Month: February 2014

Seems like Angela Merkel hasn’t reached the age of consent yet.

I’m not using the word in the same sense in which Patricia ‘Eight’s Too Late’ Hewitt uses it, and nor am I hinting at any impropriety in the relationship between Frau Merkel and Dave.

Actually I could if I wanted to: pasted all over the papers are pictures of Dave kissing Angie on the cheek – though not the same Angie’s cheek that Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has accused Dave of kissing as a sum total of his policy.

On the other hand, the same pictures show Angie’s strained expression and her successful attempt to keep her lips out of the way. So even if Dave harbours indecent thoughts about Angie’s cheeks, wherever on her body they could be found, she won’t encourage him.

No, it’s not like that at all. Dave simply wants to be Angie’s friend. More to the point, he wants Angie to be his friend. Because friends help each other out of a bind, that’s what friendship is all about.

“My love!” said Dave. “Liebchen! I want you! I need you! I can’t have any life – any political life – without you! Please consent to be my friend! Meine Freundin! Give me a sign, a teensy-weensy sign that you’re relenting. One sign, or perhaps two or three?”

“Nein,” said Angie.

“Nine signs? Even better!” Dave put his hand on Angie’s beefy arm and reached for her cheek again (her facial cheek, that is, whatever that dastardly Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says).

“Nein, dummkopf,” winced Angie pushing Dave aside. “N-e-i-n spells nein. Zat’s ze German for no. No signs. None. Zilch. Bupkes. Nichts.”

“But Lieschen,” insisted Dave, showing off his fluent German. “Can’t you see I’m in dire straits? I need you to love me. No one else does. Boys and girls who live in the left wing say I don’t love you enough. Those in the right wing say I love you too much. And then all those Europeans land in Britain like bluebottles on a warm cowpat…”

 “Was ist das?” demanded Angie, sounding like a stern mistress – school mistress, that is.

“Well, you see, Liebchen,” explained Dave. In the last election I promised to ‘slash net migration by tens of thousands’.”

“Sehr gut!” smiled Angie. “Das ist a bloody gut idea. Zey come, zey collect benefits, ze economy goes kaput.”

“Yes, well, it does indeed,” agreed Dave ruefully. “Except I haven’t.”

“You haven’t vhat?”

“Slashed the damn thing, that’s what. In fact, last year net migration went up by a third.”

“Not my problem,” replied Angie firmly. “Talk to ze Nigerian Chancellor. Or Indian. Vy me?”

“Well, there’s the rub, Liebchen…”

“You’re not rubbing me, you Irregeführter… zat’s pervert to you….”

“No, Liebling, I mean that’s the problem. You see, net migration from your EU has gone up even more, by forty percent. We must do something about that blasted free movement of labour…”

“Labour is freely moving into Downing Street,” quipped Angie with the wit for which her compatriots are so justly famous. Dave made himself chuckle politely.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “I need to do something about it. Or rather to be seen to be doing something. That clown Nigel Farage is braying for my blood, that cadaver Vince is being sarcastic, and as to my parliamentary party, oy vey…”

“Zat’s not Deutsch,” said Angie. “Zat’s Jüdisch.”

“Well, you know what I mean. If you don’t show your love immediately, pigs will fly before I’m re-elected.”

“Schweinen don’t fly,” corrected Angie.

“Exactly. That’s a figure of speech. Means if I don’t win some concessions from you, Liebling, it’s lecture circuit for me in 2015…”

“Listen, Dave,” said Angie. “Du bist ein hübscher Junge and all zat… You’re a handsome boy, and I vish I could help… But, brace yourself Liebchen, I’m in love viz someone else. His name is José Manuel, and he tells me I can only love you if all 28 members get up and salute…”

“But they never will!”

“Afraid so,” commiserated Angie. ‘But ve can’t go against Ordnung. Ordnung is important. But you’re a clever Junge, you’ll think of somesing.”

Angie walked out, leaving Dave in despair. What is he going to do? A solution came to him in a flash. Dave took out his I-Phone and speed-dialled his Director of Communications.

“Craig? It’s Dave,” he said.

“The bitch gave me a run-around, just like you said she would. But tell you what, I’ve got an idea.

“Why don’t you get those hacks you’ve got on tap and tell them I was misquoted… Well, you know, during the campaign… Tell them I actually promised to boost net migration, not slash it. They just got it wrong…

“Yes, I know it’s thin… So think of something thick – and none of your stupid jokes about Frau Merkel.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Independent judiciary is the cornerstone of English polity, and has been for centuries. Technically speaking, it’s still independent, but of what exactly?

It’s true that a government official can’t easily tell a judge what sentence would be appropriate in a case. Nor is it likely that a judge would be told to favour either the prosecution or the defence.

However, as I suggested yesterday, our judges aren’t independent of a Zeitgeist that communicates with them in imperative ways.

One way is a direct, politically motivated diktat from the EU, whence 80 percent of our new laws come. Another is an equally political pressure applied by the legislature, which is not always driven by the purest of motives.

But perhaps the greatest weight of pressure comes from modern inversions of traditional certitudes. These may not undermine the institutional independence of our judiciary, but they certainly compromise its independence of thought.

Yesterday is a case in point. Last May two Muslim fanatics (who incidentally were raised as Christians by their Nigerian parents) hacked the Fusilier Lee Rigby to death, having first run him down with a car.

If you need a clinching argument for reinstating the death penalty, this is it. But even to suggest this is tantamount to branding oneself as a reactionary fossil who himself would be a prime candidate for the gallows, should that option become available.

For the first 1,965 years since the Incarnation, the inhabitants of these Isles never regarded the death penalty as a cruel and unusual punishment. It was understood that murder sent destructive waves throughout the community, and their amplitude could only be attenuated by just punishment commensurate with the crime.

Moreover, society believed that the death of the body wasn’t as catastrophic as perdition, the death of the soul. In this belief society followed the teaching of another famous, now largely forgotten, reactionary: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul…”

Before going to the block, a murderer was given a chance to repent, ask God for forgiveness and die with the hope that his soul would be saved – even though his body was no longer welcome to tread the earth.

It took the abandonment of Christ for mankind to grasp the true meaning of Christian morality. Since we now know that there’s no God, no soul and no afterlife, depriving the vilest of murderers of his earthly existence has become unthinkable: nothing is worse than physical death to modern barbarians.

They call it progress; I’d call it something else if decorum didn’t prohibit swearing in print. Be that as it may, these particular murderers were punished to the full limit of the law. One of them was given a whole-life tariff, the other will serve a minimum of 45 years.

So far so good, even though the European Court of Human Rights takes a dim view of life meaning life and it’s seldom bashful in letting its displeasure be known.

But then Mr Justice Sweeney had his say, explaining the verdict. He accused the defendants of betraying… their humanity? elementary decency? Judaeo-Christian morality on which our laws are based? their country?

Not at all. The evil murder constituted, according to the judge, “a betrayal of Islam and of the peaceful Muslim communities.”

One of the murderers screamed, “It is not a betrayal of Islam, you don’t know anything about Islam!” And you know what? He was right and the judge was wrong.

The other defendant reinforced his friend’s statement by shouting, “I swear by Allah: Britain, America will never have any safety!” Now that’s more like it. This is really in keeping with both the spirit and letter of Islam, of which Justice Sweeney is so woefully ignorant. To wit:

“Slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out… if they attack you there, then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.”

“Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you.”

“Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.”

“Those who believe do battle for the cause of Allah; and those who disbelieve do battle for the cause of idols. So fight the minions of devil.”

There are 107 verses in the Koran unequivocally calling for the murder of infidels and apostates, plus another 41 preaching holy war and world conquest. True enough, there are also some other verses preaching peace.

But almost all those came early in the book, before Mohammed moved to Medina and hardened his position. According to Islamic law the later sanguinary verses ‘abrogate’ the earlier ones, invalidating them in case of a conflict.

Thus scriptural support for the judge’s assertion of the peaceful nature of Islam looks rather shaky, not to say nonexistent. Moreover, the blood-soaked history of the last 1,400 years shows that Muslims practise what Mohammed preached – you don’t need me to give you a list of clashes between Christendom and the Islamic world.

Why, 90 percent of armed conflicts currently under way anywhere in the world, from Indonesia and India to Africa and the Middle East, involve Islam. A betrayal of Islam, Your Honour? More likely faithfulness to it.

If queried, Justice Sweeney will probably admit he knows all this. After all, few people can advance to the bench without possessing some basic education. And yet he felt called upon to utter that nonsensical statement.

By the same token, few people can advance to the bench without possessing political skills. Prime among them is a weathervane’s sensitivity to which way the wind is blowing – and the current direction is strictly towards multi-culti political correctness.

All religions are equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. Since some of them are manifestly religions of peace, they all have to be. Saying some aren’t may mean causing offence to a minority, and this is the worst crime there is.

In this instance, public pressure was such that his sensitive nose didn’t prevent Justice Sweeney from imposing the best available verdict. In a less publicised case, the result could be different – in many instances results already are different, with murderers getting derisory slaps on the wrist.

Which brings back the original question. Just how independent is our judiciary?

Allegiance is a two-way street: we owe it to the government, and in return the government owes us protection from external and internal enemies.

This simple arrangement has been around for a while. In a 1608 case it was stated that “[A]s the subject oweth to the King his true and faithful ligeance and obedience, so the Sovereign is to govern and protect his subjects…. Therefore it is truly said that protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem.”

This principle lies at the foundation of the state – each side has to hold its end of the arrangement, for otherwise it’s unclear why we need a state at all. It follows that any state that fails to protect us can no longer expect our loyalty.

Protection in this context means that the main – some will say the only truly legitimate – function of our government is to defend British subjects from foreign enemies and to protect each subject’s person and property from domestic criminals.

Enter the modern British government that clearly sees its role in merely extracting taxes from us without offering anything in return (at least to the taxpayers). This means the state is taking our money on false pretences. Put a simpler way, the state is a crook.

Two legal cases have put this point beyond much doubt this week. In one, Andrew Young, a man driven by civic responsibility, told a young chap not to ride his bicycle on the pavement.

Lewis Gill, the cyclist’s friend currently on parole for robbery, punched Mr Young without the slightest provocation and killed him. What do you think this pugilistic feat is worth in years of imprisonment (keep in mind we no longer have the death penalty, it’s just too awful for our delicate sensibilities even to contemplate)?

Life without parole? Life with a 40-year tariff? Sounds about fair? Not to the presiding Judge Cutler it didn’t.

“I bear in mind your early guilty plea,” he said to the murderer in his concluding statement. “I accept there is no pre-meditated element and provocation does exist,” he added.

Cutler then sentenced the murderous thug to four years. Counting the time already served, he’ll be out in two years – suitably pumped up in the prison gym and no doubt ready to kill someone else.

That’s it then. A mild reproach qualifies as provocation to murder. And a 20-year-old man throwing a punch strong enough to kill a victim didn’t pre-meditate to kill. Presumably this means he didn’t mount his bike fully intent to murder someone in passing. It just happened. We’d call it an act of God, except that Richard Dawkins has explained to us that no God exists.

It’s pure conjecture, but Judge Cutler may have seen other extenuating circumstances in his mind, clearly informed by another religion, that of political correctness.

The murderer was black and he was riding a bicycle. The former entitles him to compensation for all the wrongs done to his race by the victim’s, albeit in a rather distant past. The latter means he was interrupted in the act of saving our planet.

Though no explicit law exists yet spelling these out as mitigation, Judge Cutler must have been attuned to the osmotic emanations of the modern ethos. If you have another explanation for this gross miscarriage of justice, I’d like to hear it.

In a parallel development, the IRA murderer John Downey was arrested last year for the July 1982 nail bomb atrocity that killed four and injured 31 others.

But convicted terrorist Downey was told yesterday that he wouldn’t face prosecution because of a letter mistakenly sent to him in 2007 saying he wasn’t wanted by police – despite a warrant for his arrest existing since 1983.

This wasn’t a one-off error. Nearly 200 suspected IRA terrorists on the run have received  similar letters, effectively granting them an amnesty under a deal struck by Tony Blair and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams.

The deal meant surrender to terrorists, but hey – all those horrible things Oliver Cromwell wrought in Ireland in 1649 must entitle nail bombers to lenience in 2014.

On the one hand it’s good to see that HMG is capable of keeping its word, no matter how criminally obscene. On the other hand, one can’t help noticing that our leaders’ commitment to honesty isn’t always as manifest as in letting murderers go.

Why, we can safely assume that Tony-Dave et al lie whenever their lips are moving. I could keep you awake into wee hours of the morning just listing campaign promises they not only broke, but issued in the full knowledge they’d break them.

We don’t seem to hold this against them – that’s how the game is played, and only a naïve man will expect veracity from today’s lot. But by the same token we wouldn’t have held it against them had they broken the promise not to prosecute mass murderers.

If someone did blame them, they could justifiably plead insanity (I don’t think craven spivery is recognised as a valid legal plea). We’d happily let them off without as much as a warning.

Protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem. Protection entails allegiance and allegiance, protection. They clearly knew something in the reign of James I we’ve forgotten in the reign of Elizabeth II.

Such amnesia notwithstanding, the government, Tory, Labour, hybrid, whatever, has forfeited any moral right to our allegiance. A few more cases like these, and it’ll forfeit the legal right as well.

 

 

Normally I vary my topics from one day to the next, but the events in the Ukraine are so momentous that it would be frivolous to write about anything else.

By and large, the press is treating the Ukraine as a proxy in a confrontation between Russia and the EU. That may be, but it’s a curious confrontation, for Russia wins whoever the ostensible winner will ultimately be.

There are two possible scenarios on offer, with a few subplots.

Scenario 1 is that the Ukraine rejoins the Soviet Union (by whatever name Col. Putin favours), either as a constituent republic or, more likely, an obedient ally.

Scenario 2 is that the Ukraine forms a partnership with the EU, either as a full member or, more likely, a dependent adjunct.

In Scenario 1, Col. Putin will be an instant winner. A de facto reunification of Russia and the Ukraine would constitute a significant step towards undoing what Putin sees as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, the collapse of the USSR.

This would create a monolithic bloc of the three Slavic components of the USSR, Belarus being the third and already in the fold. Add to this Kazakhstan with its tremendous natural resources, and Putin’s immediate goal would have been achieved there and then.

But it wouldn’t stop there. All other Soviet republics, with the exception of the three Baltic ones, would immediately lose whatever leverage they have vis-à-vis Putin’s Zollverein. Never completely independent of Russia anyway, they’d be drawn into an even narrower circle of hell than the one they occupy currently.

The Soviet Union would rise like Phoenix in all but name, and Col. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin would justifiably feel he’s as much of an emperor as Col. Nikolai Alexandrovich Romanov (commonly known as Nicholas II) ever was.

This much has been pointed out by numerous commentators, displaying variable command of historical and geopolitical facts but an invariably accurate grasp of the possible ramifications.

Where a void exists is in the analysis of Scenario 2, which admittedly is less straightforward.

The starting point of this analysis ought to be an accurate take on Putin’s mentality, and that of his whole Mafioso clique. This was formed not by Russian but by Soviet imperial aspirations.

The difference is telling. Though the Russian Empire had seen itself as the Third Rome since the fifteenth century, before it actually became an empire, her ambitions never included global domination.

Soviet ambitions did, as revealed by the USSR national emblem featuring a hammer and sickle superimposed on the globe. Even Soviet songs incessantly hailed the coming of a new era, with every country in the world added to the existing Soviet republics.

Col. Putin’s sponsoring organisation was at the cutting end of this strategy, both as its formulator and executor. It’s naïve to think that, now he has found himself at the helm, he’ll abandon the strategy faithfully pursued by his illustrious predecessors, such as Beria, Shelepin, Andropov and Gorbachev.

The EU is clearly seen as the lynchpin of this strategy, a much more promising one than the USSR. Starting with Gorbachev, all post-Soviet chieftains have been dropping broad hints to this effect.

It was Gorbachev who first referred, in his 1994 Nobel lecture, to “our common European home”. However, he seemed to be rather hazy on what constitutes Europe. Specifically, Gorbachev spoke of  “…the European space from the Atlantic to the Urals…”. “Since it includes the Soviet Union,” he added, “which reaches the Pacific, it extends over the nominal geographic borders…”

Speaking in unison, Gen. Shevardnadze, former Soviet Foreign Minister, talked about “Great Europe from the Atlantic to Vladivostok” which would constitute “a united military space”, dominated by you know whom. Other post-Soviet spokesmen further expanded the geographic borders of Europe, this time “from the Atlantic to Vladivostok” and even, alliteratively, “from Vancouver to Vladivostok”.

It’s interesting that Gorby still talked about the Soviet Union in 1994. After all, every child knows that the Soviet Union no longer existed at that time, and the area of the former Soviet Union that lies between the Urals and the Pacific is in Asia, not in Europe.

What every child doesn’t know, and neither do many of our grown-up analysts, is that “geographic borders” have become “nominal”. In other words, “Europe” is not a geographical but an ideological concept.

We must learn to take the tyrants at their word. No matter how devious, they tend to say what they mean and do what they say. Whether it’s Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Lenin’s What’s to Be Done or Putin’s speeches, the West would ignore their pronouncements at its peril.

In this instance we must assume that Col. Putin’s strategy involves a gradual undermining of the EU and then, having become a member, its subsequent takeover.  This assumption may prove incorrect, but it would be grossly irresponsible not to make it – especially when all signs are pointing that way.

It’s my contention that in Scenario 2 the Ukraine may well be cast in the role of the Trojan Horse. It would immediately contribute to the EU’s enfeeblement and, in the longer run, Russian dominance within it.

Acting on the foolish promises made by EU officials, including our own George Osborne, the Ukraine’s finance minister yesterday submitted what amounts to a bill for services rendered. We need, he said, £21 billion to last until the end of 2015. You wanted real democracy in the Ukraine, didn’t you? Well, put your money where your mouth is.

The EU’s experience with using money for political purposes on this scale is that the original demand is only a point of departure – for the moon. Remember Greece, and how confidently everyone predicted that the first tranche would be the last?

So let’s at least double, or more likely triple, the £21 billion and ask the inevitable question: Where is it going to come from? And if it does come from somewhere, what will it do to the EU economy? Hence the enfeeblement.

Should the Ukraine eventually join the EU, this fundamentally immoral setup will receive an influx of 45 million people utterly corrupted by a 100-year rule of criminal elites, from Lenin to Yanukovych. In due course, the bacilli thus introduced into an already diseased body will weaken it to a point where it won’t be able to resist a Russian takeover.

To use the modern jargon, Col. Putin thus finds himself in a win-win situation. This, I’d suggest, ought to be the angle from which we view the subsequent events.

 

 

The subject came up yesterday when I was interviewed by Israel National Radio.

This wasn’t my first such experience, and yet again I marvelled at the difference between the way such interviews are handled here and there.

On our own radio stations one is seldom asked probing, intelligent questions, and even more rare are occasions when one is given enough time to sound reasonably coherent in reply.

By contrast the Israeli talk-show host Tamar Yonah was asking questions not only intelligent but on occasion deliciously provocative – and she gave me a full 20 minutes, an eternity in broadcast terms, to try to appear intelligent in return.

Still, broadcast has inherent limitations, which I realised after the interview ended and hindsight kicked in. Being able to think on the hoof may help one out in a rapid-fire oral exchange, but it’s well-nigh useless when trying to ponder a serious issue at depth.

Also, much has happened in the intervening 20 hours, as history tends to speed up at the time of revolution. Yesterday I said that the EU didn’t really want the Ukraine as a fully fledged member, what with her economy making Greece look like a Balkan Tiger. Today I’m not so sure.

Mea culpa, really. I forgot for a second that the EU, its protestations notwithstanding, is really not about the economy. It only ever uses it, either as a carrot or as a stick, in pursuit of megalomaniac political aims.

One such aim is to create a giant superstate, the bigger the better. The size does matter, and if this entails beggaring Europe, the federalists will see it as the cost of doing business.

In that vein, EU officials, including our own Chancellor of the Exchequer (you don’t doubt he’s merely an EU official these days, do you?) have proffered blank cheques to the Ukrainian interim government. Billions? Tens of billions? Doesn’t matter. Progress can’t be held back by a few zeroes here or there.

Yet if history has taught as anything, it’s caution against the presumption of progress. Alas, simplistic Western minds are weaned on the binary view of politics: tyranny – democracy. If it’s not one, it has to be the other.

This leads the West, in particular its leader the USA, into appalling errors of judgement, most notably in the Middle East. Americans can’t seem to get their heads around the simple proposition, proven empirically beyond much doubt, that, in countries that have no history of stable, just institutions, every tyrant tends to be replaced by a worse one.

Whether the replacement is effected by violence or elections is immaterial, and democracy is an inadequate yardstick by which to measure the nature of each power shift.

Yanukovych, for example, was democratically elected and violently overthrown, which proves neither that his reign was truly legitimate nor that his successors are impeccably virtuous.

I for one see no reason to believe that the billions foolishly being proffered by the EU won’t reach Kiev only to double up and go back whence they came, this time ending up in the numbered accounts belonging to the kleptocrats who have been governing the Ukraine since… well, for ever.

The sainted martyr Yulia Timoshenko is one such. This formidable lady does possess a lot of fortitude, yet she displayed it not only during her imprisonment but also when amassing billions, many of them courtesy of criminal gas deals with the Russians.

With characteristic impetuosity she has been beatified in the West as the Ukrainian Joan of Arc plus hydrocarbons, whereas in fact she’s much closer to Elena Ceausescu minus the hubby-wubby.

God only knows how events in the Ukraine will develop. One of the intelligent questions I was asked yesterday was whether the country was strong enough to remain sovereign. I replied it was possible but not the way to bet, and I stand by that comment.

Modernity raises optimistic economic expectations, and Ukrainians are no different. However, their economy is too wobbly to be able to satisfy such expectations widely, that is beyond the criminalised gang of kleptocratic rulers.

Massive infusions of freshly minted, in effect counterfeit, euros won’t solve poverty in that country any more than welfare handouts can solve it in our own lands. Such handouts corrupt and, when delivered on an international scale, they corrupt absolutely.

Moreover, the Ukrainians can’t put euros into the furnaces and machines that keep the economy going. That requires energy, and much of it is coming from the Russian gas pipeline.

The control valve on the pipe is regulated by the lever that’s firmly in Putin’s hands. Turned this way, it looks like a carrot. Turned the other way, it turns into a stick with which Russian kleptocrats can beat their Ukrainian counterparts on the head.

Can the EU make up any potential deficit in energy supplies should Putin put his foot down? Somehow one doubts it. If they begin to freeze in the dark, it won’t take Ukrainians long to return to the Maidan – they know the way.

Another question intelligently asked and evasively answered in yesterday’s interview was whether or not the Ukraine was setting an example for others to follow. What if America or, say, Greece follows suit?

The possibility of an anti-Obama revolution in the States sounds as far-fetched as it would be welcome. But Greece and other sick men of Europe are a different matter.

It’s conceivable, for example, that the EU’s attempt to underwrite the Ukrainian revolution just may be the last straw that’ll break the back of the whole wicked project. For, as we’ve had numerous opportunities to observe, politics can ride roughshod over economics only for so long.

Turning the Ukraine into another major recipient of European welfare is something the Europeans simply can’t afford. It’s back to those economic expectations that have for all intents and purposes turned into entitlements. Frustrate them en masse and sparks may well fly all over Europe.

Political disputes in America haven’t been settled by violence for 150 years, and in England for 350. But the southern and eastern reaches of Europe can’t boast the same history of political stability. Violence is programmed into their DNA much more firmly than docility.

Meanwhile the Ukraine will remain lodged between the rock of the EU and the hard place of Russia. She may find a way to survive by playing both ends against the middle, she may split into two separate states divided by the Dnieper, she may sink into chaos, she may turn into a version of Belarus, she may eventually join one or the other multinational Walpurgisnacht.

Before loosening the strings of the purse filled with our money (that is, yours and mine) it would be wise to see which course is the most likely. But no one who accuses our governments of wisdom can himself be wise.

 

 

Yesterday’s symposium on Traditional Values in the Era of Globalisation was essentially devoted to the interaction between Christianity and secularism.

Chaired by the Rt Revd Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, the symposium was organised by the Russian Embassy, which in effect means the KGB (or FSB as it’s now called).

Both the panel and the audience featured an assortment of luminaries in the C of E, the Russian Orthodox Church, other confessions, the academia and, well, the KGB, aka Russian diplomats led by the Ambassador himself.

Also present in large numbers were those whom Lenin once described as ‘useful idiots’, Western fellow travellers who would sell the Bolsheviks the rope on which the West would be hanged.

The KGB international strategy from the start has been to portray the ghoulish murderers in the Kremlin as the flag-bearers of Old, ‘Holy’ Russia. It speaks volumes both for the Bolsheviks’ cynicism and the idiocy of the useful ones that such canards have always found gasping takers in spite of the on-going persecution of the Church.

Tens of thousands of priests and millions of believers were being murdered while the useful idiots talked about the convergence of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’, with the former moving to the left, the latter to the right, and the two meeting in the middle ground of eternal happiness.

Such talk was actively promoted by the KGB. One of their tricks was to talk about the ongoing Christian revival in Russia, a stratagem that began during the Second World War, when Stalin found out that his army wouldn’t fight for bolshevism. The hierarchy of the Orthodox Church was hastily co-opted to this cause.

Since then the hierarchs of the Church have been combining their pastoral duties with those of career KGB operatives. Thus the uncovered KGB archives show that the current Patriarch of all Russia Kirill, codename ‘Mikhailov’, is a lifetime KGB/FSB agent, as were the two other candidates for the post in the 2009 elections.

This is the background to last night’s spectacle. The principal Russian guest was Metropolitan Hilarion, head of the Church’s External Affairs Department. He spoke well about aggressive secularism destroying every traditional, which is to say Christian, value.

A truly accomplished man, he’s also a composer of liturgical music (such as St Matthew’s Passion) and a prolific writer on dogmatic theology. I was so impressed with him that I felt sorry he was tarred with the KGB brush – as, alas, a man in his position has to be.

It rapidly went downhill from there. Lord Green, Dave’s ex-Minister of State for Trade, kindly explained that global trade needs to be ethical to be successful. He then demonstrated the downside of erudition by shaking together an unlikely cocktail of Kant, Smith, Bentham and, amazingly, Francis Fukuyama.  

Mercifully, he didn’t illustrate his truisms with HSBC, whose chairman he was from 2006 to 2010, a tenure punctuated by his bank richly contributing to the credit crisis, breaking US sanctions against Iran and laundering money for Columbian and Mexican drug cartels. Lord Green concluded with a derogatory remark about global-warming denial.

After a short break Metropolitan Hilarion invited brief comments. The invitation was avidly taken up by the Papal Nuncio who possibly didn’t know the meaning of the English word ‘brief’. He took over the pulpit and read a 15-minute statement in what I assumed was Italian, with an unusually large number of English words mixed in. Later I found out His Excellency had actually spoken in English.

Then the floor was yielded to the Revd Dr Walters, Chaplain to the LSE. The youthful clergyman cum scholar explained that all religions have the same core, and he saw his task as that of a translator of the peripheral differences. His multi-culti heart was screaming out for an ecumenical bliss resting on such common ground, and damn the differences. He clearly saw Christianity as just one ingredient in the stew, no better or worse than others.

The LSE, he continued, has always been devoted to finding both inter-religious and inter-governmental accommodation. Personally, I would have been tempted to add that this fine tradition goes back to the university’s founders, the Webbs and GB Shaw. These apologists for mass murder were among those Lenin meant specifically when talking about ‘useful idiots’.

The next speaker, Professor Tolkunov, also represented an academic institution. He’s head of MGIMO University of International Relations. Prof. Tolkunov proudly declared that his university, founded in 1944, had produced a number of noted scholars, writers and theologians. The useful idiots nodded enthusiastically. I, on the other hand, couldn’t recall a single MGIMO alumnus who distinguished himself in such pursuits.

Remembering all the spies trained at that KGB hatchery was much easier. Specifically, most of the 31 spies expelled by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1985 were educated at MGIMO, which no doubt enhanced the University’s academic reputation no end.

Yet again I marveled at the speaker’s cynicism and the audience’s credulity. Why, the blighter actually said that the spy school founded in 1944, when the KGB was outscoring the Nazis in the number of Soviets killed, was wholeheartedly dedicated to the values of Christian universalism. Of course it was, prof, we all know that.

On to another Russian (actually Armenian) academic Prof. Agadjanian, who delivered an incoherent, barely intelligible panegyric to Rowan Williams for his 2008 proposal to incorporate aspects of Sharia into ‘the law of the land’.

Prof. Agadjanian gave the audience to understand that the expression ‘the law of the land’ was a quaint phrase coined by the former Archbishop. As far as one could understand, the good professor felt that the Archdruid blazed the trail we must all follow. After all, British Muslims have as much right to live by their own laws as do British Christians.

As far as I could follow, no specifics were commented upon, such as the stoning of adulterers, the killing of apostates or polygamy, all time-honoured parts of the Sharia law. But then the multi-culti story was so compelling that it ought not to have been spoiled by incidentals.

The ensuing discussion was actually a love-in. One speaker after another, including, alas, our third most senior bishop, extolled the virtues of accommodation with the secular world. This, according to them, would strengthen Christianity.

The two principal confessions involved in the love-in illustrate the point perfectly. One has effectively become an extension of the most evil organisation in history, best exemplified at present by Col. Putin. The other has endorsed female ordination and consecration, homomarriage, socialism, welfarism and the virtual ousting of traditional liturgy (a young man about to be ordained in the C of E told me he had never attended a 1662 mass, for once leaving me speechless).

Birds of a feather and all that, but I felt like getting up to say it was hard not to observe an unbreakable continuity: accommodation – appeasement – collaboration – surrender.

I didn’t though. On the one hand, I didn’t want to mar the festivity of the occasion. On the other, there were too many people trained in martial arts present. 

Do they work their fingers to the bone trying to alleviate the economic crisis that, according to George Osborne, is far from over?

Talk on the phone to Putin and Yanukovych in an attempt to coerce them into stopping the carnage in the Ukraine?

Rack their brains figuring out how to bolster our flood defences to avoid subsequent calamities, like the one devastating the West Country?

Concentrate on repelling the EU’s attempts to reduce the United Kingdom to a loose conglomerate of EU fiefdoms?

Actually none of the above, as I can testify under oath on a stack of Bibles. For I’ve just come home from my tennis club, and guess who was swatting fuzzy yellow balls on an adjacent court?

Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, having a hit with his personal coach under the watchful eye of two athletic young men, each sporting a bomber jacket bulging on the left side of his chest.

A few observations are in order. First, considering that Nick lives next door and fancies himself a tennis player, it’s not surprising that he’d finally join the club (he was turned down in the past, but unfortunately not for any political reasons).

Second, he plays tennis the way he governs the country – trying to look good irrespective of any results. It’s as if in both capacities he performs not as an active participant but as an impersonator of one.

In terms of tennis, someone must have told Nick that good players hit the ball hard. Corollary to that, as he must also have been informed, is the desideratum of keeping the ball in the court not to lose a point every time you swing a racquet.

If his skill doesn’t allow him to achieve both objectives at once, any decent player would take some pace off the ball to keep the rally going. Not our Nick.

His desire to look good far outstrips his technique, but that’s just fine with our new club member. The ball comes to his forehand, he takes the racquet back (too late, incidentally) – crack! – the ball hits the back fence. Backhand now – bang! – bottom of the net. And so forth.

I’ve observed over a lifetime that the way a man plays games reveals more about his personality than anything he says. Sure enough, Nick governs the country the same way he plays tennis: ineptly, with total disregard for results, but hoping to fake his way into making people think he’s good at what he does.

Quite apart from that, those players one ever sees on the courts during weekdays fall into two categories only: retired or self-employed. Which one is our new club member Nick?

I suppose in a way both, at least as far as his self-perception is concerned. His birth and upbringing entitle him to a life of leisure, and what better way to spend a sunny Friday afternoon than hitting a few tennis balls with a coach?

(The coach, incidentally, was just driving the balls at Nick without offering any words of advice. He must have learned from experience there would be no point.)

Of course there’s the slight hitch in that, on the surface of it, Nick is neither retired nor self-employed. In fact he’s employed by us to run our country. But never mind the substance: it’s all about image nowadays, which starts with self-image.

A few weeks ago, Dave Cameron was talking on the phone to someone who was having a long lunch with Nick at a restaurant. Displaying the jocular insouciance that comes so naturally to the alumni of the Bullingdon Club, Dave asked his interlocutor to tell Nick he’s “a f***ing idler”. And there I was, thinking I’d never agree with Dave on anything.

Aren’t you happy how your tax money is being spent? I hate to be beastly about a fellow tennis player, but in this case I’m willing to make an exception.

Now, in common with Martin Luther King, I have a dream, though mine is very modest. I have a dream that one day I’ll be playing doubles against Nick. And I have a dream that I get a short lob with him parked close to the net on the other side. And I have a dream that on that occasion I’ll be able to hit a smash even harder than my usual 80mph-plus…

Why, Nick would be singing soprano for the rest of his life, but at least he’d have a good excuse to skive off at his day job. He’d feel good, I’d feel good and, on balance, the country would be better off.

 

 

 

 

The EU, along with the USA and other Western powers, are responding to the Ukraine crisis in their typically craven manner.

In response to the Ukraine’s special forces using anti-Putin protesters for target practice, they’re threatening sanctions not against Putin, not against Russia and not even against the Ukraine but against Yanukovych’s family.

If he continues to be a bad boy, the EU may fine his son Oleksandr, who has built a £300-million ‘business’ empire in Europe. The quotation marks are inevitable here, for what Oleksandr has really built is an outlet for the ill-gotten gains purloined from the nation by his father and his cronies.

If such a draconian measure doesn’t do the trick, the Yanukovyches and other members of their ‘family’ may even be denied access to European countries, which is apparently seen as a punishment commensurate with the crime of taking 27 lives (with many more doubtless to come).

Meanwhile, in Sochi, 600 miles from Kiev, the man really responsible for the carnage is allowed to have his Olympic triumph. A parallel with the 1936 Nazi Olympics begs to be drawn, and in fact the Russian journalist Viktor Shenderovich did draw it.

In response to his moderate, well-argued article Shenderovich has received thousands of virulently anti-Semitic rebuttals, calling him a ‘Yid snout’ and expressing the regret that Hitler didn’t quite finish the job. Rather than refuting Shenderovich’s analysis, the campaign vindicates every word of it – and sources close to Putin are clearly implicated.

This adds but a slight touch to the backdrop against which Ukrainians are fighting against Putinite fascism in their own country. For this is what the upheaval is all about, and Yanukovych is merely a pawn moved by the chess master in the Kremlin.

The KGB’s own Col. Putin sees the world in the terms defined by his sponsoring organisation. The disintegration of the Soviet empire represents to him “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the twentieth century.” Greater in other words than the two world wars, artificial famines, purges, democide, genocide and so forth – those other geopolitical disasters that collectively destroyed more lives than in all the previous centuries of recorded history combined.

Given this peculiar view of history, it’s no wonder that Col. Putin devotes every ounce of strength (whatever he’s got left over from robbing Russia blind and using the loot to stage emetic extravaganzas) to rebuilding the Soviet Union, if by some other name.

The name he favours, the Eurasian Economic Union, betrays his heritage. For it was the GPU, the KGB’s precursor, that set up the Eurasian movement in the 1920s, with the aim of neutralising anti-Soviet plans being hatched by millions of Russian émigrés in Europe.

The aim of the movement was to portray the Soviet Union as the Russian Empire reincarnated, and many émigrés had sufficiently warm feelings about old Russia to allow themselves to be duped. Those who wouldn’t be duped were murdered or kidnapped – but then that’s how Putin’s alma mater has always done its business.

The EEU is an echo of the same movement, except that this time it’s the whole world that’s being duped into meekly accepting the rebirth of the most awful state Western history has ever known.

We shouldn’t be misled by the term ‘Eurasian Economic Union’. Just like the EU, the EEU is neither driven by economic considerations nor confined to a certain geographical space. Its aims are ideological and geopolitical.

That’s why Putin’s ruling party has far-reaching plans to include not just the former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Also targeted are countries within the former Soviet sphere of influence, such as Finland, Hungary, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Mongolia – along with those great Eurasian nations Cuba and Venezuela.

The proposed union would use Russian as its common language and incorporate what Putin has described as “the best values of the Soviet Union”, presumably including concentration death camps, mass murder, torture and obliteration of every conceivable liberty.

The project is proceeding apace. So far only Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed up, their own fascist regimes fitting seamlessly into Putin’s vision. But progress is being made on all fronts. The governments of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia are about to see the light, while Putin’s military aggression succeeded in installing a puppet government in Georgia that’ll do as it’s told.

This is the backdrop against which the events in Kiev and elsewhere in the Ukraine are unfolding. For the career criminal Yanukovych is also running a puppet government, which too is prepared to do as it’s told.

What Yanukovych’s ruling clique has been told to do is join the EEU, not the EU. The words ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’ come to mind, but in any case the Ukraine officially applied to join the EEU in September, 2013.

The trouble started because, unlike the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian people won’t do as they’re told. They have too vivid a recollection of the plagues visited on their nation by Putin’s KGB colleagues.

Specifically, they refuse to forget the 1932 Holodomor, the artificial famine with which Stalin punished Ukrainian peasants for refusing to transfer all their worldly possessions to the state. The Soviet response was both brutal and pioneering, lighting up the path to be treaded by many subsequent despotic cannibals.

In late autumn security troops confiscated all the grain stocks and other food reserves, then sealed the area so tight that no one could get in or out. When the snow melted in the spring, bulldozers moved to remove the frozen corpses, 7,000,000 of them.

Now imagine the 1932 English government doing the same to, say, Scotland. How do you suppose the Scots would feel about the English and national independence? I don’t know if your imagination is vivid enough; mine isn’t.

In today’s Ukraine we’re dealing with a real situation, not an imaginary one. Unlike their government, the people won’t be puppets to the Russians – especially when they’re led by spiritual heirs to the perpetrators of Holodomor.

More and more of them are ready to die fighting KGB stooges, who for the time being are just as ready to kill. Meanwhile the West is assuming the supine position it invariably adopts vis-à-vis tyrannies capable of defending themselves.

It’s not Yanukovych’s family that ought to be boycotted but Putin’s Russia. Yet I’m not holding my breath: the West was too lily-livered to boycott even Putin’s answer to the Nazi Olympics.

Will’s promise to destroy every ivory artefact in Buckingham Palace makes one wonder if propensity towards vandalism is passed on from one generation to the next.

The prince’s late mother didn’t quite manage to vandalise the monarchy in Britain, but not for any lack of trying. Still, though she failed in the short term, it’s conceivable that the damage she did cause may yet prove destructive over time.

While still with us, Lady Di supported every cause the PC Zeitgeist considered worthy, making even old cynics like me paranoid and insomniac.

Pursued by the nightmares of anorexic, HIV-positive lepers splattered all over the rain forest by land mines, I remember lying awake at night, pangs of conscience rattling through my brain (on second thoughts, it could have been the neighbours playing loud music).

Still, I was thanking God I was quite the opposite of anorexic, didn’t indulge in practices leading to Aids, never went anywhere near a rain forest, and neither laid nor was ever likely to step on a land mine.

Now it seems that the apple that’s Will didn’t fall far from the tree that was Diana. He too is bothering his pretty little royal head with PC causes; he too is showing early symptoms of logorrhoea, prime among which is an urge to speak before thinking.

HRH is opposed to illegal trade in elephant tusks, as is every reasonable individual. In fact, said individual is equally opposed to illegal trade in anything, from contraband cigarettes or booze to guns and drugs.

But from this it doesn’t automatically follow that there’s anything wrong with legal trade in such things. For example, the ban on illicit trade in opiates doesn’t extend to the use of morphine as a hospital pain-killer. We don’t want junkies to mainline heroin, but neither do we want cancer patients to writhe in unrelieved agony.

Legal trade in any commodity may encourage a parallel illegal trade. For example, many drinking establishments sell alcohol obtained through channels that don’t rigidly insist on compliance with trade regulations and things like import duty. That, however, doesn’t mean we should have a Prohibition similar to that existing in America between 1920 and 1933.

Moreover, that unfortunate social experiment (and all social experiments are unfortunate) showed a tendency distinctly opposite to one Prince Will sees in his mind’s eye: the ban on legal trade in alcohol didn’t just boost the illegal trade but raised it to a major industry.

President Obama suffers from the same misapprehension as the prince, and for the same reason. He too openly prays to the PC god – and I’d rather not go into the subject of what other gods he may be worshipping surreptitiously. That’s why he wants to ban all commercial sale of ivory.

However, my friend Barack Hussein stops short of the final solution advocated by Will: he isn’t promising to rip the ivory keys off the White House Steinway. Then of course he’s older and less impetuous.

One problem with curbing illegal trade in ivory is that elephants tend to live in lawless lands. The other one is that the greatest consumers of ivory also live in lawless (in our sense of the word) lands, such as China.

This dialectical symbiosis means that poaching is next to impossible to stop – the hand of demand washes the hand of supply. Yet efforts to do so must be made: poaching is vile. Why, it’s even worse than New Yorkers buying duty-free cigarettes brought from New Jersey by muscular chaps in leather coats.

That, however, isn’t what HRH wants. He wants to destroy priceless art works of which he’s a custodian, not owner. This suggests that what he regards as objectionable isn’t just poaching elephants and then selling their tusks illegally.

Diana’s boy actually thinks ivory, whether obtained within or outside the law, is immoral in se, which justifies illegal vandalism. This is simply nonsensical, falling into the same cloud-cuckoo-land area as decrying the wearing of furs or the consumption of meat.

Just as his late mother was obsessed with anorexics, William is deeply attached to elephants. If their tusks are in demand, he fears, the species will become extinct.

This indeed may happen, but what else is new? Over 98 percent of the species that have ever inhabited the earth are no longer with us, and I don’t think anyone is unduly bothered. Really, Darwin’s book should have been more appropriately called The Disappearance of Species. That way the great man would have stayed in the realm of facts, rather than fanciful hypotheses.

This anthropomorphic affection for animals, cute or otherwise, is recent in origin. It has the same source as the pantheistic adoration of nature in general, one of the gifts we gratefully received from Romanticism (another one is Nazism, but we shan’t talk about that now).

One of the desiderata of that movement was to replace the morality and aesthetics of Christendom with a new vision of the world. This vision did produce some pleasing aesthetic results, mostly in music, but appalling moral ones.

Soppy adoration of nature was one such, and it was animated not so much by the urgent need to hug trees or elephants as by a much more urgent desire to destroy our theocentric heritage. (In that Romantic spirit, the Nazis banned experiments on animals while indulging in experiments on humans.)

That this was how the battle lines were drawn was clear to the contemporaries of the Romantic movement, such as Lord Tennyson who himself wasn’t free of Romantic influences. He wrote: “Who trusted God was love indeed//
And love Creation’s final law//
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw//
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”

One day HRH may become the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, provided there will still remain a Church of England for him to govern supremely. True enough, the Church and our whole society are taking giant strides on the road to paganism, but there’s no compelling reason to nudge them further along that way.

HRH had better restrain his youthful impetuosity and think hard about such issues before pronouncing on them. Reading a book or two on the founding principles of our civilisation wouldn’t hurt either.

He should be aware of his limitations, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing to remind himself that he’s still a very young, not particularly well-educated man who just may suffer from compromised intellectual heredity on his mother’s side.

 

Over 200 British soldiers have just been sent home from the Afghanistan frontline, and not because they were no longer needed for operational reasons.

They weren’t wounded. They weren’t shell-shocked. They hadn’t experienced the deep emotional trauma our soldiers are encouraged to experience at the very thought of having to murder fellow human beings, especially those who have a multi-culti value.

They were, well, pregnant. And no, our government hasn’t yet managed to override physiology and take homomarriage to the next logical stage.

No physiology had been overridden. The 200 were all women who had got impregnated the old-fashioned way (details available on request), most of them by their fellow (male) soldiers.

At the risk of incurring some predictable wrath, one has to believe that such a result wasn’t entirely unexpected. Thrust a few fit young women among a group of young, physical, hormonally active men and chances are not all of them will treat the women as just comrades-in-arms.

One begins to see why the Romans didn’t allow women anywhere near their frontline troops: they didn’t want the soldiers to be burdened with emotional attachments, especially of the reproductive kind. What the soldiers did for sex is a different matter, and we shan’t go into it now.

But forget the ancient Romans. The interesting question is why on earth we today invite women to join the army, especially its combat units. Actually, the question isn’t all that interesting because the answer is altogether predictable.

Modern piety demands that women be regarded as not just equal to men but identical to them. Anything a man can do, a woman can do as well, if not always better. This applies to absolutely everything: operating heavy machinery, loading ships with 200-pound bags, digging ditches, boxing, high-altitude welding – and leading bayonet charges against entrenched enemy positions.

The sheer idiocy of it all should be plain for all to see. It’s indeed seen by all, except that it might as well not be. When modern PC piety speaks, reason flees and sight loses acuity.

Traditionally men rode off to fight wars while their women stayed behind to make sure our civilisation kept ticking along. Not only did they look after the men’s houses, finances and children, but they also ran schools, hospital, parishes – life.

They also tried to civilise their men when they staggered home from the battlefield, to make sure that perhaps next time the warriors would think twice before deciding to kill others, often for no good reason. That effort typically failed to avert subsequent disasters completely, but it must have reduced their numbers.

In short, men and women have their own roles to play in life, and it takes much ideological fog on the brain not to see that these roles, while always being equally important, aren’t always the same. Women think differently, feel differently, react differently – and thank God for that.

They’re also created to perform sexual roles that are different from men’s, both as far as the actual sex act is concerned and also in terms of its consequences. This observation is neither original nor perspicacious, and I only make it for the sake of our rulers whom it seems to escape.

Religious people have to believe that any extramarital sex (fornication, as it’s known in some quarters) is a deadly sin, and this is an unassailable belief. However, as I don’t feel my biography entitles me to claim high moral ground on the issue, I’d merely suggest that, morality aside, sexual intercourse may have different consequences for men and women fighting in the trenches.

They both may enjoy the experience, and they may both burn in hell as a result, although Christ did talk about those without sin casting the first stone. But while still on earth, men can have their fun and then go on fighting. Women, on the other hand, may get pregnant, and morning nausea isn’t a condition that makes people particularly bellicose.

This, along with many other physical, physiological and psychological considerations, means that having women anywhere near the frontline in any other than auxiliary capacity is frankly idiotic. Actually, it’s even worse than that because the decision was driven not just by stupidity but, which is worse, also by ideological fervour.

Some of the young ladies involved were already pregnant when they were shipped to Afghanistan. This condition could easily have been ascertained by a simple test or, provided the expecting mums were honest, by a three-word question. Either of those options, however, would have violated the soldiers’ human rights, as defined by modern morons. So no tests were done and no questions were asked.

In a parallel development, two WPCs have successfully sued the police for having been removed from the firearms unit guarding a nuclear installation. They suffered that awful injustice because their hands were too small to grip the butt of a Glock 17 pistol and still reach the trigger.

One would think that this would somewhat compromise their ability to defend the installation from, say, a terrorist attack. The young ladies were nonetheless awarded £35,000 each for having been exposed to this blatant act of discrimination.

The reports of the trial didn’t mention why neither the women nor their commanders had thought of switching them to the smaller Glock 19, specially designed for what used to be known as the weaker sex. Perhaps neither were sufficiently familiar with firearms. More likely, the bosses were uneasy about having women in harm’s way, while the young ladies grabbed their chance to turn a quick profit.

On the plus side, neither WPC was pregnant. Maybe neither had much time for men. There were too busy trying to get their hands around a pistol grip.