credentials, “[assisted suicide] will actually ease suffering.” Quite. So will murder. And the similarity between the two dwarfs the trivial differences.

 

“Only an idle fool would convict Jane Austen of bad grammar”, runs the Times headline of yet another panegyric to illiteracy produced by Oliver Kamm.

By contrast, a clever, busy chap like Ollie has no time for fine distinctions among ‘convict of’ and ‘accuse of’ or ‘charge with’, either of which would have fit his sentence better.

What Ollie has plenty of time for is a systematic campaign based on a linguistic philosophy he summarises thus: “[Grammar] has many rules and the way to find out what they are is to examine how native speakers use their own language.”

Exactly which native speakers are we talking about, Ollie? Tattooed Millwall fans? Smug Times columnists? The average of the two? Since, on this evidence, there’s little intellectual difference, the grammatical extremes must also be converging.

Real grammar, Ollie, is not only descriptive but also normative. Anyone who asserts that whatever native speakers say is correct because they say it is effectively declaring all norms to be invalid.

I’ve heard this view expressed before, though never by someone with pretensions to expertise. “Language,” they’d say, “is just a means of communication.” To which my usual retort is that linguistic norms are precisely what makes communication precise or indeed possible.

If native speakers say ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, or ‘appraise’ instead of ‘apprise’, no communication occurs because what the listener understands is different from what the speaker thinks he’s saying.

Ollie is scathing about those who criticise William Hague “for the supposed error of discussing whether he or Tony Blair held ‘the best job’. The sticklers insist that the comparative must be ‘the better job’. What hogwash.”

The sticklers are right and Ollie is illiterate, or at least ignorant of the difference between a comparative and a superlative. In the cited sentence, ‘the better job’ would mean the better of the two jobs, one held by Mr Hague and the other by Mr Blair. ‘The best job’ would mean one better than all other jobs. Either option is possible, so how is the listener to know which one is meant?

Quoting great writers’, in this case Jane Austen’s, solecisms as support for Ollie’s cherished grammatical populism is disingenuous. Jane Austen et al create their own language universes in which they are the deities establishing all the rules.

Sometimes they use bad grammar on purpose, to achieve a stylistic effect. Sometimes they do so out of carelessness, caused, say, by that second sherry before dinner, time pressure or the late hour of the day. Either way, simple mortals haven’t earned the right to the same latitude that great writers enjoy and silly mortals demand.

Encouraging such latitude is guaranteed to produce generations of tongue-tied, monosyllabic functional mutes – exactly the type churned out by our oxymoronic comprehensive education.

But hold on, Ollie takes exception to that assessment. He extols “the generally high standard of English language teaching in schools”. A less permissive grammarian would be tempted to say ‘…of English taught in schools’, which would make the sentence more mellifluous of sound if no less wrong of thought.

Here we leave the domain of grammar to enter that of ethics. Ollie, I’m like, where was you brung up, mate? Wasn’t you teached not to lie? Or is you deaf as well as dumb? Djahmean? Wha’ever.

A short walk through the streets of any British city, and not necessarily its bad part, will disabuse anyone of the notion that in our schools English is taught well, or indeed at all. One would get the impression that we’ve reverted to the primordial era, well before man received the gift of coherent speech.

Never mind the streets: listen to our newscasters who, if unprompted and unscripted, have trouble talking in correct sentences. What regularly comes out of their mouths is “people who were sat at the table”, an ugly usage of recent provenance, doubtless inspired by Ollie-style laissez-parler.

I’m sure he’ll spring to the defence of that usage with the same energy he showed a few months ago when supporting the reply “I’m good” to the question “How are you?”.

To display the power of his convictions, he’d now probably answer this question with that liberally egalitarian Americanism. Glad to hear you’re good, Ollie. But you’re clearly not well.

The waves of refugees threatening to engulf Britain amount to a crisis. Like all crises, this one begets debates, debates beget rhetoric and rhetoric begets oversimplification.

As any veteran of verbal jousts will tell you, a debate is no place for rational, nuanced arguments. It’s a place for fiery slogans and endlessly repeated mantras.

Both sides to the present debate give ample proof of this observation. One side, reduced to the absurd by Yvette Cooper, issues a blank invitation in the shape of the poster ‘Refugees welcome’. The other side screams NIMBY, citing the fiscal and demographic ramifications of accepting thousands of migrants.

The first position is as meaningless as befits Yvette Cooper. For, if left unqualified, ‘Refugees welcome’ may be tantamount to national suicide.

How many and what kind of refugees are welcome? In a pre-election interview Ed Miliband put no limit on either, which partly explains why Yvette now sits on the back benches. Does she share Ed’s view?

Since most refugees in question are Muslim, are we prepared to increase our Islamic population even further – in the knowledge that most Muslims are hostile to our civilisation and all are alien to it?

Our population is already five per cent Muslim, and some sources cite numbers closer to 10 per cent. The aforementioned waves of migrants approach 400,000, and before long they’ll reach the typhoon power of millions. Does Yvette feel we should welcome, say, a million or so?

If she does, she remains loyal to the political memory of her guru Blair. Now safe in his coupon-clipping retirement, Tony cynically admits that he imported millions of Muslims on purpose, to smash the traditional voting base of the Tories.

In other words, he was prepared to destroy Britain, debauch her whole history and rip the traditional social and cultural fabric to tatters to improve Labour’s electoral chances. If achieving that worthy goal meant turning a great, formerly Christian country into a giant kasbah, then so be it.

It’s good to see that Yvette is willing to continue her mentor’s fine tradition of demographic sabotage. Those of us who detest Blair and reject his legacy ought to transfer some of the rancour to his politically surviving acolytes.

But does that mean we should amend Yvette’s slogan to ‘No refugees are welcome’? Our answer to this question should be leavened with mercy and some sense of guilt.

There’s no doubt that many of the refugees aren’t really refugees but economic migrants. There’s even little doubt that some of them are ISIS infiltrators. But equally clear is that many of them were made homeless, stateless and hopeless by – well, us.

This is another part of Blair’s subversive legacy that ought to make us withhold snap decisions. Because, but for the criminal stupidity of Anglo-American ‘nation building’ in the Middle East, we’d have a trickle of Muslim immigrants, not a tidal wave.

It was American and British bombs followed by ‘boots on the ground’ that turned the region into a murderous chaos unfit for human habitation. Since we made that blood-filled bed, to what moral extent can we refuse to lie in it?

The dictators that our democracy-obsessed nation-builders deposed kept some sort of lid on the bubbling Islamic passions. The passions have now splashed out, scorching the region and sending a human spray over to Europe.

Hence the slogan ‘No refugees welcome’ is as bad as its opposite. We can’t just say ‘let them drown in the Mediterranean or starve to death, see if we care’.

This kind of obtuse, merciless resolve would in the long run compromise Britishness more than a generous but limited welcome would, for Christian mercy has always softened the British proclivity for rational, actuarial calculations.

Such is the principle, and it’s so easy to establish that one is amazed so few parties to the debate have managed to do so. The logistics are much harder.

To invite people to our home we must have a home left to invite them to. So how generous and how limited a welcome should we extend? How do we separate the refugee wheat from the economic (or terrorist) chaff? Let’s be absolutely clear about this: without such vetting we’re back to Yvetting, an accelerated national suicide.

The answer is, I don’t know. However, it’s obvious that some order and patience must be brought into the proceedings. There has to be one centre for all refugees to wait their turn, and no traditional DP camp would be big enough.

My earlier suggestion of using a Greek island for this purpose still holds, and this project must be financed either wholly or at least greatly by the rich Muslim states. It’s clearly within the capacity of the EU to exert pressure both on them and on the Greek government – in fact extortion is about the only thing the EU is good at.

Then each case must be considered individually, which will take months if not years. In the end we’ll accept a few thousand people in genuine need – and reject many more. And, to make sure that no further waves reach our shores, we must do all we can to repair the damage we caused to the region.

This is the price of our geopolitical folly, and we have to pay it out of decency. But we mustn’t kill ourselves out of decency – or to please wicked dunces like Yvette Cooper.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk and devout Christian, refused to issue licences for homosexual marriages because they “conflict with God’s definition of marriage”.

There are only two objections to her statement possible even in theory. One: there is no such conflict. Two: either way, God’s definitions don’t matter.

The first objection would be clearly nonsensical: both Testaments treat homosexuality as an abomination, which a priori invalidates homomarriage. This leaves only one objection on the table, one that Kentucky authorities indeed invoked.

The objection was so strong that it had to be delivered in the form of a custodial sentence – nothing less would have driven the point home with sufficient force. Since the US Supreme Court had ruled on 26 June that homomarriage is a constitutional right, Mrs Davis was sent to prison.

She took her punishment meekly but with dignity, as Christians have been doing for 2,000 years. “It is not a light issue for me,” she said. “It is a heaven or hell decision.”

That draconian measure looks particularly brutal against the backdrop of our time, when burglars are routinely spared jail. Clearly, their crimes are innocuous compared to the felony committed by Mrs Davis.

So they are, for burglars only hurt individuals. Mrs Davis, however, attacked the very foundation on which every modern state rests, emphatically including the USA.

What to her is a matter of heaven or hell is to the state a matter of life or death, and it’ll defend itself with every means at its disposal.

The modern state, pioneered by America, came into being when a jolt of anti-Christian energy was injected into Western civilisation. All resulting states may have evolved slightly different positive desiderata, but they all converge at the negative end: the urgent need to wipe out every vestige of Christendom.

Leave any of them intact, and no modern state, whatever its manifest politics, would be able to function. The Founders and the Framers understood this with prescient clarity, which is why the very first constitutional amendment, ostensibly providing for freedom of religious worship, in fact “erected a wall between religion and state”, to cite Thomas Jefferson’s gloating boast.

With a few minor exceptions, all those distinguished gentlemen were non-Christians, or rather anti-Christians – regardless of whether they called themselves atheists, agnostics or deists.

Yes, they were prepared to let their citizens worship God in private. But under no circumstances would they allow Christian tenets to exert one iota of influence on public affairs.

In due course the modern state bifurcated into its philistine and nihilist variants (championed in their purest forms by the USA and the USSR), but, in terms of their treatment of Christians, they differ only in methods, not principle.

Some, like the Bolsheviks, will massacre priests and their parishes en masse; some, like the Founding Fathers, will allow Christian worship provided it doesn’t lead believers to defying the state.

Christians may be allowed to live – as long as Christianity stays dead as a moral, social and especially political force. On this condition no modern state run by the motley crew of our today’s Baracks, Daves and Françoises will ever compromise.

However, even as Christians are imprisoned for refusing to sacrifice their faith at the idolatrous altar of state worship, many still regard America as a Christian country. This misapprehension is widespread not only in the country itself but also among the outlanders.

They base their judgement mainly on the frequency with which the plastic figurines called American politicians scream “God bless America!”, the Pledge of Allegiance to ‘one nation under God’, the slogan ‘In God we Trust’ appearing on dollar bills (which medium leaves little doubt of the deity in the message) and the statistics of church attendance. Of these only the last one merits any consideration, the others being simply risible.

Gallup polls suggest that 37 per cent of Americans are church-goers. Whether we accept this finding or rely instead on the self-reporting online surveys indicating a lower figure of 22 per cent, the number is still impressive.

My point is that, even if church attendance were 100 per cent, it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on government policy. The state would remain aggressively atheist even if its every citizen were devoutly Christian.

However, even those statistics are meaningless unless we understand clearly what kind of people go to what kind of churches.

About 23 per cent of the US population describe themselves as evangelical Christians, and one suspects that most of them are the happy-clappy folk who express their piety by speaking in tongues, jumping over pews, and dancing shamanistic jigs in the aisles.

I find it hard to see them as bona fide Christians, though my priest friends will probably say such cynicism will make me burn in hell.

Mrs Davis’s religion is described as apostolic, which could mean Catholic, Anglican (or Episcopalian, which is in communion with Anglican) or Orthodox. Whatever it is, the state’s hostility to specifically apostolic Christianity has from the time of the Founders been even stronger than to any other confession.

Hence the brutal treatment of Mrs Davis. She hasn’t quite been thrown to the lions or crucified upside down, but prison is a good modern equivalent, conveying the same message: the state, not Christ, is God. 

 

 

 

    

 

     

 

 

 

 

‘Judge a man by the company he keeps’. My friend Vlad ought to have familiarised himself with this Euripidean maxim before attending yesterday’s festivities in China.

Communist China used the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in the Second World War to parade its muscle. Over 12,000 soldiers marched through Tiananmen Square, where the same army massacred a peaceful demonstration in 1989.

According to China’s sources, 80 per cent of the military technology on show was brand-new, including missile systems operating from space against groups of aircraft carriers. Reading about it, I heaved a sigh of relief.

Mercifully Britain is safe from this cosmic threat for we have no such groups. After all, a group made up of our solitary carrier would sound shamefully tautological. How Americans feel about this technological breakthrough may be a different matter altogether.

Anyway, it was appropriate that China’s armed forces celebrate in style their triumph of 70 years ago. Defeating imperial Japan is something Chinese communists can take pr…

Ouch! An ice-cold shower has poured down to douse my enthusiasm. For Chinese communists, whose descendants rule the country now, were in effect Japan’s allies, not her conquerors.

It was Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang that fought a guerrilla war against Japan. Mao’s communists were fighting a guerrilla war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomingtang, thus helping Japan no end.

It wasn’t China – and certainly not communist China – that defeated Japan, but the combined might of the USA, Britain and, in the last week, the Soviet Union. Therefore for China to hail that victory as her own is downright mendacious.

That’s why Vlad was the only major foreign leader to accept Xi Jinping’s invitation to attend the parade. The Soviet Union doesn’t exist any longer, and the other real victors gave the extravaganza a wide berth.

That, however, didn’t make the government stands empty. Posing next to the grinning Vlad and inscrutable Xi were the leaders of those other countries that made such a decisive contribution to the glorious victory: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Burma, the Congo, Venezuela, Pakistan, Mongolia, Vietnam and Laos.

That should tell Vlad exactly where Russia falls in the pecking order of nations. And it should tip the West to the strategy Vlad is pursuing.

Emulating his role model Stalin, who in 1939 struck an alliance with the other evil power of Europe, Vlad is now hoping to get into bed with the other evil power of Asia.

Having found the hard way that the West, for all its obvious weakness, is unlikely to succumb to Russia’s nuclear blackmail, Putin is hoping to recruit China to his cause.

Hence his recent pronouncements on the essentially Eastern nature of the Russian people and Russia’s historic mission to unite Eurasia under her banners.

Vlad’s retired colleague Gorbachev used to bang on the same theme, when he defied geography by talking about ‘our common European home from the Atlantic to Vladivostok’. But at least Gorby speaking ad orbi didn’t threaten to enforce such a geographic solecism by nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, our social networks are singing hosannas to Putin. One picture catching my eye was of Cameron and Putin together, with the caption asking rhetorically which one of them “cares about his people”.

My answer would be ‘neither’, but the implication was that one of them does, and it isn’t Dave. I have to agree: Putin does care about his people. Except that he defines that group more narrowly than his Western champions think.

Putin’s people are the ruling junta of the KGB/FSB fused with the criminal underworld. That’s why the top one per cent of Russia’s population own 71 per cent of the country’s wealth, as opposed to an average of 32 per cent in Europe.

The ruling elite operates according to the unwritten laws of mafia gangs, with the godfather aware that losing face will be quickly followed by losing his life. And Putin is in danger of losing face over his aggression against the Ukraine.

His idea was to launch a staggered offensive, testing the West’s reaction every step of the way. In Step 1 the West reacted to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with roughly the same insouciance as it displayed towards Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938.

Thus emboldened, Vlad’s ragtag army of psychotic criminals and regular Russian troops without insignia moved into the eastern Ukraine. Had the West again shrugged its indifference, all of the Ukraine would have been occupied, probably followed by the Baltics.

However, though the West didn’t respond with appropriate resolve, it did respond –  by introducing sanctions and pledging its support for the Ukraine and the three Baltic Nato members.

Vlad stopped and looked around. What he saw was many a KGB caporegime looking at him askance to check if il padrino’s face was still where it should be.

Vlad knew he wouldn’t survive a humiliation. Not only would he lose power but he may not even be allowed to enjoy his ill-gotten billions in quiet retirement, Gorby-style.

This explains the crescendo in his overtures to China, which he hopes will end in the rousing finale of a military alliance. Vlad is reluctant t to take on the West by himself – the military odds don’t look promising even despite the West’s demob-happy lassitude.

I doubt that alliance will ever materialise: China’s interests probably lie elsewhere. Even so, there’s every sign that Putin is gearing up for war. In the good tradition of Soviet leaders, he cares about his people so much that he’s prepared to lose millions of them in pursuit of his own criminal ambitions.

 

   

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI once wrote that the Catholic Church is about to be wiped out – only then to start from the beginning and gradually rise again.

Though His Holiness hasn’t uttered a public word about his Vatican successor, one is in little doubt that he sees him as having more to do with the first part of this prophecy than the second – a view Pope Francis seems eager to justify.

Even his admirers will admit that His Holiness is a man of the Left, a movement whose founding raison d’être was, and its current one remains, waging war on every religious, cultural, social and political vestige of Christendom.

Hence a ‘left-wing Christian’ is to me an oxymoron, a ‘left-wing priest’ even more so, and a ‘left-wing Pope’ more still. That, however, is an inner contradiction for every man to resolve privately.

A pontiff’s personal politics ought to have no more effect on his public mission than his taste in food. He’s there to be the Vicar of Christ, not a political agitator.

The trouble starts when a Pope uses St Peter’s throne to promote a secular political agenda, especially one that’s at odds with the very Christian message he’s supposed to preach. This, I’m afraid, is exactly what Pope Francis has done ever since he first occupied the aforementioned throne.

His actions this summer did nothing to dispel this impression. First, the Pope combined political folly with bad Christianity by recognising a nonexistent ‘State of Palestine’.

By doing so he showed how deep the Church has sunk since 1095, when Pope Urban II blessed the First Crusade. Pope Urban understood something Pope Francis doesn’t: Islam is a mortal enemy not only of Jews but also of Christians.

But even if we narrow our perspective to today and tomorrow, what kind of state will ‘Palestine’ be if it gains statehood? Since the past and present are the most reliable indicators of the future, there’s only one possible answer to that question.

It’ll be a jihadist state so anti-Semitic and anti-Christian that it’ll be committed to the genocide of both Jews and Christians. This state will also be an implacable enemy of the West, and it’ll joyously act as a global terrorist base. As a short-term objective, it’ll do all it can to act on its current promise to ‘drive Israel into the sea’, presumably along with all its inhabitants.

Does His Holiness believe that this kind of state deserves pre-natal recognition? Evidently yes, because his next act this summer was to approve of the Iran nuclear deal.

Unlike the ‘State of Palestine’, the state of Iran already exists, and it already is what ‘Palestine’ will be: virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and anti-Western.

Empowering this state to develop nuclear weapons in 10-15 years may well lead not only to a regional holocaust but indeed to a global one, with mushroom clouds popping up all over the world like toadstools after an autumn rain.

What part of this scenario does the Pope like? None, would be my hope. It’s more likely that he simply doesn’t understand the full implications of this agreement. Then why approve it?

As in his recognition of the ‘State of Palestine’, His Holiness didn’t act in a holy or even rational way. He allowed his visceral political views to add poison to his Eucharistic water, thus betraying the mission to which he supposedly dedicated his life.

Not content to encourage diabolical political regimes without, Pope Francis is busily working to compromise the Church from within as well.

The Church, alone among the world’s secular and religious bodies, has always adopted an intransigent, which is to say Judaeo-Christian, position on sexual morality. That’s another thing Pope Francis has set out to destroy by advocating a more ‘liberal’ stance on homosexuality, abortion and divorce.

He tried to push his ‘reforms’ through last October’s Synod Part 1, but was defeated by the real Catholics among the bishops. Now he has announced that he’ll allow priests to forgive women who’ve had abortions.

As my friend the Rev. Peter Mullen has explained so thoroughly, this is doctrinal nonsense. Courtesy of Jesus himself, speaking through the evangelists, priests have always had the capacity to absolve any sins, including this one.

Surely the Pope is familiar with John 20:23 and Mark 3:29, not to mention the subsequent two millennia of Christian tradition? Of course he is. His generous permission for priests to do what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years anyway has nothing to do with dogma or doctrine.

It’s both an emotional cry of a leftie soul and a calculated attempt to soften up Part 2 of the Synod when it reconvenes next month. I do hope that the real Catholic bishops will again stand fast. We don’t want the first part of Pope Benedict’s prophecy to come true too fast.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The carbon dating of the Koran fragments found in a Birmingham library shows that they almost definitely predate Mohammed. And there I was, thinking that Birmingham’s sole contribution to civilisation is Balti cuisine.

Turns out it may well be the birthplace of Islam, invalidating the prior claims of Mecca and Medina. As indirect proof, Birmingham certainly has a greater Muslim population than those two put together, although, unlike them, it also has a smattering of infidels.

Actually, I must admit I had my suspicions before. I used to go to Birmingham quite often, on business (nobody goes there for pleasure), and my impression was that the city was predominantly Muslim. There must be some hidden magnetic force, I thought, attracting Muslims to that part of the Midlands, and it can’t be just the free-spending social.

The impression that Birmingham was mostly Muslim was purely that, an impression, for demographic surveys show that only a quarter of the city’s population espouse Islam. Still, you can understand my error: Muslims somehow stand out in Britain, and seeing so many in one place may easily lead one to infer that they predominate.

Also, now that we know that Islam started in Birmingham and not, as was previously thought, in the Arabian peninsula… oops, sorry. My wife has just looked over my shoulder and pointed out that Birmingham was only founded in 1871, which makes it an unlikely birthplace of Islam, seeing that it has been around for 1,400 years.

Fine, I’m man enough to admit I’ve made yet another error. If it’s an error, that is. Allah, after all, is just the Arabic for God – the same deity that’s accepted as such in both parts of the Bible. I may find Allah an odd name for God, but it’s infinitely preferable to its Russian equivalent, which is Bog. Don’t know about you, but I’d rather pray to God, or even at a pinch to Allah, than to Bog.

But God, whatever you call Him, is outside time. Hence, looking at it from His perspective, it’s possible that a city we think only appeared in the late Victorian era was already up and running circa 568 AD, when the Birmingham Koran was produced.

Hold on, I’ve just spotted a theological flaw in this argument. Yes, God is outside time – but we aren’t. Since we’re strictly temporal, at least in this life, it’s utterly presumptuous even to suggest that we can look at the world through the eyes of Allah, otherwise known as God.

Hence both Birmingham and its Koran exist on a human timescale and can’t possibly overlap. One must grudgingly admit that the distinctly Muslim character of the city must come from a different source – quite possibly from the free-spending social.

Yet the dating of the Birmingham Koran, if it’s reliable, tears a hole in the patchwork quilt of a religion otherwise known as Islam. Its founding tenet is that Allah spoke directly to Mohammed, who then initiated the game of Arab whispers by passing the message on to Abu Bakr, one of his fathers-in-law (since Mohammed had several wives, he must have had several sets of in-laws, and his ability to cope with that arrangement must be seen as divine by anyone who has ever struggled with even one set).

Abu Bakr then passed the good news on to assorted other caliphs and so forth, all the way to Osama bin Laden. This admittedly schematic history of Islam begins to wobble somewhat if it turns out that Mohammed had his epiphany second-hand, and that he more or less cribbed it from a pre-existing document.

That may create a conundrum for Muslims, as the existence of such a document casts a shadow on Mohammed’s claim to be the prophetic primus inter pares. But I don’t doubt for a second that Islamic scholars will handle the problem.

They could, for example, claim not unreasonably that carbon dating isn’t all that precise, and in this case an error of a few years here or there would be enough to reinstate Mohammed’s patent rights.

Or else they may decide to adopt the so-is-your-aunt-Tilly tactic of pointing out that the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud may also be at odds with the claims Christians make for that garment.

Yet such savants will find it difficult, not to say impossible, to deny the synthetic nature of Islam. In fact, they ought to take their cue from Marx and own up to Mohammed’s tendency to borrow from other religions.

Marx honestly identified three ingredients he shook together to produce the heady cocktail of Marxism: German philosophy, mainly Hegel and Feuerbach; British economics, mainly Smith and Ricardo; and French socialism, mainly Saint-Simon and Fourier.

Even if we discard the Birmingham Koran, Mohammed also used three principle sources: Judaism, Nestorian Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Thus he could proudly claim to be a heretic to three major religions, and we aren’t even talking about the minor ones.

But who’s to say that mixing multiple ingredients can’t produce an original concoction? No one, especially not those bar-hoppers who enjoy the unique taste of the odd Mojito, Daiquiri or Long Island Tea.

A note to those intemperate infidels: if you enjoy your cocktails, steer clear of Muslim countries. The Koran, Birmingham or otherwise, says that indulging that taste will get you flogged within an inch of your life.

I’m not proposing this drastic measure as a punishment. On the contrary, stand-up comedy is the only popular entertainment I like.

It’s just that comedians will have to make a living somehow after their profession becomes obsolete, as it surely will soon.

Comedy depends for its survival on two preconditions. First, there must be enough people out there whose sense of humour outmuscles their self-righteousness. Second, comedy can only thrive if reality doesn’t overstep the limit beyond anyone’s ability to poke fun at it.

Since neither of these preconditions is met these days, comedians will have to retrain as diversity consultants, sensitivity advisors, social workers, community organisers or anything else seen as indispensable these days.

Not to starve while the training is under way, they may indeed have to support themselves by working down the mines. If they mutter that life is the pits, no one will laugh at the pun.

As an illustration of the first precondition rapidly disappearing, Mike Kusneraitis, a Tory councillor in the Runnymede Borough, is being investigated for the terrible transgression he has committed.

I’m not sure whether the investigation is merely professional or also criminal, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were both. So what’s Mike’s crime?

He shared on the net a spoof of the advertising campaign for Carlsberg beer. For the outlanders among you, the actual campaign shows some impossibly wonderful event, with the tagline saying “If Carlsberg did [X], it would probably be the best [X] in the world.

The spoof that got Mike into trouble features the tagline “If Carlsberg did illegal immigrants…” under the picture of a boat densely packed with 14 pretty, stark-naked girls.

Now some will find this joke funny and laugh; some may find it tasteless and wince. Both will have to agree, however, that this is just a joke, and a topical one at that.

Runnymede is after all a borough where Magna Carta codified the rights of Englishmen exactly 800 years ago. Surely one of those rights must have been to be able to laugh with impunity at anything this side of the Holy Spirit.

This right was first established by a source predating Magna Carta: “Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.” Obviously, modernity is less forgiving than Christ.

Some jokes may be in poor taste, some may be funny. Some may be both, as will be confirmed by anyone who has heard that the last thing to go through Diana’s mind was the steering wheel. None, however, would be seen as grounds for prosecution in a world that didn’t think that humour is tasteless or criminal by definition.

As to reality outpacing any humour or satire, this point was put beyond any doubt by the Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.

The very fact that an institution of higher learning has such a job description on its staff would already place it outside the reach of satire, even if the gentleman in question did absolutely nothing.

But hey, everyone must earn his keep, and the good Vice Chancellor is no exception. Hence he proposed the ‘inclusive practice’ of introducing ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns as a way of “exposing our students to an increasingly diverse and global world.”

Actually a world where no sex distinctions were allowed to survive would be rather the opposite of diverse, but one can’t expect intellectual rigour from a chap in charge of diversity and inclusion.

What one can expect is exactly what one got: the proposal to do away with such offensive words as ‘he’ and ‘she’, along with their derivatives, and replace them with the new ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns ze, hir, zir, xem and xyr.

Donna Braquet, Director of the university’s Pride Centre, whatever that is, agrees wholeheartedly: “It is important to participate in making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all. One way to do that is to use a student’s chosen name and their correct pronouns.”

The wording of her drivel proves that the job is already half-done: in a sane world the antecedent ‘a student’s’ would be followed by the possessive pronoun ‘his’, not the ideologically illiterate ‘their’. But, since we’ve allowed PC fascists to impose that harebrained diktat on the world’s greatest language, we must be prepared for ‘ze’ revolution.

There we have the double whammy: PC fascists mangling English in a way that no satire could possibly fathom, and students being brainwashed to be offended by such ‘gender-specific’ fossils as ‘he’ and ‘she’. Comedians have no place in such a world.

There’s nothing we can do about it, other than refusing to use PC pseudolanguage and mocking those who do. The other day I did just that by refusing to use the PC term ‘African American’, as demanded by my interlocutor of the US neocon persuasion.

“Would you call a dog a canine American?” I asked. No smile crossed his self-righteous face. Life is no longer a laughing matter.