Category: Blog

The first Russian International Conservative Forum took place in the country’s imperial capital two days ago, and let me tell you: conservatism ain’t what it used to be.

I’ll give you a clue: the British delegation was led by Nick Griffin, who denies the Holocaust ever happened but hopes it will.

Nick led the BNP for a number of years, and I don’t mean my French bank. Then last year he was expelled from the party for racist and anti-Semitic extremism. That’s like being drummed out of Isis for excessive cruelty.

Other keepers of the international conservative flame included Jared Taylor, an American who thinks the white race should rule because it’s genetically superior to all others; Udo Voight, der Führer of the German neo-Nazis, currently serving a suspended sentence for glorifying Waffen-SS; Georgios Epitidios from Greece’s Golden Dawn party whose emblem is a tastefully stylised swastika; Daniel Karlsen, one of the founding members of Denmark’s honestly named Nationalist Socialist Movement; Roberto Fiore, head of Italy’s Nuova Forza party, which new force is neither very strong nor particularly new (old Benito tried it all before).

Well, I shan’t bore you with a complete list, but you get the picture. Just take my word for it: all the delegates came from the same ideological background. All of them coyly eschew the term ‘fascist’ to describe their parties (that term is reserved for mainstream parliamentary parties and what they represent), but that’s exactly what they are.

The forum was an attempt to unite the swampy creepy-crawlies of the world into a cohesive movement, and it’s both typical and predictable that they should be welcomed in Putin’s native city.

Since all the attending parties are nationalist, their platforms have to differ in some details. But they were all invited on the strength of two essential qualifications: approval of the Third Reich and admiration for Col. Putin.

Hence I’d like to extend my sympathy to Peter Hitchens and Christopher Booker, who were both shunned. They passed with flying colours on the second qualification but failed on the first.

Take my advice, chaps: before the next Forum make sure you say something nice about the economy Hitler got going and the trains Mussolini got running on time. Insist on assessing Hitler’s tenure in a balanced way and you never know your luck, you just may wangle an invitation next time around.

Sorry, I forgot another characteristic all the represented parties have in common: none of them has a hope in hell of ever being elected to any office other than the presidency of some global fascist alliance.

Those who do have electoral hopes, such as France’s Marine Le Pen, chose not to come even though they were invited. That’s gratitude for you: didn’t Vlad pump millions into Marine’s party coffers? Of course he did. And now that blonde b…, well, beauty, pretends they’ve never met. I’d put the Front National on notice if I were Vlad: you don’t come, I don’t pay.

That also goes for Hungary’s Jobbik and Denmark’s People’s Party, other recipients of Vlad’s largess who pretended their invitation had got lost in the post. Watch your steps, you treacherous swine, or Vlad will cut you off too.

The Russian contingent featured such colourful figures as Alexei Milchakov, officer in the army of the recently constituted Donetsk People’s Republic. Before pledging his allegiance to the new Republic Alexei was a skinhead who inundated the Internet with photos of himself holding the Nazi flag in one hand and a puppy’s severed head in the other. A true blue Conservative, in other words, the Russian answer to Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Now fascism has left bad memories at the site of this global event. After all, 1.5 million denizens of Leningrad, as it then was, starved to death during the Nazi siege, and some of the few survivors are still kicking. So it was predictable that a group of people still not completely desensitised by Putin’s propaganda would take to the streets in protest.

Just as predictable was the reaction of Vlad’s police: it featured rubber truncheons, bullying and summary arrests. Who are you calling fascists, you traitors in the pay of the CIA, MI6 and presumably RSPCA?

In a parallel development, a pro-Putin magazine Zmiana (Change) has been launched in Poland by Mateusz Piskorski, known as a translator and publisher of hard-core Nazi material. Specifically in the late 1990s he brought out the magazine Odala, devoted to Holocaust denial, praises of Nazi Germany and calls for a united Slavic empire as “the only hope for the White Race”.

Polish authorities have so far failed to establish a direct link between the new publishing venture and Vlad’s good offices, but magazines cost money, which has to come from somewhere. Then again, it’s possible that Mr Piskorski is independently wealthy and is doing this out of disinterested affection for fascism, especially of the pan-Slavic variety so cherished by Putin.

It has to be said that Vlad is building on a solid historical foundation. Immediately the Bolsheviks grabbed power in Russia they began to bankroll extreme socialist groups all over the world.

Most of the groups were international socialist, though Germany’s Workers’ Party received some funds too, before Hitler took over. At a time when millions of Russians were starving to death and cannibalism was rife, the idealistic Soviet state so beloved of Messrs Shaw and Wells was spending tens of millions to keep foreign communists in the style to which they were rapidly getting accustomed.

My contention has always been that, semantic wrangling apart, there isn’t much difference between national and internationalist socialists – as Vlad has set out to prove.

At a time when food is getting scarce in Russian shops the other side of Moscow, he’s spending millions on his ideological brethren, those whom our inept taxonomists describe as ‘right wing’ or ‘left wing’ (such as Greece’s ruling party). Both wings propel the same fascist bird, a carrion vulture with a voracious appetite.

In conclusion, one has to compliment Vlad on his honesty. By extending a welcoming hand to this global scum, he has finally abandoned subterfuge. Vlad is a fascist, and proud of it. He knows who his friends are, and he doesn’t care who else knows it.

 

The death of one of the greatest modern statesmen didn’t touch me emotionally. I’ve never been to Singapore, have no desire to go there and have little sympathy for the kind of money-obsessed, sterile, excruciatingly modern country Lee created.

Yet Lee’s death made me think about Britain, the country that does touch me emotionally – even though most Brits now subscribe to the same philistine values Lee championed with such thundering success.

I am well aware that my contempt for a society that measures its success mostly in monetary terms puts me in a small minority that can never have any political, social or even cultural influence. Not any longer.

That’s fair enough and, having spent my life outside the mainstream in three different countries, I don’t at all mind. If most people want to have wealth above all else, by all means they should pursue it, and more power to their elbow.

Obviously in historical terms Britain is indeed very wealthy. Yet much of our prosperity is phoney, financed by money we don’t really have. Our economy is a giant pyramid scheme, and the pyramid is inverted, tottering on its sharp end.

Sooner or later it’ll collapse, burying under the rubble several generations to come. It may even collapse sooner rather than later, in which case those living today won’t escape the fallout either.

Many Brits, even those lacking in the knowledge of recondite economic concepts, sense this intuitively, which is why the Tory party isn’t the runaway success in the polls that it ought to be on the strength of its apparent economic competence.

Actually, the knowledge of recondite economic concepts isn’t so much essential as antithetical to economic wisdom. All it really takes is basic common sense and the kind of pragmatic intelligence measurable by IQ scores.

Lee had it, and I suspect at least some of our politicians do as well, though these days this isn’t the way to bet. However, Lee managed to use those fine qualities to create real prosperity for his nation, while the best our rulers can manage, regardless of the qualities they may or may not possess, is the phoney kind.

Why? The answer is obvious: democracy won’t let our government govern intelligently. Even if our officials knew what produces economic success, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. Their heads would be banging against the brick wall of democracy run riot.

It’s against this background that one should read the Times article Quitting EU Could Cost Britain £56bn. The article is yet another diatribe against Ukip’s putative desire to “shut the borders and shut the world out, which would mean a net loss in terms of the UK’s GDP.”

This is all par for the pre-electoral course: Ukip could take votes away from the Tories, which makes anything The Times says against Farage perfectly acceptable, no matter how false or slanderous it is.

I suspect I know more Ukip politicians and supporters than the author does, yet I’ve never heard one of them express any such desires. All they are saying is that any sovereign nation should decide whom and how many to admit to its shores. And, if Britain has no such right, she is no longer sovereign, which, in view of thousands of years of British history, is rather regrettable.

But the usual Ukip baiting apart, the article does make an interesting point. It quotes the Open Europe think tank as saying that, rather than losing £56 billion from leaving the EU, Britain could actually gain £35 billion, and don’t you just admire such precise figures in such a notoriously imprecise science.

However, to turn such a precise loss into an equally precise gain, says Open Europe, Britain would have to put through measures that anyone with half a brain knows make sense anyway.

We’d have to sign free-trade agreements with the US, India and China and “rip up workers’ rights and green legislation”. In other words, we should do what Lee Kuan Yew did so effectively in Singapore.

We’d also have to follow Lee’s lead in other areas, which the article leaves out. Specifically, we should lower taxes to the point where the state’s take is no higher than 25 per cent of GDP, drastically roll back the welfare state, replace our socialist NHS with a combination system that gave Singapore the world’s most effective healthcare system – in short, do all those things that alone can give us a healthy economy.

All those things, in other words, that we’ll never do, EU or no EU, Ukip or no Ukip. Our cherished, unlimited democracy of one-man-one-vote or, to be pernickety about it, one-man-one-woman-and-increasingly-one-child-one-vote, makes economic sanity impossible.

Since the passage of the Reform Act (1832) and repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), Britain has needed no lessons in free trade from Singapore or anyone else. Nor does she need to be taught the benefits of free and open labour markets, which are indeed as essential to prosperity as Open Europe claims.

But imagine a political party standing on a platform of measures designed to turn Britain into another Singapore economically, while retaining the cultural advantages of being a Western, which is to say residually Christian, nation.

What do you suppose the electoral chances of such a party would be? I’d say that on a scale of one to 10 they’d be about -20.

Unfortunately our democracy is egalitarian, in that it corrupts both the government and the governed equally. Lee Kuan Yew – who incidentally was educated at Cambridge – succeeded so spectacularly because he counterbalanced his country’s parliamentary democracy with his own quasi-monarchical power, not letting people’s desires get in the way of their interests.

He learned the lessons taught by Edmund Burke and our other great political thinkers, the lessons that we ourselves have forgotten. That’s why our politics is reduced to scoring cheap party-specific points, of the kind in which The Times specialises.

And that’s why we’ll never match Singapore’s economic success, in the EU or out of it. We may, however, reclaim our sovereignty by leaving the EU – even if this costs us £56 billion (which I personally don’t believe for a second).

A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money, says a conventional wisdom.

Our politicos would disagree because they have no principles and don’t really know what the word means. Lee would have disagreed too – he believed in the kind of principles that made money rather than lost it.

Lee Kuan Yew, RIP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Countries ruled by law are rather dull, wouldn’t you say? Before they do anything interesting they have to go through a slow legislative process, which takes all the fun out.

Not so tyrannies ruled by the will of one man. They never lose the ability to surprise because no man, including one in power, is ever entirely predictable.

Few are so rational that their every step can be anticipated. Even a spouse, never mind a friend, can suddenly do something so unexpected that one has to reassess the whole relationship.

Tyrants are only human in this respect even when they, like Putin, appear to be subhuman in every other way. Hence the constant guesswork along the lines of ‘Will he or won’t he?’

Will he launch an all-out offensive on the Ukraine? Intelligence data seem to suggest he might. What’s next then?

The way the Russian troops are deployed points at a Baltic strategy, with former Soviet republics there being routinely and loudly demonised in Putin’s media for the way they allegedly mistreat their Russian minorities.

From there Finland and the rest of Scandinavia are but a cannon shot away, and recent pronouncements by Russian KGB leaders should give those countries reason to worry.

The former head of that service Nikolai Patrushev, now head of Russia’s Security Council, has castigated “an increased influence” of Finnish nationalists on the population of Karelia.

Said influence, according to Gen. Patrushev, is being exerted through those pernicious human rights groups that have no place in civilised society, as defined by the KGB.

Actually there was only one such group in Karelia, their Youth Human Rights Organisation, but a court order shut it down back in January. Hence the evil influence must come from the government of Finland, which is doubtless gearing up for yet another attempt to conquer Russia.

The previous such attempt, and one is amazed those bellicose Finns have had to wait so long, came on 26 November, 1939, when Finnish artillery shot up a Soviet border post, presumably as a prelude to a victorious march on Moscow.

However physics conspired against the world’s first haven of workers and peasants. You see, shell fragments spread in the direction of the shell’s trajectory, which makes it easy to determine whence the shot was fired.

A brief inspection of the pattern established that the barrage had come from Russia, which could only mean that the dastardly Finns must have bribed the Giver of Physical Laws to conspire with them against the present-day garden of Eden, aka the Soviet Union.

Such beastliness demanded a worthy response, which came immediately. The entire might of the Soviet military machine, fine-tuned for the conquest of Europe, was unleashed on the Finns – or the White Finnish fascists, as they were then described in the Soviet press.

The Soviets had three times as many soldiers, 30 times as many aircraft and 100 times as many tanks. The Finns, led by the former Tsarist general Mannerheim, had skis, rifles, explosives and an all-abiding hatred of communism.

They fought smartly and heroically, defending their sovereignty with self-sacrificial abandon. The Soviets suffered horrendous casualties, as many as a million dead, according to Khrushchev. Nikita, however, was much given to hyperbole, and the actual number was probably a fourth of his estimate. Still…

The USSR was summarily expelled from the League of Nations, with those doubting Thomases refusing to accept the self-evident fact that it was the mighty, gigantic Finland that had attacked the tiny, defenceless Soviet Union, not the other way around.

Also, just as the Finnish army was running out of steam, Britain informed Stalin that, should he persist with the aggression, the RAF bomber squadron based at Mosul in Iraq would take out the Baku oil fields, then the principal source of Soviet hydrocarbons.

Hence Stalin had to contend himself with only 11 per cent of Finland’s territory, not the 100 per cent as planned. He then added that acquisition to the adjacent part of Russia to form the Karelo-Finnish SSR, number 16 in the Soviet fraternal family of nations.

That contrivance survived until 1956, by which time every denizen with but a drop of Finnish blood in his veins had skipped out to Finland. The Russians were joking that the only Finns left there were the fininspector (financial auditor) and Finkelstein, although a closer examination revealed they were both the same person.

Hence where ‘Finnish nationalists’ could have come from in today’s Karelia is a mystery – as much so as those Finnish artillery shells flying into Russia, then turning around and hitting that border post from behind.

But then, as Putin explained to military historians exactly two years ago, Stalin attacked Finland to “correct the mistakes” made in drawing the border in 1918.

Now juxtaposing Putin’s Stalin-like urge to correct any such historical mistakes (the Crimea springs to mind) with Patrushev’s statement, one may get the impression that Finland isn’t far down on Russia’s hit list.

If so, it’ll be only a hop, skip and jump to Denmark, which has just been put on notice for a potential Russian nuclear strike.

Apparently the Danes have agreed to enter the European anti-missile defence system, something that makes Putin see red, as in the colour of the Soviet flag. Who do those Westerners think they are, wishing to protect themselves from Russia’s nuclear missiles?

Placing anti-missile systems on their territory just may expose Denmark to massive nuclear strikes, threatened the Russian ambassador Mikhail Vanin. Denmark’s government protested, claiming that, as their nomenclature suggests, anti-missile systems are defensive in nature.

While they are playing those semantic games, Russia has launched the Tu-160M, a supersonic nuclear bomber that can outrun our Typhoons (provided we still have them after the current batch of defence cuts).

The biggest strategic bomber in the world, the Tu-160M will be operating from a Russian base near Murmansk, a mere 1,000 miles from Britain. Considering that the bomber boasts a 7,600-mile range, along with its Mach 2 speed, I don’t know how confidently our Scandinavian allies can count on our help.

A situation where such help will be needed may arise sooner than we think, and the danger will always be there for as long as Russia is run by the KGB, so ably fronted by Messr Putin, Patrushev et al.

“The KGB,” explained Patrushev 15 years ago, “is Russia’s new nobility”. He was clearly referring to the organisation’s stature, not any inner qualities.  

 

 

 

Opening remarks in a debate at The Freedom Festival, Bournemouth, 2015:

 

“O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!” cried Marie-Antoinette on her way to the guillotine.

Indeed the Enlightenment shifted liberty to the fore of political desiderata. Since that shift, and largely because of it, the world has suffered the most oppressive tyrannies in history.

This brings us to the fundamental distinctions between conservatism and libertarianism, which are often confused with each other.

The key question for a conservative is ‘what is it that you’d like to conserve?’ The key question for a libertarian is ‘liberty for whom, from whom and to do what?’

There is only one answer to the conservative question that makes the issue intelligible.

It’s the Christian, specifically apostolic Christian, way of life that defined and shaped the cultural, social and political institutions of the West over the past 2,000 years. It is this way of life that in modern times has been under sustained attack from all sorts of quarters.

From this the definition of conservatism flows as naturally as wine out of the bottle, for it’s clear what it is that conservatives wish to conserve: Christendom, whatever is left of it.

Because Christendom has so many facets, not just religious but also social, political and aesthetic, conservatism must reflect them all – never forgetting that they are indeed facets of the same whole, rather than unconnected phenomena.

For example, it’s hard to imagine a true political conservative preaching the social delights of a classless society, as John Major once did when he was still prime minister.

Nor should a man get a free ride when claiming to be a social liberal but a fiscal conservative, which presumably means he loves the welfare state but hates to pay for it.

To a conservative, political liberty isn’t an aim in itself – it’s but a natural by-product of a just order.

An individual’s right to political liberty, understood as the state placing no unreasonable restraints on human behaviour, depends on society accepting the individual’s definition of an unreasonable restraint.

This right is therefore suspect, for its exercise involves an obligation imposed on others. In general, ‘liberty’, along with all its cognates (liberal, liberation, libertarian and so forth), is a word fraught with semantic danger: one man’s liberty is another man’s licence and yet another’s anarchy.

For example, is the absence of anti-homosexuality laws a factor of liberty or licence? If the answer is the former, as it has to be in our PC times, then we ought to ponder the fact that the first modern country without such laws was Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1934, a place and period not otherwise known for a laissez-faire attitude to life.

Libertarianism is often confused with conservatism, mainly because of their shared commitment to limiting the power of the central state over the individual.

For a conservative this commitment is rooted in Christendom, which shifted the social focus from the collective entity of Hellenic polis to the individual.

Libertarians, on the other hand, have replaced the Virgin with Ayn Rand, Jesus Christ with Murray Rothbard, faith with ideology and hence a realistic assessment of man’s nature with unbridled and unwarranted optimism.

The states of Christendom followed the church principle of subsidiarity, with power devolved to the lowest sensible level. To use modern terminology, localism trumped centralism.

On the other hand the modern post-Enlightenment state created in the name of liberty is innately centralising.

Hence even the absolute monarchs of Christendom never had anything near the power enjoyed by our post-Enlightenment presidents and prime ministers.

Both conservatives and libertarians accept that a free market is a sine qua non of civilised society even though libertarians assign a much greater importance to the economy in the general scheme of things.

They tend to preach what I call totalitarian economism, claiming that, once the economy is free, everything else will follow, which strikes me as primitive philosophically and wrong factually.

However, libertarians also seek to curtail the influence of tradition as conveyed through benign associations, such as guild, parish, or township, lying at the foundation of any traditional order.

Originally created mostly for the purpose of keeping people safe from encroachment by kings, in time those institutions assumed the role of the formulator, educator and custodian of the social and moral order.

It was such institutions that gave physical shape to the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

Fully paid-up libertarians have to reject these, as they tend to reject the resulting institutions. That is why, while a part of their creed overlaps with conservatism, temperamentally it has more in common with socialism and especially anarchism.

The ideal libertarians see in their mind’s eye is abolition of the state, and there they converge not only with Bakunin but also with Marx.

While the historical roots of libertarianism can be traced back to so-called free thinkers, mainly in Britain and France, its modern home is the United States.

This reflects the difficulties with defining political conservatism there.

British conservatism, on the other hand, practically defines itself.

The triad of ‘God, king and country’ may be as simplistic as all slogans tend to be, but it’s more precise than most, encapsulating neatly the essence of British conservatism, both its transcendent inspiration and political expression.

A monarch ruling by divine right or some similar claim to legitimacy represents the transcendent aspect of such a system, a factor of constancy linking generations past, present and future.

At the same time, an elected parliament is a temporal institution translating the people’s interests into political action and preventing the monarch from becoming a despot.

To achieve a workable balance, Parliament’s power must be real but limited, the monarch’s power limited but real, and they should both feel accountable to the institution that is itself accountable to God only.

Hence the triad of ‘God, King and country’, in which the first element reflects transcendent continuity, the third temporal interests represented in Parliament and the second the link between the two.

Regarded in this light, the slogan stops being just that, becoming instead the philosophical premise of British conservatism.

It’s important to remember that the triad lists its elements in a descending order of importance. Thus eliminating the first element, God, as has effectively been done in Britain, largely invalidates the second one, king, and runs the risk of destroying the third, country.

Conservatism then becomes problematic, as demonstrated by today’s Conservative party, which is neoconservative at best and downright socialist at worst. But at least British conservatives have a past model they can hope to revive.

Americans, on the other hand, excised the second part of the triad, King, and effectively fused the other two, God and country, together.

Falling victim to this surgical procedure was the philosophy of political conservatism, indeed its clear definition.

The American secular creed of exceptionalism stepped in to fill the vacuum thus formed, but this creed can draw believers from all sorts of political groups.

How would an American conservative answer the question ‘what would you like to conserve?’ In all likelihood he’d say the Constitution of the United States.

But the American republic, just as the French one, is revolutionary, dedicated to marginalising, rather than conserving, the political heritage of Christendom.

That’s why Americans who decry statism gravitate towards various surrogates of conservatism, such as neoconservatism or libertarianism.

But surrogates they are, and I dare say that neither of them is philosophically, historically or emotionally close to true conservatism. It would be more accurate to say that they are antithetical to it.

 

I, along no doubt with Peter Hitchens, have heaved a sigh of relief. For a while there I was genuinely concerned about Vlad’s continued good health, what with his having taken 10 days out of his public life.

That disappearance act gave rise to all sorts of rumours, ranging from a fatal disease to a palace coup to a sort of paternity leave, with Vlad attending the birth of his illegitimate child.

Mercifully, Vlad is back, looking slightly wan but in high spirits, cracking jokes about the prophets of doom. His comeback coincides with what he doubtless sees as excellent news. 

France, Italy and especially Greece are making it clear that an extension of sanctions beyond this July is highly unlikely.

Greece is the most vociferous appeaser, and has been since the last election brought into power a party that is communist in all but name.

One wonders how our right-wing champions of Putin, such as Messrs Hitchens, Booker et al, reconcile their affection for the KGB colonel with his unreserved support for Greece’s ruling Syriz party, which sits slightly to the left of the USSR Communist Party at the time Putin joined it.

Aren’t we supposed to believe that Putin is the last bastion of conservatism in the world? The last bulwark of Christian values? One can easily feel confused.

There is no confusion about his plans though. The Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has just made public the intelligence data showing that Putin is preparing a large-scale offensive along the entire frontline.

Large battle formations of both Russian troops and their proxies are being moved into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. This is accompanied by an increased concentration of artillery, tanks, personnel carriers and rocket systems, which keep firing at the Ukrainian troops.

At the same time ranking field officers of the Russian army are coming in en masse, accompanied by senior officers of the General Staff, GRU and Putin’s own KGB/FSB.

Trainloads of ordnance are arriving in their wake, along with fuel carriers. The Russian army is actively deploying the rear support in all strategic directions.

In parallel Russia has mobilised her Northern Fleet to full combat readiness and is conducting massive exercises across the country, all the way to the Barents Sea.

These involve 45,000 troops, 56 warships and submarines and 110 aircraft. Russia is also moving tens of thousands of military vehicles, including tanks, into the areas along her border with the Baltic states.

According to Lord West, a former First Sea Lord, Russian espionage in the North Sea represents a ‘worrying level’ of ‘provocation’.

Converted fishing boats equipped with the latest surveillance technology are keeping track of British nuclear subs, with the clear aim of nullifying our Trident deterrent.

Meanwhile Vlad has done a star turn in a new documentary film The Crimea. Return to the Motherland.

One implicit message of the film is that we do need our nuclear deterrent. Vlad admitted nonchalantly that when he and his four colleagues (whose names are available on the Russian government’s official website) were planning the eponymous return, he ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to be put on high alert. Just in case.

In case of what, one wonders. In case Nato countries had responded with anything more resolute than a token slap on the wrist? Was Putin ready to push the button for a nuclear holocaust?

Apparently, because otherwise there would have been no need for putting his ICBMs on a hair trigger. Nice to know what kind of adversary we’re dealing with.

But wait a minute. What’s that planning business? Until the release of this cinematic masterpiece, Vlad’s official line was that the Crimea was annexed by a spontaneous uprising of local Russian patriots, armed by the orts and ends from the army surplus stores.

Now he is stating on full-colour celluloid that “We [that is, he and his four mates] had to begin work aimed at returning the Crimea to Russia.” In other words, it wasn’t an outburst of local Russian patriotism but the ‘work’ of the Russian ruling junta that led to the annexation.

Details? Vlad is on hand to provide those with alacrity. Russia moved Spetsnaz units to the Crimea in order to disarm the Ukrainian troops there. Or, in Vlad’s own words:

“We needed specialists who know how to do such things. That’s why I gave an order to the Defence Ministry to move to the Crimea, to be honest under the cover of beefing up the protection of our Crimean bases, special-task units of the Chief Intelligence Directorate, marines and airborne troops.”

Hold on a moment, Vlad. Haven’t you been screaming at all and sundry that no Russian troops were involved in the operation? Why this sudden bout of prideful honesty?

The only possible resounding answer to this is, why not?

You see, to you or me Vlad’s announcement may sound like an admission of a crime, specifically the crime of stealing another country’s territory.

To Vlad, however, it’s taking credit for a major achievement. He isn’t ashamed of what he has done. He is proud.

Logic suggests that he’d be even more proud if Russia grabbed the rest of the Ukraine and then moved on to the Baltic republics, which just happen to be Nato members.

Add to this Vlad’s gleeful playing with his nuclear toys, and one begins to see the point of those who claim that the world hasn’t been in such danger since the Cuban crisis.

How do we deal with this mortal danger? Why, by getting ready to remove sanctions on Russia and effectively eliminating our own defence capability.

Once again we are reminded of some hard facts of history. Specifically that all great geopolitical catastrophes happened when an evil tyrant presented a grave threat, while the West was led by craven and at best mediocre leaders.

Such as… well, there is no need for ad hominems here. You know who they are.

 

 

 

“Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one,” wrote Benjamin Franklin.

In common with most pronouncements by Enlightenment thinkers, this is a pithy, epigrammatic phrase. There’s only one problem. It’s not true.

Moreover, it’s rather the opposite of truth, and was so even at the time it was uttered. These days, when an unobtrusively toted suitcase can wipe out a major city, it takes a poor observer indeed not to see that sometimes it’s necessary to sacrifice a little freedom for a lot of security.

Overall freedom, or rather liberty, which in this context is a more accurate term, may be broken down into its various fragments, and every one of them will at some point clash with security.

Take, for example, the freedom of religious worship, which in America is enshrined in the Bill of Rights and is taken for granted throughout the Western world.

Back in the 1960s there were 60 mosques in Britain. Now there are 1,600, which fact is often mentioned by some as a confirmation of religious freedom.

Yet most of the same people admit that many of these houses of worship are hotbeds of anti-Western, and specifically anti-British, propaganda and brainwashing.

Young people imbibe the words of hate-spewing imams and go to Iraq to fight for Isis, sometimes having first gone to a London university.

Some of them gleefully blow themselves up together with dozens of passengers on public transport, with both the terrorists and their victims being British subjects.

Yet in spite of this obvious security threat, not a single mainstream politician has to my knowledge proposed to close down, say, a thousand mosques. Such a step, we are told, would be incompatible with religious freedom.

However, it could be plausibly argued that not taking this step is incompatible with security.

Religious or any other liberty isn’t a suicide pact. What if one such brainwashed youngster detonates a nuclear suitcase bomb in, say, Kensington, killing 100,000 people in the process?

Suffice it to say for now that a conflict between liberty and security can’t easily be swept under the carpet.

Security is also often incompatible with freedom from discrimination. For no police force in the world can function effectively if it has to keep an eye on every citizen indiscriminately, eschewing any bias based on experience.

For police officers and security personnel to do their job well they have to have the licence to discriminate against groups that are statistically more likely to pose a threat to security.

It’s no use trying to pretend at airports that an 80-year-old granny, who sounds like a nice cup of tea would sound if it could talk, is as much of a security risk as a muscular Muslim chap, even one who has attended the University of Westminster.

By the same token, our police for all intents and purposes have been stripped of stop-and-search powers, since these are bound to be discriminatory against groups most likely to commit crimes.

Yet our police have been told, perhaps not in so many words, that if they stop and search a young Rasta in Brixton, they must also stop and search, say, an aging tweedy gentleman in Chelsea. And if they can’t do that – and no police force can possibly have the personnel to be indiscriminate – then they can’t stop anyone.

Historically even Anglophone countries used to realise that some liberty must sometimes be sacrificed for some security.

Hence over 1,000 refugees from Germany and Austria were interred on the Isle of Man for the duration of the Second World War. Among them were many Jews who on balance would have been unlikely Nazi spies.

Americans went even further by interning in 1942 110,000 people of Japanese origin, 62 per cent of whom were US citizens.

It has to be said that both Britain and the USA were in those days a lot freer than they are now. And yet they didn’t shy away from the occasional conflict between liberty and security.

It’s in this context that privacy must be viewed.

The right to privacy is an essential concept of the Anglophone world. In fact, neither Russian nor French, my other two languages, even has a word for it.

Yet Britain boasts a CCTV camera for every 12 of Her Majesty’s subjects, making surveillance one of the few areas in which we lead the world. Communist China, for example, has fewer cameras even in absolute terms, never mind per capita.

Numerous scandals have been brought to light, involving various government agencies intercepting people’s e-mails, listening in to their phone conversations or reading their letters before they themselves do.

If this isn’t a violation of privacy, I don’t know what is. Yet I’m sure that even the loudest critics of such practices wouldn’t object too vociferously if reading a man’s e-mail illegally would stop him from taking the aforementioned suitcase to the centre of London.

However, there is a problem with this line of thought. It’s the nature of modern government.

All modern governments are power-hungry, and all are hell-bent on expanding their power ad infinitum.

And they routinely hold up security concerns as justification for acting on their powerlust.

It goes without saying that certain civil liberties have to be curtailed or even suppressed at wartime. Yet observing modern politicians in action, one notices that some of the wartime measures don’t disappear once the war ends.

First the state beats ploughshares into swords and then, once they have vanquished, the weapons can be recast into the strongest chains binding the individual hand and foot.

One can see how dramatically state power has increased in Britain after both world wars, and it is still growing. Neither does America circa 2015 boast all the same liberties taken for granted before the First World War.

A suspicion has to be strong that, given greater powers of curtailing our liberties and invading our privacy, the state is likely to use such leeway not for increasing our security but for its own self-aggrandisement.

Hence we have a problem. How do we protect our nation without enslaving it? How do we keep our privacy private without making life easy for those who want to kill us?

Where, in other words, do we draw the line? Where do we find a workable balance between security and liberty, with all its sub-divisions?

It’s reasonably clear that a dogmatic, all-or-nothing approach, whichever side of the argument is allowed to take it, will tip the balance unduly one way or the other.

This is one instance of principles having to be weighed against practicalities, making sure that neither end deviates too far from the fulcrum.

For there are no hard and fast rules, nor can there be. Prevailing in each case must be common sense and sound judgement.

Do we need one surveillance camera for every 12 Brits? Do we need to gather so much video information that we’ll only ever be able to process a small portion of it?

Perhaps we do. It’s more likely, however, that our security would be much better served if surveillance, be it video, audio or any other, were concentrated in places where security threats are more likely to come from – such as every one of the 1,600 mosques.

Now can we rely on our government to have enough common sense to come up with sound judgement? I’m afraid we can’t. This faculty was expunged from Westminster a long time ago, and there’s no immediate prospect of it ever coming back.

That’s why we must all exercise vigilance, making sure the government doesn’t overstep the limit beyond which a legitimate concern for our security ends and tyranny starts.

But an unbending, doctrinaire libertarian position is I believe a recipe for disaster.

Two months before the general election an open season on Nigel Farage is in full swing, with Tories especially firing at will from the lip.

To be fair, Farage presents an inviting target, what with his tendency to say things that may be correct, but not politically correct.

Such as, for example, his statement that he’d throw out the Race Relations Act, which essentially dictates hiring policies to employers.

Never mind making sensible arguments or building a serious case. You say something like that and you are a racist, a fascist and the sort of vermin who has no place in otherwise pristine British politics.

Hugo Rifkind, Malcolm’s boy, compares Farage unfavourably to Jeremy Clarkson. Michael ‘the Maggie slayer’ Heseltine says he is as bad as Enoch Powell and no better than Oswald Mosley.

Both men set their store early. Rifkind, whose journalistic career is among the most baffling mysteries in God’s creation, states with misplaced pride: “I approve of political correctness.”

Farage, he says, “stands proudly against the whole concept of a multicultural, inclusive society.” Why, he’s even worse than Jeremy Clarkson.

And didn’t his English teacher at school describe him as ‘a fascist’ 40 years ago? Well, there you are then. Farage was 10 years old 40 years ago, but he already bore the mark of Cain, as damning as it is perpetually indelible.

Not only that, adds Heseltine, but he’s as bad as Enoch Powell, who “was a more intelligent politician than Farage, but had the same irresponsible instinct…”

Alas, sighs the Maggie slayer, “there are extremists, as there always have been: look at Oswald Mosley in the 1930s.”

I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mr Farage, and hence don’t know whether he is a racist in the mode of the chap who led the British Union of Fascists. I rather doubt it, but stranger things have happened.

I have, however, met myself, and I know for a fact that I’m no racist. Yet I’d scrap the Race Relations Act in a second if I could.

Thus I’m convinced that objections to the Act don’t in themselves testify to racial prejudice any more than opposition to progressive income tax bespeaks class prejudice or objections to the welfare state betoken hatred of poor people.

Personally, I wouldn’t shake the hand of a businessman who refuses to employ a qualified candidate just because of his race.

A man like that is a troglodyte who doesn’t belong in the company of decent people. But a man who thinks that the state is within its rights to force such an objectionable individual to hire someone doesn’t belong in the company of intelligent people.

Heseltine is proud that racial minorities today “are confident, aware of their rights, equal before the law and sensitive to the first sign of someone wishing to abuse that.”

What this means in practice is that any minority chap can sue if he is fired or not hired for any reason, often one that has nothing to do with race.

Hence many employers free of racial prejudice hesitate to hire, say, a black because they know he’d be devilishly difficult to sack should he prove to be inadequate for the job.

Similarly, a black, Asian or Muslim candidate can sue if he doesn’t get the job, for which his credentials qualify him — and, thanks to spivs like Heseltine he may well win the case.

But credentials don’t do the work; the person does. The employer may decide that the candidate doesn’t belong — for whatever reason. His freedom to make such decisions is, I believe, essential to a society that calls itself free.

When I myself was in a position to hire and fire, I would have employed a Shetland pony if it could do a better job for the same money or the same job for less money. But I would have been damned if I had let the government order me to employ — or keep — anyone who didn’t meet those requirements.

One case springs to mind. I once hired a young devout Muslim (let’s call him Tarik) as a part-time designer. He was competent, inexpensive and hard-working.

Every lunchtime he’d spread a prayer rug in the conference room, kneel, turn towards Mecca and pray. I observed those performances with a bit of ethnographic curiosity.

On balance, I preferred Tarik’s show of piety to the chosen lunchtime activities of some of my impeccably British employees who consumed, on average, four pints of strong lager each and were often well-nigh useless in the afternoon.

One day a client came to the office to thank everyone who worked on her account. I took her around, introducing her to art directors, designers and copywriters. The client, a nice woman who paid her bills promptly, would shake hands and say the usual things.

However, when she reached Tarik, her proffered hand was left hanging. “I won’t shake hands with a woman,” he declared with obvious hostility.

The client was stunned, but controlled herself. I didn’t. When she left, I told Tarik to get out and never again to show his face in the office (those of you who have ever worked in the service industry will understand my ire).

So he did, terrifying my partners who could see a summons to the industrial tribunal before their eyes. Mercifully none came: Tarik must have been unaware of what Heseltine calls his ‘rights’, or else felt that his part-time status didn’t put him in a strong position.

My problem with him wasn’t his race or religion. It was his incompatibility with the business culture of a British company. That, I felt, gave me the moral right to act as I did.

Telling company owners whom they must hire or may not fire is the same as telling individuals whom they must invite to dinner and may not disinvite. When the state assumes this power, it’s guaranteed to abuse it.

The potential damage of such abuse to society is infinitely greater than any caused by the few morons who won’t hire, say, a black simply because of his race.

Enoch Powell may have been more intelligent than Nigel Farage, and he definitely was more intelligent than Messrs Rifkind and Heseltine put together, times ten.

He realised, correctly, that the social, cultural and political fabric of British society would be torn to tatters by the advent of ideologically driven multi-culti nonsense. One suspects Nigel Farage knows it too.

That’s why he should be criticised not for making his statement but for the haste with which he withdrew it when all hell broke loose.

 

 

 

The Reverend Giles Goddard, vicar at St John’s in Waterloo, came into some unfair criticism for holding an ‘inclusive mosque’ service at his church, at the end of which he invited the congregation to praise “the god that we love, Allah”.

All those reactionary sticklers for the letter of canon law are up in arms, which only goes to show how far the spirit of reconciliation is away from their hearts. Some even felt that such a hybrid service pushed ecumenism too far.

However, you and I know the damage that religious particularism can cause. After all, as my friend and co-believer Richard Dawkins has explained so poignantly, religion is responsible for all evil in the world.

Richard correctly refused to single out any particular creed, sensing unerringly that they are all the same at base. Thereby he made a valuable contribution to the ecumenical movement, to whose ideas I subscribe wholeheartedly.

As a committed ecumenist at heart, I applaud the Rev. Goddard’s noble effort as thunderously as I rebuke his critics. They clearly haven’t read my friend Richard, or else haven’t heeded his wise words.

Besides, these nay-sayers clearly didn’t attend the service in question and hence base their criticism on biased newspaper reports.

Well, I was fortunate enough to be present at that historic event – and prescient enough to record the Rev. Goddard’s homily for posterity. Here’s the transcript, and I hope you keep your mind open, but not so wide that your brain falls out:

“In the name of the fatwa, the gun and the holey corpses, hey man.

“Brothers and sisters! Well, for propriety’s sake let’s keep it just to the brothers this once, shall we?

“It’s customary to recite the Lord’s prayer after the sermon, but what have such customs given us over history? Nothing but trouble.

“Hence this new, ecumenical prayer shall be recited at the beginning of my sermon. So repeat after me:

“Our Fatwa which art in Hajj, hollowed-out be thy rounds, thy kingdom come in England as it is in Iraq. Give us this day our daily brawl, and forgive us our trespasses as we don’t forgive them which trespass against us. And lead us not into contemplation but deliver us to evil. For Allah’s is the kingdom, the power and the gory. For ever and ever, hey man.

“Today, brothers in Allah, I want to concentrate on the words of Jesus Christ, a prophet of Allah second only to Mohammed.

“Specifically, I want to draw your attention to the one verse that puts the meaning of Christianity in a nutshell: Matthew 10:34.

“Ibn Matthew describes the speech Prophet Jesus delivered in the Muslim city of Jerusalem, temporarily occupied then, as it is now, by, well, you know whom.

“Jesus said: ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’

Having made that open-ended promise, Jesus was about to explain what he meant. However, he was crucified before he could do so.

But, as we know, he didn’t die. He came back five centuries later as Mohammed and provided all the necessary clarification:

“‘Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…’ (2:91) ‘We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.’ (3:151) ‘Take them [unbelievers] and kill them wherever ye find them. Against such We have given you clear warrant.’ (4:91) ‘The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.’ (4:101) ‘…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…’ (4:89)

“Yes, brothers in Allah, there are 107 verses like these in the Koran, the book Mohammed, formerly Jesus, actually dictated personally – unlike some other so-called holy books I could mention.

“Now I ask you: which religion is brandishing the sword on the Internet even as we speak, killing infidels wherever it finds them? Which religion casts terror in the hearts of those who disbelieve? Which religion practises what Mohammed/Jesus preached?

“Islam, I hear you say, and you are right. Therefore verily I say unto you, Muslims are the real Christians, and now Christians must become the real Muslims to be as worthy of Mohammed/Jesus and other prophets.

“It’s time we cast aside our differences and joined forces in our common fight against disbelievers, idolaters, capitalists and those who occupy the holy Muslim city of Jerusalem.

“It’s time we morphed the cross into the crescent, thereby bending all its four ends clockwise.

“It’s time we Christians recognised Mohammed as our prophet too, as Jesus incarnate, Allah’s messenger on earth.

“Blessed are the peace breakers for theirs is… well, anything they fancy.

“In the name of the fatwa, the gun and the holey corpses, hey man.

“Here endeth the holey mess.”

By the time the Rev Goddard finished his homily, many bearded men in the congregation were weeping openly, and so was I, even though I was clean-shaven.

Allah has found another prophet in the Rev Goddard who has finally found a common burial ground between Christianity and Islam.

If we can’t beat them, we must join them – and together we’ll be able to beat anybody. Hey man!

 

 

 

 

The Islamic State has just blown up a 10^th century Chaldean Catholic church in Iraq and bulldozed a nearby graveyard.

Of course, multi-culti rectitude demands that we, well, if not exactly applaud such cultural self-expression, then at least acknowledge its validity.

Yes, we disagree with such vandalism and would never condone it in our own backyard. But we realise that other cultures are different, and who’s to say we are right and they are wrong?

That way we comply with diktats of progressive modernity, thinking we’ve displayed proper respect for other cultures, without, one hopes, laying ourselves open to their more extreme manifestations.

Moreover, we think ours is the first generation, or perhaps the second, that learned the value of diversity and an open mind.

In fact, ours is the first generation, or perhaps the second, that doesn’t even begin to understand the meaning of true cultural tolerance. This can only arise from a deep-seated feeling for our own heritage, and a profound understanding of it.

For Christendom was an asset-stripping civilisation like no other. Those for whom Western culture was practically a part of their biological make-up knew that Christianity had produced a civilisation towering head and shoulders above all others.

But they also knew that our own culture could become even better by borrowing the best of what different civilisations had to offer. And even if we didn’t borrow other people’s creations, by showing genuine respect for them we would assert the formative animus of our own civilisation: love.

I’m not talking about pre-historic times here. Here’s what Lord Curzon, at that time the Viceroy of India, had to say on the subject in 1900, when my grandfather was already a grown man:

“If there be any one who says to me that there is no duty devolving upon a Christian government to preserve the monuments of a pagan art or the sanctuaries of an alien faith, I cannot pause to argue with such a man.

“Art and beauty, and the reverence that is owing to all that has evoked human genius or has inspired human faith, are independent of creeds, and, in so far as they touch the sphere of religion, are embraced by the common religion of mankind.

“Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Mohammedan Musjid as the Christian Cathedral. There is no principle of artistic discrimination between the mausoleum of the despot and the sepulchre of the saint.

“What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask of the face of the past and helps us to read its riddles and to look it in the eyes – these, and not the dogmas of a combative theology, are the principle criteria to which we must look.”

I have to admit that my own philosophy, and tastes derived thereof, is rather less ecumenical than that. A Buddhist temple or a mosque, no matter how beautiful, will neither affect me aesthetically nor engage me emotionally nearly as much as, say, Chartres Cathedral does.

Nor do I believe that “art and beauty… are independent of creeds”. On the contrary, I am convinced that, the greater and truer a creed, the more beautiful the art it inspires.

However, while disagreeing with some of the statement, I doff my hat to the man who made it. For the nobility of spirit, sagacity and sheer goodness shine through every word – and these matter more to me than Lord Curzon’s cultural preferences.

He practised what he preached, and Lord Curzon is still venerated in India, which must disappoint those who don’t have a good word to say about the Raj.

Here, for example, are a few words of appreciation from Jawaharlal Nehru, the man second only to Ghandi in his contribution to India’s independence: “After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”

Now, which of our contemporary politicians, preaching multi-culti values in order to garner the multi-culti vote, would be capable of speaking with the same subtlety and erudition, with the same genuine respect for other cultures?

Dave? Ed? Nick? Anyone? The very thought sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? They could learn a lesson or two from Lord Curzon, if they had any use for such knowledge, which they don’t.

The Muslims especially could also partake of his wisdom and kindness, except that their own macabre obtuseness won’t let them because their religion doesn’t encourage ecumenical respect.

Historically, even those few Muslims who made an important contribution to world culture, men like Avicenna in the 11^th century or Averroës in the 12^th, were in their own religion despised as heretics. It’s Isis that’s the paragon of Islamic piety.

I think Lord Curzon underestimated the decisive role the founding religion plays in a civilisation. I also think he knew it – but felt he had to speak that way. He was a politician after all.

 

 

 

Only what’s left of Obama’s political life is under attack, I hasten to reassure his fans, though one can detect a distinct longing in some quarters to jeopardise his physical existence as well.

Given that the Republicans control both Houses of Congress, Obama is a lame duck. Still, as he still possesses presidential powers, there’s no shortage of volunteers to cook the bird in orange sauce.

It has become abundantly clear even to slow learners that this beneficiary of affirmative action run riot really doesn’t belong in the White House. He never has.

Besides a photogenic appearance and a knack for demagoguery honed in his previous career as ‘community organiser’, Obama brings nothing to the job – other than an opportunity for Americans to repent their sin of black slavery.

After two elections and six years of Obama in the White House, that aspiration has lost much of its urgency. Coming to the fore instead is naked primal fear.

People around the world have suddenly realised that, with Obama-led America no longer wishing to lead the world, a nuclear catastrophe is looming large.

For the White House is no place for nincompoop community organisers with their ideology of care, share, be aware. As America has appointed herself the Leader of the Free World, the freedom of this world and even its continued existence depend on how well America plays this role.

Having said that, I don’t believe that the world needs a global policeman or indeed leader, and nor do I think America is ideally suited for that role.

Every serious country should pull its own weight on defence, policing itself. Only then military and political alliances like Nato can be a marriage of equals rather than a sort of global vassalage with America playing the part of feudal lord.

However, we must deal with situations as they are, rather than as we’d like them to be. If America is to lose her function as global protector, she ought to be eased out of it gradually, with other countries developing a valid ability to keep the world safe.

No vacuum of power must be allowed to appear, for it’s only likely to be filled by evildoers who won’t think twice before acquiring and using nuclear weapons.

Ever since such weapons became available and their potential was demonstrated with such explosive power in Japan, mankind has done all it could to prevent their use.

The problem with a nuclear exchange between any two countries is that its consequences would be unpredictable. It’s conceivable that a shootout with tactical nukes could stay local, with the two countries involved just fighting it out and then going home to lick their wounds.

But such a conflict could also escalate to a point where the whole survival of our species could be endangered. In between those two extremes there are a whole range of scenarios, ranging from disastrous to cataclysmic, that are too awful to contemplate.

The sheer unpredictability of any nuclear exchange has led to all sorts of non-proliferation treaties that have so far managed to keep nuclear weapons out of real loonies’ reach – just.

US power has been central to this relative success, and it is this power that Obama is trying to neuter. His playing footsies with Putin over the Ukraine and Syria, craven vacillation over North Korea and irresponsible withdrawal from the Middle East have all been factors of danger to the world.

Yet none of them has been as fraught with explosive potential as his proposed nuclear treaty with Iran, whereby the US will lift all sanctions in return for the Ayatollahs’ nebulous promise not to make a nuclear bomb just yet, at least not openly.

This isn’t so much the accurate text of the agreement as its essence, but the essence is accurate enough.

Hence the price of Iran doing America’s bidding in fighting Isis (which has appeared as a direct result of America’s bungling) is a nuclear-armed Shiite loony bin whose declared purpose is to destroy Sunni lands and Israel.

No wonder the potential targets of what passes for Obama’s foreign policy are running scared. Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has delivered a rousing speech to US Congress, where he was invited without Obama’s prior knowledge.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are feverishly looking for ways of beefing up their security and possibly acquiring nuclear weapons themselves. And Israel, which already has such weapons, has made it clear she’ll use them when it becomes inevitable that Iran will go nuclear.

All such measures, present and future, are tantamount to a declaration of war on Obama’s presidency. And now Congress has launched its own offensive.

In circumvention of accepted practice, and quite possibly US law, 47 of the 54 Republican senators, including three presidential candidates, have published an open letter telling Iran that Obama’s deal isn’t worth the proverbial paper it’s written on.

Republican-controlled Congress, they explained, will never ratify the treaty, and the next president will revoke it “at the stroke of a pen”. So don’t get your hopes up high, was the overall message.

Obama’s Democratic admirers scream treason to the Constitution, and, though I’m no expert on American constitutional law, they may have a point.

What’s more, there are enough experts on American constitutional law among the signatories to know that the Democrats may have a point. But, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures.

This letter has the makings of an American constitutional crisis and an effective paralysis of the US as a global power. This means that a match is being taken to the wick sticking out of the powder keg.

The world is on the brink of a major war – largely thanks to ‘Oh, Bummer’, who lists the Nobel Peace Prize among his attainments. Can the prize be revoked in parallel with the Iran treaty, one wonders.