Category: Blog

Our Attorney General thought he was supporting Dave’s assertion that Britain is still a Christian country, even though neither Dave nor most people take its formative faith very seriously.

Instead he dug the hole even deeper.

People, said Dominic Grieve, are “turned off” from religion by the “disturbing” and “very damaging” rise of fundamentalism, defined as “deep intolerance” of other people’s views.

“I do think that there has been a rise of an assertiveness of religious groups across the spectrum,” he explained, which spectrum to him includes both Islam and Christianity.

Actually it’s somewhat wider than that. It also comprises Judaism, Taoism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, animism, atheism and what not.

All those are to a varying degree intolerant to other people’s views for the simple reason that faith presupposes belief in the truth. The truth, not one among many.

Thus an exponent of one religion has to believe by definition that he’s right and exponents of other religions are wrong. If he possesses a modicum of intelligence, he’d know that others feel the same way about his own faith.

And, if he does satisfy that minimum cerebral requirement, he wouldn’t be unduly bothered by such diversity of belief. To each his own, live and let live, that sort of thing. Such is the way of the world. Others are entitled to their ridiculous opinions.

Thus a believer wouldn’t be upset by other people’s intolerance of his faith unless, of course, such intolerance is manifested through certain unpleasant actions. These can vary from oral insults to physical harassment, from assault to murder, from shrill propaganda to a forceful imposition of alien values.

People who resort to such affronts are usually called ‘religious fundamentalists’, although nowadays the term tends to broaden its meaning to include those who accept not only the moral precepts of their religion but also the dogma whence the morality comes.

Since Mr Grieve lumps all ‘fundamentalists’ together, one has to presume that he must have been jostled in the street by militant Buddhists, attacked by bolshie Christians, harassed by uppity Confucians, forcibly converted by crazed Taoists and assaulted by fanatical Jews for buying pork sausages.

He must have been forced to diet during Lent by fundamentalist Christians, dragged away from a bus on a Friday night by fundamentalist Jews, made to marry in a certain way by fundamentalist Buddhists.

No? None of those calamities has befallen him? Well, then he surely must possess numerous case studies of fundamentalist Anglicans maiming their daughters for dating Catholics, fundamentalist Jews picketing restaurants for not serving kosher food, fundamentalist Chinese insisting that Confucian law must take precedence over the English Common Law in assorted Chinatowns.

No, not even that? So what on earth is he talking about? What kind of religious fundamentalism is such a sharp burr under Mr Grieve’s blanket?

He must realise that failure to provide a satisfactory answer to this simple question may make some feel that, in common with most politicians, he just runs off at the mouth, making politically expedient noises with no substance to them.

Actually Mr Grieve’s problem is neither rare nor hard to understand. Many people these days have been brainwashed by our atheist modernity into talking about religion in general.

Yet there’s no such thing. Every religion is sui generis. Different religions differ from one another as much as any of them differs from atheism.

If there is no such thing as religion in general, then there’s no such thing as religious fundamentalism in general. Then, since Mr Grieve will probably agree that pious adherents of the creeds I’ve mentioned aren’t in the business of shoving their faith down other people’s throats, what kind of sui generis fundamentalism does he have in mind?

There’s only one answer to this question, because there’s only one religion in Britain that’s being practised not just devoutly but aggressively. Islam.

One can understand why Mr Grieve doesn’t want to put it this way. He’s the Attorney General and wants to keep that post at least, if not to move up. Such an aspiration is incompatible with even hinting that one religion is worse than another. The enforcers of political correctness won’t allow it.

So a government official can’t attack Islamic fundamentalism specifically. He can only talk about religious fundamentalism in general, even though everyone with ears to hear will know exactly what he means.

However, even had he come out and actually said it, the statement still wouldn’t make sense. Granted, in some parts of Britain espousing Christian beliefs may expose one to intimidation and even assault. But since most of us don’t live in predominantly Muslim areas, it’s unclear how Islamic fanaticism can turn anyone but a morbidly timid soul off Christianity.

And we’ve already seen that any other fundamentalism tends to be unobtrusive, if not exactly nonexistent. Thus if Britain is indeed a Christian country, as Messrs Grieve and Cameron correctly assure us she is, then how come church attendance is going down, while fewer and fewer self-professed Christians practise the faith they claim to possess?

To find who (and what) is to blame we’d have to go back a few centuries and then slowly move towards Britain circa 2014. At some point along this meandering path we’d find our culprits. But whatever they are, they won’t be ‘religious fundamentalists’.

They are much more likely to be those who, like Messrs Grieve and Cameron, think society can feast on the fruits of Christianity while diligently severing the roots of the tree that has borne the fruits.

They too are fundamentalists, but not of any religious sort. Their cult is our vulgar, anomic, soulless modernity, and they serve it with unwavering piety. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

His Eminence, ever the politician, didn’t name UKIP specifically.

But his remarks on immigration were clearly inspired by the party’s poster campaign saying “British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labour.”

“The reality,” countered His Eminence, “is that the vast majority of migrants to this country add to our well-being.”

Some of us would like to see his sources, and also some more precision of phrasing. How vast is this majority? More important, does His Eminence see in his mind’s eye some cut-off number beyond which migrants may reduce our well-being?

One of the UKIP posters says the EU boasts 26 million unemployed, which claim Cardinal Nichols doesn’t dispute. Juxtaposing this number with the fact that Britain’s economy is growing faster than any other in Europe, it’s not an unfair supposition that some of those 26 million will end up here.

Assuming that some of them have families in tow, let’s calculate conservatively that, should they all come to Britain, the country’s population would double overnight.

That clearly would be unsustainable – even assuming that no immigrants from outside the EU would follow suit. So what about half that number? A quarter? Ten percent?

I dare say we’d be overrun even at my lowest hypothetical level. If His Eminence has information to the contrary, then by all means he should share it with us. If not, then – how can I say this without offending anyone’s innermost feelings – some people may think he’s indulging in empty bien pensant phrase-making.

His Eminence doesn’t strengthen his case by making further claims, to the effect that “We have grown to appreciate the richness that immigration brings… to the life of hospitals and many public sector areas…”

Going back to my conservative estimate, does the Archbishop think that the NHS has so much spare capacity that it could effortlessly accommodate, say, another five million patients? If so, one would like to see some concrete proposals on how our infection-infested hospitals killing people en masse through neglect and incompetence would pick up their performance when their workload increases.

They already produce 1,200 preventable deaths every month – how would an extra five million patients reduce that number? I don’t know. Neither, I’m afraid, does His Eminence.

His is therefore a general statement of political allegiance, which is redundant. We already know that the Archbishop’s sympathies are broadly on the left, and no further confirmation was necessary.

One can only hope that his unfortunate bias won’t interfere with his ministry, which is more important than politics. After the ecclesiastical damage done to the Church of England by a succession of wishy-washy ‘liberal’ prelates, it would be a shame to see the Catholic Church going the same way.

As to the UKIP campaign, it’s decent advertising and good politics. After the decades of the two major parties converging not just in their policies but also in their philosophy, such as it is, it’s good to see a party that sets out to emphasise its divergence from the others.

Evidently the party’s strategists don’t feel UKIP can engage the main parties in a frontal assault along the entire line of policies. Instead they’re engaging in a guerrilla warfare, trying to derail a few ideological trains on the flanks.

Staying faithful to its heritage, UKIP naturally chooses to concentrate on the horrendous damage caused by Britain’s membership in the EU.

By far the greatest and deadliest damage isn’t economic but constitutional, and this doesn’t depend on the number of new arrivals. An inordinately brisk immigration will undeniably cause some economic attrition, with more cultural and social damage to follow.

But Britain could conceivably survive such casualties and remain Britain. What the country can’t survive is the destruction of her ancient constitution that reflects the nation’s political genius.

The constitution isn’t written, or rather it’s not written in a single document. That is its strength: rather than being a flimsy ideological contrivance, the British constitution has evolved over many centuries by gradually accumulating bits of wisdom and prudence.

These are reflected in a number of common-sensical statutes, laws and practices that have withstood the test of time – a millennium of it. The nation’s sovereignty has developed alongside with, or probably out of, the English Common Law, and it’s vested in the strong alloy of Parliament fused with the crown and the judiciary.

This edifice of constitutional sovereignty isn’t so much undermined as blown to smithereens by Britain’s having to comply with a huge number of laws originating outside Parliament. By signing his name to the Maastricht Treaty, John Major thrust a dagger through a millennium of British political history. The life’s blood of the nation flowed into the ground.

UKIP leaders know all this better than I do. Yet, unlike me, they’re practical politicians who need to reduce their message to the kind of sound bytes our comprehensively educated masses can understand.

I’m sure UKIP must have tested the constitutional message and found it wanting. For the message is too involved to be reduced to sound bytes.

It has taken me almost 300 words to outline the skeleton of the argument, without adding much flesh to it. Perhaps a better writer could cut a few words out – but not many more than a few.

Such loquacity may be sound political philosophy but it’s rotten politics. Democratic politicians, and this is a huge drawback of universal-franchise democracy, have to talk in slogans if they want to be elected.

The flanking manoeuvre undertaken by UKIP is based on a simple, not to say simplistic, message aimed at people who have to work for a living. There are only so many jobs to go round, the campaign says, and one of them is yours. Unless we regain control of our borders (that is, leave the EU) it may go to an immigrant willing to work for less. 

Not being a mechanic of political rough-and-tumble, I can’t judge if this is the right tactic. But being a voter, I’m happy to see that not all parties are saying the same things, give or take a couple of percent. A feeling obviously not shared by Cardinal Nichols.

“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea” (Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt).

If Horace were alive today, he’d probably change animum for nous to confirm the point I always make: lefties, on either side of the Atlantic, aren’t merely misguided but actually stupid.

Witness the letter to The Telegraph, in which 50 leading ‘liberals’, including AC Grayling and Peter Tatchell, take exception to Dave’s description of Britain as a Christian country.

“We are a plural society with citizens with a range of perspectives and a largely non-religious society,” says the letter. “To constantly claim otherwise fosters alienation and division in our society.”

The intellectual level of this statement fully matches its stylistic elegance, and some of the signatories actually write for a living. But never mind the English, feel the idiocy.

The authors seem to feel that their first assertion, that not all Brits are Christians (I presume that’s what it means), is at odds with Britain being described as a Christian country. It isn’t.

If it were, then no large collective entity could ever be described as anything at all. For example, even though many inhabitants of the British Isles aren’t actually British, we still call the country by its normal name.

Not every citizen of Bolshevik Russia was a communist and not everyone living in Nazi Germany was a Nazi – but we still insist on the usual nomenclatures for those places. Staying within the subject of religion, not every citizen of Indonesia is a Muslim, and yet we routinely describe it as the world’s largest Islamic state.

If these chaps had half a brain among them, they would have considered how closely England’s ancient constitution is intertwined with Christianity. For example, they would have looked up Her Majesty’s 1953 coronation ceremony, which included this exchange:

Archbishop: “Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?”

Queen: “All this I promise to do.”

Then they would have reminded themselves that the Queen is the statutory head of the Church of England, and ‘Defender of the Faith’ is part of her full title, to realise that Britain is indeed a Christian country constitutionally and historically.

And not just that. England is also part of Western culture, which is Christian for all intents and purposes. The English language, perhaps more than any other, was shaped by sacred texts, from the Prayer Book to the Kings James Bible. English music, like all Western music, was born in the church.

So yes, Britain is a Christian country any way you look at it, and the presence of numerous non-Christians here can’t change this situation even if they are in the majority.

What these intellectually challenged chaps really mean is that they lament this fact because they viscerally hate Christianity, along with our constitution generally and monarchy specifically. That is of course their privilege.

But the more they try to argue their case rationally, the more irrational they sound. Which is another word for stupid.

How anyone can take such gibberish seriously escapes me. But then the Brits have been brainwashed to think that trendy leftiness, ideally accompanied by rabid atheism, is a sign of intelligence. Conservatives are generally lampooned as being tweedy, senile colonels retired to the shires, where their lives are wholly circumscribed by hunting, shooting and port.

In the States, the image of a conservative is different. There the iconic picture is a gun-toting redneck, preferably from the South, who hates blacks, loves beer, never reads books without pictures in them, and y’ll have a nahs day now.

American lefties are, by contrast, portrayed in the similarly slanted media, and therefore popular mythology, as cultured, educated, brilliant, urban, urbane, multilingual and impeccably East Coast.

When George W. Bush was president, he effortlessly slotted into the former cliché, and the papers were densely filled with his malapropisms and solecisms. True enough, old Dubya was never the sharpest chisel in the box, but then we can’t expect intellectual attainment in a modern politician. That sort of thing would disqualify them from holding public office and actually prevent them from seeking one.

Obama is cut from the same cloth, even if its colour is different. Yet his idiocy is as studiously covered up as Dubya’s was shouted off the rooftops.

In all honesty, however, Obama could give his predecessor a good run for his money in the stupidity stakes. According to his public statements, there are 57 states in the USA, not 50, Canada has a president, Austrians speak Austrian, Afghans speak Afghan and the Malvinas is a different name for the Maldives.

This walking argument against reverse discrimination is routinely described as a law professor, whereas he was merely a locum instructor paid by the hour, and he’s lauded for having been president of the Harvard Law Review, even though he never published a single article of note there.

My American colleague (and countryman) Vladimir Kozlovsky suggests that Obama was elected to the post for the same reason he was elected president: because he’s black (actually half-black, but his mother doesn’t count) and handsome.

This is a highly objectionable and cynical view, made even more so by the obvious fact that it’s true. But then, as our own lot show so convincingly, propensity for stupidity is derived from neither race nor nationality.

Political convictions, however, demonstrably have something to do with it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day before Easter is a good time to ask this question, wouldn’t you say?

It’s also a good time to lament that this question needs to be asked at all. One would think that the answer is self-evident.

And so it was for the better part of 2,000 years. You could have asked anyone, say, 200 years ago, and you would have received an unequivocal answer:

A Christian is someone who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

Had you insisted on details, the same respondent could have simply said, “Read the text of the Nicene Creed. It’s all in there.”

These days following this advice is considerably easier than 200 years ago. Just tap ‘nicene creed’ (never mind the capitals) into your Google, push a button and out it comes: “I believe in one God…”

Alas, in common with such words as ‘liberalism’ (and other cognates of ‘liberty’), ‘conservatism’ and ‘marriage’, the word ‘Christian’ has become desemanticised. Or rather it now means so many different things as to mean nothing at all.

For example, the way my friend Dave uses it, the word means roughly the same thing as a conscientious social worker who may choose a church rather than the local ‘social’ as his base of operations. Or he may choose neither – just caring and sharing is enough.

(Actually, never mind Dave. He really doesn’t care about Christianity, however defined. His sole concern is staying in power, such as it is.

The word ‘Christian’ comes in handy when it offers a chance to outflank his proudly atheist opponents. If the word ‘animist’ could do the job better, Dave would be claiming that dancing around a totem pole is his favourite pastime.

And if he felt that cannibalism would serve his purpose better… well, you catch my drift.) 

Many people use the word ‘Christian’ simply to mean a good person. That makes one wonder what exactly is wrong with the words ‘good person’. Why do they need help from another term, that’s always more likely to confuse the issue?

And so forth – the lexical hole is getting deeper and deeper, yet people never stop digging.

This unfortunate tendency isn’t all that recent either. For example, in 1901 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Leo Tolstoy.

This represented an act of ultimate mercy: in, say, Elizabethan England, Tolstoy’s frenzied anti-Christian invective would have put him on a pyre faster than you could say ‘blasphemy’.

In the Russian Church, incidentally, excommunication didn’t mean expulsion or anathematising. It merely meant that the parishioner could no longer take communion – which for Tolstoy shouldn’t have been particularly onerous since he didn’t believe in all that nonsense anyway.

Yet he felt called upon to write his notorious Letter to the Synod, protesting that he was a true Christian and, implicitly, the truest of all. Tolstoy didn’t offer his definition of a Christian, but it can be easily inferred:   

“That I have rejected the church that calls itself Russian Orthodox,’ he writes, ‘is perfectly true… I’ve come to the conclusion that in theory the teaching of the church is a perfidious and harmful lie, while in practice it is a collection of the crudest superstitions and sorcery, hiding completely the entire meaning of Christian teaching… It is perfectly true that I reject the incomprehensible Trinity and the myth, these days meaningless, of the fall of the first man, the blasphemous story of a god born of a virgin to redeem the human race… You say that I reject all the rituals. That is perfectly true… This [the Eucharist] is horrible!”

If this is protest, methinks the writer doth protest too little. Every word in this ‘protest’ screams visceral hatred for the church and everything it stands for. Just look at the adjectives: ‘perfidious’, ‘harmful’, ‘crudest’, ‘meaningless’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘horrible’.

The rhetoric of Bolshevik cathedral-dynamiters had nothing on Tolstoy’s harangues. But the Bolsheviks had the advantage of never describing themselves as true Christians.

In other words, it’s possible to claim being a Christian not only when one sees the Church as merely an extension of social services, but even when one is maliciously hostile to it.

It’s getting too complicated for words. Do let’s keep it simple. Forgetting Tolstoy’s stupid hysterics, we must still realise that a ‘Christian’ means something different from a ‘good person’.

Not every good person is a Christian; not every Christian is a good person. The terms are too different to be interchangeable.

Thus terminological precision, if nothing else, demands that, in search of an answer to the question in the title, we go back to the Nicene Creed. Specifically, on this eve of the greatest day in the Christian calendar, to these words:

And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures,

And ascended into heaven,

And sitteth on the right hand of the Father.

And he shall come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead:

Whose kingdom shall have no end.

Happy Easter!

 

 

 

Jews leaving a Donetsk synagogue after Passover celebrations were given the good news.

No, I don’t mean the Gospel, which would have been appropriate, if perhaps tactless, at a time between Palm Sunday and Good Friday. In fact, the glad tidings came from a source not just non-Christian but decidedly anti-Christian.

The news was delivered in the shape of leaflets bearing the letterhead of INDEPENDENT DONETSK REPUBLIC, HEADQUARTERS.

Said republic declared its independence on 7 April, and its founding document was issued by Putin’s storm troopers… pardon me, I along with our media should be calling them ‘pro-Russian activists’, who occupied a government building in Donetsk – and continue to hold it in spite of yesterday’s triumph of Western diplomacy at Geneva.

Some of them did venture outside at Passover to keep the 15,000 Donetsk Jews on their toes, and the leaflet they used for that purpose deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

“Esteemed citizens of Jewish nationality:

“Since the leaders of the Ukraine’s Jewish community have supported the Bandera [Ukrainian nationalist leader murdered by the KGB in 1959.] Junta in Kiev, and have been hostile to the Orthodox Donetsk Republic and its citizens, the Headquarters of the Donetsk People’s Republic has decreed the following:

“All citizens of Jewish nationality over 16 years of age residing within the territory of the sovereign Donetsk Republic shall before 3 May, 2014, present themselves for registration to the acting Commissar for Nationalities at the Donetsk Regional Government offices, Room 514. The registration fee is 50 USD.

“You shall have on you the amount of 50 USD for registration fees, your internal passport for marking the confession of faith, documents listing family members, and also legal papers establishing title to all your real estate and means of transportation.

“Those guilty of attempting to avoid the registration shall have their citizenship revoked, followed by their enforced deportation from the Donetsk Republic and the confiscation of their property. ‘              

“SIGNED: Your People’s Governor Denis Pushilin”

An excellent document, that. The only thing missing there is the requirement that Donetsk Jews should henceforth sport a yellow star on their clothing.

That’s a pity, because such negligence goes against historical tradition of long standing. After all, the mandatory wearing of the yellow badge by all Jews was first introduced by a caliph of Baghdad as far back as the ninth century.

That pioneering effort has, however, been overshadowed by the more recent decree issued by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heidrich in 1941. Actually the later document deserves this primacy, largely due to its widely publicised consequences.

Also, the Donetsk republicans have reversed the time-honoured sequence of events. First, before issuing the demand for registration with subsequent sartorial embellishments, they should have passed the Donetsk Laws, establishing a firm parallel with the 1935 Nuremburg antecedent.

Because, if personal observation is anything to go by, Jews in Russia and adjacent areas tend to poison the Aryan-Slavic gene pool by entering into conjugal relations with chaste simon-pure Russian girls.

(Those you see plying the world’s oldest trade in London hotels may not be chaste in any physical sense – but by being simon-pure Russian they’re pristine metaphysically, and shame on you for being blind to such nuances.)

And – are you ready for this? – in most instances those Natashas and Tanias accept such attentions not only willingly but also enthusiastically. That just goes to show they can’t be trusted to resist the miasma emanating from those wily oversexed Hebrews. It’ll take the Donetsk Laws to protect their chastity and the native bloodstream.

Other than that, one ought to congratulate the government of the new republic and also its patron, SS-Obersturmbannführer… pardon me, KGB-Lieutenant-Colonel, Putin for abandoning subterfuge.

Honesty is a virtue, and we must be thankful to the Donetsk chaps for proudly wearing their true essence on their sleeves (before the Jews are made to wear theirs). If they are to be rebuked for anything, it’s the haste with which they then declared the leaflet to be fake.

Call me a cynic, but I can’t help thinking that the speedy denial was largely prompted by the thunderous gasp of international disgust that followed the event.

You see, Western taste buds have been weaned off that sort of thing, at least for the time being. Col. Putin, who in his professional capacity was trained to keep his finger on the Western pulse, knows this. So he must have rung his storm…, pardon me, pro-Russian activists, and told them not to jump the gun.

“Let me sort out this mess first, lads,” he must have said, “and then you can have your fun. But be discreet, for God’s sake, be clever. First arrange some preamble, of the sort practised in your region since time immemorial. Perhaps an exsanguinated Russian boy or a raped Russian girl… well, you don’t need me to tell you how to do those things.”

All fine and well, but I’m confused. Ever since the word Maidan seeped into most languages, hysterical Russian propaganda has kept banging on about all those fascists who ousted Putin’s stooge Yanukovych.

They’re all, scream Russian ‘independent’ papers, followers of Bandera and, by inference, Hitler. And don’t be misled, fellow Russians, by the large presence of Jews in the Maidan. These members of the Judaeo-Banderite conspiracy have been tricked by those secretly anti-Semitic rabbis who call themselves ‘the leaders of the Jewish community’. Those Judaeo-Banderites even claim that Ukrainian anti-Semitism is no worse than Russian.

It all makes perfect sense so far, wouldn’t you say? But then those impetuous Donetsk chaps have to throw a spanner into the works of Putin’s juggernaut. Suddenly it’s they who are the anti-Semites, they who invite overused parallels with the Nazis.

This reconfirms yet again the importance of proper planning and coordination. It also shows the importance of timing: Maundy Thursday wasn’t the best moment for the supposedly Orthodox republic to establish its Nazi credentials.

Unless, of course, they mean Orthodox Nazi, not Orthodox Christian.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Who says there’s nothing we can teach Americans? Here’s a valuable lesson our trans-Atlantic pupils would ignore at their peril:

Push Obamacare to its logical extreme, nationalise medical care, then start counting casualties, those killed by negligence and incompetence. They’ll multiply quickly.

Today’s exhibit, class, is Malcolm Green, millionaire Pembrokeshire businessman recently awarded an MBE for his charity work.

Mr Green underwent an abdominal operation and was recovering well. Suddenly his blood pressure headed south at an alarming speed, which often is a sign of internal bleeding.

An urgent operation was needed, yet the hospital staff took 12 hours to take Mr Green to an emergency ward. There he had to wait for a further five hours before the surgeon got to him.

By then it was too late: Mr Green had bled to death. This is a tragedy of course. But it’s more than just that.

It’s yet another object lesson, one of thousands the NHS obligingly provides every year. Free medical care is dear at the price.

In common with all socialist Leviathans it starts with a lie. For nothing in life is free, and medical care least of all.

‘Free’, to a semantic rigorist, used to mean something one didn’t have to pay for. To a modern Englishman it means something different.

If pressed, he’d admit that of course somebody has to pay for all those CAT scans and ECGs. Such things are expensive; and the more inefficiently provided, the dearer they get.

If patients don’t pay for them directly, the payment comes from the government, which can only make money the old-fashioned way: either from taxes or from borrowing, which ultimately is a hidden tax as well.

‘Free’ thus means that the transfer of money from patient to hospital is mediated by the state acting as a general contractor with megalomania.

But governments are less efficient than private enterprise. So we must assume that operations are more expensive when one pays for them through the government, whether one needs them or not, than they would be if one paid for them direct, and only when one needed them.

Yet when today’s Brits pay for state medicine, they don’t just pay for operations and scans. An ever-growing proportion of our money pays for the ever-growing state bureaucracy required to administer ‘free’ medical care, something for which we would pay less if medical care weren’t ‘free’.

Since steady growth of nationalised medicine is tantamount to the state extorting increasingly larger sums from the people, ‘free’ medical care places an ever-growing proportion of the nation’s finances and labour force under state control, thus increasing the power of the state over the individual.

Another ever-present feature of any socialist Leviathan is that it eventually shifts away from its declared raison d’être and towards its true inner imperative: making the people dependent on the state and therefore subservient to it.

In the old days, a hospital was managed by two people: head doctor and head nurse (called ‘matron’ in England, class – and you’re not paying attention, Barack), in other words by those directly involved in treating patients.

However, since we’ve already established that this is no longer the primary function of medical care, its management can no longer be entrusted to medical professionals.

Control has to pass over to those whose life’s work is devoted to advancing state power, which is to say bureaucrats. The shift may be slow initially, but it’s always accelerating and inexorable. Just like a snowball getting bigger as it rolls downhill, so do the administrative staffs of medical establishments grow at a faster and faster rate.

They bear titles like Director of Diversity, Director of Community Relations, Facilitator of Optimisation and Optimiser of Facilitation. Typically, none of them has any frontline medical experience, which is fine. The NHS isn’t mainly about medicine.

Incidentally, the same trend is observable in many other walks of life as well. That’s not surprising for, if it’s the state that sets the tone, sooner or later even ostensibly private concerns will start singing the same tune.

Hence the propagation of management courses, which evoke the fond memory of the Soviet nomenklatura. There it was The Marxism-Leninism Institute, here it’s assorted MBA programmes. In both instances the graduates are judged to be qualified to manage anything, from a symphony orchestra to a hospital.

There is, however, a subtle difference between a symphony orchestra and a hospital. The former may offend your aesthetic sensibilities; the latter can kill.

The drastic shift in managerial emphasis isn’t just unfortunate but inevitable. Sooner or later all institutions, whatever their declared purpose, revert to type. In the case of the NHS, patients are increasingly seen as annoying irritants getting in the way of the Leviathan’s real business.

Hardly a day goes by without a horrible tragedy like the one that befell Mr Green making the papers. This on top of hundreds (thousands?) that pass unnoticed and unpublicised.

Then again, even the explicit promise of the NHS isn’t excellence. It’s equality, equal medical care for all, the bloke who lives under the bridge and the wealthy Mr Green.

Just as people used to be regarded as equal before God, now they’re supposed to be equal before the state, which thereby assumes divine powers. Unlike God, however, the modern state isn’t loving and merciful. It’s self-serving and spivocratic.

Effectively it’s waging an undeclared war against all traditional certitudes, and any war claims casualties. Malcolm Green is the latest one of many, and many more to come.

 

 

What have the Romans ever done for us? As posed by Monty Python, the question was never meant to be serious.

The Romans have given us quite a lot, including some basic lessons in how to avoid war.

Back in the fourth or fifth century, when neither Russia nor the Ukraine existed, the Roman military thinker Vegetius wrote “Si vis pacem, para bellum”. If you want peace, prepare for war.

The saying became proverbial, and the Germans even blended the last two words together to name their 1913 MG14 machine gun. Perhaps they thought the weapon would prevent the impending war. More likely, they thought the gun would help them win it.

Neither thing happened, the machine gun became obsolete, and the word ‘parabellum’ moved on to describe some new pistol rounds. However, the lesson taught by the original words was still valid.

Unfortunately Western powers ignored it, and parabellum rounds were then used by the Germans to pierce uncountable heads, many of them belonging to innocent victims.

The lesson is still there, and it’s still being ignored. If you want peace, prepare for war. The adage holds just as true in reverse: if you want war, prepare for peace.

The proverb works so unfailingly both ways because predators are always on the prowl. They may be outnumbered by their potential victims, but that doesn’t matter.

Predators always look for an opening to pounce, but the potential victims, especially if no one has pounced on them for a while, grow soft.

They don’t want war and they don’t prepare for it. They thus vindicate Vegetius by making sure it’s going to come. Examples of this are numerous throughout history, none so dramatic as the Second World War.

In the run-up to it Europe was cursed with two major predators, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, both dreaming of world conquest and gearing up for it.

Western nations, still demob-happy after the previous carnage, didn’t prepare for war. That’s why they were denied peace.

The two predators set the world on fire by joining forces to attack Poland, with the West unable to respond properly until most of Europe was overrun and German planes (flying on Soviet fuel) were raining bombs (many of them Soviet-made) on London.

Since at some point the two predators jumped on each other’s throats, some four years and 50 million deaths later their number was halved: Nazi Germany was put down.

Yet the Soviet Union, the other equally culpable predator, survived and thrived. It’s still going strong, even though for a short while, some 20 years or so, the wolf had shed its grey fur and was sporting a designer sheepskin.

The West again went demob-happy; again it refused to prepare for war. Even the United States, the backbone of NATO, was cutting its defence budgets drastically. In Europe they were almost peace-dividended out of existence (the average EU spend on defence is a puny 1.4 percent of the budget). 

The diminution of arsenal was accompanied by the erosion of will, with the West again growing soft and complacent. Once that became obvious, down into the bin went the designer sheepskin – the old predator, its fangs bared, has re-emerged.

Ever since the transfer of power from the Communist party to the KGB (the operation going by the codenames of ‘glasnost’, ‘perestroika’ and ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’), Russia has been run by the inner sanctum of the KGB, at present fronted by Col. Putin.

It was these men, rather than the token Russian government at large, who used their professional expertise to assess the situation and decide that the time had come to put the Humpty Dumpty of the old Soviet Union together again. For starters.

The decision to “probe Europe with a bayonet”, in Lenin’s phrase, was specifically taken by a small cabal including Col. Putin himself, Sergei Ivanov, his chief of staff, Nikolai Patrushev, head of the security council, and Aleksandr Bortnikov, the current director of the KGB (codename FSB). All of them served together in the KGB Leningrad branch in the 70s and 80s.

In their professional capacity these officers judged that the West was unprepared both physically and morally to stop the predator in its tracks. So far their judgment has been vindicated.

Yet again the West is inviting war by failing to prepare for it. Yet again Westerners are asking the same question they asked in 1939: “Will he or won’t he?”

Wrong question. The right one would be “How can we make sure he doesn’t and, if he still does, how can we wipe him out?” But we lack strength, cerebral, muscular or testicular, either to pose this question or certainly to answer it properly.

“It’s déjà vu all over again,” in the words of the American answer to Mrs Malaprop, the baseball coach Yogi Berra. Let’s just pray it won’t be exactly that.

 

This is the message delivered by our Chancellor, who claims that the modest upturn in Britain’s economic performance was caused by his cosmetic cuts in some tax rates.

In other words, well, see the title above. I’m sure when you first heard the news it hit you with the power of a nuclear blast. Your mouth stayed agape for hours and respiration was coming in stops and starts.

Now that you’ve got your breath back, here’s some more staggering news:

Night follows day. Water is wet. The sun is hot. Hold on, I’d better stop here lest you gasp yourself into a coma.

The point is that we don’t need politicians or economists to tell us something that’s blindingly obvious to anyone with a modicum of common sense.

In fact, whenever economics ventures into an area unreachable by common sense, it turns into self-perpetuating gibberish. For economics is nothing but a study of human behaviour at its most basic.

Everybody who wasn’t born rich knows he has to work hard in order to eat. That requirement satisfied, he needs to work even harder to create a better life for himself and his family.

Working hard is, well, hard. People need an incentive to do so, and the more of their money they get to keep, the greater the incentive to work harder and make more.

Hardly cutting-edge stuff, isn’t it? Neither is the simple deduction that the harder people work, the more they produce. And the more they produce, the higher the tax revenue they generate.

However, if the government gets greedy and tries to extract a higher percentage of people’s income in various taxes, the whole process begins to work in reverse.

People have less incentive to work hard, their output shrinks and so does the tax base. And when the government gets downright extortionist, the most enterprising and hardworking people flee for sunnier economic climes.

Seriously, do we need economists to tell us all this? Still, it’s nice when they do.

First came Arthur Laffer who made a startling observation. If you take two tax rates, 100 percent and 0 percent, they both produce the same tax revenue: zero.

Taking these two rates as the starting points, Laffer grabbed a napkin while having dinner with Reagan’s advisors and drew a curve plotting various points between the extremes. His conclusion was that the government would optimise its tax revenues at a flat tax rate somewhere between 17 and 20 percent.

Another American economist, Richard Rahn, drew another curve showing that when government spending increases beyond 20-25 percent of GDP, long-term economic growth will suffer.

The briefest of looks at the greatest economic success stories of recent times, especially those of the ‘Asian tigers’ Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, with Japan of 20 years ago thrown in for good measure, will vindicate both curves.

Those countries all kept their taxation reasonable and their government spending under 25 percent. Starting from an abysmally low point, in a few short post-war years they prospered to (or beyond) the level of the great industrial nations.

Similar, if lower-scale, stories were later told by some newly liberated Eastern European countries, such as Poland and Estonia.

Opposite and equally compelling examples have been provided by Hollande’s France where extortionist tax rates have driven every economic indicator down and the best income producers out, with London becoming the fifth largest French city.

Yet our Exchequer continues to defy both curves, if with slightly less vigour than under Labour.

Our public spending is somewhere around 45 percent of GDP, and actually higher if you discount some creative accounting practices for which all modern governments are so justly famous.

And middle classes, known to be the greatest producers of tax revenues, are being taxed at over half of their income, all in.

Rather than patting himself on the back, the Chancellor should try to explain why he still taxes and spends at a level incompatible with sound economic practices. Hasn’t he seen all those rather compelling curves? Why is he bucking human nature?

This is precisely the reason Keynesian economics fails. Keynes advocated a short-term boost in government spending as a way out of recession or stagnation.

The assumption is that the government will put the ailing economy on the intravenous drip of this powerful stimulant and, once the patient has recovered, it’ll pull the needle out. All fine in theory, but then human nature kicks in.

Any modern government will happily increase public spending. But reducing it would mean reducing its own power, and no modern politicians will accept that – it’ll go against their nature.

This brings us to the real reason all European governments continue to tax at such suicidal rates and spend at, or above, 50 percent of GDP. They don’t do this to increase the people’s economic performance. They do so to increase their control over the people.

There are three basic control techniques known to politics. One is slave-master, based on violence. Another is guru-flock, based on brainwashing persuasion. The third is parent-child, rooted in the latter’s dependence on the former. Most modern governments use all three, but in different proportions.

If we look at so called democracies, their principal crowd-control stratagem is burgeoning paternalism, underpinned by propaganda and thought control. Violence is kept in reserve, though it’s getting to be used more and more, with thought and word criminalised increasingly more often.

The most important part of paternalism is economic. Putting it crudely, the more of our money the government takes away and spends (in however wasteful a fashion), the greater our dependence on the state, and the greater its power over us. High taxes also have a punitive purpose: just like a parent uses a rod not to spoil an unruly child, so does the state use tax rates to punish those who dare try to be independent of it.

So Messrs Laffer, Rahn and their ilk can draw all the curves they want. They’ll run out of napkins before modern politicians run out of resolve to pursue their inner imperative – state, and therefore their own, power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ed Miliband has my sympathy. His bulging eyes suggest he may be suffering from a thyroid disorder, and that sort of thing can make one deluded.

Specifically, he appears to have delusions of grandeur – to the point of thinking he is some kind of deity, possibly the Almighty himself.

It’s hard to interpret the remarks he has made on faith in any other way. But judge for yourself.

First Ed said he didn’t believe in God, which is par for the Labour course. But then he claimed he still had ‘faith’.

Now everyone has faith in something, even animals do. A dog has faith in its power to keep intruders away by barking. A cat has faith in its ability to outrun a dog. Both have faith in their owner’s commitment to feeding them.

But when a man uses the word ‘faith’ in the same sentence as ‘God’, then he must be talking about some sort of religious faith. So what’s Ed’s? Thought you’d never ask:

“In terms of faith for me, it’s a faith about how you change the world. And that is actually true for a lot of religious people as well.”

Thanks for making it clear, Ed, and in such stylish English. There is no God, so it’s Ed Miliband’s remit to change the world.

But a slight correction, if I may. ‘A lot of religious people’ don’t think they can change the world. A lot of lunatics do.

‘Religious people’ set much less grandiose tasks for themselves: keeping faith in God and living according to his commandments. Whether or how God will then choose to change the world is entirely up to him.

What Ed effectively says is that he has faith not in God but in himself. This activates a simple syllogism: Only God can change the world. Ed can change the world. Ergo, Ed is God.

Now that we’ve deduced that fact, let’s acknowledge that Ed isn’t alone in suffering from this delusion – madmen seldom are. Loonie bins are full of Jesus Christs, Napoleons and Hitlers.

Ed’s co-sufferers are much more numerous, but they’re all children of the same parent: the Enlightenment. That catastrophic development was all about knocking God out of the edifice of Western civilisation and pretending that man himself is big enough to fill the hole thus formed.

The most salient thing man has demonstrated since then is his ability to do murder on an ever-accelerating scale. But there are gradations within that talent, as there are within any other, and socialists, whether national or international, are without close seconds.

I’m not suggesting that Ed has personally perpetrated any crimes – only that his devout allegiance to that pernicious doctrine makes him an accessory after the fact. It’s really that allegiance that he tried to communicate so awkwardly by dragging God in.

Having demonstrated his grasp of theological nuances, Ed proceeded to establish his credentials as both historian and logician.

His intention, he said, is to become “the first Jewish Prime Minister”. Ed has probably heard of Benjamin Disraeli, who definitely served as Prime Minister to Queen Victoria. Hence one has to surmise that, according to Ed, Disraeli doesn’t qualify as a Jew.

True enough, Disraeli didn’t espouse Judaism. But then neither does Ed, which doesn’t prevent him from regarding himself as a Jew.

Of course Ed made his profound remarks on a visit to Israel, where a Jewish convert to another religion isn’t viewed as a Jew. Disraeli was baptised into the Church of England at age 12 and, if he were alive today, he wouldn’t be automatically entitled to an Israeli passport.

This is a perfectly valid, if not indisputable, view. But the thing is that Ed doesn’t share it: “I’m Jewish by birth origin and it’s a part of who I am,” he said in the next breath.

This presupposes a purely ethnic view of Jewishness, which is as valid as the one wholly based on religion. The problem is that the two views are mutually exclusive.

Disraeli was Sephardic Jewish on both sides of his family, just as Ed’s family is Ashkenazi. They’re both ‘Jewish by birth origin’. Disraeli believed in God, Ed doesn’t. But he tries to disavow Disraeli’s Jewishness on the basis of a strictly clerical definition.

Such a disastrous failure to think logically is sometimes symptomatic of a mental disorder, but we oughtn’t try to medicalise everything. Simple common or garden idiocy is a much more frequent and plausible cause.

I for one welcome this explanation for it tallies with my lifelong observation that lefties aren’t only misguided but actually stupid. Or else so wicked that they’ll say or do anything to advance their cause.

One can only hope that Ed won’t become Prime Minister at all, Jewish or otherwise. That way he’ll be spared querying on such subjects as Judaism, faith, history and logic. And we’ll be spared the calamity he’d certainly visit on Britain given the chance.

 

I don’t know what possessed me. A friend e-mailed me, attaching a recent article by the American conservative pundit Pat Buchanan. The article asks a question that seemingly presupposes a yes answer: “Is God on the side of Putin’s Russia?”

Since such questions unfailingly make me see red, I replied at a greater length than my normal blogs. Not to let all that impassioned effort go to waste, I’m reproducing it here.

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Pat Buchanan is a good man, but either he’s getting too old or, more likely, he suffers from the traditional Western malaise of not being able to see through Russia’s knavish tricks.

Even to ask the question he poses in his piece betokens woeful ignorance liberally laced with wishful thinking.

What exactly does Buchanan chalk up in Putin’s credit column? That he doesn’t allow homomarriage and homosexual propaganda?

This, ipso facto, means nothing in terms of assessing Putin’s regime. If this were a crucial criterion, we’d have to praise, say, Hitler and Osama bin Laden who didn’t favour homosexuality either.

Soviet Russia, incidentally, was the first country to decriminalise homosexuality – in 1917, when the bolsheviks were already murdering people on a scale never before seen in history. Then they recriminalised it in 1936. Are we going to evaluate either period on this basis? Not if we have half a brain.

A Western politician who campaigns for homomarriage is by definition an unprincipled, possibly evil, definitely not very bright, opportunist. But that doesn’t automatically mean that any non-Western politician pursuing a different agenda is on the side of the angels.

So what else? Oh yes, Putin has made a couple of speeches Pope Benedict would have happily signed. That, however, doesn’t make Putin a Benedict clone.

Russia and America are the only major countries that have for centuries been driven by messianic zeal. Old Pat certainly is a great champion of the ‘manifest destiny’ ideology of American exclusivity and he must be detecting a kindred spirit in Putin.

It’s kind of him to explain what Third Rome means, but that claim was based on Ivan III marrying the Byzantine princess Sophia Paleologue just as Byzantium was going to the dogs (or rather to the Turks). Thus the claim that Russia was thenceforth the flag-bearer of Eastern Christianity, and hence the modifier ‘Holy’ often attached to the country’s name.

In practical terms this led to chronic hostility towards the West and occasional attempts to defend Orthodox Christian lands, such as Bulgaria, usually from Muslim attacks.

But this ideology went much further as a unifying slogan, a sort of justification for things like serfdom, deadly famines (on average, one every seven years), general internal oppression. Russia was Holy, God was on her side, so it seemed churlish to complain that 80 percent of the population were slaves in all but name.

I’m not going to go deep into Russian Christianity here. Suffice it to say that it was always tinged with paganism, Eastern Gnostic mysticism and anti-clericalism. In my day peasants still jumped over and danced around camp fires on high holidays. All sorts of diabolic sects, such as the Flagellants and Emasculators, always thrived (Rasputin, for example, was a Siberian Flagellant who quickly developed a huge following among court aristocracy, including the royal family).

One way or the other, it took Russia’s ‘holy’ peasants, in round numbers, about five minutes after the bolshevik coup to start looting and destroying churches, and murdering priests en masse. About 40,000 were murdered in all sorts of imaginative ways (I’ll spare you the details) on Lenin’s watch, and Stalin ran the score up to about 100,000. Add to this whole parishes gassed or machinegunned, and you’ll realise that this sort of thing would have been impossible without millions of erstwhile Christians lending a helping hand.

Yet the need for a messianic ideology was more pressing than ever, what with millions being murdered, starved to death or slowly (usually not that slowly) killed in labour camps. We all know what the new ideology was, but bolshevism’s key premise, and promise, was a world revolution.

Lenin banged on about that from the very beginning, saying things like “Soviet Russia won’t survive more than 10-20 years unless the whole world joined her.” The world didn’t and Soviet Russia didn’t survive – as a Soviet state. That is, the name and the set of shibboleths remained, as the ideological raison d’être, but in 1937-1938 Stalin murdered most of those who believed in that evil nonsense in earnest.

Instead, roughly at the time of his pact with Hitler, he began to weave the old nationalist strands into the ideology. The Church, along with the Holy Russia bit, had to be taken off the mothballs during the war, when it turned out that the army, mostly made up of those who had lost their families to bolshevik brutality, simply wouldn’t fight for bolshevism.

The catastrophe of 1941, when Red Army soldiers were deserting in droves, the Germans took 2.5 million prisoners in the first two months, and two more million shortly thereafter, spoke volumes. More than 1.5 million ended up wearing German uniforms (under the tsars, not a single serf soldier wore the French uniform in 1812).

The Orthodox Church was legalised, and its hierarchy staffed with priests at least loyal to the NKVD (as the KGB then was), more typically its agents. That provided the carrot, while mass executions both at the front and in the rear acted as the whip. The Soviets executed 157,000 of their own soldiers by tribunal verdicts, and at least three times as many by summary shootings and hangings. Altogether the Red Army suffered heavier casualties to its own side than the British army suffered altogether.

After the war was won at a horrific cost, the Church remained legal – and obedient. The Soviets kept it on tap for future need, which duly arrived when they decided to abandon the communist jargon and present a more civilised face to the West, the better to dupe it.

You’ll notice that, unlike Germany that repented Nazi crimes and thereby at least partially atoned for them, Russia did no such thing. The crimes weren’t repented, which means that all those glasnosts, perestroikas, free markets and democracies were no more than window dressing.

But since Russia can’t be without a messianic ideology, the only one available was the old imperial chauvinism underpinned by the Third Rome effluvia.

Just as 70 years earlier millions of yesterday’s Christians instantly began to murder priests, so now yesterday’s atheists instantly flocked into churches, sporting the same pious expressions they had the day before reserved for party rallies. Russian chieftains, from Gorbachev to Putin, led the way – even though at times they hadn’t been briefed that Russian Orthodox Christians cross themselves from right to left.

The church hierarchy played its part, especially since by now it was fully staffed with KGB/FSB agents. For example, all three candidates in the last patriarchate election fit that description, including the current patriarch Kiril (KGB codename ‘Mikhailov’). Those interested in details should read the two-volume Mitrokhin Archives published in the West a few years ago.

This isn’t to say that there is no genuine Christian revival in Russia. There is, but not within the official Church that’s in bed with the secret police. There exists a parallel, formerly underground, Orthodox Church, but by far the greatest numbers are drawn into various charismatic, and in my view dubiously Christian, sects introduced some 20 years ago by visiting American preachers.

Just as Putin was, is and will for ever remain a KGB thug (he said so himself: “There’s no such thing as ex-KGB. This is for life.”), so will every word out of his mouth be a lie enunciated mostly for the benefit of credulous Westerners, of the kind Lenin called ‘useful idiots’.

He is not, as Buchanan seems to believe, a “champion of traditional Christian values”. He is an utterly evil and corrupt tyrant trying to rally the Russian masses to his messianic banners, while at the same time attempting to build some following in the West, chiefly drawn from conservatives who have despaired of their own spivocrats so much that they’ll swallow any canard emanating from the mouth of a KGB thug.

In most immediate terms, Putin is clearly determined to rebuild the Soviet Union in all its past glory, a drama whose first act we’re currently watching with stoic detachment. To this end he has intensified the propaganda effort, of which claims to traditional Christianity are the most important part.

This way he hopes to disarm exactly the same segments of Western public opinion that in the past were staunchly anti-communist. Take care of those, and the lefties will take care of themselves, this seems to be his thinking. So when the final push comes, it’ll seem downright anti-Christian to resist.

To see good men like Buchanan falling for all this evil nonsense is most upsetting. He must be truly desperate, as we all are. But Putin’s kleptofascist regime isn’t the answer. It’s not God but Satan who’s on Putin’s side.

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