Category: Blog

Newly published archival data show that as early as the 1950s Robert Maxwell was investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Soviet spy. The conclusion was that he wasn’t, yet this conclusion was wrong.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone: both the FBI and MI5 were notoriously inept at flashing out Soviet spies. One of them, Kim Philby, almost became head of the Secret Service; another, Aldrich Ames, ran the CIA Soviet desk for years; yet another, Robert Hanssen, was one of the FBI’s top counterintelligence officers – this list can become longer than anyone’s arm.

The FBI were probably correct technically: Maxwell didn’t ‘transfer technological and scientific information to the Soviets’. Of course he didn’t. He was much too valuable to risk on such trivial assignments.

Maxwell was what the Soviets called ‘an agent of influence’, perhaps the most important one next to the American industrialist Armand Hammer. Said influence was exerted through both individuals and ‘friendly firms’. One such firm was Maxwell’s Pergamon Press.

Maxwell, a retired captain of the British army, bought 75 percent of the company in 1951 and instantly made it an unlikely success. Actually, it’s also unlikely that a poor Czech immigrant could have found the required £50,000, which was then serious money, about £1,000,000 in today’s debauched cash.

If the original investment miraculously didn’t come courtesy of the KGB, the overnight success did. Maxwell signed a brother-in-law deal with the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (a KGB department) and began publishing English translations of Soviet academic journals.

Making any kind of income, never mind millions, out of that would have been next to impossible. On the one hand, Soviet science at the time was hardly cutting edge stuff, and those parts of it that were didn’t publish their findings in journals – they were (and still are) strictly classified. Interest in the Soviet academic press was therefore minimal, while the cost of having it translated and published was immense.

Publishing even English-language academic periodicals is an extremely laborious and low-margin business requiring much specialised expertise. That’s why it’s usually done by big and long-established firms, which Maxwell’s wasn’t. Add to this the cost of translation and one really begins to wonder about the provenance of all that cash.

Subsequent close ties between Maxwell and the Soviets dispel any doubts. He became a frequent visitor to Moscow and a welcome guest in the Kremlin. Specifically, he met every Soviet leader from Khrushchev to Gorbachev, and they didn’t just chat about the weather.

As an MP, Maxwell made speeches defending the Soviet 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, bizarrely portraying it as some kind of recompense for the country’s betrayal at Munich.

In the ‘70s Pergamon Press prospered churning out such sure-fire bestsellers as books by Soviet leaders. On 4 March 1975, Maxwell signed, on his own terms, another contract with VAAP and published seven books by Soviet chieftains: five by Brezhnev, one by Chernenko and one by Andropov, then head of the KGB.

Under a later 1978 contract he also published Brezhnev’s immortal masterpiece Peace Is the People’s Priceless Treasure, along with books by Grishin and Ponomarev, the former a Politburo member, the latter head of the Central Committee Ideology Department.

All those books were published in huge runs and, considering the nonexistent demand for this genre, would have lost millions for any other publisher. But Maxwell wasn’t just any old publisher and these weren’t any old publishing ventures. The translation, publishing and printing were paid for by the Soviets.

In 1981 the Central Committee of the CPSU passed a resolution authorising direct payments to the French branch of Pergamon Press for publishing English translations of Soviet leaders’ books.

In the ‘80s Maxwell met Gorbachev three times, the last meeting also involving Vladimir Kryuchkov, the KGB boss. As a result Pergamon Press began publishing the English-language version of the Soviet Cultural Foundation magazine Nashe Naslediye (Our Heritage), along with the writings of both Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (Charles Dickens and Jane Austen they weren’t).

One objective pursued by the Soviets was propaganda, but this could have been achieved with less capital outlay and greater effect. The real purpose was the old Soviet pastime: money laundering and looting Russia in preparation for ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, which in effect was the transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. And the core business of Pergamon Press played only a small role in this enterprise.

Between 1989 and 1991 the KGB transferred to the West eight metric tonnes of platinum, 60 metric tonnes of gold, truckloads of diamonds and up to $50 billion in cash. The cash part was in roubles, officially not a convertible currency. But the Soviets made it convertible by setting a vast network of bogus holding companies and fake brass plates throughout the West.

The key figures in the cash transfer were the KGB financial wizard Col. Leonid Veselovsky, seconded to the Administration Department of the Central Committee, and Nikolai Kruchina, head of that department. Putin, who ‘left’ the KGB at that time, took a modest part in the looting of Russia in his capacity of Deputy Mayor of Leningrad.

The focal point of that transfer activity in the West was Maxwell, the midwife overseeing the birth pains of the so-called Soviet oligarchy. We know very little about the exact mechanics of this criminal activity, perhaps the biggest one in history. The actual engineers knew too much, which could only mean they had to fall out with the designers.

Specifically, in August 1991 Kruchina fell out of his office window. Two months later Maxwell fell overboard from his yacht. Veselovsky, who handled most of the leg work, managed to leg it to Switzerland, where he became a highly paid consultant. Obviously he knew quite a bit not only about his former employers but also about his new clients, which enhanced his earning potential.

Thus ended Cap’n Bob’s illustrious career, during which he was a Czech immigrant, a British officer, a publisher, an MP, The Daily Mirror owner, purloiner of its pension funds. And a Soviet agent by anyone’s definition but the FBI’s.

Occasional fisticuffs were unavoidable in the neighbourhood where I grew up. After a few useful if painful lessons, one usually grasped the cardinal rule of street fighting: get the first punch in and keep punching, especially when facing a known bully.

On the somewhat larger scale of global politics, this sort of thing is called ‘pre-emptive strike’, but the principle is the same: hit’em first and hit’em hard. Chances are the first strike will also be the last.

The strategic benefits of this approach were demonstrated most clearly by the Germans in the summer of 1941, when they beat the Soviets to the punch, wiped out the regular Red Army within a couple of months and almost succeeded in taking Moscow. This in spite of the Soviets’ seven-fold superiority in tanks (infinitely better ones than anything the Germans had at the time), five-fold superiority in warplanes and in (much better) artillery – to say nothing of their vastly greater numerical strength.

The USA enjoys not just a superiority but indeed supremacy over North Korea in firepower of every description and also in the quality, experience and training of its armed forces. Yet the Koreans are allowed to get away with their aggressive stance, threatening both American Pacific bases and South Korea, America’s ally. The first threat is probably perceived as being trivial: US antimissile defences should be able to negate it. The second threat isn’t just real but, considering that Seoul sits only 30 miles from the border, deadly.

Nevertheless, after their original tough response the Americans seem to be softening their position and making vaguely conciliatory noises. The reasons for this aren’t immediately clear, considering that the nature of North Korea’s deployment and the belligerent pronouncements of its leaders would have been justly regarded as casus belli at any point in history.

Moreover, dithering at this point may create a situation where a nuclear response would become the only one available. On the other hand, a powerful first strike with conventional weapons could probably reduce the North’s military capability to ruins, nipping war in the bud.

So back to the original question: why not strike first? Part of the reason may be the way the Americans approach such situations historically. The second Gulf war is the only one I can think of in which they attacked without either waiting for the other side to make the first move or provoking it into doing so.

The USA got into the First World War by openly assisting the Allies, especially Britain, while staying technically neutral. The House of Morgan floated British war loans, and a steady trans-Atlantic traffic in arms left the Germans no choice but to engage in submarine warfare (not that they needed much provoking). Eventually the Lusitania was sunk, and Woodrow ‘He-kept-us-out-of-the-war’ Wilson was able to swing the public and legislative opinion towards the war he craved.

The other day I commented on a similar stratagem used by Roosevelt to get America into the Second World War by provoking Japan into the raid on Pearl Harbour. And in the 1950s and ‘60s both the Korean and Vietnam wars were legitimate responses to communist aggression. So what’s going on now?

One explanation of American shilly-shallying could be the viscerally dovish nature of their socialist president who, in accord with his ideology, has to believe in the good nature of his fellow men, even those who aim ICBMs at his country.

Another reason may be that Americans trust their ironclad intelligence showing that North Korea isn’t really planning an attack. Instead it’s indulging in empty posturing designed to soften the sanctions against it.

I don’t know what exactly American intelligence services have done to deserve such trust. After all, their most recent coup was to provide incontrovertible evidence that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. I’d treat their information with a pound, as opposed to a mere grain, of salt, but I’m in no position to know for sure.

It’s also possible that America’s prolonged and ill-advised involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has sapped its will even to contemplate muscular action elsewhere.

Yet another possibility is that the Americans actually want a war to break out in earnest and escalate to a major, possibly nuclear, conflict. It’s conceivable that this is the only way they have of steering their economy out of its dire straits.

I don’t know which of the four guesses, and that’s all they can be, is true. All I know is how to act when being bullied in a bad neighbourhood. And the Far East, what with the North Korean sabre-rattling and growing tensions between China and Japan, is as rotten a neighbourhood as they come at the moment.

If America wants to prevent a major war, now is the time either to act or to pray that the communists don’t mean what they say. If America actually wants a war, God save us all.

 

 

 

 

Political leaders often have a weakness for spiffy aphorisms, which is partly why so many are attributed to them. Another reason may be that a politician’s saying is nowadays more likely to be preserved for posterity.

A brief scan of The Thesaurus of Quotations will show precious few coming from politicians predating the 19^th century – the Bible and Shakespeare will dominate. But come modern times, and politicians begin to hold their own against writers and philosophers, with Churchill setting the tone.

Some politicians, however, are quoted not for the sagacity of their aphorisms but for their inanity. America’s previous president George W. ‘The French Have No Word For Entrepreneur’ Bush claims the leadership of this category, but his position isn’t uncontested.

I’ll let you judge exactly where the recently published sayings of Leonid Brezhnev belong. Here’s a brief selection (in case your Russian is a bit rusty, I provide some parenthetic translations):

‘Any Soviet man has a right to a powerful car.’ [This means that someone has an obligation to provide one.]

‘Only time can correct some mistakes.’ [Particularly time served in a concentration camp.]

‘A Soviet policeman must be a bit of a doctor’ [To conceal the effects of his interrogation techniques.]

‘Our dream is to feed all people. The American dream is to turn them into gluttons.’ [That may be, but the Americans are succeeding where the Russians aren’t.]

‘The kinder the boss, the more worried the subordinates.’ [Logically, the sterner the boss, e.g. Stalin, the more serene the underlings.]

‘A man is different from a machine in that he can’t work without understanding the meaning of his work.’ [Obviously Leonid never had the pleasure of meeting our Dave.]

‘A factory is a much more precise model of the modern world than a theatre is.’ [Yes, it’s noisy, smelly and ugly-looking.]

‘Everyone wants to be friends with the nuclear bomb.’ [A friendship either made in heaven or leading there, I’d say.]

‘A good Jew is a Soviet Jew.’ [By inference, a non-Soviet Jew is bad – Ed Miliband, beware.]

Dubya’s primacy in the aphoristic stakes is clearly under threat. Before long the present Soviet – pardon me, I mean Russian – leader will follow suit by expanding his aphoristic legacy beyond the now proverbial ‘whack’em in the shithouse’ (or the bathroom, as the case may be). Actually, he already has:

‘Anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart.’ [I agree, it takes a heartless animal not to miss the concentration camps.]

‘Nobody and nothing will stop Russia on the road to strengthening democracy and ensuring human rights and freedoms.’ [Except perhaps its government.]

‘You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.’ [And if you don’t, we’ll whack you in the shithouse, or the bathroom, as the case may be.]

‘Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.’ [It would be silly to call for something that’s already there.]

‘I believe that the presidential term should be limited.’ [Presumably to the president’s lifespan.]

The sterling standards of intellectual attainment, rhetorical brilliance and erudition thereby set by Russian leaders are trickling down to the population at large. A recently posted internet video shows an interviewer approaching at random some well-dressed young people in the centre of Moscow, where all the best schools are.

One question dealt with Anna Karenina, and how the currently playing film may have distorted Gogol’s original. The youngsters countered by suggesting that this is par for the course: the 21^th century imposes its own ethos even on the classics. They knew the value of relativism – what they didn’t know is that it wasn’t Gogol who wrote the book.

Another question dealt with the outrage of one Soviet writer, Pushkin, killing another Soviet writer, Lermontov, in a duel. The interviewees agreed that this was indeed deplorable; none let on he realised that the implied chronology was about a century out of kilter – or that, while both writers were shot in a duel, they didn’t fight each other.

Next time we feel like castigating the risible level of our leaders or the Mowgli-like savagery of our youngsters, we should remember all those poor people around the world who are at least as disadvantaged as we are. I’m man enough to acknowledge that this suggestion goes for me too.

 

 

 

 

 

The question came from a good-looking French girl, which focused my mind in ways similar queries posed by my fellow old codgers never would.

Why indeed? One of the explicit aims of the EU from its inception has been to counter America’s economic power. To that end the Union has been designed as a protectionist bloc… sorry, I mean as a free-trade area.

It’s funny how modern words denote not just something different from their original meaning, but indeed something diametrically opposite, and I know I keep banging on about this. In their day the French revolutionaries convinced the populace that martial law was liberty, the cull of the upper classes was fraternity and conscripting the whole male population was equality.

Now EU ideologues are portraying protectionism as free trade. They impose tariffs on America, Americans impose tariffs on them – trade suffers and so especially do consumers who ultimately pay all those levies at the till in their local supermarket or department store.

And yet it’s true that all US administrations since Wilson’s have been ecstatic about the idea of a pan-European, ideally world, state. Why? Are they out to cut off their economic nose to spite their face? Do they welcome obstacles to doing business because they see them as a character builder?

It would take a longer format than I have here to answer this question in all its complexity. But, off the top, the USA has been pursuing imperial ambitions for over a century now. It’s reasonably clear that the American establishment sees the EU, for all its protectionist churlishness, as something advancing such ambitions, rather than holding them back.

They may be right too, as far as it goes. For history shows that any modern federation, or any other multinational entity, will eventually be dominated by its most dynamic member. Prussia bossed all of Germany after 1871. Serbia bossed all of Yugoslavia after 1918. Russia bossed the Soviet Union from 1923 onwards. Germany is bossing the EU, running it into the ground. More to the point, the mercantile North got to dominate the USA after defeating the agricultural South after 1865.

Learning from these historical lessons, Americans seem to believe that, tariffs or no tariffs, the EU will sooner or later fall under their sway. For one thing, in their desperate attempts to keep this moribund abortion afloat for a while longer, the eurocrats are steadily disarming all Europeans countries, in spite of an extremely volatile situation in the world. This means they’ll depend on American protection even more than in the past.

In American streets and public bars one hears a lot of laments about their country having to spend a fortune on defence, just because Europeans won’t pull their own weight. But in Washington office buildings no one is complaining. The situation, as far as they are concerned, resembles the protection racket: retailers pay off big hoodlums to keep smaller ones at bay. Before long the charges become unaffordable, and the gangsters take over the business.

I’m not equating the US with the mafia in any moral or legal sense. But tactically the arrangement with the EU does bring such parallels to mind.

This, as I said, is off the top. There are deeper reasons as well, dealing with the very nature of our times. For over a hundred years now, America has been a champion of modernity – it’s not for nothing that the publisher Henry Luce spoke of ‘the American century’, meaning the twentieth.

Modernity is animated by a quest for both creation and destruction. The former deals with things of the body, the pursuit of ‘happiness’, which is to say philistine, gadget-laden comfort for the whole family (including those families where no one has had a job for three generations). The latter aims at eliminating every survival of the world in which happiness was defined in different terms, those springing from the soul.

While the creative impetus of modernity is universally recognised and lauded, its destructive animus is hardly ever commented upon. And yet it’s at least as strong, for in order for modernity to scribble its vulgar message, the slate has to be wiped clean.

This is where American politicians must sense, not necessarily in their minds but in their viscera, that their interests converge with the European Union’s. Hence their support for this abomination, which is particularly noticeable among the more aggressive members of the American establishment, those who describe themselves as neoconservative.

I don’t know if this answers to her satisfaction the question asked by my lovely interlocutor. I hope so, for I want to stay in her good books. If not, I’m sorry. It’s the best I can do in under 1,000 words.  

 

 

The appointment of Paolo Di Canio as manager of Sunderland AFC has raised quite some controversy, and not because of any doubts about his football credentials.

Many supporters are appalled by his politics, and there isn’t much doubt about that either. For rather than trying to conceal his fascist views, Di Canio proudly wears them on his sleeve.

When still a player at Rome’s Lazio, whose supporters are a bit like our Millwall fans but with a nasty political dimension, Di Canio celebrated his goals by giving fascist salutes to the crowd. Eventually he was banned for one game in spite of his vigorous protests.

The salute, he explained, wasn’t just fascist but also Roman and anyway ‘I am a fascist, not a racist’. That’s all right then. If this is protest, methinks the lout doth protest too little.

Nor has this tattooed thug spared us his take on politics in the written format. In his autobiography he praises Mussolini as ‘a very principled, ethical individual’. Almost as principled and ethical as Hitler, I’d suggest, though with less power of his convictions.

And speaking of principles, the appointment has inspired David Miliband to venture into that territory for probably the first time in his life. He took a firm stand by resigning as Sunderland’s vice chairman, citing his contempt for Di Canio’s views (his imminent move to America would have made it hard for him to discharge his duties anyway).

You see, Miliband is a socialist, so allegedly are most Sunderland supporters and, according to David’s profound analysis of political theory, their ideological bias is incompatible with fascism. However, had his analysis been a tad more profound, and we’ve been told ad nauseum what a deep thinker Miliband is, he would have realised that the distance between the two is so small as to be barely discernible. 

This brings me to the real point of this piece, and it’s not football. It’s my recurrent theme: the Babel-like confusion reigning in our political vocabulary. Actually, come to think of it, most vocabulary these days is political, with even such seemingly neutral words as ‘man’ and ‘woman’ able to invite politically motivated rebukes.

But rather than commenting on terms only recently co-opted into ideological partisanship, I’d like to focus on those that have been political ever since they were coined. For example, ‘leftwing’ and ‘rightwing’ whose very etymology conveys diametrical opposition.

Thus our press the other side of The Mail and The Telegraph tends to describe someone like Lady Thatcher as ‘extreme rightwing’. The same designation is also applied retrospectively to the likes of Hitler.

One infers that the political spectrum, as the Milibandits see it, starts at the extreme right exemplified by Thatcher and Hitler and ends up at the extreme left represented by Trotsky and Stalin. So what does the ‘extreme right’ Thatcher stand for? Why, laissez-faire economics at home, free trade abroad, limited government, individual responsibility, meritocracy. In short, she is an out-and-out Whig, even though she confusingly led the Tories.

If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. Applying this proven logic to the task in hand, we have to assume that Hitler, Lady Thatcher’s fellow ‘rightwing extremist’, was a Whig too. But then we realise that his beliefs ran more towards socialist ideals: big government, nationalised or at least subjugated economy, wage and price controls, strict tariffs, cradle-to-grave welfare, vegetarianism and the kind of genocidal peccadilloes that until (or after) him were practised on that scale only by socialists, who are undeniably leftwing.

Then we remember that Hitler’s party was called National Socialist Workers’ and ask another question: so who’s the rightwing extremist then? And what does the term mean?

It’s instructive to lay side by side Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hitler’s Four Year Plan and Stalin’s Five Year Plan. One will instantly see that the three documents are remarkably similar, which isn’t surprising considering that the first two were largely composed, and the third inspired, by the same individuals. Hence if the word ‘socialism’ is to mean anything at all, other than implied praise or abuse, the economics of all three countries were at the time inspired by the same – socialist – ideology.

Obviously there were differences, there always are. But those were slight variations on the same theme: corporatist socialism as advocated by Roosevelt, national socialism as practised by Hitler, international socialism as propagated by Stalin. Add to this democratic socialism by which Miliband presumably swears, and socialism emerges as the common denominator to which they can all be reduced.

The Milibandits of this world don’t mind emphasising this at their party conferences by waving red flags and singing such big hits as Internationale and Bandera Rossa. They also sometimes raise their clenched fists. Di Canio, by contrast, raises a straight arm – a distinction without a difference.

Therefore, if Sunderland supporters are indeed as socialist as they are portrayed in the press, they should welcome Paolo as their own. He’ll fit right in.

 

 

It’s funny how faith leaders start rediscovering their faith when they stop being leaders.

When he was still the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey did much to contribute to aggressive secularisation (if only by not resisting it robustly enough). Amazingly secularisation is still called ‘liberal’ whereas in fact it’s the exact opposite of that.

Now Lord Carey attacks Dave’s government in The Mail for ‘aiding and abetting this aggression every step of the way’. How true. And how much more weight such accusations would have carried had Lord Carey levelled them ex cathedra, say in 1999, when the previous lot of spivocrats were abusing Christianity in most egregious ways. Dave doesn’t call himself ‘heir to Blair’ for nothing.

Mind you, Carey’s first paragraph shows that he’s still sitting on the fence: ‘I like David Cameron and believe he is genuinely sincere in his desire to make Britain a generous nation where we care for one another and where people of faith may exercise their beliefs fully.’ But at least he’s now on the fence, rather than consistently remaining on its wrong side.

From then on, Lord Carey, now freed from the shackles of high office, says all the right things, which perhaps could suggest that he doesn’t like Dave as much as he professes.

Listed are such outrages as the government’s plan ‘to turn the 700-year-old Parliamentary chapel of St Mary Undercroft into a multi-faith prayer room so that gay couples can get married there.’ Homomarriage itself comes in for rough treatment, as Lord Carey is ‘very suspicious that behind the plans to change the nature of marriage, which come before the House of Lords soon, there lurks an aggressive secularist and relativist approach towards an institution that has glued society together from time immemorial.’

‘Suspicion’ is the political for ‘certainty’, and once a politician always a politician. But the situation is as dire as Lord Carey ‘suspects’. Dave is an oxymoronic modernising Tory, and such modernisation includes hatred of Christianity as an essential constituent. This ineluctably leads to distaste for all traditional institutions that collectively add up to what used to be called Christendom.

For just as Christ begat Christianity, Christianity begat Christendom, our ancient civilisation. That’s what the likes of Dave strive to modernise, which is the political for destroy. As far as they are concerned, Christian symbols which they are banning from public life don’t just transgress against other religions – they offend against the very essence of modernity.

Dave presumably hopes that the crucifix will be replaced by the blue rosette as the unifying symbol of what he calls modernisation. In fact it’s much more likely that the new dominant symbolism will be provided either by the crescent or the hammer and sickle or perhaps even a version of the swastika.

For, when Christianity goes, Christendom goes with it – the two are linked by an unbreakable umbilical cord. Christian civility, love of fellow man, sublime art, justice, charity will all have a door slammed in their face, just as another door will be flung wide-open to beastliness and barbarism.

But the event we’ll be celebrating tomorrow shows that death does not have to be final, that it’s possible to rise from the dead and start a new, higher life. This applies to Christ, Christianity – and we must all pray that it holds true for Christendom as well.

Happy Easter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent Great Depression left the American economy in dire straits. About 11,000 banks, half the total number, had failed. Unemployment stood at 25 percent. The ‘dust bowl effect’ had emptied farms.

Parallel 1: The US economy suffered a similar shock in 2008. Unemployment skyrocketed. Venerable financial institutions either collapsed or had to be rescued.  The motor trade, America’s pride, went bankrupt.

President Roosevelt instigated the New Deal, increasing state interference in the economy to an unprecedented level. Regulations multiplied, an alphabet soup of new state agencies were created. The printing press began to churn out banknotes, the gold standard was abandoned. Yet after an initial surge the economy began to suffer again.

Parallel 2: Following the 2008 financial crisis, the US administration became an even more active player in the economy. The state stepped in to bail out banks, financial institutions, industrial concerns. The Fed’s printing presses went into high gear.

Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, admitted before Congress that the New Deal had failed (no current politician would make a similar admission): ‘We have tried spending money,’ he commiserated. ‘We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I say after eight years of this administration, we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!’ As a competent economist, Morgenthau knew that the economy was suffering from a chronic disease, not a temporary malady.

Parallel 3: For all its much-touted recovery, the USA is bankrupt: its liabilities exceed its assets. America’s $16.5-trillion debt now stands at 73 percent of annual GDP, not counting internal debts, such as the depleted Social Security trust fund. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the debt is on course to reach 93 percent within 10 years and nearly 200 percent in 25 years. Only Weimar-style hyperinflation would then be able to manage the debt, but the treatment would be even worse than the disease.

Roosevelt, though obviously a more benign politician than Hitler, reached the same conclusion: only a major war could correct the structural defects of the economy. Europe conflagrated in 1939, but there was no domestic consensus for America to join in. Hence Roosevelt hoped that either Germany or Japan, both aggressors of no mean attainment, would launch a pre-emptive strike, the sooner the better. To that end the US government suddenly froze all Japanese assets in American banks, simultaneously imposing an embargo on the export of oil. Japan’s foreign trade instantly shrank by 75 percent and her oil imports by 90 percent.

Parallel 4:  Operating either through the UN or unilaterally, the USA imposed crippling sanctions on North Korea, the most aggressive state in the world’s most vibrant region. On 7 March the UN approved fresh sanctions on Pyongyang; North Korea said this gave it the right to a ‘pre-emptive nuclear strike’ on the US and especially its Pacific and Korean bases.

Anticipating a Japanese strike, Roosevelt left Pearl Harbour, the US major naval base in the Pacific, defenceless. Realising that the next naval war would be fought in the air he withdrew the carriers from Pearl Harbour, leaving obsolete battleships as bait. Japan promptly struck, drawing America into a war that went on to solve her economic problems for decades to come.

Parallel 5: Yet to be drawn. However:

Annual military drills and fresh UN sanctions have angered North Korea, while recent US bomber overflights have made it see red.

State news agency KCNA announced that Kim Jong-un ‘judged the time has come to settle accounts with the US imperialists’. US actions, said Kim, represented an ‘ultimatum that they will ignite a nuclear war at any cost on the Korean Peninsula’.

On 12 December, 2012, North Korea launched a three-stage rocket, a UN-banned test of long-range missile technology.

On 12 February, North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test, its third after those in 2006 and 2009.

On 11 March, annual US-South Korea military drills began.

On 19 March,  B-2 and B-52 nuclear-capable bombers overflew the peninsula following several North Korean threats to attack US and South Korean targets.

On 20 March, South Korea was hit by a mysterious cyber attack, almost certainly launched by the North.

On 27 March, North Korea cut the military hotline with South Korea – the two countries are no longer on speaking terms.

On 28 March, B-2 stealth bombers overflew the Korean peninsula again, demonstrating, said US officials, an ability to deliver ‘precision strikes at will’. North Korean missile forces were put on stand-by.

According to Euclid, parallel lines can never meet; Lobachevsky showed how they could. In this instance, the clearly discernible parallels can only meet at a crucible of a major war, possibly to be fought with the kind of weapons that were barely tested the first time the USA found a quick way out of its economic difficulties.

Will they or won’t they? Let’s just hope that the time hasn’t come yet for Hilaire Belloc’s macabre forecast of decades ago to be proved right: ‘Like all our modern evils, this evil will not get better. It will get worse. The only remedy for modern evils is catastrophe.’

 

 

‘All crimes are vulgar, all vulgarity is a crime,’ declared Wilde through half a dozen of his protagonists (Oscar was ahead of his time in practising responsible recycling).

If we accept this definition of vulgarity, then Melvyn Bragg is a serial offender. By devoting his career to carrying ‘culture’ to the masses he has contributed to reducing everything to mass culture. The result is enduring, emetic, all-conquering vulgarity – just the ticket for the BBC and other broadcasters.

As his recent article in The Times testifies, Lord Bragg has now directed his attentions, unencumbered by any conspicuous knowledge of the subject, towards Christianity. He must have surmised correctly that vulgarity would be a deadlier weapon against it than hysterical hatred, à la Richard Dawkins.

Specifically he set out to correct all the wrongs the church has perpetrated upon women in general and Mary Magdalene in particular. To that end Bragg decamped for Israel, spent a couple of weeks there and solved all the mysteries by neatly blending Ernest Renan and Dan Brown with a dollop of anti-misogynist self-righteousness. The resulting concoction is revoltingly rancid, but then Bragg’s taste buds have atrophied by now, if he ever had them in the first place.

‘Was Mary Magdalene a saint or a prostitute?’ he asks in the first sentence, establishing his ignorance from the start to avoid any subsequent confusion on the reader’s part. Clearly, according to Bragg she could not have been both. Presumably he thinks saints don’t just imitate Jesus Christ – they are Jesus Christ, born without sin, untouched by the original Fall.

Elementary knowledge of Christian hagiography, not to mention history, shows this simply isn’t, nor can be, the case. People achieve sainthood by the grace of God and until they do they remain fallible and, quite often, fallen. St Augustine, for example, sowed a lot of wild oats in his youth, and quite a few other cereals as well. So did St Francis. St Margaret of Cortona was a right slapper as a girl. St Paul prosecuted Christians. St Peter betrayed Christ himself – thrice.

Such is the auspicious beginning of Bragg’s article. From then on it’s all either Renan or Brown, with a bit of Richard Dawkins to spice things up (though Bragg tries to dissociate himself from the latter’s ‘glib criticism’). Thus Bragg-Renan: ‘The gospels are – minus miracles – reasonably convincing accounts of a unique man.’ Thus Bragg-Brown: ‘…evidence may lead one to the conclusion that she [Mary Magdalene] was his [Jesus’s] wife.’ Thus Bragg-Dawkins: ‘[Pope Gregory’s] superb and effective act of misogynist propaganda.’ ‘Celibacy… has led the organised church into so many abuses and crimes and distorted lives.’

Gospels without miracles wouldn’t be gospels – they owe their very existence to a miracle, and Christ is ‘a unique man’ precisely because he isn’t just a man. To say that he is means accusing the evangelists of lying.

Bragg himself points out that the gospels ‘were written at a time when fictional, that is mythological, writing simply did not have this kind of detail.’ I wonder if he ever asked himself why. He probably didn’t, for the only persuasive answer would have been that the gospels, miracles and all, are true, and this answer would be unacceptable to an ideological atheist like Bragg. Well, he’s a Labour peer after all. Comes with the territory.

It’s not celibacy but the fallen state of man that has led some members of the ‘organised church’ (as opposed to a disorganised one?) to naughtiness. Yet clerical and monastic celibacy also focused men’s minds on serving God, rising above their collective and individual sinfulness.

As to Mary and Jesus having been an item, one wonders why Lord Bragg had to travel as far as Israel (sorry, Palestine – ‘Israel’ is only favoured by the BBC in negative contexts) to uncover the relevant evidence. He should have rung me instead and I would have recommended such unimpeachable sources as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and indeed The Da Vinci Code. Add to this a brief scan and loose interpretation of a couple of apocryphal gospels, and he could have saved the BBC the price of airfare.

It takes ignorance elevated to the level of worship to suggest that the entire history of the church has been devoted to suppressing the importance of women. Has Bragg actually read the gospels? If he had, he would have noticed that women, including Mary Magdalene, come across much better than men. St Mark’s gospel in particular holds women up as examples of true discipleship, contrasting their role to that of men.

Not only did Jesus first reveal himself to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, but she was also among the women who witnessed the crucifixion: ‘There were also women looking on afar off: among them was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome.’ Not so the male disciples: ‘And they all forsook him, and fled.’

In apostolic denominations the Virgin is worshipped side by side with her son, and Mary Magdalene, ‘the apostle to the apostles’, isn’t far behind. Misogyny? Personally, I think the church ought to be charged with misandry – and Bragg with what Oscar Wilde defined as a crime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spent last Saturday at a cross-party seminar featuring an alphabet soup of eurosceptic groups, each bristling with passion and leaflets.

Depending on the exact conduit of the passion and content of the leaflets, their ideas varied in detail but they were all united in, well, desperately seeking a referendum. I agreed with some, disagreed with others, but either way it was good to rub shoulders with likeminded individuals.

On Sunday morning we drove from our place in London to chez nous in north Burgundy. The plan was to stop in Paris for an early dinner and then, suitably lubricated, zip through the remaining 120 miles of the journey. That, however, wasn’t to be. North Paris was gridlocked by marchers protesting against same-sex marriage and, well, desperately seeking a referendum. France too has my likeminded individuals, I thought, veering off to Versailles.

Thus both London and Paris can pride themselves on having people who think as I do, albeit on different issues. But there was a salient difference between the two places.

In London my likeminded individuals, about 30 of them, met at a private club, perfectly civilised if fashionably integrated. In Paris my likeminded individuals, between 300,000 (official estimate) and 1,300,000 (unofficial one) of them, were out in the streets, braving police batons and tear gas. Much as I generally prefer the British way of tackling thorny issues, in this instance it was hard to escape the thought that perhaps the French were on to something.

For in both our countries, and possibly the rest of the West, the time for civilised discussion has passed. Those of the seminar attendees who talk about negotiating or renegotiating with the EU are clutching at straws, which as we know constitute the main ingredient of a pie in the sky.

For any negotiation to be meaningful it has to be conducted in good faith. This minimum requirement can never be met when Dave (or any other spivocrat) sits down to talk with Rumpy-Pumpy (or any other eurocrat). The spivocrat would be talking about repatriation of some powers, but his real concern will be the perpetuation of his own power, however curtailed by EU diktats. The eurocrat’s concerns would be essentially similar: the perpetuation and expansion of EU power and derivatively his own.

Cut as they are of the same cloth, the two parties would probably reach an agreement that would have enough PR appeal to mollify the restless natives, while strengthening the spivocrat’s electoral position. He could then do a Neville Chamberlain by stepping off the plane and waving a piece of paper promising something or other in our time.

Both the spivocrat and the eurocrat would know that at best the piece of paper would mean a temporary diversion, a bone tossed to the British electorate off the EU table. The electorate will gnaw on the bone for a while and, when there’s no more gristle left on it, will dump it into the bin on top of other similar bones already piled up.

None of the ideas kicked about at the seminar sounded as if they would work, and indeed their enunciators themselves distinctly lacked conviction. For what is at fault isn’t the transfer of this or that piece of sovereignty from London to Brussels – it’s the cosmic philosophical, moral, and therefore political, shift that made any such transfer possible or indeed thinkable in the first place.

‘Let’s not forget that the EU has done some good things,’ said one of the speakers, he of the Labour persuasion. Well, I for one can’t see a single one, and the venerable gentleman offered nothing to clarify my vision. Even had he done so, by mentioning some minuscule advantage brought by the EU, everyone present would still have agreed that the minuses far outweighed the pluses.

What some of them may not have realised is that the whole weighing exercise is spurious. The problem with the EU isn’t that it’s incompetent and not even that it’s undemocratic – the problem is that it’s based on evil premises, pursues evil ends and employs evil means. It is evil.

Hitler built those autobahns and put Volkswagens on them, Mussolini made the trains run on time, Stalin fixed the price of bread and vodka. Their apologists may mention those achievements till they’re blue in the face, but that would be missing the main point: those men and their regimes were evil. So is the EU.

Its purpose is to throw all European nations into a giant crucible and boil the mix into a uniform stew that would nonetheless accentuate whatever is rancid in each ingredient. The scum, ruthless bureaucrats with totalitarian aspirations, would rise to the surface of the amorphous concoction, and the stew would no longer be visible underneath. The bureaucrats’ power would then solidify for centuries.

Negotiate with this lot? But of course – if what we really want is to hasten their triumph. Munich, Teheran, Yalta, Potsdam (and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, to mention a more recent example) should all act as reminders that totalitarians can use any treaty, whatever its ostensible content, to advance their own aims.

Nor is there any value to thinking that our self-serving nonentities, all those Cameroons and Milibandits, can possibly get a reasonable deal out of the EU even if – and it’s a massive if – we get a referendum and win it.

If we want Britain to get out of the EU, we must first get that lot out of Westminster. In the absence of any difference, as opposed to distinction, between the two main parties, even millions of votes cast this or that way won’t achieve this aim. But millions of people in the streets might.

Such rallies, ‘manifs’ as the French call them, never happen by themselves – they are carefully planned and meticulously organised. The group now in existence that has the public presence and authority to unite such organisation under its aegis is UKIP, the only one of the four main parties that calls for outright withdrawal from the EU.

The energies of other eurosceptic groups ought to be channelled into either building up the financial, electoral and communication strength of UKIP or coming together into another single group they feel could do the job better.

The chances of UKIP forming a government in the next several parliaments are slim. Its chances of reshuffling the political cards by renationalising the British political discourse are much stronger, and this, as things look now, is our only chance.

There’s so much more I could tell you about this, but I’m pressed for time. There’s a thick wad of leaflets I’ve got to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Boris Berezovsky’s death may remain ‘unexplained’ in the language of the investigating police officers. But this side of forensic certainty there’s no shortage of explanations, speculations and theories.

Most of them centre around the possibility that Berezovsky was, in the language of his nemesis Putin, ‘whacked’ – this even though the body was found in the bathroom and not in ‘the shithouse’ that figured so prominently in Putin’s threats. 

So did Putin ‘whack’ Berezovsky or didn’t he? Some say he did, some say he didn’t. However, no one says he couldn’t possibly have done, and ultimately this is what really matters.

Intelligence officers are trained to think that, if coincidences number more than two, they’re no longer coincidences. Regarding the event in that light, one has to observe that the British climate seems to be perilous for Putin’s enemies, while it’s more sparing of his friends and acolytes, such as Abramovich.

In 2006, for example, the high content of radioactive substances in London’s air did for Col. Litvinenko, though that time few claimed his death was ‘unexplained’. In 2008, Berezovsky’s partner Badri Patarkatsishvili, 52, died ‘from a suspected heart attack’ in Surrey, and surely a competent post mortem could have pinpointed the cause of death more precisely. Also in Surrey Alexander Perepelichny, 44, died while jogging last November. ‘His death,’ say the papers, ‘remains a mystery’, although Perepelichny’s planned testimony at a money-laundering trial could perhaps demystify matters a bit.

In all these instances Putin had not only a motive but also the means, for there’s little doubt that such a scientifically and technologically advanced country as Russia is capable of inducing heart attacks that look natural. So did Putin kill Patarkatsishvili, Perepelichny and Berezovsky (we know as near as damn he had Litvinenko ‘whacked’)? I don’t know. But he could have done.

Such a distinct possibility delivers yet another crushing blow to today’s useful idiots who point out that Russia has changed, presumably for the better. True enough, unlike his predecessors Lenin and Stalin, Putin ‘whacks’ his victims by the dozen, not by the million. But then the same could be said about his predecessors Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov – so were they democrats as well?

Fundamentally, what Reagan described as ‘an evil empire’ may now be less imperial than in the past, but it’s no less evil. Once we’ve established that, the number of its victims becomes a purely actuarial matter.

Evil regimes don’t necessarily murder millions – but they can. The differences between institutional ability and numerical fact are all purely tactical. Such regimes murder as many as they need to: dozens if that’s what it takes, millions if that’s what’s required.

For example, in the first few years of his rule Hitler kept his score sheet several orders of magnitude lower than what he ran up in the subsequent few years. Did he suddenly become more evil? Of course he didn’t. Hitler didn’t change; the situation did.

Be that as it may, I’m hard-pressed to find it in my heart to mourn Berezovsky. Nil nisi bonum… and all that, but in his heyday Berezovsky was exactly what the title of Paul Klebnikov’s book said he was: ‘Godfather in the Kremlin’.

(Incidentally, by way of literary criticism the author himself was in 2004 gunned down in central Moscow. Putin’s colleagues immediately spread the rumour that Klebnikov, Forbes bureau chief, was killed by a jealous husband. Two jealous husbands apparently, for there were two submachine guns involved in the drive-by shooting.)

Such people sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. Berezovsky in particular went much further than most other gangsters tend to do. Typically, these gentlemen cultivate political contacts as a way of protecting their business interests. Berezovsky and Abramovich reversed the process: they used their ill-gotten cash to run the country, more or less.

Both men, then loyal partners, called the shots within the Yeltsyn camarilla, as the president was drinking himself to death. Having used Berezovsky’s media empire to re-elect Yeltsyn against overwhelming odds (his approval rating was a mere six percent going into the campaign), the partners essentially appointed the cabinet. And it was Berezovsky who engineered Putin’s ascent to the Kremlin.

‘The godfather’ thought the obscure KGB colonel would be putty in his hands. Inadvertently but predictably, once the figurine was moulded it turned into a monster capable of devouring its creator. Abramovich, his nose of beagle sensitivity, realised this, which is why he’s still thriving in the London climate, his billions intact. But Berezovsky’s olfactory sense was too dulled by hubris.

So he died. Whether he killed himself, died of a heart broken by loss of power and wealth or was murdered is immaterial. Berezovsky tried to fight the monster of his own creation and died in the attempt.

One can only hope that his death will help our useful idiots to become less idiotic, to learn to recognise monsters for what they are. Mind you, I’m not holding my breath.