Category: Blog

Generally, unless some cataclysmic event is under way, I avoid writing two consecutive pieces on the same subject.

However, I’m warming up to Jean-Claude so rapidly that a single article can no longer contain all the burgeoning affection.

The more he’s criticised, the warmer this emotion becomes, with both the personalities of his detractors and the nature of their arguments acting as Bunsen burners.

In fact, all worthy men must praise Jean-Claude for what his critics see as his disqualifying habits.

Apparently Juncker likes a drink, which makes him almost Churchillian. One has to admit regretfully that my friend Jean-Claude has little else in common with our wartime leader, but even some resemblance is laudable.

Cognac at breakfast? This means the man wants to start his day in high gear, ready to take on the world. A shot of brandy in a cup of strong black coffee is the best upper known to man, this side of the law, that is.

To continue the flattering parallel with Churchill, Winston reportedly drank a bottle of booze and up to five bottles of champagne every day. Simple arithmetic would suggest that he must have started at breakfast too, for otherwise there wouldn’t have been enough hours in the day to get so much alcohol down his neck.

So let’s scratch that as a minus, chalk it up in the plus column and move on. My new friend also smokes, thus ignoring the diktats of health fascists. Surely this has to be a sign of good character?

It’s also an indication of a refined sense of style, for it would be aesthetically incongruous for someone who drinks spirits at breakfast not to accompany – or, better still, precede – his first shot with a cigarette.

Jean-Claude’s nemeses don’t specify his brand but, since I feel an intuitive empathy for him, I bet I know what it must be. Unfiltered blue Gauloise, black and strong, just like the two espressos Jean-Claude drinks at breakfast to dilute his hair of the dog.

He also swears in half a dozen languages, which only a prissy middle-class wimp would hold against him. Show me a man afraid of flouting bourgeois conventions, and I’ll show you one whose sphincter needs loosening, surgically if need be.

Switching from one language to another when swearing is a sign of impeccable manners. It’s rude to swear in a language one’s interlocutor doesn’t understand. False modesty aside, I regard myself as a man of irreproachable decorum, which is why I always abuse fellow motorists in their language, not my own.

This goes for semiotic swearing too. Thus it would be rude to flick two fingers (about which later) or make an onanistic gesture in front of one’s forehead at a Frenchman, who’s unlikely to understand the message. The polite alternative is to shoot one’s forearm up while simultaneously slapping one’s biceps.

I don’t claim to be as much of a polyglot as Jean-Claude, but we both try our best to strike a blow for propriety by gearing our self-expression to our interlocutor’s understanding.

Here he’s reported to be laying into a government colleague: “I f*** where, who, and when I want – do you get me? You could f*** too, but you can’t even do that – your German correctness… won’t allow you to.”

One can take many positives out of this tirade, and only two negatives: it should be ‘whom’, not ‘who’, and the word f*** in the second sentence requires a direct object. Yet these minor solecisms are outweighed by the mighty spirit (or spirits, if you’d rather) shining through. 

Certain animosity to the Germans, shared by all worthy men including most Germans, is also discernible, giving the lie to the slanderous accusations of Jean-Claude being Frau Merkel’s minion.

As to the f-word, it doesn’t really matter whether it was used literally, in an amorous sense, or metaphorically, in the sense of treating someone harshly. The whole phrase shows an independence of spirit(s) that would be incompatible with Juncker’s putative servitude to Frau Merkel.

Thus the ad hominems levelled at Jean-Claude lack any substance whatsoever, and the same goes for the feeble attempts to besmirch his politics.

As I suggested yesterday, Jean-Claude’s devotion to European federalism is simply a job requirement. A believer in national sovereignty can no more become an EU functionary than a pacifist serve in the SAS.

Yesterday the Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith ignored this obvious fact, choosing instead to whip the decomposing carcass of the dead horse.

“If they give Jean-Claude Juncker a job,” he said, “this is like literally flicking two fingers at the rest of Europe… I have always been of the view that there needs to be major change within the European Union if Britain is to honestly think this is a viable enterprise for us… At the end of the day every elected MP has a free vote, they have to take the decision of their conscience.”

On the evidence of Mr Duncan Smith’s statement, the proposed English test as an ironclad requirement for residency ought to be extended to our cabinet ministers as well.

The fingers on one hand, including the two flickable ones, won’t suffice to count the solecisms he managed to jam into just three sentences:

Juncker isn’t after ‘a job’. What Mr Duncan Smith doesn’t want him to get is ‘the job’.

The proverbial flicking is in this case metaphorical, not literal.

Anyhow ‘they’, meaning continental federalists, wouldn’t ‘flick two fingers at us’, for the reason I outlined earlier: this manifestation of opprobrium is strictly British.

‘To honestly think’ is illiterate: government ministers may get away with splitting hairs, not infinitives.

‘At the end of the day’ is a meaningless, parasitic cliché to be avoided in cultured speech.

Since the antecedent ‘every elected MP’ is singular, it should be followed by a singular personal pronoun, which ‘he’ is and ‘they’ isn’t.

If the word ‘his’ burns the lips conditioned to utter politically correct usages only, it’s possible to get around this offensive pronoun without coming across as an ignoramus. Had Mr Duncan Smith said ‘all elected MPs’, he would have been on safe grammatical grounds.

Jean-Claude probably uses English better than our own leaders, which wouldn’t be difficult, and this is yet another argument in his favour.

But the argument to end all arguments is the one Mr Duncan Smith only hinted at: Juncker’s appointment to the presidency of the European Commission would strengthen the Out vote in a future referendum.

If so, all one can say is ‘Go, Jean-Claude!’. We need you.  

 

 

 

 

 

By combining a French Christian name with a German surname, Jean-Claude Juncker carries the very essence of the EU within him.

A Europe dominated by Germany, with France bringing up the rear and all other countries doing as they’re told, is the ideal towards which the EU strives.

The ideal was achieved in 1940-1941, but it wasn’t sustained long enough to turn a toehold into a firm purchase. Therefore it had to come back in a different incarnation bearing a less aggressive name. The European Union sounds so much more benign than the Third, or for that matter Fourth, Reich, wouldn’t you say?

One has to acknowledge ruefully that this ideal, attractive though it doubtless is to some, goes against the grain of both Britain’s political tradition and the intuitive knowledge of her people. But then the EU wasn’t created for our benefit – its purpose from the very beginning was to convert Germany’s national socialism into the international variant.

Not only every Commission president, from Hallstein to Barroso via Delors and Prodi, but every EU functionary and indeed enthusiast is aware of its nature and supports it wholeheartedly.

The differences among them are slight and strictly personal, mainly springing from the branch of Marxism they used to espouse but pretend not to any longer, or else from the specific tactics they favour.

Just as one assumes that any lifeguard can swim, so can one be certain that any candidate for Commission presidency, or any other post in the EU bureaucracy, is committed to the cause of a single European state dominated by you know whom.

This makes Dave’s last stand against the forces of federalist evil, as personified by Juncker, either stupid or cynical or, more likely, both. Yes, Dave, the muscular lifeguard at our municipal pool knows how to swim, and, yes, Juncker or any other candidate for the position is a federalist. What else is new?

Any British statesman, evidently an extinct breed, would work tirelessly towards taking Britain out of this foul abomination. Not being a statesman, and being British in the technical sense only, Dave intends to do nothing of the sort.

In what passes for his heart he’s as committed to the cause of European federalism as is Barroso, Rumpy-Pumpy or, for that matter, Juncker. Unlike them, however, he has to be clever about it if he doesn’t want most of the Tory party to vote Ukip in the next election.

Such a shift would hurt the cause that Dave holds even dearer than European federalism: himself, Dave. Hence he has to pretend he’s fighting the EU tooth and nail, trying to wrench a better deal for Britain out of it.

Like all modern politicians, Dave counts on the public being ignorant, which in this case means not realising that no better deal exists, nor can exist.

Britain’s destroying her constitution is a treasonous act for which there can be no redemption – a pre-gnawed bone tossed our way from the EU table isn’t going to feed those hungry for restoring the country’s ancient sovereignty.

Dave either doesn’t understand this or pretends not to. Hence, rather than declaring that he and his party will call an immediate In/Out referendum and campaign for the Out vote, he froths at the mouth and rolls on the floor trying to block Juncker’s candidature.

In the process he comes up with all kinds of specious arguments, such as that Juncker is a federalist. And who isn’t, this side of Nigel Farage?

Now he has come up with a real clincher: Juncker is a sot; he drinks cognac for breakfast. Yes, Dave, but in spite of that he’s still a nonentity, and a pernicious one at that. Now name a EU functionary who isn’t a federalist and win a valuable prize.

Dave’s campaign against Juncker is like Patton’s phantom army 70 years ago, pretending to be ready to invade Pas-de-Calais, while the real invasion force was sailing for Normandy.

Dave’s principal objective is to keep Britain in the EU, and himself and his cronies in cushy jobs when they become unelectable in their own country. Everything else is a smokescreen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Vodka’ and ‘samovar’ apart, the Russians have contributed mostly unpleasant words to the English language.

‘Pogrom’, ‘nomenklatura’, ‘apparatchik’, ‘collectivisation’, ‘golodomor’, ‘gulag’ all fill the darker niches of lexicon, each denoting something for which there’s no indigenous equivalent.

Of these, ‘disinformation’ can take pride of place, and there too no indigenous equivalent exists. ‘Strategic deception’ is the best we can do, and it’s still two words, not one.

Like ‘nomenklatura’ and ‘apparatchik’, ‘disinformation’ adapts a Latin root to Russian needs, the prime of which is to subvert the West, the better to defeat it.

Since ancient times, the Russians have believed that they’re perpetually locked in mortal combat with the West. The battle has mostly been unilateral: the West has engaged it only occasionally, and then usually not so much to conquer Russia as not to be conquered by her.

This hostility reached maniacal heights after the 1917 advent of social justice, that is the Soviets first turning their own country into an abattoir cum concentration camp and then trying to spread this combination universally.

The Soviets correctly perceived that the nightmare they perpetrated upon Russia was so much at odds with Western civilisation that it could never be reconciled with it. One or the other would have to go.

No development in Soviet or post-Soviet policy is intelligible without realising that, one way or another, the Russians never cease to fight their battle against the West.

Like in any other war, the use of military force may be intermittent, but propaganda aimed at demoralising the enemy is continuous. Hence ‘disinformation’, a voluminous concept developed and practised by what in Soviet times was called the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. After perestroika, the same job is done by a quasi-autonomous foreign-intelligence service, the SVR (Sluzhba vneshney razvedki).

KGB disinformation has always pursued multiple objectives. Historically, its first task is to convince the outside world that the Russian nightmare is really a sweet dream.

An abbreviated list of variously successful disinformation operations would include Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which had nothing to do with liberalisation; Stalin’s ‘vertigo from success’ (ditto); Soviet ‘struggle for peace’ (while preparing for world conquest); Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’; Brezhnev’s ‘détente’; Gorbachev’s ‘perestoika’; Yeltsyn’s ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’; Putin’s ‘democracy’ and what not.

I’d describe such disinformation ops as metaphysical, designed to bring about a favourable shift in Western attitudes, rendering the West disinclined to resist Russia’s knavish plans.

However, just as important has been what could be called physical disinformation aimed at gaining military or strategic superiority over the West. A great part of it is something not unique to Russia: a large-scale operation to portray the country’s armed forces as weak when they are indeed strong, and strong when they are indeed weak.

Soviet disinformation in the run-up to the Second World War is a good example of the former: the country’s army was at the time stronger, in most categories, than those of the rest of the world combined, and it was deployed in an offensive setup. Yet the West was being fed the lie that the Soviet army was purely defensive in strength and deployment.

The opposite example is the Soviet aggressive posturing in the ‘60s, when they were severely outgunned by the USA, and yet managed to punch above their weight by spreading disinformation about the ‘missile gap’.

Such tactics have been known at least since the sixth century BC, when Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War. But the KGB can pride itself for having developed a disinformation technique all its own: energy blackmail in the nuclear age.

One part of it is straightforward. Europe never had in the past, nor especially has now, any conventional capability to stop the tens of thousands of Soviet tanks in their tracks. This can only be done by nuclear weapons.

Hence it hasn’t been the EU, as its fanatics have the gall to claim, but the US nuclear umbrella that has prevented a major European war in the last 70 years. Hence also a concerted Soviet effort to reduce the West’s nuclear arsenal or at least to prevent its wide deployment in Europe.

This is the strategic objective. The tactics include cultivating an army of ‘useful idiots’, influential Westerners who could be tricked, blackmailed or bribed into preaching the Soviet cause.

Some useful idiots are in fact witting agents of influence, but most are used ‘in the dark’, to use the KGB jargon. By a variety of subtle means they’re made to feel they’re fighting for a better world, whereas in fact they’re working to spread the most diabolical evil known in history.

Another important stratagem has been the financing of various front organisations, such as our own dear CND, the hatchery of so many prominent Labour politicians. Whether CND leadership worked for the Soviet cause wittingly or unwittingly is immaterial: one way or the other they did work for it.

An important corollary to the anti-nuke movement has been a lavishly financed campaign not just against nuclear weapons but also against nuclear energy, which effort gathered pace in parallel with the spread of nuclear power stations.

Courtesy of KGB disinformation transmitted through the CND and similar fronts, Western papers were filled with cartoons depicting nuclear power stations disintegrating into mushroom clouds.

Honest physicists screamed themselves hoarse explaining that, unlike weapon-grade Uranium-235, Uranium-238 used to produce electricity is a non-fissile isotope incapable of sustaining a chain reaction. All in vain: the safest form of energy has been hysterically portrayed as cataclysmically dangerous.

The Russians stand to gain from this in two ways. Their most immediate benefit is increasing Europe’s dependence on Russian hydrocarbons and thus keeping their price high. Since oil and gas provide most of the country’s wealth and, more important, Putin’s wealth, the benefit is crucial and immediate.

The other benefit is less obvious and more long-term. By increasing the West’s dependence on Russian and Middle Eastern hydrocarbons, the Russians strengthen their strategic position in their millennium-old war against the West.

They can easily interrupt their own hydrocarbon exports, and almost as easily disrupt those from the Middle East. This gives them a powerful blackmail weapon in peacetime and a decisive military advantage in any future shooting war.

Regarded in this light, their efforts to extend the anti-nuke campaign into one against hydraulic fracturing of shale hydrocarbons become both predictable and understandable.

Fracking can defang a great part of Russia’s offensive strategy by giving the West vast resources of domestic hydrocarbons. The example of the USA, where shale gas has already solved most energy problems, shows that fracking can hurt Russia economically, by reducing her exports and making them cheaper.

More important, making Russian hydrocarbon exports largely irrelevant can make Russia strategically impotent, no longer able to confront the West globally. This sort of thing was bound to focus the Russians’ minds and intensify their disinformation.

According to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, General Secretary of Nato, the Russians are secretly using various environmental groups to act as conduits for this campaign.

The techniques have passed the test of time: fracking is being demonised the same way nuclear energy has been. It’s supposed to present deadly dangers to the environment, while its economic effect would be negligible. Armageddon is upon us, and fracking is it.

Greenpeace and other such groups reacted to the comment by venting their inexhaustible reservoirs of venom. A Greenpeace spokesman, for example, called it ‘preposterous’, adding as a clinching argument that “Greenpeace had thirty of its people locked up in Russian prisons last year, threatened with fifteen years in jail.”

That’s supposed to prove that Greenpeace wouldn’t have anything to do with the Russians. The level of the argument is staggering, as is the ignorance behind it.

Back in the ‘30s Stalin didn’t just threaten Western communists with prison but culled them in their hundreds. He had practically the whole leadership of the Comintern shot or, more usually, tortured to death.

That, however, didn’t prevent other Western communists from toeing the Soviet line slavishly. The Greenpeace statement is therefore yet another larcenous non sequitur in which lefties specialise.

Yet again I don’t care whether the shrill opponents of fracking are fools or knaves – in other words, whether they act in Russia’s interests wittingly or otherwise. I suspect most of them are being used ‘in the dark’ but, even so, it would be naïve to think they aren’t being used at all.

 

This title, as you doubtless realise, is supposed to be consonant with the title of Bennett’s most famous play.

To achieve this phonetic effect, I had to compromise accuracy to some extent. For Bennett’s virulent attack on public schools isn’t so much mad as stupid. Even worse, it’s symptomatic of leftie thought, if you’ll forgive the oxymoron.

Speaking at Cambridge University, Bennett delivered himself of a diatribe jammed to the gunwales with at least two centuries’ worth of destructive idiocy: “[Private education] is not fair… Governments, even this one, exist to make the nation’s circumstances more fair, but no government, whatever its complexion, has dared to tackle private education.”

This is typical of our times: someone who’s competent in one field feels competent in all others, a claim that our celebrity-worshipping public gobbles up with relish.

Bennett is a decent playwright, a sort of poor man’s Terence Rattigan, not much more than that. Hyperbole reigning supreme in our lean times, he’s often anointed with more exalted adjectives than ‘decent’, yet it’s not my aim here to debate aesthetics.

Be that as it may, his ability to spin a good yarn doesn’t automatically qualify him as an expert in government, which his statement proves to resounding effect.

Governments don’t “exist to make the nation’s circumstances more fair”. They exist to keep the nation free, safe and just. This means protecting people’s life, property and freedom of legitimate action from wickedness, be it on the part of the state itself, domestic criminals or foreign enemies.

When a government is successful in this, its only legitimate, undertaking, all people will be able to seek their own level. Common sense suggests, and empirical evidence proves, that the number of levels is roughly equal to the number of people, and this applies to everything: wealth, culture, education – you name it.

The only way for a government to reduce the number of aspirational levels is to forfeit its legitimacy by excising from its remit the protection of freedom and justice. In other words, for a government to indulge in levelling so dear to Bennett’s heart, it has to turn itself into a tyranny.

This theoretical postulate has been amply proved wherever governments have pursued egalitarianism – with uniformly disastrous results. At one extreme, these ranged from ruining the nation’s economy by dispossessing the economically gifted groups to ruining the nation’s culture by eliminating the educated classes.

At the milder end, socialist governments achieve similar results more slowly and by less violent means, the degree of approximation to the ultimate carnage depending on the government’s zeal.

Specifically in the area on which Alan Bennett chose to enlarge, Britain has proved that any attempt to make everyone equally educated can only succeed in making everyone equally ignorant.

The wanton destruction of grammar schools (and Mr Bennett himself benefited from grammar-school education) predictably achieved the opposite effect from the one intended. It didn’t so much level the playing field as drown it in mud, thereby making it unplayable.

Hence the proliferation of minor public schools: responsible parents are willing to make tremendous sacrifices to prevent their children from turning into little Mowglis, unable to communicate in human speech.

To Bennett this constitutes “unfocused parental anxiety” about “class” and children having to mix with “rough” classmates. Karl Marx did reduce the entire complexity of life to class antagonism, but Bennett must realise that his spiritual father’s ideas have been compromised everywhere they’ve been tried.

The country in which I grew up was a prime example of this. Having gone to a school where half of the boys carried knives (I have a scar in my back to show for it), I can’t blame parents for wishing to protect their children from similar experiences.

Nor can I blame them for pinching every penny to keep their children out of schools that don’t even approach the literacy level taken for granted 150 years ago. It’s not about belonging to a certain class, Mr Bennett. It’s about hanging on to what’s left of our civilisation.

Bennett’s solution to the egregious unfairness of it all? Public schools must be rolled into the comprehensive system – the same one that has turned our education into the laughingstock of the world.

Of course socialist halfwits never give a serious thought to the practicalities. In this case, public schools are privately financed out of funds established for the purpose.

This means that an attempt to do what Bennett suggests would involve downright confiscation of private property – but then of course socialists never balk at this sort of thing. That’s what fairness is all about.

It’s abhorrent to Mr Bennett that some schools are better than others. What’s abhorrent to me is that he tries to justify this nonsense by dragging Christianity in.

Mr Bennett clearly worships the Gospel of Christ the Socialist, a heretical notion first mooted in the 1960s, the playwright’s formative years. The intervening half-century seems like an adequate time for some reflection, but Bennett must have been too busy knocking off his popular plays.

Nor does he seem to have made any effort to develop his logical faculty. Public schools, he says, are un-Christian because “Souls, after all, are equal in the sight of God and thus deserving of what these days is called a level playing field.”

The second part of the sentence is a flagrant non sequitur to the first. Souls are indeed equal in the sight of God, but only a mentally retarded chap would conclude from there that therefore, in this life, all schools must be identical.

Mr Bennett clearly understands Christianity as badly as he understands government. Spiritual, unearthly equality of all before the omnipotent God isn’t tantamount to the physical equality of all before omnipotent government.

Yet that’s what socialism of every hue preaches, or rather that’s the inevitable result of sermons similar to the one delivered by Alan Bennett. Christ himself disavowed social egalitarianism when he said, “For ye have the poor with you always…”

It’s woefully ignorant to be unaware that Christ’s mission was to show a spiritual path to eternal salvation, not to equalise social conditions in earth. Then again, socialist passions, when in full flow, trump all others.

Mr Bennett seems like a nice enough man, and he should realise that socialism isn’t nice. Sorry to be putting it in such simplistic terms, but I don’t think he can understand anything more complex. 

 

 

Speaking to an audience with learning difficulties, otherwise known as our parliamentarians, the Archbishop of Canterbury attacked Twitter.

Social media, he said, have killed off thoughtful reflection. A sophisticated question can’t be answered in 140 characters.

Yes, it can, Your Grace – and sometimes even before it’s asked. Always provided, of course, that it’s the right question.

Thus Pontius Pilate, a protagonist in the book with which His Grace is surely familiar, asked a wrong question when interrogating Jesus: “What is truth?”

Jesus didn’t deign to answer the wrong question because the night before he had already answered the right one. The right question wasn’t “What is truth?” It was “Who is truth?”, and to that question Jesus had indeed given an unequivocal reply:

“I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

That’s only 59 characters, Your Grace, but this number was sufficient to plum philosophical depths that encapsulate the very essence of Western civilisation.

Pilate was a man weaned intellectually on Greek and Roman philosophy. His exposure to it might only have been tangential – he was a military man, after all, not a scholar.

Still, that kind of stuff was in the air, and it was inhaled even by those who hadn’t studied the primary sources. Hence to Pilate truth was a what, an abstract idea ringing true more loudly and clearly than other, competing abstract ideas.

Jesus Christ corrected that metaphysical error by explaining that truth wasn’t a what but a who – he personified truth, thereby making it absolute and detaching it from the musings of individual thinkers. Thenceforth their task wasn’t to find truth but merely to comment on it.

It followed that reality also existed outside the perception of a single person, no matter how bright and learned he was. Just as truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and therefore objective, so was reality removed from subjective perception. Reality just was, it had been created, and nothing a mortal man thought would change it.

This concept of truth and of reality changed the world immeasurably more radically than all revolutions put together. Among other things it made real science possible, and no civilisation that wasn’t privy to this truth has ever even approached the scientific discoveries of Christendom, or Western civilisation, as one is now supposed to call it to avoid offending assorted groups.

I’m not proposing to indulge in cracker-barrel philosophising here. All I’m suggesting is that, if a mere 59 characters could change the world for ever, then surely 140 characters would be ample to contain what Justin Welby called ‘reflective comment’.

This is assuming, of course, that those who are active in the social media are capable of reflection. And there’s the rub: they aren’t, not en masse at any rate.

That’s why people, especially young people, seek the sound-byte comfort provided by Twitter. Their inability to think seriously came first, Twitter merely provided a tool for expressing mental deficiency.

Why are our young people intellectually retarded? This would have been the correct question to ask, and “because they tweet” would have been a wrong answer.

The correct answer would have been “because they are now detached from the civilisation whose very essence was explained in 59 characters”. But that’s not the kind of answer our parliamentarians, led on that occasion by Dave and Ed, would have understood.

More worryingly, this isn’t the kind of answer our prelates are any longer prepared to give. Blaming Twitter is easier, safer and less ‘controversial’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Football is popular because stupidity is popular,” wrote the wonderful Jorge Luis Borges.

If Borges was right, and he usually was, then I have to admit to being stupid. For I like watching football almost as much as in my younger days I enjoyed playing it.

Over the years tennis has replaced football as my active sport, but even now I’d no more miss an England match in the World Cup than my own book launch. Certain things just have to be held sacred.

To this day I bitterly regret having missed the 1966 final on TV, the only one England has ever won or indeed made, and you’d think 48 years is enough time to get over it.

Still a teenager at the time, I instead went on a date with the girl I eventually married. The marriage didn’t last, but the regrets have, serving a constant reminder of how important it is to get one’s priorities right.

Still, I like to think that my reservoir of stupidity is mostly expended on football, which is why I like to use the game as a source of further-reaching observations, mostly dealing with crowd mentality and a need for tribal belonging.

My love of the game is disinterested at the club level because I don’t support any particular team. My mild preference is usually for the currently best London club, as long as it isn’t Chelsea.

That team I detest for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a disgusting Russian gangster. Second, I live not far from their stadium. Every time Chelsea plays a home match, crowds of tattooed blue-clad dipsomaniacs descend on our neighbourhood, turning it into a Millwall with better architecture.

Once we couldn’t even get home because both King’s and Fulham Roads were blocked by grex venalium celebrating their triumph in the FA Cup. The celebrations took the shape of open-top buses slowly driving through the jubilant and uniformly pissed crowd.

Cans of lager were being tossed onto the bus tops, and the fans dancing there would drain them, then throw the cans back. The continuo was provided by the crowd singing such masterpieces as “We win home and away, we win every f****** way!” and “Chelsea here, Chelsea there, Chelsea everyf******where!” The f-word, as you may realise, is the sine qua non of this poetic genre.

I opened the window of my car and asked a neutrally observing policeman, one of the regiment in attendance, why they allowed two major thoroughfares to be taken out of circulation. The cop looked at me the way St Ignatius Loyola must have looked at a heretic.

“These men have a right to celebrate, Sir,” he said. “And I have a right to get home,” I replied. “How am I going to do that?”

The officer looked at me the way St Ignatius Loyola must have looked at someone insisting on his right to worship as he saw fit. He didn’t say anything, but his expression did: “That’s your problem.”

On another occasion my wife and I were driving down King’s Road, which is densely lined with drinking establishments. Each was full to the brim, with crowds of Chelsea fans either celebrating or commiserating, I can’t remember which.

Both types of post-match festivities are identical, involving as they do championship-calibre drinking and concomitant excretions through every orifice God gave man, except ears.

That day was fine, and the crowds had spilled over onto the pavement. As we drove along, one man politely turned his back to the pub and relieved himself onto the street, narrowly missing our car as it crawled along.

My wife, who’s rather prim in such matters, immediately rang the police. “A man has just exposed himself to me on the King’s Road!” she exclaimed. “So what do you want us to do about that?” asked the officer on duty. “I want you to arrest him!” “Lady,” said the cop, “we don’t have enough men to arrest everyone who does that on match day.”

I was disloyally laughing throughout, what with my own sensibilities being considerably less refined than my wife’s.

Though public urination isn’t my chosen spectator sport, I do enjoy some of the bawdy songs our football fans often extemporise.

Once Millwall FC, the club representing the area I mentioned earlier, were playing a team from Iran. After a few minutes, the local fans began singing “You are Shiite and you know it,” changing the original lyrics only slightly. They also sang “Get your face out for the lads”, again adapting the existing mantra to the occasion.

Though perhaps wishing that these chaps channelled their ingenuity into a more productive conduit, one still has to admire the ready, if somewhat crude, wit.

During the Big Firm match in Glasgow, that is the game between the Protestant Rangers and the Catholic Celtic, the fans add a nice touch of sectarian invective to the chorus.

For example, the Rangers fans sing, to the tune of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain and in reference to the IRA terrorist who starved himself to death in prison, “Would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands, would you like a chicken supper, you filthy Fenian f***er, would you like a chicken supper, Bobby Sands?”

Every law of the genre is observed, with a few added nuances. Hope the Scots vote No in the referendum – we want them in the Union.

So fine, all football fans are stupid. I still hope England will stuff Uruguay on Thursday, and Borges is dead. Go, Ingerland! (The word is now in the OED, in case you’re wondering.)

Tony has regaled us with a long essay claiming that the escalating slaughter in Iraq has nothing to do with anything he and George did back in 2003. It would all have happened anyway.

This is a version of the defence often heard in our courts: It’s all society’s fault, gov.

The inexorable pull of forces beyond human control exculpates the murderer. He didn’t do it. It’s society that slashed the victim’s throat. Even if the knife wielder hadn’t been there, the throat would have been cut anyway.

Commentators are stuck for an explanation behind Tony’s bizarre piece of writing, but only because they insist on referring to the facts. True enough, these appear unequivocal.

It wasn’t aliens from Planet X-4 who falsified intelligence reports and lied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction aimed at Western cities. It was Tony and George.

It wasn’t visitors from outer space who then attacked Iraq, eliminating the only regime that had a reasonable shot at keeping a lid on the bubbling violence. It was Tony and George.

It wasn’t Martians who then promoted the ‘Arab Spring’, in effect replacing unsavoury secular regimes with jihadists fanatics. It was Tony and George.

It wasn’t creatures with pointed heads who kept changing their professed reason for the aggression, eventually settling on the urgent need to bring democracy to the Middle East. It was Tony and George.

The difference between the two is that George at least has the decency to keep his mouth shut, while Tony not only tries to vindicate his criminal acts but is actually screaming for more of the same.

Anyone with a modicum of education knows that the Islamic world has always been a powder keg waiting for a lit match. This started 1,400 years ago, not 10.

When Mohammed died, one lot felt that power should pass on to the wise elders, while the other lot insisted that only the Prophet’s kin were fit for the role. Since then the two groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites, have been at each other’s throats.

Ostensibly this situation isn’t unique to the Muslims. Charlemagne’s death, for example, was followed by an internecine struggle for succession. When one part of Europe decided to destroy the traditional Christianity still practised in the other part, wars ensued. The Roundheads and the Cavaliers falling out led to a civil war.

All that is par for the course: boys will be boys. The difference between what used to be called Christendom and the Muslim world is that in the former people would set about killing one another with gusto but after a few years, decades at most, they’d come to their senses.

Muslims don’t. Their so-called religion encourages both murderous fanaticism and long memory. When the two are combined, tectonic plates of seismic violence perpetually strain to slam together, and only a greater force can keep them apart.

Specifically in Iraq, the Sunnis hate the Shiites, the Shiites loathe the Sunnis, they both detest the Kurds, who reciprocate with relish. All of them abhor the West, which they claim is decadent, hedonistic and godless.

The claim isn’t without merit, but what weakens it somewhat in this context is the historical evidence showing that the Muslims hated the West even when it was none of those objectionable things.

These overlapping hatreds could only be kept from exploding into a blood-soaked chaos by… what, class? What could have prevented a violent chaos in Iraq? Democracy, Tony? One man one vote, George? Sit down, both of you. You fail.

A check on the murderous passions could only come from ghastly, unsavoury dictators, ideally military. Like Assad. Like Gaddafi. Like Mubarak. And – are you paying attention, Tony and George? – like Saddam.

The criminal aggression perpetrated by Tony and George unseated them all with the exception of Assad, who’s hanging by a thread. The result was wholly predictable: the region is being drowned in a tsunami of blood threatening to engulf it all and then spill over into other regions.

Such is reality. Yet the commentators who are baffled by Tony’s obvious divorce from it are missing the point.

Tony isn’t ignorant of the facts. He isn’t ‘in denial’, a term much in vogue. He isn’t even lying, in the sense of uttering falsehoods he knows for what they are. He’s mad or, to be more forensically exact, a psychopath.

Such people are driven by a single passion to which they dedicate their whole being. Since others are unlikely to want to cater to the psychopath’s obsession, in order to succeed he has to learn how to manipulate people, bending them to his will.

In due course, manipulation itself becomes the obsessive passion. It stops being the means and becomes the end.

Appealing to the psychopath’s reason is pointless, as is trying to argue with him on the basis of obvious facts. He simply wouldn’t understand what you’re talking about – if facts are stubborn things, as Stalin once said, so much the worse for the facts.

When Tony denies that the 2003 invasion of Iraq made the current atrocities inevitable, he’s not lying, meaning deliberately distorting reality. Every lie is a falsehood, but not every falsehood is a lie.

For a psychopaths only his mania is real. Everything else is grist to the mill.

Hence Tony’s famous gift of the gab, making him millions on the lecture circuit. It’s tempting to think that those willing to pay good money to listen to Tony’s revelations are simply stupid. After all, the man has never uttered a thought that isn’t a vulgar banality at best or utter drivel at worst.

Stupidity doubtless features prominently in Tony’s audiences. But most people are simply mesmerised by his hypnotic power of a manipulative psychopath. Rather than listening to the words, they respond emotionally to the miasmas emanating from the mad effluvia.

I’d suggest that, by reducing political success to a talent for manipulating large blocs of votes, modern politics brings this type – and increasingly only this type – to the fore. Tony isn’t the only one, he’s just better than most.

He’s the ideal towards which every modern politician strives, and in this sense Dave is indeed ‘heir to Blair’, his typological son as it were.

But equal talent seldom occurs in two successive generations of the same family. A woman wishing to give birth to a musical genius shouldn’t marry Mozart. She should marry Mozart’s father.

Hence Dave will remain a pale imitation – he’s not quite psychopathic enough. When his time comes, his earnings from postprandial talks will be lower than Tony’s by an order of magnitude.

So yes, Tony, of course you’re right. You’re blameless in the ongoing orgy of bloodshed in Iraq. Whatever you say, dear. Just calm yourself.

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

One has to give it to the KGB thug: he understands how the West works.

It’s not for nothing that The Art of War by the Chinese strategist Sun Tsu (6^th century BC) is required reading at the KGB/FSB academy.

“If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperilled in a hundred battles,” taught Sun Tsu, and obviously Putin has learned that lesson well.

The colonel knows himself very well indeed, but then of course there isn’t that much to know. With KGB genes coursing through his blood (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” boasted the colonel once, “This is for life.”) he’s single-mindedly dedicated to promoting the cause of his sponsoring organisation.

That cause is so simple that it can be summed up in a single word: power. The power to shove their own people’s faces in the dirt and stamp on them to keep them there. The power to bully anyone at home or abroad who’s too weak to resist. The power to suck every ounce of wealth out of Russia and use it for personal enrichment.

This quest for power is the overriding strategy. Everything else is tactics, the means to an end.

That’s why the colonel sees the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the worst geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century” – and he’s particularly nostalgic for the Stalin period. Stalin is the colonel’s role model, the ideal that can never be fully reached but towards which one has to strive.

Hence he has let it be known that he wouldn’t be averse to Volgograd regaining its historical name Stalingrad – only if the people vote for it, of course. Putin wouldn’t dream of bypassing the democratic process.

It has to be said that the city’s historical claim to bearing Stalin’s name isn’t indisputable. After all, it was called Stalingrad for only 36 years, from 1925 to 1961. For the previous 372 years it had been named Tsaritsyn, but who’s counting?

The colonel knows himself perfectly, and he realises that reviving Stalin’s sterling contribution to Holy Russia would strengthen his own claim to royal descent. If Dave can be heir to Blair, why can’t Putin be heir to Stalin?

So first Russian schoolbooks have been rewritten to portray Stalin as merely an effective, if occasionally harsh, manager. Then a million-strong city on the Volga will again be named after Stalin. Then the statues and portraits will come back – one step at a time.

It’s not all about symbolism either. Stalin was the greatest empire builder Russia has ever known, and Putin’s KGB heart still bleeds at the sight of the empire created by his idol falling apart. What rankles most is the fickle jewel in Stalin’s crown, the Ukraine.

Those bloody Ukies always get ideas above their station. So they had to go and declare independence when Russia was in turmoil, busily trying and failing to reconcile Stalin’s cherished heritage with the dire need for Western dollars.

Not only that, but those upstarts actually pretend not to realise that this is all a game. The Soviet Union didn’t really collapse, it has merely been put on hold, just like Russia’s membership in the G8.

It was understood all along that, when the time came, Russia would reclaim what’s hers. Well, as far as Putin is concerned, the time is now. Granted, one has to proceed with caution, not to trigger a violent reaction from Enemy Number 1. The West.

Here comes the second part of  Sun Tsu’s lesson: know thy enemy. Col. Putin does, which is to say he knows what he needs to know.

The essence of Western civilisation doesn’t fall into that category. All Putin is really interested in is a simple binary problem. The West is prepared to stop Russia’s expansion in its tracks – yes or no?

If yes, stop and bide your time. If no, proceed with caution to the next step. It’s like computer programming, only simpler.

The West has already given the good colonel every encouraging sign that the answer is no. Putin flagrantly annexed a chunk of Ukrainian territory, and the West just shrugged its collective shoulders.

Nothing but derisory sanctions were imposed, and the Crimea has gradually disappeared from all subsequent negotiations. These focused on the colonel’s obvious desire to swallow up the rest of the Ukraine.

When it became clear that Putin wasn’t prepared to drive thousands of tanks into Kiev just yet, the West heaved a sigh of relief. The EU in particular was relieved. There’s no need to risk losing Putin’s gas – the colonel seems to be happy with the fait accompli of Crimea alone.

Oh yes, he is fomenting sedition in the Ukraine’s eastern provinces, arming the so-called separatists to the teeth and threatening an Armageddon if the Ukrainian army gets too bolshie. And yes, some of those ‘separatists’ have never set foot on Ukrainian soil before, coming as they do from places like Moscow and Chechnya.

But hey, for as long as they pretend to be Ukrainians, we’ll pretend to believe them. No need to upset the apple cart.

The Ukraine has predictably proved too taxing for the West’s minuscule attention span defined by news bytes. The new version of “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing” could only keep our interest for so long. As long as Putin’s tanks stay on his side of the border, there’s better news to follow, like Kate’s billowing skirt.

With his predator’s instinct, honed at the KGB academy and unencumbered by any excessive intellect or moral sense, Putin knew this would be the case. He also sensed that Kate’s billowing skirt wouldn’t provide a sufficient distraction should his tanks indeed roll. Something more spectacular was needed (no disrespect to the Duchess’s shapely behind).

Abu Dua’s assault is just what Sun Tsu ordered. The West is holding its breath, hoping that the whole Middle East won’t go up in smoke, and the Ukraine is now on Page 48, if in the papers at all.

So Putin’s tanks have rolled, though not yet in their thousands and not yet all the way to Kiev. Just three T-72s and a few personnel carriers, just 17 miles into the Ukraine, just for Putin to poke his toe in the water.

When Abu Dua overruns Baghdad and, ideally, bombs Israel, then the time may be ripe for some serious business. Meanwhile, Putin is happy with yet another proof that the West is impotent and craven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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