Category: Blog

Publishers like pigeonholes: a book must slot neatly into the groove of a specific genre. Anything else, and promotion becomes difficult – if it takes more than two words to suggest the shelf in which the book belongs, reviewers and bookshop buyers may demur.

That’s why Thames River Press ought to be complimented for bringing out Vitali Vitaliev’s brilliant Granny Yaga. After all, the book is subtitled A Fantasy Novel for Children and Adults, raising such awkward questions as, “So is it for children or is it for adults?”

The answer supplied by every beautifully crafted sentence may confuse some publishers, but it’ll delight every reader: Granny Yaga is for the child in a grown-up and the grown-up in a child.

After all, any child will eventually grow up and Granny Yaga will make a small but telling contribution to helping him end up more knowledgeable and aesthetically developed. And any adult who has expunged the child in him is a crashing bore unable to marvel at life.

A parallel between Vitaliev’s main protagonist Danny and Harry Potter begs to be drawn, but I’d suggest that Danny, what with his greater subtlety and sophistication, would feel even more comfortable in the territory signposted by C.S. Lewis’s Narnia.

Actually, Danny’s physical habitat is London, but his adventures go way beyond mere physicality. For Danny finds himself smack in the middle of the metaphysical world inhabited by the traditional personages of Slavic, particularly Russian, folklore.

Every Russian tot, which Vitaliev once was and, in every good sense, remains, grows up hearing, in due course reading, fairytales about Baba Yaga and Koshchei the Deathless. When the child is old enough to listen to serious music, he’s reminded of Baba (Granny) Yaga by a segment in Musorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition.

But no reminder is really necessary – childhood images stay with us for ever. Baba Yaga, she of the bony leg, chicken-legged hut and such arcane modes of transportation as a broom or pestle and mortar remains etched in the memory, ever alive, ever up-to-date.

When the lady appears in Vitaliev’s book, she flies astride a Dyson Hoover as both a bow to modernity and a reminder that, like her nemesis Koshchei, she’s truly deathless. She’s also a considerably more sympathetic character than I remember from my own childhood, much too protracted if my wife is to be believed.

For example, the witch I remember wasn’t known for her insouciantly ironic humour, and she really ought to thank Vitaliev for humanising her so much. Neither did she ever fly her broom to the same destinations she now flies her Dyson, such as London.

By the looks of it, the old lady may be angling for a tour guide’s job: her amusing interplay with Danny and other characters reveals so much intricate knowledge about London that I defy any reader to say he hasn’t learned something about this great city he didn’t know before. I most certainly did.

Yet Granny Yaga is so much more than a travelogue in disguise. It’s also a history book, a guide to today’s politics, a commentary on modern mores. Above all, it’s riveting, fast-flying entertainment that moves through its gears as rapidly as Granny Yaga flies her Dyson.

The reader flies along with the narrative, never feeling like getting off, hoping the journey will never end and feeling sad that, like all superb books, it has to. But not to worry: by more magic, a little bird has told me that a sequel is coming, and the journey will resume. I for one can’t wait. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s one result democracy is guaranteed to produce in the Middle East. When it’s on the march, people are on the run.

In this instance hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are fleeing south, a step ahead of the rapidly advancing jihadists led by the warlord Abu Dua. As they run, they’re pursued by a rapidly congealing tsunami threatening to sweep across the whole region.

The forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have already seized two major cities, Mosul (where much of Iraq’s oil is) and Tikrit. By the looks of it, Baghdad may well be next, while the ISIS already controls the adjacent area of Syria.

Abu Dua’s people hate the West with hysterical fervour, that’s a given. But the West is rather far away and still strong enough to defend itself against the slings and arrows of aggression, if not the pinpricks of terrorism.

For the time being Abu Dua’s black-clad troops can vent their unused bile on other groups they also loathe, those closer at hand. Mainly it’s the Kurds and the Shiites who make up the majority of Iraq’s population.

When al-Qaeda chaps are hot, they’re hot, and even their coreligionist Sunnis are finding themselves on the receiving end of egregious violence. So it’s not just the Shiites and the Kurds who are running for their lives.

When American neoconservatives, who’ve substituted democracy worship for more traditional religions, were cheering the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I spoke to one of their prominent British acolytes.

“Don’t you lot realise this will end in disaster?” I asked, somewhat rhetorically. “It may,” he replied. “But it’s still good to prod the hornets’ nest.”

Well, prod the nest they did, and the hornets are stinging thousands dead – in a vain attempt to teach our warmongering democracy-hounds a lesson. Wasted effort: ideologues never learn, no matter how many mutilated corpses are used as visual aids.

It was all oh-so terribly predictable. Democracy, in its post-modern perversion, can’t fulfil its promise even in the countries that enjoyed the real thing for centuries.

It can no longer function as a just and truly representative form of government even in its native habitat. All it’s good for these days is sloganeering designed to rally enough support for the ideologues to indulge their lust for power.

The peculiar trait of the neocons, whose movement was started by Trotskyists, is that the boundaries of their own countries can’t contain their indomitable bellicosity. Foreign wars are a must, except nowadays it’s not world revolution but democracy they’ve inscribed on their banners.

This particular slogan still carries a lot of weight since most people don’t realise that, contrary to its thunderous claims, our virtual democracy pushes power away from the people, not closer to them.

Those who vote our governments in have no idea what sort of outrages are being perpetrated in their name. It has all become a megalomaniac game of virtual reality: governments pretend they’re acting in the people’s interests, the people pretend they believe them.

That’s why it’s relatively easy to rally what passes for public opinion these days behind yet another asinine foreign adventure. All it takes is a bit of scaremongering backed up by a few rigged intelligence reports – and Dubya is your uncle, Tony is your aunt.

Thus George W. Bush and his poodle Tony ‘Yo’ Blair combined their forces to drag the two countries into a war whose aims they falsified and for whose end they didn’t even try to plan.

Anyone without an ideological fire in his belly and with an IQ above room temperature (Centigrade) knew it would come to grief. Saddam was a monster and a sadist, but one thing he wasn’t was a jihadist.

Both he and his Ba’athist mate Assad kept Muslim fanatics at bay because they correctly saw them as a threat to their own power. Their countries were pressure cookers bubbling with toxic hatred, and the two chaps relied on rather unsavoury but successful methods to keep the lid on.

Trying to replace their regimes with Western-style democracies was idiotic to the point of being criminal, and I for one would love to see our two democracy champions tried for war crimes. The only possible result was to create a power vacuum, and these are always filled by the most impassioned groups.

In this case it meant jihadists, and the only way to keep them down was to replace Saddam’s violence with the Anglo-American variety. That wasn’t on the cards, not for long.

Anyone familiar with the history of American conflicts, especially the disaster of Vietnam, knew that tricking all of the people all of the time would prove impossible. Then too the country ran out of political will to finish the military job.

Sure enough, after a few years of growing casualties and attenuating will, first the British and then the Americans withdrew from Iraq, tails between their legs.

By way of a smokescreen covering the retreat they laid on a thick fog of lies, perpetuated by the successors to our would-be war criminals. These are exemplified by the comment of the National Security Council on the current calamity: “President Obama promised to responsibly end the war in Iraq and he did”.

Never mind the grammar, feel the lie. Responsibly? This must be the newspeak for irresponsibly. So what did Obama mean by his claim to responsibly have ended the war? (Sorry if I’m using the split infinitive without any natural flair for this grammatical perversion.)

Why, democracy of course. Wasn’t that what Dubya, Tony and the neocons decided was the aim of the war? Granted, that wasn’t the original aim, but them good folks from Texas are allowed to change their minds – and their stooges’ minds as well.

Obama confirms: “We ended our war and left Iraq to its people and a fully sovereign Iraqi state could make decisions about its own future.” Methinks the ‘fully sovereign  Iraqi state’ is about to have a few decisions made for it, doubtless to the accompaniment of the neocons’ loud cheers.

What are we going to do about the unfolding catastrophe? Well, in broad strokes, not to cut too fine a point – nothing. A square root of sod-all or, in the more polite words of Foreign Secretary William Hague, “We’re not countenancing any British military involvement at this stage.”

Or at any other stage actually. We’ll just sit back and enjoy the show. Democracy has been served.

“Accidents will occur in the best-regulated families,” said Mr Micawber, one of the cleverest literary protagonists.

Dickens could have had the Le Pens in mind, and only the slight chronological divergence makes such an intention unlikely this side of prophetic prescience.

The founder and honorary chairman of Front National Jean-Marie and his daughter Marine, the current leader of the party, don’t seem to be seeing eye to eye on politics, ‘seem’ being the operative word.

Le Pen fille has just scored the minor triumph of carrying the European election in France. She partly managed that feat by distancing herself from Le Pen père, who eschews his daughter’s crypto-fascism for the no-holds-barred variety.

Marine is a cleverer politician than her father. She knows what his ideas are, shares them and realises that so do most of those who vote for the party. But she also knows that she has to make voting for FN socially acceptable.

To that end she eschews the more inflammatory vocabulary favoured by her openly and proudly fascist father. Even as it is, those who vote FN seldom own up to it.

By chatting to the locals in our province of France one gets the impression that no one would ever even dream of voting FN. FN, moi? Absolument non!

Yet the party always carried the province by a wide margin even when Jean-Marie was in charge, never mind now. This has to be the only example in the annals of democracy of a party winning elections without having a single vote cast for it.

Now there’s talk in France that Marine may just win the next general election, especially since a large drift is expected from François Hollande’s socialists. They seem to be ever so slightly disillusioned, can’t imagine why.

And the UMP Gaullists aren’t over-enthusiastic about Sarko’s return either, although some are looking forward to seeing more nude pictures of his wife, a visual feast to be confidently expected in the run-up to the election.

All Marine has to do is make the electorate forget that her party neatly blends socialist economics with the nastier version of nationalism. Nationalism plus socialism equals… well, everyone knows what it equals. So temporary amnesia on the part of the electorate would go down nicely.

Just when everything seemed to be going swimmingly, Jean-Marie had to go and jog the people’s memory by suggesting with a distinct longing in his voice that a popular Jewish singer Patrick Bruel ought to be put into an oven (une fournée).

The modifier ‘gas’ wasn’t uttered, but Jean-Marie’s record on the issue leaves little room for doubt that it was implied. One doesn’t have to be an elephant to remember that Le Pen has several convictions for inciting racial hatred to his credit.

Marine screamed bloody murder. That was a political error, Dad, she said. What’s going on? (Qu’est que c’est que ce bordel, papa?). What are you trying to do, throw a spanner in the works?

Her father said he was deeply hurt. Everybody knows what his views are, and he’s not going to change them just because a few sales Juifs don’t like it. Can’t teach an old chien new tricks, and if his daughter doesn’t realise this she can go boil an oeuf.

This family squabble wouldn’t be worth talking about if it didn’t communicate a wider message. But it does, and the message is: beware of single-issue politics even if you happen to agree with the single issue.

Any reasonable person in France or, for that matter, Britain would accept some of the planks in the FN platform.

Curtailing immigration, especially that of cultural aliens, regaining national sovereignty by leaving the EU, banning homosexual marriage – all these are sound ideas. But voting for, or even approving of, a fascist party just because it espouses them isn’t.

Nigel Farage is absolutely right when saying that Ukip has nothing in common with FN, even though they may share a few ideas. But what’s important isn’t just how a party stands on this or that issue, but also why it does so.

Ukip starts from a generally conservative point of departure; FN from a generally fascist one. They may overlap on a point or two, but their philosophical lines will never converge – and they aren’t even parallel.

It’s always useful to remind oneself of others who may share one’s perfectly sensible feelings, and why they do so. Otherwise one may end up in bed with perfectly unsavoury partners.

Don’t like homosexual marriage? Neither did Osama Bin Laden. Feel uneasy about rampant internationalism? So did Hitler. Want to leave the EU? So do the Le Pens. Bad people are capable of holding some good ideas, but that doesn’t make them any less bad.

Before voicing support for a political party or group, one would be well-advised to look deep into its overall philosophy, both at present and as it has evolved historically. Failure to delve deep may lead to a terrible error of judgment, which, if compounded in a democracy, may be translated into ill-advised policies.

Thus I know some decent and intelligent (which is to say conservative) people who have warm feelings about Putin because he claims to support traditional Christian values. As evidence of the KGB thug’s virtues, they cite his recently acquired piety along with the ban he imposed on homosexual propaganda (reliable rumours in Russia insist that the colonel doth protest too much).

They don’t see the wood of fascism for the trees of a few policies they wish our own government would adopt. Personally I’d rather stay in the EU than have a fascist government take us out.

Decent people can like Putin or, if French, vote for FN only if terribly misguided. Alas, in our democracy run riot it’s not knowledge but ignorance that confers power.

Education Secretary Michael Gove is upset, and Home Secretary Theresa May is upset he’s upset.

Apparently Islamic ideology has been imposed on Birmingham schools, turning them effectively into breeding grounds for fanatics, with bright if short-lived career prospects in suicide terrorism.

An investigation by Ofsted found that, rather than being an organic development, this was part of a concerted campaign by Muslims to change “the character and ethos” of our schools.

As a result, some publicly financed state schools cancel Christmas celebrations and nativity plays, while some others broadcast a Muslim call to prayers on their loudspeakers. In all such schools, Muslim girls must wear the traditional Halloween garb even when it’s not Halloween, sit in the back of the classroom and keep their mouths shut.

This, says Mr Gove, isn’t good enough: “We will put the promotion of British values at the heart of what every school has to deliver for children. What we have found was unacceptable. And we will put it right.”

So far so good, as a man said falling down past a 10^th floor window. The question is, British values as defined by whom and on what criteria?

If Britain were still a sovereign realm, this question, though still valid, could be answered easily enough. But since our laws are superseded by those imposed by the European Court of Human Rights, just about any reasonable answer would be deemed unacceptable.

Both government officials and educators have tried to define Britishness so as not to offend anyone in Brussels and Strasbourg. Part of being British, they explain, is tolerance to those of other faiths. This is stipulated by British law, and going against it means discrimination.

In other words, all religions, including Christianity, must enjoy equal treatment under law and therefore at schools. Sounds reasonable but, at the risk of being regarded as a fossilised bigot, I’d suggest that such even-handedness is what got us in trouble in the first place.

For many years now, our schools have treated Christianity as at best one of the five major religions, no better or worse than any other. This has been reflected in the amount of time allocated to the study of various creeds. Two periods for Islam, two for Buddhism, two for animism (I’m guessing here) two for Christianity and so forth.

This not so much confirms as denies what it means to be British. Our realm is constituted along strictly Christian lines, as anyone can ascertain by looking up the text of the Queen’s coronation oath. More recently, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (aka William and Kate) married in a church ceremony, as they had to by law.

Stepping outside politics, British culture is specifically Christian, as are British pre-EU laws that can all be traced to the two Testaments of the Christian canon.

In other words, Britain is, if only residually, a Christian country. Giving Christianity equal time – at best! – thus constitutes an act of cultural and constitutional sabotage.

Therefore Christianity, in its religious, cultural, social and political manifestations, should be the only religion studied at British schools, and every school day ought to start with the Lord’s prayer. The odd period or two may be devoted to an overview of other faiths, but not to the detriment of the educational focus on British tradition.

Children of other faiths may be exempt from the prayer if they so wish, but not from the academic study of Western religious and cultural heritage. Should they or their parents deem it necessary for them to delve deeper into other faiths as well, they should do so at Sunday schools, or whatever they call them.

This doesn’t mean intolerance to other creeds or lack of respect for them. On the contrary, pupils must be taught equity, fairness and tolerance. Britain is, or rather used to be, a free country and denying other people’s freedoms is tantamount to denying our own.

But tolerance isn’t a suicide pact – by all means, let’s respect other religions, but not at the expense of letting them destroy our own, imposing in the process values that aren’t just different from ours but actively hostile to them.

I’m not so naïve as to imagine that anything I suggest could possibly happen even if HMG were so bold as to propose measures in this vein. The European Court of Human Rights would throw them out faster than you can say multiculturalism.

Even the timid, largely meaningless palliatives mooted by Mr Gove are regarded as wildly controversial. Teach pupils to be British? What on earth does he mean?

For example, in a typically ignorant statement, former Labour home secretary Jack Straw said: “It’s crucial that if we are to get the overwhelming majority of members of the Muslim faith on board that we draw a distinction between those who are devout and embrace British values as well, and those who are extreme.”

A devout Muslim, Mr Straw, can’t ‘embrace British values’ while remaining a devout Muslim. He has to sin either against Britishness or against Islam.

Such standard Muslim practices as the stoning of adulterers and the murder of infidels, for example, would be hard to reconcile with the English Common Law. Yet there are 107 verses to that effect in the Koran, and these diktats are widely enforced not only in most Muslim countries but also in the self-created Islamic ghettos mushrooming all over Europe.

What we are witnessing today isn’t just a Muslim plot to take over Birmingham schools but a pan-European drive to expunge Western tradition, knocking the cornerstone out of the edifice of what used to be called Christendom.

This is a sine qua non for the success of the European ‘project’ to which we’re all supposed to have subscribed, a morass into which we’re being sucked deeper and deeper.

It would take a national government brimming with moral integrity, intellectual rigour and stern courage to put up any meaningful resistance. If you think that any Western country, emphatically including our own, is blessed with such a government, there’s a bridge across the Thames I’d like to sell you. 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

What do the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil and all African countries have in common?

The answer is, they were all constituted in their present shape much later than Great Britain.

This now familiar nomenclature came into being in 1706 and 1707 when the Parliaments of England and Scotland passed the Acts of the Union, joining the two kingdoms into one.

The two crowns united a century earlier, when James VI of Scotland became James I, King of England and Ireland, in what was known as the Union of the Crowns. The political union of 1707 merely recognised the status quo, as in those backward days monarchy was still taken seriously.

This brings us to the c-word, as in ‘constitution’, and shame on you for thinking I had something else in mind.

This word is slipping out of the vocabulary of public discourse as fast as the masculine possessive pronoun. The two words are worth keeping, ‘his’ for cultural and aesthetic reasons, ‘constitution’ because most political debate should both begin and end with it.

Americans, proud of their 1789 Constitution (since then amended 27 times, as one has to remark with a bit of Schadenfreude), like to point out that Britain has no constitution, by which they mean no single written document. This is ignorant nonsense.

When Salic Law was debated in France, its opponents were invoking a similar argument. “Where is it written?” they kept screaming. “Salic Law,” replied the great constitutional thinker Joseph de Maistre, “is written in the hearts of Frenchmen.”

I’d suggest that if a constitution isn’t written in that organ, any written document will be useless. And if it’s indeed written there, any written document will be redundant. In fact, a written constitution is like a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.

The Acts of the Union were written both in the hearts of the two fraternal peoples and on paper. And now politicking on the part of the SNP and its fanatical leader Alex Salmond is threatening to destroy the constitution of Great Britain.

The amazing thing is that both the opponents and proponents of devolution are arguing this issue of cosmic constitutional import on all sorts of trivia – without ever mentioning the c-word.

The debate seems to revolve around the fiscal impact of devolution on an average Scottish family. The two sides are about £2,400 apart: one lot claim the Scots will be £1,400 a year richer, the other that they’ll be £1,000 poorer.

Even considering the legendary parsimony of the Scots, surely they must realise that such matters oughtn’t to be decided on a few pennies here or there.

To be fair, they aren’t the only ones. Money seems to be the crux of the matter even when the Brits argue about an infinitely more vital constitutional issue: that of the country’s membership in the EU.

Those who favour this abomination claim that our economic survival depends on tearing our ancient constitution to shreds, with Her Majesty becoming just another citizen of the EU. When I say that even if this were true – and it isn’t, not by a long chalk – I’d still be opposed on purely constitutional grounds, the federasts look at me with touching concern for my mental health.

In fact, it’s their heads that need examining: taking the constitution out of our body politic is like amputating the skeleton from a man’s body. Everything else will collapse and the body will die.

The issue of devolution is bogus from beginning to end. It’s not as if the Salmonds of this world felt that Scotland would be better off if she fended for herself.

Quite the opposite, the intention is to swap the historical union with England and Northern Ireland for that of the EU, where Scotland will enjoy a great deal less independence – and, incidentally, much smaller handouts.

In fact, the primary force behind the current devolution drive came not from Alex Salmond but from Mel Gibson, who brought to his awful film Braveheart the same burning passion he expresses privately through anti-Semitic rants.

Every Englishman featured in the film is a sadistic villain torturing, raping and murdering heroic, selfless Scots. The subversive potential of such films was first pointed out, with grateful appreciation, at the dawn of cinematography by Lenin, who described it as “the most important of all arts”. Important to rabble-rousing, that is.

Amazingly, even some conservative, which is to say intelligent, Englishmen often say “We’ll be better off without them”. They cite things like the predominance of the Labour vote in Scotland, which is usually the only factor swinging general elections the Labour way. (Even their saintly election winner Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair was solidly beaten in England in each general election he won.)

Or else they point out the enormous cost to the Exchequer of maintaining Scotland’s social handouts, which are higher than anywhere else in the UK. Effectively this amounts to income redistribution from England, mainly her South, to Scotland, something no conservative can countenance.

All true, all trivial. The economic argument is particularly weak: it’s not as if the English taxpayer will benefit if Scotland leaves the Union. Our own dear government, whichever party will form it, will find other ways of wasting our money up the wall (the idiom isn’t quite precise, but my wife says I mustn’t use in writing the same horrid language I use in speech).

The political argument fails on the same general principle: the difference between today’s  Tory and Labour parties is that between a calamity and a disaster. We choose not so much the lesser of two evils as the evil of two lessers.

Obviously, the advent of Labour would be more catastrophic but, even so, I’d still insist that the devolution argument shouldn’t stand or fall on party politics.

Like no other nationhood, Britishness – and Englishness – is defined by the country’s constitution. Take it away, and it’s not just the national politics but the national character that will be dealt a mighty blow from which it may not recover.

The Scots too would be well-advised to recall the c-word more often – and not just the one they use when talking about the English.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A government-sponsored study recommends expanding reverse discrimination in university admissions.

According to Dr Claire Crawford, pupils coming from comprehensives should receive preferential treatment over those from selective schools.

Moreover, the worse the comprehensive the more preferential should be the treatment of its graduates. After all, good schools enjoy the unfair advantage of what Dr Crawford calls “teaching effect”.

In a language well-nigh incomprehensible this side of a loony bin, the study insists that universities “may wish to consider lowering their entry requirements for pupils from non-selective or low-value-added state schools (relative to pupils from selective or high-value-added state schools, or independent schools) in order to equalise the potential of students being admitted from these different types of school.”

Cutting through the gibberish, one could sum up the proposal in simple English: pupils of selective schools are better-educated because their teachers are better. This riles our class warriors because they detect a deficit of equality.

Hence the mad idea of equalising “the potential of all students”. Inasmuch as one can discern any sense there, this means that cleverer and better-educated youngsters must be pulled down to the level of their cultural and intellectual inferiors. That failing, they ought to be kept out of universities altogether.

In other words these educational subversives wish to wreak on our universities the same disaster they’ve already wreaked on our schools – all in the name of equality.

The study authors grudgingly accept that most universities are already adopting such discriminatory policies. However, “more could be done” to make higher education even more meaningless than it is now.

It’s refreshing to observe that we still have a seemingly endless supply of home-grown social engineers. Perhaps that’s why we have to import so many mechanical engineers from China, India, Eastern Europe or wherever else they don’t stress equality over quality.

Equality is perhaps the most pernicious of all myths, and its destructive potential has been demonstrated in all places where it has been taken seriously. It was in the name of equality that various tyrannical states (democratic or otherwise) have destroyed their economies, education, medical care – and, at their extreme, millions of people.

In democratic tyrannies, all egalitarians other than militant socialists magnanimously acknowledge that equality of result is an indigestible pie in the sky. However, they insist that equality of opportunity is a goal that’s both desirable and achievable. In fact, it’s more or less the other way around.

Equality of result can indeed be achieved by enforced levelling downwards (the only direction in which it’s ever realistic to level).

It’s possible to confiscate all property and pay citizens barely enough to keep them alive (this was more or less achieved in the country where I grew up).

It’s possible to put in place the kind of dumbed-down schools that’ll make everybody equally ignorant (this has been more or less achieved in the country where I grew old).

It’s possible to provide the kind of equal healthcare for all that has little to do with either health or caring (both countries have achieved this).

What’s absolutely impossible is to guarantee equality of opportunity anywhere but in prison.

A child with two parents will have better opportunities to get on in life than a child raised by one parent.

A boy who grows up surrounded by books will have a greater opportunity to get ahead intellectually than his coeval who grows up surrounded by discarded syringes and crushed beer cans.

A girl who goes to a good private school will have greater opportunities in life than one who attends a local comprehensive (closing private schools down, an idea so dear to our egalitarians, wouldn’t work: middle-class parents will find a way of supplementing their daughter’s education either abroad or at home).

A young businessman who inherits a fortune will have a better opportunity of earning a greater fortune than someone who has to start from scratch (again, confiscatory inheritance laws will fail: as with all unjust regulations, people will either find a way around them or flee).

Human potential, Dr Crawford, can’t be equalised. But it can be destroyed, and following the recommendations of your study would surely do just that.

One never tires of admiring the contortionist dexterity with which this lot tie themselves in knots trying to reconcile their conflicting pieties. Much of this enviable flexibility comes from the knack at lying they all share.

First they claim an all-out commitment to meritocracy – meaning that people should get ahead in life on the basis of personal attainment rather than, say, birth. But then they call for overriding meritocracy by favouring a different kind of birth.

No moral difference is immediately apparent, though the destructive potential is there for all to see.

In the same vein, the Milibandits keep bellyaching about the so-called crisis in our standards of living. And sure enough, this complaint is easy to make.

Since no absolute criterion for standards of living can possibly exist, they could always be higher. Even though ours are stratospheric by any historical comparison, who wouldn’t like to live a bit better?

So how are we to go about achieving our soaring aspirations? Never mind that, comes the egalitarians’ answer.

What really matters isn’t the standard of living but equality. With barely a year left before the general election, the sharpest burr under our class warriors’ blanket is the disparity of wealth between the South, where people tend to work, and the North, where people tend to favour state handouts.

To correct this glaring inequity, in a recently leaked document the Milibandits are proposing to hit every freeholder in the south of England with extortionist taxes.

This is aimed not only at homeowners but, in a commendable show of even-handedness, especially at the owners of retail outlets: high-street shops, groceries, fishmongers, off-licences.

One doesn’t have to be a Nobel economist to realise that the shops will be certain to pass the extra costs on to consumers. So how does this tally with the Milibandits’ unflinching commitment to raising our standards of living?

It doesn’t, and asking these egalitarians to explain their reasoning would be pointless. When ideology speaks, reason falls silent.

What matters to this lot is gaining power, and they sense that an appeal to the egalitarian instincts of the British public, thoroughly corrupted by decades of Marxist propaganda, will represent a welcome shortcut. For the sake of our country, let’s hope they’re wrong.

 

Since we were first blessed with the advent of mass communications we’ve been cursed with a flood of horrifying, blood-chilling images.

Thousands of skeletal bodies bulldozed out of Soviet and Nazi concentration camps, uncovered mass graves filled by both evil regimes, Japanese children disfigured by radiation, people jumping to their deaths out of the World Trade Centre and so forth.

Some images, however, aren’t so much blood-chilling as puke-making: the England footballers raising their arms in the Heil Hitler salute at the 1936 Olympics, Martin McGuinness wearing white tie, a bearded sideshow winning the Eurovision song contest, happy homosexual couples kissing at the altar, that living argument against affirmative action Obama pontificating on the joys of European federalism (or anything else), Tony Blair whatever he does – the list is interminable.

It’s hard to decide how high or low Putin rubbing shoulders with Western politicians in Normandy should be on this list. But there’s no doubt he belongs there.

I don’t mean to keep banging on about this, but please let’s not forget that the Second World War was started by the alliance of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Both nations were seeking world domination, which eventually led to them falling out. Both suffered horrendously as a result, but then so does a man who kills a dozen pedestrians at random before turning the gun on himself. In both instances, the perpetrators’ horrendous suffering is self-inflicted, which is more than one can say about the victims.

This is something we ought to keep in mind as we shed a tear for the millions caught in the deadly spectacle or, come to that, for the lone murderer’s family. Forgive we may, but we should never forget.

Frau Merkel and Col. Putin, the leaders of the two erstwhile predators, are holding a meeting behind closed doors even as we speak. I doubt we’ll ever know exactly what they’re talking about because the get-together is likely to be strictly à deux: they speak each other’s language, so even interpreters aren’t needed.

The two share common interests and, to a large extent, common backgrounds. When Col. Putin did his spying in the Dresden rezidentura of the KGB, Frau Merkel held a nomenklatura position in both East Germany’s Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands, the Young Communist League working hand in glove with the Stasi, and in the ruling party Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands.

It’s not inconceivable that the two met in their professional capacities back in those unlamented days, which is why they use the familiar forms of address when takling to each other, du in German, ty in Russian. Yet what matters in this context is that since then the two colleagues have taken divergent paths.

Frau Merkel took over the leadership of a country that had unequivocally repudiated Nazi Germany’s criminal past and tried to make amends for it. That’s why, whatever we may think of her personally or indeed of her country’s persistent efforts to dominate Europe by subterfuge, as Chancellor of a repentant Germany she belongs among the world leaders coming together in Normandy to commemorate D-Day and those thousands who died on the beaches.

Col. Putin’s country, on the other hand, not only hasn’t repudiated her criminal past, but she’s proud of it. More important, she’s extending it into the present and doubtless the future as well.

That makes Putin, who regards the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, an active accomplice in Soviet crimes – including the country’s aggressive role in starting the Second World War.

That’s why his presence in Normandy is so utterly emetic: he doesn’t belong there any more than a proud ex-SS officer would. By welcoming this unrepentant KGB thug still acting in character, the leaders of civilised nations risk having some of the Soviet evil rub off on them.

Just imagine the stench and reach for a sick bag – you may well need it, especially on a hot day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Germany’s pre-emptive strike on 22 June, 1941, effectively destroyed the Soviet regular army, with 4.5 million prisoners (my father, incidentally, among them) taken in the next two months. Many of those prisoners not only surrendered without a fight, with whole regiments marching into Nazi captivity to the sound of brass bands, but at least 1.5 million of them volunteered to fight against Stalin.

Comparing this shocking figure with the number of Russian soldiers bearing arms against their country in the Napoleonic war of 1812 (none), we may begin to realise the depth of hatred the Bolshevik regime had unleashed among its own people.

Few were Soviet soldiers who hadn’t had next of kin shot, tortured or starved to death, sent to concentration camps or imprisoned. The morale in the army, especially after the 1937-1938 purges in which most officers from the level of regimental commander up had been wiped out, was below low.

 The terrorist methods used by Stalin and Beria to make the Red Army fight are best described in the book Stalin’s War of Extermination by the late German historian Joachim Hoffmann. But fight the army finally did, losing uncountable and largely uncounted millions on the way to Berlin.

 But already in 1941 Stalin knew that THUNDERSTORM, if it was to succeed at all, would have to have its objectives reassessed. Conquering the world, or even all of Europe, was no longer on the cards. He knew he’d have to satisfy himself with a slice instead of the whole cake. From the debacle of 1941 onwards Stalin’s sole aim was to make sure the slice could be as fat as possible.

Britain, thrust into an alliance with Soviet butchers, pursued more modest aims. Winston Churchill, who had devoted his whole life to the good of the British Empire, wished to have the Empire preserved. Also, alone among the Allied leaders, he wasn’t blind to the Bolshevik threat. For Europe to thrive after the war, he felt correctly, it wasn’t enough to defeat Hitler. Stopping Stalin was just as important.

Understandably, this put Churchill on a collision course with Stalin, a conflict that could only be resolved by the richest Ally and the greatest supplier of arms to both Britain and the USSR – the USA led throughout the war by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

However, Roosevelt’s war aims, and especially his post-war ones, differed from Churchill’s. Not to cut too fine a point, Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire, while Roosevelt wanted to destroy it. His aim was for America to supplant Britain as the major Western power, and in this Roosevelt was continuing the American imperialist policy already pursued during the previous war by President Wilson.

Thus Roosevelt’s aims overlapped with Stalin’s who also saw Britain, and Churchill personally, as the main obstacle on the way to achieving his own objectives. This explains why Roosevelt consistently joined forces with Stalin to defeat Churchill’s proposals on war strategy.

A significant factor in Roosevelt’s decision-making was his entourage, densely staffed with Soviet agents, such as Harry Dexter White, who de facto ran Treasury, Alger Hiss, one of Roosevelt’s top diplomats, and especially Harry Hopkins, who effectively led the country during Roosevelt’s last term when the President was increasingly incapacitated.

These men were influential in steering Roosevelt’s policies towards Stalin’s, and away from Allied, interests, but their role must not be exaggerated. Roosevelt was a visceral American supremacist, and as such he knew anyway that his and Churchill’s bread was buttered on opposite sides.

Stalin desperately wanted the Allies to invade Europe through northern France, for this would leave Eastern Europe defenceless against Soviet conquest and subsequent domination. Churchill, on the other hand, was in favour of invading through the south, mainly Italy, cutting Stalin’s hordes off the Balkans and eastern Europe.

Understandably, if illogically, Stalin kept bleating about the need for a second front, refusing to acknowledge that it already existed. It was as if the Anglo-American troops dying in their thousands in North Africa and the Far East weren’t fighting on any front at all (incidentally, this is the impression most Russians have even today, largely thanks to the history books created by Putin’s government).

Most important, a second front had already existed even in Europe since 12 September, 1943, when 200,000 Anglo-American troops landed from Sicily at Salerno on the Italian mainland. Using their established bases in Italy as the beachhead, the logic of the war demanded that the Allies expand their operations from the Aegean and Adriatic Seas into south and central Europe.

This view was shared by Gen. Eisenhower who later said, “Italy was the correct place in which to deploy our main forces and the objective should be the Valley of the Po. In no other area could we so well threaten the whole German structure including France, the Balkans and the Reich itself.”

Yet the thrust through Italy was slowed down, with the invasion forces denuded in preparation for the utterly unnecessary invasion of northern France. Even in spite of that the Allies managed to liberate Rome on 4 June, 1944 – two days before D-Day.

None of that counted as a second front as far as Stalin was concerned, and Roosevelt agreed. Yet there’s little doubt that, had the Allies refused to play lickspittle to Stalin, they could have driven from Italy into Austria and then into Germany much sooner, conceivably ending the war a year earlier, and saving millions of lives.

The American general Mark Clark, commander of Allied forces in Italy, understood this perfectly well. In his 1950 memoir he wrote, “We celebrated a victory when in reality we had not won the war.”

Indeed we hadn’t. Whatever was left of the British Empire was lost immediately after the war, as was Eastern Europe and much of Asia. The Soviet Union emerged as the immediate victor, and the United States the long-term one.

Still, this isn’t what we should mainly think about on Friday. Instead we should turn our thoughts and prayers to the Allied heroes who died on the beaches of Normandy exactly 70 years ago.

But once we’ve risen up from our knees and joined in the spirit of jubilation, we ought to remind ourselves that neither those 10,000 nor the subsequent millions had to die. Through no fault of their own, their heroism delivered half of Europe to the worst nightmare history has so far thrown up, probably adding years to the life of that foul abomination.

Happy D-Day!

 

 

 

 

 

    

In this double feature I’ll try to comment on the event we’ll be celebrating on Friday: D-Day, universally and rightly seen as a pivotal milestone in the history of the last big war.

Yet not everything about it is clear-cut. The Second World War was a complex drama, with the plot played out in the proscenium while multiple sub-plots unfolded behind the curtain.

The general public, good folk who just get on with their lives without being excessively bothered about modern history, are probably familiar with the plot and the dramatis personae in the key roles, although, after half a century of comprehensive education, this might be an unsafe assumption.

The sub-plots, on the other hand, remain in the shadows, often invisible even to those who take professional interest in such matters. D-Day, the term normally used to describe the Allied invasion of northern France is one such sub-plot.

In history’s greatest seaborne operation on 6 June, 1944, 6,939 ships landed 156,115 allied troops on Normandy beaches. Contrary to the misconception prevalent in the USA (“we won your war for you”), only 73,000 of them came from the US. The rest mostly flew the flags of Britain and her dominions.

The landing succeeded largely due to the undercover preparation work, preceded as the invasion had been by a massive deception operation. Consequently the SS tank divisions deployed to protect the coast of Pas-de-Calais didn’t make it to the beachhead in time to wipe it out. Even as it was, 10,000 Allied soldiers died amidst the dunes.

The resulting triumph of Allied arms could easily have turned into a disaster. In fact, even the most optimistic members of the Allied High Command had rated the chances of success as 50-50 at best.

These weren’t the kind of odds on which Anglo-American generals typically risked potential casualties in the hundreds of thousands. So what made them push the button this time? What dire operational necessity was guiding their finger?

The answer is, there was no operational necessity, dire or otherwise, for the invasion of Northern France. It wasn’t the bellicose god of war that drove the Allies across the Channel, but the shifty god of political chicanery.

Here we ought to remember that the three main Allied powers, Britain, the USA and the USSR, while united in their common goal of defeating Nazi Germany, also pursued aims of their own – and these were at odds.

In the run-up to the war, the Soviets had built up the biggest invasion force known in history, far outstripping the rest of the world’s armies put together in both manpower and materiel.

Stalin had a seven to one superiority in tanks over Germany, with his machines being technologically two generations ahead of the Wehrmacht’s (or anyone else’s). Soviet fighter planes had demonstrated their superiority over their German and Italian analogues during the Spanish Civil War. Stalin boasted more submarines than the rest of the world combined. And as to the human resources, the Soviets could match Germany three times over.

It would be tedious to argue the point that ought to be self-evident to any historian other than fully paid-up apologists for Stalin: that gigantic force, assembled at a cost of millions dead and hundreds of millions enslaved, was put together not to defend Russia but to conquer the world.

The plan was to provoke Hitler’s assault on the West, wait until his troops got mired either in France or, ideally, in Britain and then drive the juggernaut across the central European plains.

The entire Soviet policy from about 1932 onwards is intelligible only in the light of this objective. It’s to achieve it that in a few short years Stalin turned the Soviet Union into a giant military-labour camp, starved millions to death, courted Hitler, first secretly, then – after August 1939 – openly, provided the raw materials without which Nazi Germany couldn’t have attacked the West, invaded Poland from the east 17 days after the Nazis had invaded her from the west, provided the bombs that German planes rained on London.

Two developments prevented Stalin from launching his offensive in 1940, as had been planned (that operation went by the codename THUNDERSTORM). The first was the Winter War of 1939-1940, in which Stalin threw against Finland an army almost outnumbering the entire population of that tiny country.

The Finns heroically fought Stalin’s hordes to a standstill, inflicting 500,000 casualties, against 20,000-odd of their own. Brilliantly led by Marshal Mannerheim, who had learned his trade when serving as Lieutenant-General in the Tsar’s Guards, the Finns gave Stalin a reality check: his army was poorly trained, ineptly led and incompetently supplied.

Still, the Finns could keep up their heroic struggle only for so long: a country whose population was smaller than Leningrad’s was running out of resources. Yet just as Stalin was finally ready to overrun Finland, he was given another reality check.

The British government hinted, not so subtly, that, should Stalin refuse to accept an armistice with a token gain in Finnish territory, the Brits would use the RAF Mosul base in Iraq to take out the Baku oilfields, then the only source of Soviet oil. Stalin took the hint, sued for peace and delayed the planned invasion of Europe.

‘Delayed’ shouldn’t be understood to mean ‘cancelled’: THUNDERSTORM was to go ahead, but a year later than originally planned, around July-August, 1941. When Hitler finally realised what was going on, he took the wild gamble of delivering a pre-emptive strike, thus accepting what every German schoolchild knew would be catastrophic: a two-front war.

What those precocious schoolchildren didn’t know, and some eminent historians still don’t, was that Hitler no longer had a choice. Stalin’s monstrous juggernaut had to be destroyed before it had a chance to roll.

(TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW)

We should all be thankful to the EU for letting us partake of its economic wisdom.

As this august organisation keeps swearing on Karl Marx’s grave, it’s solely dedicated to ensuring that Europe is a rip-roaring economic success – no ulterior political motive anywhere in sight.

This single-mindedness of purpose has produced the kind of results the European Commission in general and Frau Merkel in particular can justly regard as revolutionary.

That’s why it’s churlish of all those Ukip (and even some Tory!) ingrates to bellyache about the Commission’s generous offer of sound advice. It’s sheer arrogance to refuse to listen to proven experts.

One must admit that at first glance, the EU’s diktat…, sorry, I mean constructive proposal, sounds insane. But that’s only if you listen to those who strive to stick a crowbar into the wheel spokes of progress.

Without overburdening you with excessive detail, the diktosal (if you’ll pardon a portmanteau neologism) boils down to the time-proven policy of ensuring economic progress: tax and spend.

Actually the details are irrelevant. What matters is the general philosophy. Once that has been absorbed into Europe’s bloodstream, it doesn’t really matter how the extra tax will be extorted and in what areas the spending will be increased.

In this instance, the diktosal calls for increasing our council taxes and slapping punitive levies on those who dare live in expensive houses. The money raised thereby ought to be spent on lowering the cost of childcare and presumably also on providing EU functionaries with the kind of housing they deserve. 

Predictably, some reactionary fossils, especially those racists-fascists-loons-sexists-homophobes-xenophobes in Ukip, are screaming bloody murder. They claim such policies will only succeed in hurting the economy, which will result in lower, rather than higher, tax revenue.

They don’t even notice the gross inconsistency of their own arguments, which isn’t surprising considering that so few of them live in Notting Hill, that hatchery of intellectual and, especially, sartorial excellence.

First the fossils bang on about the horrors of excessive immigration – even to the point of attacking the sainted Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair for daring to suggest – self-evidently! – that an influx of Somalis and Roma Bulgarians will resuscitate the Old Blighty, stimulating economic blood-flow through her sclerotic veins.

But then they fail to realise that the EU’s breakthrough idea will correct the very problem that riles Nigel Farage so – that of immigration. This obtuseness betokens their inability to follow elementary logic.

What’s the opposite of immigration? Correct. It’s emigration. If Farage sees immigration as a problem, he should logically either welcome emigration or else shut up. Are you with me so far?

Now imagine a pipe through which fluid flows in a certain direction. How do you reverse the flow? Any hydraulic engineer knows that you do so by installing a check valve.

What those homespun economists in Ukip and the lunatic fringe of the Tory party don’t realise is that the EU’s diktosal is tantamount to installing exactly such a device. A device, may I add, whose unfailing efficacy has been proven everywhere it has been tested.

Just look at the success the check valve of tax-spend has brought to France. Keeping his finger on the EU pulse, my friend François introduced – or rather expanded – the use of such policies. The success has been resounding.

The check valve clicked into action, bankrupting the country and reversing the flow much to everyone’s satisfaction. French people began to run away at an ever-increasing speed, mostly, by the looks of it, to West London, making it the fifth largest French conurbation in the world. Job done.

It’s not just immigration either. What about the traditional and much-vaunted English virtue of fair play? One may be forgiven for getting the impression that it has left these shores to settle somewhere near Brussels.

It’s blatantly unfair that the British economy is growing faster than any other in Europe. Actually, the comparative is inaccurate here, for other economies in Europe aren’t really growing. They’re either stagnating or contracting everywhere but in Germany.

If all those Little Englanders really understood England’s rich tradition of equity and fairness, they’d welcome any measure manifestly aimed at redressing this imbalance.

Britain has no business growing while others aren’t. Hence the EU’s idea, universally proven to put paid to economic growth. Since the Brits don’t seem to realise the fairness of it all, we must thank the EU for trying to get us in touch with our inner selves.

Not only are all these Eurohaters trying to poison the continent’s healthy body, they’re also injecting their venom into the veins of normally sound politicians, such as my friend Dave. This worthy man is being blackmailed into opposing the elevation of Jean-Claude Juncker to the presidency of the European Commission.

Scared by the current advent of racism (otherwise known as Ukip electoral victory), Dave has even threatened Frau Merkel that Britain will leave the EU if Jean-Claude is appointed. So fine, Dave doesn’t really mean it, but the very fact that such seditious words could cross his lips is grounds for concern.

We ought to support Jean-Claude’s candidature on the strength of his name alone. The amalgam of a French Christian name and a German surname proves that my new friend embodies in his very person the true spirit of the EU: the fusion of German and French bureaucracies first achieved when the two countries were more or less one back in the early ‘40s.

Add to this Jean-Claude’s exemplary record of leading that European powerhouse Luxembourg, a dazzling career only interrupted by an electoral defeat brought about by a wee bit of scandal, and you’ll see that the EU can’t find a better candidate to promote its founding values.

Rejecting life-saving economic advice. Campaigning against the walking embodiment of the EU. Attacking my friend Tony, whose only fault is that he wants to bring to all of Europe the same triumphant policies that benefited his own country so much.

Really, how truculent can they get, those Eurohaters? But don’t get me going on that.