Category: Blog

These days few things surprise me any longer, but even an old cynic like me was somewhat taken aback by the news that the Dalai Lama will visit Glastonbury Festival tomorrow.

Before you know it, the old boy will enter the GQ Best Dressed Contest – and will be the odds-on favourite to win.

For those of you who live on Mars or at any rate outside England, Glastonbury Festival is a five-day celebration of drug culture as expressed through rock and pop music (there must be a difference, though I don’t know what it is). To quote from Wikipedia, the idea “was inspired by the ethos of the hippie, counterculture, and free festival movements.”

If you like that sort of thing, Glastonbury is kind of cool. But if you are a hopeless retrograde like me, it’s the nearest thing to a Walpurgisnacht, or hell on earth, if you prefer a different idiom.

That’s why Glastonbury has so far been spared the presence of too many leaders of world religions. This is an injustice that His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, has decided to redress.

The reports I’ve read say that His Holiness will only be at Glastonbury as an honoured guest, not a performer. That, however, leaves room for speculation that perhaps he has a surprise up the sleeve of his saffron robe.

Perhaps, and I’m guessing here, His Holiness will get into the swing of things and deliver a rousing performance of something or other, say a Tibetan Rap, composed in the style the genre requires.

Can’t you just hear it? “I’s Dalai Lama// I bin thrown in the slammer// By Communist China// It rhymes with vagina// Those Commie runts// Are a bunch of big…” Well, I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

One gets the impression that the Dalai Lama has already reincarnated and come back as a globe-trotting politician. As such, he knows how to command popular support, which these days is more or less equivalent to pop support.

Tony and Dave hobnob with drug-crazed pop stars without whom no 10 Downing Street party is imaginable these days. So why wouldn’t another global politician go to Glastonbury?

I don’t know enough about Tibetan Buddhism and how high the dignity of the Dalai Lama office is on its list of priorities. Judging by his decision to attend this affront to every religion one could think off, not very high.

One also wonders if His Holiness will stick around until Friday morning, when music actually kicks in to the delight of the projected audience of 177,000. After the first pre-music night, 10 people were already arrested for drug offences and theft. Just 10, mind you, but it’s early days yet.

Whether the Dalai Lama is there on Friday or not, and whether he’ll just listen or – as I maliciously suggested – also perform, the festival organiser Emily Eavis has already stated that she’s “honoured” by His Holiness’s visit, calling it “a special moment for the festival”.

No doubt it is. That’s precisely why the Dalai Lama should have shunned it. I don’t know what the Chinese is for vade retro, but whatever it is, he should have said it.

The only redeeming hope is that His Holiness doesn’t know enough about the Western ethos to realise exactly what place Glastonbury occupies in it.

 

 

 

Let’s say you lead a union with a grievance. What are you going to do about it?

If you’re in France, the answer is as simple as things of genius always are. You tell your members to do a spot of rioting. You know, block a few roads, burn some tyres, overturn a few cars, take a few swings at cops, smash a few car windows with baseball bats (these are in plentiful supply even though no one plays baseball).

The government caves in, bends over backwards to satisfy your demands – and Robert est ton oncle, as they don’t really say in France.

I’m not indulging in theoretical contemplation. This chain of events is exactly what happened yesterday, when after a day’s rioting by the taxi union FTI, the French foreign minister Bernard Cazeneuve declared a ban on the low-cost taxi service Uber.

Uber is illegal, explained Mr Cazeneuve, because it indulges in unfair competition (compétition déloyale). Meaning it provides a better service at half the price, thereby threatening a monopoly – as it does all over the world, including London, where black-cab companies are taking the Mickey with their outrageous prices.

It has to be said with some chagrin that in France just about any compétition is regarded as déloyale. Contrary to what the philologically challenged Dubya once opined, the French do have a word for ‘entrepreneur’, but it means – or at least implies – something entirely different.

For les contemptible anglo-saxons, an entrepreneur is a chap who has made a success of a new business by satisfying a market demand and creating wealth not only for himself but also for his employees, suppliers and, incidentally, the tax services. A good thing all around, in other words.

In France, an entrepreneur, usually referred to as a boss (patron) is un anglo-saxon in disguise – a materialistic bloodsucker out to do a Robin Hood in reverse by robbing the poor and giving to the rich. Not a good thing at all, let’s put it like that.

Hence the broad popular support enjoyed by the unions, the more violent the better. Hence also the supine position typically adopted by the French government whenever the unions are out to have their fun with baseball bats.

Just the other day a French minister said, at the risk of being summarily lynched, that what France really needs is a Margaret Thatcher. He’s thinking in the right direction, but I’m afraid things have gone a bit too far for a Maggie Mark II.

What France really needs isn’t another Thatcher but another Napoleon, who in 1795, when still a newly promoted general, used grapeshot-spewing cannon to disperse rioters in Paris.

The unfortunate upshot of that decisive action was that the revolutionary government got a new lease on life. But, on its own merits, the Nappy way of dealing with violent unrest sets a useful example to follow.

As it is, France lacks not only Nappy but indeed even Maggie – as witnessed by the US pop singer Courtney Love. The aging blonde had her car ambushed, attacked and pelted with eggs by irate unionists as she left the Charles de Gaulle Airport.

Old Courtney poured her heart out in a Tweet, eschewing capital initials as one does: “they’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. they’re beating the car with metal bats. this is France? I’m safer in Baghdad.”

Miss Love solved the problem in the typical way of les anglo-saxons: with money. “paid some guys on motorcycles to sneak us out, got chased by a mob of taxi drivers who threw rocks, passed two police and they did nothing.”

I have an idea: perhaps those aesthetically minded unionists recognised Courtney Love, and their subsequent action was a form of musical criticism.

Oh Nappy Bony, where are you, when la France needs you so badly. Bring out the grapeshot, I say.

 

    

 

 

The Queen, God bless her, doesn’t speak her own mind in public. She speaks the PM’s mind, in this instance Dave’s.

That’s why one can’t really blame her for joining the campaign portrayed by the government as an epic struggle between David (Cameron) and Goliath (the EU).

Against overwhelming odds, David claims to be swinging his slingshot loaded with the stone of reforms. The composition of the stone remains unknown, but then it’s only a tool.

Any tool is designed to do a certain job, and Dave’s courageous efforts are no exception. The job is to get the Yes vote in the upcoming referendum, thus shutting up all those Little Englanders attached to our centuries-old sovereignty.

The EU fanatics play along by playing hard to get, only to make Dave’s eventual ‘victory’ so much more effective. Thus a youthful French minister explained to Dave the other day that there’s no such thing as “à la carte Europe”.

The culinary idiom comes naturally to the French, and they tend to use it with precision. True enough, no compromise is possible to the founding aspiration of the EU: a single European state.

However, tactical concessions aimed at pacifying some restless natives are possible, indeed inevitable. When the time comes, Dave will bang his head together with the federasts, and they’ll figure out the sufficient minimum of concessions needed to swing the referendum the right way.

Whatever it is, one can be certain that the concessions will be both meaningful and irreversible. However, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, the meaningful ones won’t be irreversible, and the irreversible ones won’t be meaningful.

Meanwhile, Dave is waging a war of words, using focus groups to identify the key triggers to which our comprehensively educated masses will respond with Pavlovian alacrity.

Take ‘cooperation’, for example. The thesaurus gives such antonyms for it as ‘hostility’, ‘obstruction’, ‘antagonism’ – rotten words every one of them. All God’s children will prefer cooperation to hostility, so Dave can win an important propaganda skirmish by repeating ‘cooperation’ so often that the masses will identify it with European federalism unfailingly.

‘Unity’ is another referendum winner, while its opposites, such as ‘division’, ‘dissention’, ‘denial’, all leave a nasty taste in the population’s collective mouth. Wouldn’t you prefer unity to its antonyms? Any sane person would.

One just wishes that Dave played his little word games on his own, without dragging in our aged monarch. But of course such deference is impossible to expect from our spivs.

Hence Dave, acting as ventriloquist, made Her Majesty utter these words on her state visit to Germany: “We know that division in Europe is dangerous and that we must guard against it in the west as well as the east of the continent.”

The statement is meaningless demagoguery any way you look at it. Considering that the last time Europe (minus Britain) was truly united was in 1940-1944, one could say with greater justification that unity is much more dangerous than division.

But such general statements never have any value, other than the propaganda kind. What the Queen has actually said, or rather allowed Dave to say through her, is that any unity is better than any division. But that is demonstrable nonsense, as anyone who lived under German occupation will agree.

It’s true that some unity is better than some division, but not when the former stands for the Fourth Reich of a European federation and the latter represents Britain retaining her sovereignty.

And what is the division ‘in the east of the continent’ against which ‘we must guard’? The only topical disunity to which Her Majesty could have been alluding is Russia’s unprovoked aggression against the Ukraine.

If so, then the word ‘division’ is no more applicable here than it would have been in 1939 if used to describe the rape of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union. Thus division, as used by the Queen, means war.

Hence we must guard against one Western European state attacking another. Contextually it follows that only elevating my friend Junk (as Jean-Claude Juncker likes to be known) to the de facto presidency of Europe can prevent Germany, to use one hypothetical example, from attacking France yet again.

This jibes with the mendacious line taken by federasts, that only the mighty power of the EU has secured peace in Europe since 1945. By saying this, they inadvertently show their hand.

For the only power that has prevented another war of all against all in post-war Europe is Nato generally and the American nuclear umbrella specifically. But for that, the only possible unity Europe could have achieved would have been under the red flag – just like in 1940, but with different symbols superimposed on the red background.

Other than that, there have been wars aplenty in Europe, with thousands dying in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Georgia, the Ukraine – while pan-European institutions’ peace-keeping efforts ranged from incompetent to criminal.

However, and that’s where the federasts unwittingly tell the truth, the EU is predominantly a Franco-German enterprise. Hence, when they say that thanks to the EU there have been no wars in Europe since 1945, they mean no wars between France and Germany – and the rest be damned.

We are among the presumably damned ones, and one wishes Her Majesty were constitutionally entitled to spit out the words Dave was trying to shove down her throat. Alas she isn’t – monarchy is one of the European institutions modernity has befouled.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Ever since the brutal attack on the Ukraine, the world has been wracking its collective brain to find out what Russia is all about. Patriarch Kiril graciously agreed to satisfy this curiosity in a recent sermon:

“Our national idea consists in achieving sainthood… [This] largely determines our culture, the aims of our education, our literature and, finally, our people’s view of life, their understanding of what is good and what is evil, where they should go in life and what end they should reach.”

This is in stark contrast to the bloody Ukraine, whose national idea is godlessness, explained His Holiness. And in the Donetsk area that idea has led to Ukrainian genocide, added the patriarch. Now does ‘Ukrainian genocide’ mean murders by Ukrainians or of Ukrainians? Contextually, His Holiness meant the former, the mass murder of Russians by Ukrainians.

So far this outrage hasn’t been reported by any news service, which means Kiril is in possession of new and privileged information. If that’s indeed the case, he must by all means divulge it. I for one will be waiting with bated breath.

But never mind the connotation. The patriarch’s denotation clarified his meaning beyond any doubt. Since Russia is all about sainthood, continued His Holiness, Russophobia is by far the most dangerous of all xenophobias.

If other xenophobias are aimed against nations, Russophobia has to have God himself in its sights. And it’s Russophobia that has animated the on-going slaughter of Russians by the godless Ukies, which massacre has been maliciously overlooked by the world’s news services.

I must say that, as a Christian, I welcome any state that defines itself in spiritual, theological and eschatological terms, especially if it identifies sainthood as its national idea. And I’m proud of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) that leads this march to collective canonisation.

Even though I’m not an ROC communicant myself, I’m ready to go down on my knees and thank God for having guided Russia, her Church and its patriarch to such a holy mission. Or rather I would be ready to genuflect but for a few annoying facts.

Such as the personal record of His Holiness himself, which ill-qualifies him to set such lofty goals. Recently published documents, cited in the two-volume Mitrokhin Archives, identify Kiril as a lifelong KGB operative (codename ‘agent Mikhailov’).

The uncovered KGB dossier cites many assignments entrusted to ‘agent Mikhailov’ on his foreign travels, when he was head of The ROC Foreign Department. According to the dossier ‘agent Mikhailov’ carried out every assignment with distinction.

He is by no means unique in his dual loyalty. The entire ROC hierarchy is an extension of the KGB/FSB, and both rivals of ‘agent Mikhailov’ in the 2009 patriarchal election had KGB codenames of their own.

One must admit with chagrin (and a frightened look toward heaven) that His Holiness’s personal habits are more in keeping with his KGB identity than with his declared role of leading the nation to sainthood.

For example, he was recently photographed sporting a £30,000 Breguet watch at a press conference. Since all Russian senior clergy have to be monks, an outcry followed, and the patriarch’s PR men came out fighting.

They accused everyone who had commented on the timepiece of Russophobia, atheism and lies. The patriarch, they claimed, had never worn the offensive item – and as proof they showed a doctored version of the same photograph, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, meticulousness not being the most salient Russian virtue, their Photoshop artist overlooked an important detail: the reflection of the watch on the tabletop in front of His Holiness. The picture became supernatural, as befits a prelate: only the shadow of an object, not the object itself, was in evidence.

In a more serious vein, whenever an evil and aggressive regime decides to go the route of self-sacralisation, it becomes particularly nauseating. Russia has always had this tendency, only suppressed during the early Bolshevik years, when religion was unfashionable and priests were being slaughtered en masse together with their congregations.

Ever since the war, when Stalin converted international bolshevism into the national variety, Russia’s criminal state has been making use of the ROC. While communism was still the nominal idea of the state, this was done more or less surreptitiously.

After Putin’s advent, Russia has achieved a successful fusion of  Third Rome, Third Reich and Third World, and the ROC is an essential hypostasis in this rather unholy trinity.

I’m not sure that Russia really has a national idea or, if she does, what it might be. Whatever it is, it seems to be not so much sainthood as its direct opposite.

A KGB state running a KGB church and using Third Rome drivel as its self-justification is heading not for sainthood but for perdition. The only question that remains unanswered is how many others it’ll take down with it.

It really saddens me, however, that so many good Western people, including some of my Ukip friends, fail to see the true nature of Putin’s kleptofascist state. Some even hold Putin up as a model our own leaders should follow.

He’s a patriot, they say, or better still a nationalist who loves his country, has no time for minorities, takes a tough line with liberals and bans homomarriage. So did Hitler, I invariably reply.

 

 

 

 

Sayeeda Warsi has bitten the hand that made her Baroness.

Back in 2012 Dave found to his horror that the focus groups were uneasy about lots of unticked demographic boxes. Dave scanned the available options and his eye stopped on Sayeeda, who ticked lots of relevant boxes. Woman – tick. Muslim – tick. Working class – tick. Iffy accent – tick. Under 40 – tick.

Alas, Sayeeda’s sole contribution to politics to that point had been losing an eminently winnable Tory seat.

Not to worry. Dave fast-tracked Sayeeda to the House of Lords, making her eligible for a cabinet post. Gratitude was in order, one would have thought, but Sayeeda had the bit between her teeth.

Baroness Warsi, as she now was, pretended to have many convictions, but there was only one she had really felt in her bone marrow: hatred of Israel, which she believed was a criminal state that had no right to exist.

Monomaniacs who reduce the whole complexity of life to a single passion inevitably divide mankind into two categories: friends, those who share the passion, and enemies, those who don’t.

Sayeeda thought Dave was her friend, but he proved to be her enemy by failing to share Sayeeda’s sole conviction. Being a person of strong, if single, principle, she had no option but to resign and keep a watchful eye on Dave.

Sure enough, he slipped by making a speech suggesting that some British Muslims “quietly condone” extremism. Baroness Warsi was instantly up in arms.

By suggesting that some Muslims are sympathetic to Isis, she declared, Dave is “demonising” the whole Islamic community. ‘Demonising’, you understand, is the vogue catchword denoting amply justified criticism.

Hence anyone who finds anything wrong with Putin thereby demonises Russia. Anyone objecting to homomarriage demonises all sexual minorities. Anyone saying that Sayeeda is a stupid ideologue demonises women, Muslims, working-class origins, iffy accents and people under 40.

“Muslim communities across the UK are fighting Isis ideology,” claimed Sayeeda and then, with her usual disregard for logic, contradicted herself: “It’s the children of British Muslims that Isis are targeting to recruit.”

That makes those Isis recruiters not only evil but also clueless. If Muslim communities “are fighting Isis ideology”, any attempts to recruit volunteers for a spot of suicide bombing must be doomed to failure.

They aren’t. In fact, hundreds of British Muslims have joined the ranks of Isis cannibals and beheaders. Why, just 10 days ago a teenager from Sayeeda’s hometown of Dewsbury became the UK’s youngest ever suicide bomber.

Such actions come from a base of solid popular support. In fact, the polls taken in the aftermath of the 7/7 massacres showed that 20% of British Muslims sympathised with the terrorists, and 25% felt the bombings were justified. Among young Muslims this number goes up to 35%, which is predictable, considering the impetuosity of youth.

Five per cent of British Muslims tell pollsters they wouldn’t report a planned Islamic attack, 27% are against the deportation of Islamic hate preachers, and 37% believe British Jews are a legitimate target.

One third of British Muslims believe that Islamic apostates should be killed, 78% supported punishing the publishers of Mohammed cartoons, 40% want Sharia in the UK, 28% want Britain to be an Islamic state, while two-thirds think ‘honour’ violence is acceptable.

And it’s not just violence: the community with which Sayeeda identifies so faithfully has strong ideas on family law as well: 51% believe a woman can’t marry an infidel, 49% don’t think a Muslim woman may marry without a guardian’s consent, and 52% feel a Muslim man may have up to four wives (just think of the mess of four divorces).

Considering that only 7% of British Muslims think of themselves as British first, one finds it hard to resist the feeling that perhaps the British Muslim community isn’t as staunchly patriotic as Sayeeda claims. The feeling grows even stronger when we translate all those percentages into absolute numbers based on the overall British Muslim population (three million that we  know about).

One just hopes that next time Dave targets his ‘demonising’ more precisely, aiming it at the true-blue Tory Baroness Warsi specifically.

Literally, that is. For by supporting the campaign to boycott Israel, the pianist-conductor has come out on the side of those who yearn to kill every Israeli.

It has to be said that only in our time could a musician of Barenboim’s modest abilities have possibly achieved his prominence. In the past, concert platforms were mostly inhabited by musicians whose talents were worthy of the giants whose music they played.

The subsequent collapse of education and taste put an end to such outdated elitism. Music has become just another entertainment genre, one that has to function according to the laws of pop. Under such conditions, a different talent becomes paramount – one for self-promotion.

It’s in this area that Danny ‘Boy’ Barenboim approaches genius, which God’s gift he has built into a life of renown matching that of pop stars.

Danny’s status in the musical world is unrivalled because he blows his trumpet better than anyone else. And the sound of that instrument is too loud to be contained within the concert hall.

Since Danny has become a Celebrity, he feels entitled to pontificate on areas outside his immediate expertise. And because he’s a Celebrity, our comprehensively educated masses are prepared to listen.

If the frankly savage Russell Brand can command a political following, then surely the cultivated Danny, who can mouth pseudo-intellectual leftie platitudes in several languages, can do even better.

Anti-Israeli invective is an essential part of today’s leftie parcel, what with the reflux from the erstwhile battle against colonialism still burning leftie throats everywhere. Israel, with her selfish desire to survive against odds, has to be portrayed as a colonial empire, while the Palestinians are seen as the virtuous third-world masses yearning to be free. 

Hence the emergence of Danny Boy as a world statesman, one who intends to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict single-handedly. To that end he has created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, staffed with both Israeli and Palestinian musicians.

That undertaking almost got Danny the Nobel last year, and his narrow loss still rankles. Clearly he has to step up his efforts and raise the already febrile temperature of his self-aggrandisement.

Danny’s views on global, especially Eastern, politics were borrowed wholesale from Edward Said, the guru of anti- and post-colonialism, who was to jihad roughly what Diderot was to the guillotine – someone who didn’t call for it directly but provided the necessary philosophical basis.

That’s why Danny always hails the justice of Palestinian aspirations, pretending he doesn’t realise that the innermost of those is to eliminate Israel and kill every Israeli. The even-handedness that Danny preaches closely resembles the leftie sermon of moral equivalence between the KGB, an organisation that murdered millions, and the CIA, one created to prevent further murders.

The coveted Nobel being so tantalisingly near, Danny has come out in favour of  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), the Palestinian-run campaign aimed against Israeli goods, scientists, artists – well, against Israel.

Delivering his Edward W. Said lecture in London, Danny spoke from the heart: “I think the boycott movement BDS is absolutely correct, it’s perfectly right and necessary with one limitation… It is… not positive… to boycott anything that has anything to do with Israel. Anything to do with government policies, yes.”

In other words, distinctions must be made between good Israelis, those who support the Palestinian cause (and let’s not forget that destruction of Israel is in fact its essence) and bad ones, those who support their government’s efforts to keep Israel alive. He’ll hate the parallel, which to me is unmistakable: the Nazis elevated ‘good’ Jews like Warburg and Oppenheim, those they saw as indispensable to their cause, to the status of ‘honorary Aryans’, thereby letting them live.

In a recent speech ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu cited one of the leaders of BDS as explaining that his real aim was “to bring down the State of Israel”.

Danny has no such far-reaching aspirations. His aim is more personal: to win the Nobel. But in pursuit of this lifelong dream, he has converged with those who are red in tooth and claw.

I’m sure he’ll succeed. If Arafat could win the Nobel, why not Danny?

 

 

One could be forgiven for getting the impression that the Churches of England and Rome are in some sort of contest, with the world title in lefty subversiveness at stake.

First the Archbishop of Canterbury issued a declaration calling for a low-carbon economy, an initiative avidly supported by other faith leaders. Score one for the Anglicans.

Then Pope Francis, having first anathematised capitalism, delivered himself of a 192-page encyclical demanding that political leaders pass tougher climate laws because the Earth is becoming “an immense pile of filth”. Score even.

And now the Bishop of Salisbury, the Right Rev Nicholas Holtam, reclaims the lead for the Anglicans by telling them to skip lunch on the first day of each month, thereby saving ‘our planet’ from melting away.

The General Synod, to meet next month, will rubber-stamp the motion, which also includes a demand for “ministerial formation and in-service training to include components of ecojustice and ecotheology”. Such training is to be provided in addition to studying the Bible, not yet – as will surely be the case soon – instead of it. 

I too have a motion, or rather a recommendation, of my own. Whenever someone refers to the Earth as ‘our planet’, punch him in the face. As he lies dazed on the floor, explain to him why the punishment was meted out.

Are our church leaders out of their tree? There is no such thing as ecojustice or ecotheology. There may be some anthropogenic warming going on at the moment, and a good job too.

However, by far the greatest effect on climate comes from solar activity, which is why ‘our planet’ has always gone through periods of warmer and colder weather.

There were grapes growing in Scotland in Caesar’s time, which betokens a warmer climate than it is now – and yet in those days people didn’t drive cars, didn’t have thermostats, never saw aerosol sprays and hadn’t yet identified global warming as the root of all evil.

Also, think of the pollution problem that would arise if each of the three million London cars were replaced by a horse. Why, one wouldn’t be able to walk the streets without a gas mask, and theology would be even further away from people’s minds than it is now.

The theological source of ecological wisdom is Genesis 1: 28-30, which in broad strokes tells us that everything on earth has been created for the use and benefit of man. Now I have news for our prelates: almost everything man does to make use of God’s gifts releases temperature into the atmosphere.

The greatest (and earliest) release comes from tilling the land and turning the soil to grow “every herb bearing seed”. This global-warming activity has been going on for rather a long time, proving that God didn’t create us to be ecology-obsessed cretins.

That scientific and industrial progress has some polluting effect that so vexes His Holiness is true – and he should pray that long may it continue. Before the Industrial Revolution, the average life expectancy was between 30 and 40 years. Now, by the mercy of God and as a direct result of modern science, it’s between 80 and 90.

Surely God doesn’t want us to die before our time? Well, then He must be happy that man has learned to look after himself so well. How He feels about our Catholic and Anglican prelates is, however, open to question.

I doubt that Pope Francis, Archbishop Welby or Bishop Holtam know enough science to form a firm view on such subjects on their own. Clearly, they must rely on the judgement of scientists.

In that case they ought to know that ‘global warming’ has the unique distinction of being the only discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by a political organisation, specifically the UN.

The likelihood of a scientist supporting this theory is directly proportionate to the size of the grant said scientist receives from the UN, its branches or other similar political setups. Scientists who receive no such grants and are therefore independent tend to punch holes the size of St Peter’s basilica in this slapdash theory.

His Holiness, who is institutionally obligated to be concerned about the plight of the poor, should also remember that the acuteness of such plight is inversely proportionate to the amount of capitalism in the country – the more capitalism, the less poverty, and the other way around.

As to taking fasting out of its normal religious context and putting it into one of radical left-wing politics, Bishop Holtam ought to be ashamed of himself.

I have an idea: perhaps he ought to demand that the Church of England convert to Russian Orthodoxy. If the prescriptions of that confession are followed religiously, as it were, the communicants are supposed to have at least 200 fasting days in a year.

That’s something to ponder in the future, but in the meantime the leaders of our Western confessions ought to remind themselves of what they were brought into this world to do.

Their remit is to save souls, not ‘our planet’. The two desiderata are not only not identical, but in fact mutually exclusive. Are they bright enough to realise this? I’m beginning to doubt that.

 

This leftie with learning difficulties has felt called upon to comment on the Charleston massacre. Though by itself this is unobjectionable, the nature of Mr Morgan’s comment confirms both his political and intellectual credentials.

The rhetorical device he chose is called anaphora, the deliberate repetition of a phrase at the beginning of successive sentences or paragraphs.

This trick has stood various orators (or demagogues, depending on how one sees them) in good stead, from Churchill with his “We shall fight them…” to Martin Luther King with his “I have a dream…” to Hillary Clinton, who once repeated “it takes…” six times in one sentence – and then started the next one with “It takes…” as well.

Following such illustrious role models, Mr Morgan wrote an article of 26 short paragraphs, each beginning ad nauseam with the phrase “I’m sick…”. (A piece of avuncular advice, Piers, if I may: the phrase isn’t ad nausea, as you seem to think, but ad nauseam – sic. It’s the Latin for till you wanna puke, mate.)

What brought on Piers’s serial bouts of emesis isn’t the gall of the British police who dare investigate editors for phone hacking, and nor is it the rotten taste of the American public whose indifference to some TV chat shows leads to their cancellation.

No, Piers feels sick thinking about 26 different things that all boil down to one: the availability of guns in America. (Another piece of avuncular advice, Piers: rephrasing exactly the same thought 26 times is neither grown-up nor clever.)

Like all intellectual vulgarians, he likes to reduce an extremely complex phenomenon to the simple terms even Daily Mirror readers can understand: If only Dylann Storm Roof had been unable to lay his hands on that .45, the truly sickening carnage wouldn’t have happened.

In what passes for Piers’s mind, the tragedy reflects a primitive equation: availability of guns equals gun crime. The reverse of this is another equation: unavailability of guns equals no gun crime. Oh if only things were as simple as that.

For example, take four New England states, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The first two have liberal gun laws, which is why they have some of the highest gun ownership in the USA.

However, in what Piers would probably dismiss as an inexplicable paradox, Vermont and New Hampshire have the lowest rates of gun assaults in the country.

Connecticut’s gun laws are also quite permissive, and the state’s rate of gun assaults is quite high: 22.46 gun assaults per 100,000 population.

Neighbouring Massachusetts, on the other hand, has some of the tightest gun controls in the world. One would expect the statistics of gun assaults there to be much lower than in Connecticut. In fact, at 30.8 per 100,000, they’re a third higher.

Broadening our scan, the incidence of gun crime in Japan, where firearms are tightly regulated, is extremely low. Yet it’s even lower within the Japanese community in California, where guns can be bought easily.

And in Switzerland, where practically every household possesses an assault rifle and, usually, a handgun or two, they don’t even bother to keep gun crime statistics. There is no gun crime.

All this goes to show that, in conditions of even relative liberty, the state can’t cut the supply of a product, be it guns, drugs or prostitutes, for which there exists a popular demand. Assorted psychos and criminals will always get weapons if they want them, as you can find for yourself by having a pint with a pub landlord somewhere is South London and asking him, “I say, you wouldn’t happen to know someone…” 

Getting back to Piers’s adopted land, John Lott in his book More Guns, Less Crime presents an analysis of crime statistics for every US county from 1977 to 2005. His scrutiny of reams of data proves beyond any doubt the truth of his book’s title: the relationship between gun ownership and violent crime isn’t direct but inverse.

Hence blaming guns for gun crime is a factual fallacy, but it’s more than that. In our morbidly politicised world, every piece of data has to have a political dimension, and gun statistics are no exception.

Piers lived in America for a few years, so he had time to cotton on to how the political cookie crumbles there. In America guns are one of the watersheds separating socialists (liberals, in the American misnomer) from conservatives.

As they do in everything else, the lefties rely on sheer demagoguery and fiddling of facts to make their point, and Piers instantly fit in. He knows what a good story is, and he won’t let facts interfere with it.

Never mind that in his own country gun crime almost doubled in the six months following the 1997 bans on firearms. Never mind the mass of incontrovertible data gathered by Lott and other serious researchers. Politics trumps it all.

John Adams once described facts as ‘stubborn things’. The arch-socialist Stalin added an interesting dimension to this adage: “If facts are stubborn things, then so much the worse for facts.”

No doubt the socialist Piers Morgan would agree. Sickening, isn’t he? 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you call a chap who explains his actions by saying: “A man like me cares little about the lives of a million men”? (Napoleon to Metternich, 1813)

I call him a monster, to be cursed in eternity and mentioned side by side with other ‘men like him’, such as Lenin, Hitler and Stalin.

The French (with some exceptions, to be fair) call him a hero and venerate the memorials to his grisly deeds.

Well, that hero was taken down a peg 200 years ago, and, unlike Napoleon’s own victories, this anniversary is worth cheering.

The anniversaries widely celebrated in France have been coming thick and fast over the past 10 years: Marengo, Austerlitz, Friedland, Wagram.

There is, however, a fundamental difference between their anniversaries and ours. Theirs celebrate a march of despotism; ours commemorates stopping despotism in its tracks.

Yet Napoleon is still given the benefit of doubt, nay adoration, by assorted groupies, not all of them French. We’ve had our share of those too, from the pop poet Byron to the pop historian Andrew Roberts.

But the French won’t be outdone. Thus Dominique de Villepin, former prime minister: “This defeat shines with the aura of victory”. Moral victory, that is, which is the traditional fall-back position for sore losers.

Much as I admire the French, the ability to lose graciously isn’t their most salient trait. Nous sommes trahis (we was robbed, in colloquial English) is the blanket explanation of all French defeats.

They never lose battles to superior, better-led armies. They only ever lose them to treason – by the enemy, their own generals or, as is claimed specifically in relation to Waterloo, God.

The amazing thing about Nappy’s groupies is that they don’t even realise how ridiculous they sound. This is, for example, how the most febrile of those groupies, Victor Hugo, contrasted Wellington’s soulless performance to Nappy’s inspired leadership.

Wellington’s: “precision, planning, geometry, prudence, a safe line of retreat, well-managed reserves, stubborn calm… nothing left to chance…”

Nappy’s: “intuition, feeling… superhuman instinct, flamboyant vision… prodigious and scornful impetuosity, all the mysteriousness of a profound soul.”

I know which army I’d choose to fight in, even though Hugo’s description of Nappy’s forces sounds as if they were made up of 50,000 St Pauls led by Christ himself.

This last phrase is merely a reiteration of a French blasphemy. Nappy was – in some quarters still is – well-nigh deified. That elevation to divinity became especially pronounced after his defeat at Waterloo.

Doing the rounds in France at the time was a disgusting mockery of the Lord’s prayer: “Our Emperor who art in St Helena// Respected be thy name// Thy will be done// Against the extremists who take away our pensions// Rid us of the accursed Bourbons// Amen.”

In the pagan groupies’ eyes Nappy’s free hand with pensions outweighed the 2,000,000 dead Frenchmen. Methinks their moral scales are badly in need of readjustment.

Nappy’s self-confidence indeed matched Christ’s, but with considerably less justification. If Jesus sacrificed himself for others, Nappy did exactly the opposite throughout his career.

Whenever he felt that military defeat threatened his power, he never hesitated to abandon his bleeding army and rush back to Paris to make sure his own position was secure. Nappy did that in Egypt and in Russia, and by any traditional military codes he ought to have faced tribunal with the firing squad at the other end.

Add to this Nappy’s summary executions of POWs (for example, between 2,000 and 4,000 of them after the siege of Jaffa), another offence worthy of tribunal, and one may wonder how he still enjoys a posthumous reputation as a great man, rather than as a great criminal.

Nor was his purely military judgement always as impeccable as is universally claimed. Attacking Russia knowing that his unprotected supply lines would have to stretch to 1,000 miles was sheer madness, as was Nappy’s failure to provide his soldiers with winter gear.

Another great failure of Nappy’s martial nous was his gross underestimation of opposing leaders, specifically Wellington. Speaking on the eve of Waterloo to his generals, with many of whom Wellington had wiped the Iberian peninsula, Nappy told them there was nothing to fear.

Wellington, he said, was a bad general. The beaten veterans of the Peninsular War must have exchanged glances, thinking “What does it make us?”

In fact, for a bad general, Wellington boasted a remarkable record of never losing a battle in his life. He also knew how to protect his soldiers’ lives by training them to rely more on accurate musketry than frontal bayonet charges so beloved of Nappy.

Wellington trained his infantrymen to deliver three shots a minute, as opposed to an average of two in the French army. That, plus the organisational brilliance and attention to detail so derided by Hugo, gave Wellington an in-built advantage. For example, rather than flying by the seat of his breeches, Wellington had personally reconnoitred the Waterloo battlefield a year before the battle.

Deploying his infantry beyond the crest of a ridge, out of enemy artillery’s reach, as he did at Waterloo, was another tactic pioneered by Wellington. To him, unlike to Nappy, the lives of men did matter.

Napoleon is also venerated as a great statesman, one who gave France her civil code and departmental structure. Both, however, were direct offshoots of the Enlightenment, whose storm trooper Nappy was.

Even if the Napoleonic code were indeed as great an achievement as some claim, mentioning it next to the millions perished in Napoleonic wars brings to mind the naughty American joke: “Yes, but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

It’s those moral scales again. But even considered on its own terms, the Napoleonic Code is less than admirable. What it adumbrated wasn’t so much the rule of law as the rule of lawyers, along with legal and economic dirigisme – something from which France is still suffering.

The French feel nostalgic about their country’s greatness, which they mistakenly equate with martial glory. Yet only just wars contribute to a country’s greatness. Those waged by Napoleon are largely responsible for France’s present misfortunes, something the French fail to understand, which is why they ignore today’s anniversary. 

For us, however, there is much to celebrate. But for the victory won by the Wellington-led coalition, despotism would have arrived in Europe a century earlier than it actually did. And – perish the thought! – Trafalgar Square would be called Place de l’Empereur, while Waterloo Station would probably be known as Gare du Sud.

Cheers!

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How does the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) differ from Western confessions? You might mention things like filioque or papal supremacy, and that would be God’s own truth. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth.

For the ROC, in the person of Patriarch Alexis II (a career KGB operative, like all the post-war patriarchs), issued in 1997 a blessing to the singer Zhanna Bitchevskaya, thereby making her an official performer of ROC songs.

Unofficially, her patriotic, religious and nationalist oeuvre has deeply endeared her to my friend Vlad, who developed an affection for religious songs, or indeed religion, at the time of his first presidential campaign in 2000.

Until that momentous event, Vlad’s biographies, including the book First Person Singular he had dictated, had never mentioned any inchoate religious feelings, unlike, for example, his affection for German beer. Yet already in 2000 Vlad decided to turn Russia into an eerie amalgam of Third Rome, Third Reich and Third World, for which undertaking a public demonstration of religiosity was de rigueur. 

Incidentally, that campaign was bankrolled by Boris Berezovsky who subsequently fell out with Vlad and hence came to a sticky end in his London exile, proving yet again that Vlad’s enemies can run but they can’t hide.

Bitchevskaya (I wonder how she abbreviates her surname) is still going strong at 71, performing and recording non-stop, a sort of ROC round the clock. She ought to be congratulated for staying on the same wavelength with her church and her state.

Actually the two entities have been one and the same since Peter I’s reforms, which effectively turned the ROC into a department of the state and, usually, an extension of its secret police.

Both before and after that fusion, the Russian state and the ROC have always been united in their pathological hatred of the West. This is a shame, for, unlike the state, the ROC is after all a Christian institution and, as such, ought to preach love, not hate.

The ROC’s record of hatred isn’t automatically attributable to its Byzantine origin, as some commentators suggest. After all, Greek and Coptic churches have the same provenance, and yet they don’t openly preach anti-Western invective.

No, this trait is peculiarly Russian – it’s the leitmotif of the country’s whole history. And you can trust Zhanna ‘Bitch’ to keep her finger not only on her silvery guitar strings but also on the nervous pulse of Russia.

The Russophones among you can confirm this observation courtesy of YouTube. But for the benefit of my linguistically challenged readers, allow me to translate a few bits and pieces from her lyrics (many, incidentally, written by the arch-monk Roman) and writings.

“Russia will be free again, and the world will fall down at her feet!”

“Russia spits on the power of Americas and Europes!”

“May you all [Westerners] croak!”

And then, in a different genre, that of journalism: “When we cross ourselves, we spit on the West thrice. And say, ‘I deny you, Satan’. All filth, all the refuse of the disgusting Antichrist comes from the West. That’s why everything that comes from the West should be expunged from our heads, our homes. Don’t dance to the West’s tune!”

“I do what God has put into my hands, my mouth, my soul. The songs I sing lead people to the church, to God.”

In other words Zhanna ‘Bitch’ is God’s apostle. Hence it stands to reason she should have healing powers: “The head physician of Moscow’s oncological centre once told me, ‘Zhanna, I must tell you something important: some patients in the last, fourth stage of cancer recover having heard the records of your songs by the arch-monk Roman. Not all, but some.’”

It’s then incomrehensible that every Russian cancer patient who can afford it still seeks treatment in the West. They could save themselves a lot of money and trouble by staying in Russia and listening to Zhanna ‘Bitch’ intoning ‘May you all croak!’ at the West. Or watching her clip We are Russians, Russians, Russians where Zhanna’s voiceover accompanies the footage of Russian bombers firing missiles, which is then cut to wide shots of burning American cities.

I do hope the Putin groupies among my Ukip friends will read this. They just may change their view of Vlad, he of staunch faith and nationalism. (‘Nationalism’ is seen as a desirable quality in some quarters – the distinction between that and patriotism is lost.)

Underpinning both his ‘faith’ and nationalism is visceral hatred of everything the West stands for. And the art of Vlad’s favourite performer faithfully imitates the life he fosters in Russia.