Month: October 2014

Obviously the outgoing gauleiter of the European Commission didn’t make that argument in so many words.

However, he does make it in his person. For an organisation that brings the likes of him to the fore has to be fatally flawed, not to say downright evil.

José Manuel Barroso began his political career in the ranks of an underground Maoist party committed to terrorism as a valid form of political self-expression.

His aim then was to destroy the sovereign government of Portugal, and he pursued it with youthful vigour.

Age has diminished the vigour, as it usually does, but the aim has remained essentially the same. The scale, however, is different: these days Barroso works tirelessly to destroy the very concept of national sovereignty within Europe’s borders.

In his student days he advocated a mix of violence and agitprop, which is to say strident drivel lacking any intellectual content. In his new role he seems to eschew violence, but the drivel remains.

Yesterday he attacked Cameron’s government for failing to highlight the benefits of the EU, thereby allowing anti-EU sentiment to go “largely unchallenged”.

Specifically, Dave has earned the gauleiter’s rebuke for making vague, Ukip-inspired noises on the subject of unlimited immigration from the EU.

The only sound thing Barroso said was that any restrictions on migration would be illegal under EU law. This is true, and thank you, José, for pointing this out to Dave, who pretends we’ll be able to circumvent the EU while remaining in it.

Limiting migration is indeed illegal under EU law. That’s why we must leave the jurisdiction of this ridiculous contrivance and restore the English Common Law to its erstwhile status of unchallenged sovereignty within our borders.

In his testosterone-fuelled youth Barroso would spout any nonsense, provided it advanced his ideological goals. Thus, for example, he clamoured that the capitalist government of Portugal was fanning a conflict between students and workers.

Today is no different: the message has changed, but the intellectual level hasn’t. Thus Barroso claims that unrestricted migration is a two-way street:

“British citizens have freedom of movement all over Europe. There are 700,000 living in Spain,” he said.

In the good tradition of Marxist propaganda this is a lie, both factually and conceptually. The official number of British subjects (a more accurate term than ‘citizens’) living in Spain is 297,229, less than half of Barroso’s claim.

But let’s not be pedantic about a few hundred thousand here or there. Instead let’s ask a few questions begging to be asked.

How many of those peregrinating Brits are taking jobs away from the local population? How many sleep rough in some of Madrid’s best neighbourhoods? How many are driving the crime rate sky high? How many are collecting social benefits in Spain, which they share with their families back home?

The fact is that most Brits living in Spain are retirees who import capital into Spain without taking anything out. A majority of them live in self-contained, poorly integrated communities where the only Spanish they ever attempt is “dos cervezas por favor.”

The locals welcome their presence because the Brits freely spend their pension funds and make the natives richer by driving property prices up. Similarly, I doubt many denizens of, say, Hull would object to elderly Spaniards moving in, bringing their money with them and improving the food quality at tapas bars.

However, many Englishmen cringe when realising that their communities are being disfigured, in all likelihood irretrievably, by swarms of European riffraff bulging the welfare rolls, placing an unsupportable burden on the NHS and other social services, and in general reducing England to a faceless gau of the EU.

This isn’t to say that all, or perhaps even most, EU migrants fit that description. Far from it. Many indeed enrich our neighbourhoods and the country in general.

For example, thousands of the French have moved into my part of London, and one doesn’t hear too many locals complaining. On the contrary, I dare say our neighbourhood appears more civilised as a result, and the food, bread especially, has certainly improved.

But many of us are aghast to realise that we collectively have lost the sovereignty we all possess individually: the right to decide whom we wish to welcome as guests in our house and whom we’d rather turn away.

This bears much eerie resemblance to the Moscow of my youth, where the authorities could ‘densify’ families deemed to have too much living space. If a family had more than the mandated nine square metres per person, the council could move into the same flat any number of strangers who’d bring the residency down to the target level.

No doubt such an arrangement would be close to Barroso’s Maoist heart, but one wishes he argued his case with more than just Maoist logic.

“It may be a revelation to some, but the vast majority of people living in Europe are also rather attached to their national identity” is another example of his rhetoric. The irony is a bit feeble, but the factual accuracy can’t be faulted.

Similarly, there were many Soviet children who were sufficiently attached to their parents not to wish to have them taken away for ever in the middle of the night.

Many Jews were doubtless also rather attached to their lives, which they then went on to lose in Nazi gas chambers.

Closer to Barroso’s spiritual home, many Chinese peasants were rather attached to their plots which were then taken away, often along with their lives, during the Great Leap Forward.

However none of them were given any choice in the matter, and neither are the European citizens of today. To be sure, on occasion the EU gauleiters propose they vote on yet another surrender – a privilege denied to the groups I’ve mentioned above.

But the privilege is illusory: any anti-EU vote is immediately invalidated, and the people are asked to vote again until they get it right. A pro-EU vote, on the other hand, is irreversible.

My favourite paragraph in Barroso’s diatribe is this: “If people read only negative… portrayals in their newspapers from Monday to Saturday, you cannot expect them to nail the European flag on their front door on Sunday just because the political establishment tells them it is the right thing to do.”

Barroso apparently realises that our political establishment is on his side, and he ought to be complimented on this perspicacity. Also praiseworthy is his honesty: he doesn’t deign to conceal his wish that the EU stellar ring should adorn every British front door.

But accusing British newspapers of anti-EU bias betokens either ignorance or mendacity. A study of our mainstream papers’ editorial content will show that The Guardian, The Observer and The Independent are pro-EU unwaveringly, The Times mostly and The Telegraph intermittently.

It’s true that The Mail seldom runs pro-EU articles, which Barroso doubtless finds vexing. But Britain isn’t quite Mao’s China yet. Our papers can’t be forced to toe the line, although we’re moving in that direction.

Anyway, which benefits of the EU would Barroso like us to highlight? Social unrest? Economic stagnation? Stifling labour laws? Being ruled by Maoists and other assorted socialists craving world government? Impotent foreign policy? Protectionism?

One just wishes we were governed by the kind of people who’d have the courage to say “No way, José” and leave the EU without as much as saying good-bye.

But one fears that this walking argument against the EU will get what he wants: a giant superstate run by the likes of him.

 

During a Formula One race in Sochi Bernie Ecclestone was sufficiently impressed with Col. Putin to suggest he could run both Europe and America if he could find time in his busy schedule.

Bernie didn’t specify what made the good colonel’s schedule so busy, probably deciding it would be impolite to suggest that his host’s time is mostly taken up with ripping off his own country and attacking his neighbours.

Col. Putin is indisputably very proficient in those areas, but he isn’t a natural administrator. Few Russians are – organisation, enterprise and discipline aren’t among the nation’s most salient strengths.

Now the Germans in general and Frau (Madam) Merkel in particular are different. They know how to run things efficiently and profitably.

Their secret is eschewing cottage industries and organising production on a grand scale – this without any detriment to efficiency.

Of course Germany isn’t immune to economic force majeure, which is why her unemployment rate is now the highest it has ever been since Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard got a grip on the economy in 1950.

The force majeure directly responsible for this unfortunate state of affairs is called the EU. You see, the Germans decided to do what Bernie thinks Putin could do better: run Europe, before proceeding to take over America as well.

Alas, while Germany was running Europe, Europe was running up debts and, like any loving vater, Germany had to assume responsibility for the debts of its wayward children. Hence the 4.5 million unemployed.

But if any country can solve such problems, Germany can. And my friend Angela, with her housewifey touch, knows how to run a household.

Thus at least one German industry is already showing a spectacular growth. Since the previous government legalised prostitution in 2002, the number of German sex workers, to give them their official name, has grown to 400,000 and the whole industry is adding €16 billion to the country’s economy every year.

Germany has sprouted a number of industrial-scale brothels, some occupying 12-storey buildings, with each floor dedicated to its own thematic motif.

Many have introduced innovations based on the concept of American all-you-can-eat restaurants. You pay your €100 at the door, and the delights of all 12 floors are yours without any limit on consumption. To make the transaction cost-effective, customers no doubt use various stimulants, but that’s no one’s business other than their own.

Angie certainly doesn’t care. All she wants is that the thriving concerns function according to the legal requirements imposed on all German businesses. Specifically, they are expected to pay taxes and provide the statutory package of benefits for the employees.

In return they are treated like any other business, which extends to their having access to job centres’ data bases.

Now these establishments are much more rigorous than their British equivalents. Working hand in glove with the social services, they follow a simple and, this being Germany, ironclad rule.

If a centre’s referral produces a job offer, a person unemployed for a year or longer has to accept it or lose half of his unemployment benefit. Another refusal, and he loses the other half. If he proves to be so picky, he can starve for all the job centre cares.

That’s how a 25-year-old woman found herself in a spot of trouble. Having lost her job as computer programmer, she registered with a job centre and began to wait for offers. To stack her bets she also listed other qualifications on her CV: before learning programming the young lady had done stints as waitress, bartender and hostess.

Germany’s unemployment being what it is, no offers came for a year. At last the centre sent the woman a long-awaited letter, saying that a potential employer felt that her profile fit the requirements expected to fill a vacancy.

The woman hopefully contacted the prospective employer and was invited for an interview at what she thought was a night club. It wasn’t, not quite.

The outfit turned out to be one of those licensed bordellos that comply with every legal requirement and are therefore granted access to employment data bases. At the interview the woman was politely asked to demonstrate her qualifications by taking her clothes off and playing with a vibrator.

That she indignantly refused to do and stormed out in a huff. The very next day she was informed that, since she had declined a legitimate job offer, her unemployment benefit was thenceforth cut in half.

Without waiting to lose the other half in a similar situation the girl sued, or rather tried to. However it was explained to her that there were no grounds for a lawsuit since the job centre had followed both the spirit and letter of the law.

And, following the reforms introduced by Madam Merkel, if any woman under age 55 can’t get a job in her profession for a year, she is obliged to accept any job on offer, including that of a prostitute.

As far as the law is concerned, an employer seeking a prostitute of either sex is no different from one looking for an engineer or a nurse. No honest work is immoral, the labourer worthy of his hire and all that.

Moreover, a job centre attempting to bar a bordello’s access to its data bases breaks a law and can be punished for it. “Why should I be denied access?” asks, rhetorically, Tatiana Ulianova, the Russian owner of a brothel in the centre of Berlin. “I pay taxes just like any other business.”

Quite. And when her German colleague Ulrich Koperkoch was indeed kept away from the data bases, he sued, won his case and was awarded sizeable damages.

All those stories date back to 2005. Since then Madam Angela’s government has been running a propaganda campaign to the effect that sex services are no different from, say, physiotherapy or massage.

As a result many young women, regardless of their marital status, no longer stick to their outdated prejudices and gratefully accept any job going, emphatically including prostitution.

Really, Angie has missed her true calling. Still, the opportunity isn’t lost irretrievably. Sooner or later she’ll retire from politics, and running a knocking shop could offer her a chance to remain a valuable member of society.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

The impression that we now live in a lunatic asylum, with the lunatics running it, is getting stronger by the day.

It’s impossible to open a paper, even a supposedly conservative one, without reading at least one article whose author shows every symptom of being not just intellectually backward but downright insane.

Today’s prize in the madness stakes goes to The Mail’s Jan Moir for her article Football’s Vile Rapist Must Never Get His Old Job Back (author’s underline).

What got Miss Moir going is today’s release from prison of Ched Evans, former Wales international.

Allow me to recap the main circumstances of the case for those of you who have negligently missed this week’s most important news item.

Back in 2012 Ched and another footballer went out on the town with the explicit purpose of – are you ready for this? – getting laid. That, in the eyes of the prosecutor and all right-thinking, which these days means self-righteous, people by itself constitutes corpus delicti.

To that criminal, or at least highly unorthodox, end the two culprits checked themselves into a local Premier Inn, thus laying themselves open to a charge of malice aforethought.

The only thing missing at that point was a willing participant, but the two handsome, wealthy footballers didn’t anticipate any trouble finding one.

So it proved. They went to a nightclub and one of them picked up a girl who had had a couple of drinks too many. The girl happily agreed to accompany the ball-kicker to his hotel, where they had sex.

Then, in the good ‘roasting’ tradition of the footballing profession, Ched Evans joined the fun and had the girl as well.

She woke up the next morning naked and alone in bed, after which crying rape seemed like the only possible thing to do, especially since the perpetrators clearly weren’t short of a bob or two.

The two men were arrested and tried for rape. The prosecution’s case was based on the claim that the girl was too drunk to consent to intercourse.

Personally, I find that a bit suspect. The girl was fully conscious, able to walk unaided, consume pizza that she carried across the hotel lobby, get in the lift.  As someone who used to get drunk on occasion, I can see how booze could have removed some of her inhibitions, provided she had any in the first place, but not how her free will could have been completely overridden.

But fair enough, the jury accepted the prosecutor’s claim, and the law spoke.  The girl couldn’t say no, and the subsequent amorous activity therefore constituted rape.

Yet here’s the weird part: the first man who had sex with the girl was acquitted. Hence the jury accepted the defence’s argument that the girl had consented to sex. Logic would then suggest that she was sober enough to consent.

I don’t know how long the act of consensual love lasted, but let’s assume it was about 10 minutes. During this time the victim supposedly lost her capacity to say no, which means that when Evans then climbed aboard he committed rape.

It was of course possible that the girl fancied the first suitor but not the second. It’s also possible she drew the line at group sex, which is why she rejected Evans’s advances and he had to resort to coercion.

If that’s what the prosecution had claimed, the second act would have been clear-cut rape. But the prosecution claimed nothing of the sort.

The accusation remained the same: the girl was too drunk to reject the second lover even though she hadn’t been too drunk to accept the first one. As she consumed no alcohol in between the two, this sounds odd.

One way or the other, at the end of that extremely soft case Ched Evans was sentenced to five years in prison. Earlier today he was released, having served half his term.

The real fun began a few days ago. The TV personality Judy Finnigan (don’t ask me what she does on TV for I don’t have a clue) had the temerity to suggest that now that Evans had paid his debt to society he should be allowed to resume plying his trade.

That by itself would have been sufficient to impale Miss Finnigan on the stake of what these days passes for public opinion, and what in the relatively recent past would have been called the braying of a mob.

But she made things far worse by saying the public should take it easy on Evans because after all the rape he committed wasn’t violent.

All hell broke loose. For Miss Finnigan implicitly rejected the received opinion, nay diktat, that rape is the only crime that has no gradations and no extenuating circumstances.

When it comes to the taking of a human life, the law accepts such nuances as murder, manslaughter, unintended or accidental homicide and what not. But what’s killing compared to unauthorised hanky-panky?

Thus a savage who jumps a stranger in a park, beats her up, has sex with her while she’s unconscious and leaves her for dead is a rapist in exactly the same sense as someone who forgot to breathalyse a girl before sex.

In other words, Miss Finnigan committed a crime that’s much worse than even Mr Evans’s: he violated one person, she violated the whole modern ethos.

Defenders of women’s rights were aghast enough to unleash a torrent of hate mail, targeting Miss Finnigan even more than Mr Evans.

Refusing to accept her hastily offered apology, the crazed mob… sorry, I mean champions of women’s rights, threatened to rape Miss Finnigan’s own daughter Chloe, which seemed to them like a just thing to do.

A bunch of loonies, you’d think, and you would be right. But here speaks Jan Moir, a columnist in a respectable newspaper committed to the defence of tradition:

“While I have great sympathy for Chloe feeling ‘violated’, her experience doesn’t compare with the 19-year-old girl raped by Evans…” Neither does it compare with the experience of Jews gassed at Treblinka, which has about as little to do with the issue at hand.

Perspective is important, concludes Miss Moir. So is sanity. And a sane person would realise that, since Chloe presumably wasn’t holding the victim down while Evans was having his wicked way with her, that parallel simply doesn’t work. Chloe did nothing to deserve finding herself on the receiving end of criminal threats.

Unless, of course, Miss Moir feels, which she assures us she doesn’t, that Miss Finnigan’s sin is visited upon her daughter, who should therefore grin and bear it.

Of course the title of Moir’s piece is self-explanatory: she doesn’t think Evans should be allowed to make a living in his chosen field. Again, a sane person would know that punishment in a way wipes the slate clean. A released prisoner must be rehabilitated, and easing him back into work is the best way of achieving that.

But Miss Moir isn’t a sane person, she’s a modern one. As such, she isn’t able to put some kind of limit on her sanctimonious hysteria.

Such uncontrollable incontinence used to be regarded as a symptom of insanity. Now it only means that the lunatic is civic-minded and therefore normal.

 

       

Generally, it takes American perversions five to ten years to reach our shores.

This happens invariably and inexorably. The self-appointed leader of the free world mandates political correctness, homomarriage, reduction in greenhouse gases, reverse discrimination in favour of racial minorities or women, multi-culti rectitude, vegetarianism as a political statement – give it a few years and we’ll follow suit with obsequious alacrity.

The same goes for smoking. First, Americans banned smoking in all but specially designated areas. Then in all public buildings. Then in bars and restaurants. Finally, seven years ago, smoking in New York parks was deemed too dangerous to public health.

And what do you know, the Atlantic Ocean failed to provide a sturdy enough barrier for each ban to bless us with its eventual presence.

The latest of these is the proposed ban on smoking in city parks, which is guaranteed to become law in the next few weeks.

The British, however, have retained the last vestiges of sanity, which is why we aren’t making the patently deranged claim that a chap puffing on a Silk Cut in Hyde Park is jeopardising public health.

We don’t want every tobacco company to hire a regiment of doctors able to prove, convincing figures in hand, that someone who believes such nonsense presents a much greater threat to society than even clouds of tobacco smoke enveloping the Serpentine.

It’s so much safer to rely on an argument that, in defiance of logical positivism, can be neither proved nor disproved by any empirical method.

In this instance, the argument is that smoking sets a bad example for children, and I can see the point. Why rely on parks to teach tots rotten habits? That’s what we have schools for.

Children tend to go to schools much more often than to Hyde Park, and that’s where they learn all they need to know – or rather all that our powers that be think they ought to know.

Thus the little ones learn about French letters long before they learn the letters of the alphabet. The are taught that any judgement is wrong by definition because, by insisting on one postulate, we deny the validity of others that may be just as true. They are expected to express themselves long before they have anything to express. They grow up convinced that all religions are equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant. They… well, you can compile your own list.

Then they go home, and few are the parents who don’t pass on bad habits to their progeny. Mum and Dad swear, drink, fight, watch moronic TV shows, listen to music that isn’t music, eat food that isn’t food – and smoke.

That last bad example is set at a frequency that increases as we go down the social scale, but talking about this would set another bad example to be avoided. God forbid we teach children to say what’s true rather than what’s politically correct.

You decide whether smoking is the worst vice children could possibly imbue from the ambient air. My contention is that a brief walk through a London park (I have to plead ignorance of parks in other English cities) will expose children to many things that are a lot worse than lighting up.

For example, by listening to grownups passing by they’ll learn to talk with Third World grammar and demotic pronunciation. Yet we’re unlikely ever to see a notice saying “No glottal stops allowed beyond this point” or “No dropping aitches”.

They’ll see plenty of adults eating and drinking as they walk, which is rotten both aesthetically and digestively. So do we see injunctions against munching on the hop? Do we hell.

They’ll even – are you ready for this? – encounter many men wearing socks with sandals or women not wearing much of anything at all, and what kind of example does this set?

And let’s not forget men and women sporting facial metal and covered head to toe with tattoos. A child constantly exposed to such walking exhibitions of body art is likely to grow up with the aesthetic sense of a savage, and surely this is a worse fate than having one’s lifespan abbreviated by a few fags.

Music resembling elephantine flatulence interspersed with orgiastic gasps blares from ghetto blasters in every corner of our parks – what does that teach children? To be savages who are proud of their savagery? To pay no attention to those whose tastes may be different from theirs?

It’s frightening to observe how quickly the stupidity and amorality of modernity can degenerate into sheer lunacy, definable in clinical terms. A ban on smoking in public parks is a most clear-cut symptom.

Our society no longer needs just a good government. We need a good psychiatrist with an advanced degree and plenty of experience in collective madness.

Meanwhile allow me to offer a slight embellishment on our new ban. Before they pass through a park’s gates, children have  to walk in the street: public transportation tends to stop some distance short.

Thus even on its own crazy terms the ban will miss the mark unless we also prohibit smoking in the street – along with smoking anywhere else where children could possibly observe it, emphatically including private homes.

Stands to reason, doesn’t it? But reason is off limits in the loony bin going by  the name of modernity.  

 

Doublespeak, doubletalk, newspeak are rapidly ousting straight talk from official discourse.

Connotation trumps denotation, subtext overpowers text, semiotics ride roughshod over semantics.

As a result we increasingly listen not so much to the officials’ words as to their inflexion. Rather than getting their meaning we try to second-guess it. More and more we learn the art of what Soviet citizens called ‘reading between the lines.’

This has become so commonplace that we no longer expect any politician to come out and say exactly what he means.

When he talks about ‘helping the less fortunate’, does he actually mean it or is he hinting at a plan to rob the more fortunate?

When he talks about reducing the deficit, does he mean sweeping reductions eventually leading to the state paying its own way or merely a token sop to fiscal conservatives?

When he talks about his commitment to equality, is he really so stupid as to believe he can catch this Chimera by the tail or is he merely talking about an imminent tax increase?

We have to figure it all out for ourselves, without much help from the speaker.

In a way this is to be expected. A politician, especially a modern one, isn’t going to commit himself explicitly to something he knows he won’t deliver. Unless, of course, he feels he has to in order to win the next election, which is, as we know, the only goal of modern statesmanship.

But one would expect more straightforward statements from prelates of the Church. They are, after all, answerable to the kind of authority that can see through any dissembling or equivocation.

Neither does church doctrine encourage vagueness and ambiguity in the same way as politics does. After all, it’s supposed to come down from God, either directly, through Scripture, or through the ecclesiastical intermediaries he inspires.

Alas, we are all supposed to be politicians now, and prelates are no exception. Instead of speaking in a loud and clear voice, they increasingly leave us scratching our heads and wondering what this or that pronouncement actually means.

The current example is the Vatican’s statement on homosexuality, which the papers are describing as “a dramatic shift in the Catholic Church’s traditionally negative view [of it]”.

Actually, this isn’t the only way to read the statement issued yesterday. If one so chose, one could just as easily say that the Church is stubbornly clinging to its discriminatory homophobia (I hope I get the PC lingo right).

After all, the statement does say that there is no “denying the moral problems connected to homosexual unions.”

And there’s more: “The Church furthermore affirms that unions between people of the same sex cannot be considered on the same footing as matrimony between man and woman. Nor is it acceptable that pressure be brought to bear on pastors or that international bodies make financial aid dependent on the introduction of regulations inspired by gender ideology.”

Now if that’s not homophobia, I don’t know what is. We no longer acknowledge any moral problems with any form of sexual activity, other than feeling a girl up without permission. In fact, sex has been taken out of the moral sphere altogether.

“If it feels good, it’s moral,” pronounced Hemingway, and if you disagree with this indisputable statement you are not fit to live in modern society.

And what’s that about homomarriage being any different from the old kind? Write something like this in a modern paper, and you’ll get a deluge of indignant effluvia faster than you can say Press Complaints Commission (spoken from personal experience).

So where does the ‘dramatic shift’ come from?

The first sentence in the statement says that “homosexuals have gifts and qualities to offer to the Christian community”. No doubt. But where’s the novelty appeal?

The best-known chapel in the world is covered with frescos produced by a 16^th-century homosexual, whose Pieta sculpture also adorns St Peter’s in Rome. Both the chapel and the sculpture are in the Vatican, under the immediate jurisdiction of popes throughout the centuries.

In fact it would be tedious to enumerate all the great works of religious art commissioned and gratefully received by the Church from many homosexuals, whose proclivities were common knowledge.

If Renaissance popes acknowledged the gifts of homosexuals at a time when their chosen method of consummating passion constituted a criminal offence, how does the Synod’s statement represent a dramatic shift?

The statement goes on to say “Often [homosexuals] wish to encounter a Church that offers them a welcoming home. Are our communities capable of providing that, accepting and valuing their sexual orientation, without compromising Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony?”

Things are beginning to look dicey – but still falling way short of a dramatic shift.

The traditional Church position is hate the sin, love the sinner, which, in spirit if not letter, is an accurate rendering of Augustine’s “Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum”.

Applied to the issue at hand, a homosexual has (or should have) always been accepted by the Church, provided he repented his sin and accepted the imposed penance.

So yes, communities are capable of providing a welcoming home to homosexuals. But no, they can’t be expected to accept, or especially to value, their sexual orientation, for the simple reason that there is nothing valuable about it.

No sexual activity is valued or indeed countenanced by the Church unless procreation within wedlock is its aim. ‘Catholic doctrine on the family and matrimony’ is unequivocal on this, and any divergent interpretation would indeed spell compromising it.

Then there is the issue of repentance and penance. For a homosexual to accept such traditional practices as the price of admission to communion, he has to acknowledge his ‘sexual orientation’ is a sin and promise to desist.

The Synod’s statement implicitly affirms this aspect of it, although an explicit statement would have been welcome.

That august body then gets further into hot water, without quite drowning:

“It has to be noted that there are cases in which mutual aid to the point of sacrifice constitutes a precious support in the life of the partners. Furthermore, the Church pays special attention to the children who live with couples of the same sex, emphasising that the needs and rights of the little ones must always be given priority.”

The first sentence is true but irrelevant, not to mention poorly phrased. The same logic could be applied to marriage between siblings or parents and children. Hence ‘mutual aid to the point of sacrifice’, laudable as it is, isn’t ipso facto redemptive. Why mention it at all then?

As to ‘the children who live with couples of the same sex’, is one to understand that the Church condones such living arrangements? And what does giving priority the ‘rights of the little ones’ actually mean?

One could argue that such rights have already been violated by the very fact that the child is denied the chance of growing up in a normal family, whether natural or adoptive. Does the Church not think so? Again, one would appreciate a less ambiguous statement.

Such quibbles apart, semantics alone don’t quite justify the talk of seismic or even dramatic shifts. Neither, as a matter of fact, do they justify the opposite view.

In other words, the statement is more political than ecclesiastical, and as such it displays all the foibles of modern politics. It’s as if the Synod had a ruling party that wished to preserve its majority by being all things to all men/women/other.

If that’s indeed what the Church has become, then one could indeed talk about a dramatic shift. For the institution whose brief is to guard tradition is giving signs of surrendering to a world that sees tradition in its bombing sights.

These aren’t good signs – and they can’t happily co-exist with the sign of the cross.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

“Under capitalism,” cynical Muscovites used to quip, “man oppresses man. Under socialism it’s the other way around.”

There’s only one area in which socialism is demonstrably more successful than capitalism: mendacious propaganda.

In that sense, propaganda is like advertising: repeated often enough and long enough, it housetrains the populace to accept slogans as reality.

Socialists have known this from the time they first entered history, stage left. Thus French revolutionaries came up with liberté, egalité, fraternité, the slogan that still adorns every public building in France.

For a while they managed to convince the world that martial law was liberty, a cull of the upper classes (and anyone else the revolutionaries disliked) was equality, and dressing most of the eligible population in uniforms of the same design was brotherhood. But this didn’t last.

The appeal of the revolution has worn off, even in France, but the propaganda is still working overtime. Throughout the world, and certainly in Britain, people swallow socialist lies whole, without bothering to chew on them first.

Hence they accept statements like the one in today’s Times, describing our medical care as “virtually free”. Having lived in the USA, with medical care supposedly taken over by greedy medics, I can compare the two systems and conclude that ‘virtually free’ can be dear at the price.

My medical costs in America, and I was hardly the paragon of health, never approached the 12 per cent of my income, which is the National Insurance tax paying for ‘free’ medicine in Britain – and that’s not even counting the cost of additional private insurance, which is mandatory for anyone desiring proper treatment and able to pay for it.

Yet because the NHS is a socialist enterprise it’s held to be off limits for any substantive criticism. One is allowed to lament a few mechanical glitches and too much bureaucracy, but not to make the obvious point that the problem with the NHS is that it’s founded on an inherently corrupt socialist idea.

Some politicians know this, but they also know that even hinting at this fundamental flaw of the NHS would spell an instant end to their careers. People need to have faith in something and, since God is no longer an option, they have to worship the NHS.

Moving on from the specific to the general, the belief nurtured by socialist propaganda is that, though socialism may not make us all richer, it will make us all equal – or at least more equal than we can aspire to be under blood-sucking capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

“Workers of the world, unite!” screamed Marx and Engels when the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace, “you have nothing to lose but your chains!” And the amazing thing is that even many self-described conservatives accept that capitalism, unlike socialism, fosters inequality.

Alas, like many other good stories this one is contradicted by facts, not that firmly entrenched beliefs are ever vulnerable to such trivia.

Thus in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Marx’s dreaded capitalism was at its peak and American robber barons were at their most oppressive, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1.

These days, when egalitarianism proudly reigns supreme and much of socialist dogma goes uncontested, this ratio stands at 158:1.

Hence we shouldn’t be surprised that the data published today show that directors of FTSE companies earn 120 times more than their average employees. The survey doesn’t even mention the gap between the bosses and their lowest-paid workers, which is twice as wide.

One has to conclude that socialism and equality exist in an inverse proportion, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has bothered to study socialism seriously.

Now that supposedly private firms are run the same way as publicly funded, which is to say socialist, enterprises, they conform to the same principles.

The most important of these is that socialist systems are operated mostly for the benefit of the operators. As a result, the operators, be it directors of multinational ‘capitalist’ concerns or managers of multicultural socialist Leviathans, seek to distance themselves from those who do the actual work.

In an age of stock market flotation and public ownership, today’s ‘capitalists’ typically don’t own the capital they control. This absolves them of the same responsibility for their employees that owners of the past felt as a matter of course.

As in any socialist enterprise, the rank-and-file are seen as material, not an aim in themselves. An average worker is reduced to the level of a cog – just as the average voter is merely a cipher in today’s fundamentally socialist ‘democracies’.

This shouldn’t be construed as the idealisation of dog-eat-dog capitalism. That too had its flaws and excesses: no system can be so perfect as to absolve people of the need to be good, as T.S. Eliot pointed out.

Since all people are fallible and some downright wicked, perfection is unattainable in this world. But there is a big difference between a basically sound system that’s at times corrupted by unsound individuals and a system corrupt in principle.

The gap in earnings that’s exciting everyone’s imagination at the moment isn’t significant in itself. Overemphasising it only serves to foster envy, a rather unenviable emotion.

The purpose of an economy is to promote not equality but prosperity, and the two are at odds. But today’s average employee living in a small suburban semi or a smaller urban flat has been sufficiently poisoned by socialist venom to resent his employer living in a mansion.

Being a religion of envy, socialism has an inherent interest in bolstering this vice, and the more socialist a country the more envious will its population be.

Yet the income gap isn’t without significance: it’s a teaching aid for those who still haven’t learned the truth about socialism.

The main truth is that, since socialism is based on a lie, everything emanating from it is a lie too. Looking beyond the lies, we can see that, rather than achieving its proudly proclaimed goals, socialism invariably achieves their exact opposite.

Thus, upon closer examination, its liberty begins to look more like tyranny, its brotherhood turns out to be envy reigning supreme, and its equality naturally develops into a glaring inequality.

Yet those who are ignorant of socialism but pray at its altar nonetheless won’t be swayed by facts. They are proud of their ignorance.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ukip may win anywhere between 12 and 25 parliamentary seats come next May, say the polls.

They also say that the Tories and Ukip will win about 50 per cent of the vote between them, with Labour getting just over a third.

One would think that the two centre-right parties would form a pre-election coalition and stand as a bloc. That would prevent the calamity of Miliband (assuming, and this is an unsafe assumption, that he’s still around then) at Number 10, at the head of a minority government, possibly also including what will be left of the LibDems.

Yet both Nigel Farage and other senior figures in Ukip are saying that such a marriage of convenience isn’t on the cards.

One such senior figure, a man who has made me reassess my hitherto firmly held view that politicians can’t be human by definition, told me over dinner last night why Ukip will stick to the ‘I’ in its nomenclature.

If such a coalition government does well, he said, the Tories, as the senior partner, will claim all the credit. If the government does less than well, then it will be Ukip to take all the blame. That may eventually lead to the party being crushed out of existence.

In other words, even if the Tories do offer several portfolios to Ukip, with possibly Nigel Farage as Deputy PM, or else the Secretary for Europe, the offer will be declined.

Instead the party will act as king maker, or slayer as the case may be, exerting a meaningful influence on policy – this regardless of whether the minority government is tinted blue or red.

I don’t know enough about the mechanics of politics to have a firm view on the matter. But somehow I can’t imagine Ukip steering even a minority Labour government in the right direction, and it takes only a marginally lower flight of fancy to see them do that under the Tories.

Ukip has a whole raft of policies, but all of them are derivative from their umbrella commitment to getting Britain out of the European Union.

While this aspiration is shared by many among the Tory rank and file, and by some of Labour’s, we know that the top hierarchy of both parties is deadset against this, for all the vague noises Dave is extruding from his mouth out of political expedience.

If either party forms a coalition with the LibDems, who are as committed to the EU as the communists were to the USSR, then they’ll definitely throw their combined weight behind staying in that wicked organisation.

In case of a Dave-led Tory government in coalition with the LibDems the weight would be slightly lower but not enough to make a difference.

It’s useful to remember that every significant step in the direction of the UK becoming a gau in a Europe dominated by Germany has been taken under Tory governments, those of Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major (which is not to suggest that any other party would have acted differently).

This time around the Tories would be likely, for once, to keep their promise of holding an In/Out referendum, but I’m almost certain its result will go the wrong way. The combined resources of the Tories, Labour, LibDems and – above all – the EU itself will create a propaganda tsunami in favour of the In vote.

The British public proved its susceptibility to pro-EU (or the EEC as it then was) scare mongering in 1975 when for the first time in the history of the United Kingdom this constitutional issue was put to a referendum.

Yet at that time the technical means of disseminating propaganda were peashooters to today’s heavy guns. Some time during the life of the next parliament, these guns will start spewing flatulent pro-EU salvos and will continue to do so until the public surrenders.

A political innocent like me would think that the only way for Ukip to get what it wants, what all decent people want, would be from the inside of a Tory-led majority government.

There it could join forces with the numerous anti-EU backbenchers, both Tory and Labour, to commit the government to regaining British sovereignty, with or without a referendum. The risk pointed out by my dinner guest is of course real, but then so is the possibility of success.

Staying outside looking in just may turn Ukip into a pariah having to fight against the tripartite majority expertly whipped together by the Tories, Labour and LibDems. I doubt such a fight would be winnable.

The upshot of it all is that I have no idea what the immediate electoral future will bring, and my only excuse for this ignorance is that not many people are any the wiser.

Meanwhile one has to take a purely aesthetic pleasure in watching our governing spivs scampering about like cockroaches in a tightly shut jar. They can sense power slipping out of their fingers, and power is all they want, even if they only get it courtesy of Brussels.

This delight is by itself sufficient to extend our heartiest congratulations to Ukip, while keeping reins on hopes that may or may not come true.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

London filmmaker Grace Gelder has just lent a helping hand to Dave’s noble drive towards broadening the concept of marriage.

An expansion was self-evidently necessary. Anyone could see that insistence on the outdated notion of marriage as a union between one (1) man and one (1) woman was out of keeping with the inclusive spirit of modernity.

We live to be happy, don’t we? Everyone knows there can be no other purpose to life.

Hence anything that adds to the sum total of human happiness must be welcomed, and anything that subtracts from it must be resisted. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Marriage used to be regarded as a necessary condition for the survival of the human race, but that, we now know, was wrong. Marriage is all about happiness, although some of my married friends may disagree.

Who are we then to prevent two homosexual persons, male, female or other, from tying the knot? Such obduracy would be judgemental, and that’s among the worst things either an individual or a society can be.

God (who definitely doesn’t exist) save us from passing moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgement. A propensity for doing so would mark us out as pariahs in our brave, new, all-inclusive world, especially if we cling to the frankly fascist view that some judgements just may be better than others.

We’d be known as elitists and classists (I’ve just come across this neologism in a newspaper, making me wonder how we’ve ever managed without it so far). Even worse, we’d carry the stigma of being survivals of the past, whereof nothing deserves to survive.

Such progressive thoughts, I must admit, are new to me. At the time same-sex marriage became a reality, I still hadn’t abandoned my stale reactionary beliefs, which led me to indulge in shameful mockery.

Whatever next, I kept asking, in jest. Marriage between siblings? Parents and children? Different species? True enough, I sneered, such unions can’t, or at least shouldn’t, produce progeny, but then neither can a homosexual marriage. So, if being happy is all marriage is about, why can’t a man divorce his sister and then marry his father or, say, a borzoi?

I’m ashamed now of my sarcasm. Having realised the error of my ways, I’m prepared to accept all those variations on the theme of marriage as perfectly valid and indeed desirable, something not to satirise but to applaud.

Predictably, in my then jaundiced mood I shackled my imagination, not allowing myself to see the full range of nuptial possibilities. What is it called these days? Thinking outside the box?

Well, I not just thought inside the box but I nailed the lid shut. My sneering remarks were based on the assumption that any future expansion of matrimonial licence would still include two parties, irrespective of their sex, species or kinship.

My new heroine Grace Gelder has disabused me of this silly superstition. Having despaired of finding a suitable spouse, this comely young woman with long hair and a tasteful ring in her nostril has married herself.

Now, Oscar Wilde did say that falling in love with yourself is the beginning of a life-long romance, but he never realised that self-adoration could lead to self-marriage. His imagination was as hamstrung by tradition as mine was, even if his life wasn’t.

Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s imagination, on the other hand, soars free and, like all true pioneers, she lit up a path for others to follow.

Apparently her eye-opening Damascene experience came from the Bjork song Isobel which includes the lyric “I’m Isobel, married to myself”. Indirectly this again pointed out how hopelessly retrograde I am, for I’ve never even heard this or any other song by Bjork and – to my eternal shame – have no idea who Bjork is.

In everything other than the number of parties involved, the marriage was as traditional as they come.

Grace proposed to herself, presumably on bended knee, blushed, lowered her eyelashes and whispered ‘yes’. She then bought a ring, a wedding dress and a full stock of flowers, rice and confetti.

She then invited all her friends to the wedding, to be officiated by her recently ordained friend. None of the reports I’ve read specifies either the friend’s sex or the confession in which he/she/it is a celebrant. But on this evidence, our new-style Anglican Church is the likely candidate.

All in all, 50 guests came, which made Grace’s wedding better attended than any of mine. The invitees watched the ceremony proceed swimmingly, with the blushing bride/groom making two sets of vows, exchanging rings with herself, kissing a mirror reflection of herself (a nice touch, that) and tossing a bouquet over her head.

The reports also omitted the more intimate details of the wedding night, which lets one’s fantasies run riot – mostly in the direction of the objectionable phrase that starts with ‘go’ and ends with ‘yourself’.

Whatever the consummation method was, and whatever objects were used therein, it can elicit no moral objections outside the strictest interpretation of Catholic doctrine. The practice was after all sanctified by marriage.

Which brings me to another neologism, the one I used in the title. For the law has so far failed to recognise Miss/Ms/Mrs Gelder’s marriage as valid.

This has led me to coin the word ‘couplism’, designating yet another flagrant violation of every principle modernity holds dear.

Who are we to insist that it takes two to marry? For one thing, this amounts to committing two other widespread crimes, those of racism and intolerance.

We seem to forget that millions of Brits live according to the law that allows up to four concurrent wives. This law is based on their religion, which is as at least as valid as anything else some of us may practise or, in the eyes of the law, even more so.

In fact, the Newcastle footballer Cheick Ismaël Tioté openly has two wives, and he continues to ply his trade with nary an interference. One can infer that our law no longer insists on a particular numerical makeup of wedlock.

Thus it is flagrant discrimination to accept a marriage of three but not of one. And, this side of fondling a woman’s breast without permission, no crime is worse than discrimination – even if it only involves preferring Bach to Bjork (whoever he/she is).

Down with couplism, I say. Let’s start a campaign, which I’m sure Dave will support, to recognise self-marriage – provided of course that such a hermaphroditic union makes the self-married person happy.

I remember a patriotic Soviet song that started with the words “We are born to make a fairytale come true.” Some clever chaps would replace the word skazku (the Russian for fairytale) with Kafku, with the line now saying “We are born to make Kafka come true.”

Now why do you suppose I suddenly recalled that line? Memory, like marriage, does work in mysterious ways.

 

 

 

 

You know how it is. You make a mental note to send your Mum a Happy Birthday card, and then the note slips out of your mind. 

You wake up on the day and suddenly the date displayed on your bedside clock sounds a distress signal in your half-dormant consciousness.

Bother! you scream, if your neglected mother brought you up well. If not, or more likely if you’ve since forgotten all she ever taught, you scream something else.

One way or the other you get the idea of how I felt this morning upon realising that yet again I forgot that yesterday was the birthday of Vladimir Putin, Vlad to his friends, among whom I proudly number myself.

My only consolation is that the bitter disappointment Vlad doubtless felt was amply assuaged by many others, those more diligent than me in marking the key dates of the Christian calendar.

I was particularly impressed by the 100,000-strong celebratory march in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

The marchers wore blue, white or red clothing, which enabled them to arrange themselves in three files looking from above like the Russian national flag, 2,000 feet long. What a fitting, touching tribute to the man who made Russia what it is!

The tribute is particularly touching if one remembers that Grozny was bombed flat during the second Chechen war started by Putin to consolidate his power.

As a result, the UN designated Grozny as the most devastated city on earth. Thousands were buried under the rubble, adding to the 250,000 Chechens killed in the two post-perestroika wars.

Against that background, the unbridled enthusiasm of the Grozny marchers looked a bit odd. It was like watching the extant Auschwitz inmates taking to the streets to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, a rather surreal sight by any standards.

One can only congratulate the surviving denizens of Grozny on the truly Christian spirit of forgiveness animating this supposedly Muslim nation. Unlike those sore losers with numbers tattooed on their forearms, the Chechens let bygones be bygones.

And what about this beautifully produced video of a children’s choir celebrating the historic event with childish brio but very grown-up mastery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqGaDP7z52g&feature=youtu.be

If you don’t understand Russian, eat your heart out: you’ll miss the full moving experience of watching a hundred tots, most of whom no older than five, singing hosannas to their beloved leader.

Yet pictures, as we know, speak louder than words, and you’ll get into the spirit of things by just watching, even if the high poetry of the lyrics goes by you.

The refrain evokes Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr President” at Carnegie Hall. The tots have embellished the line only slightly by belting out “Happy Birthday, Pre-si-dent of Russia!!!”, which is as far as the parallel can be allowed to go.

For Marilyn was having an affair with the birthday boy, something none of the tots can probably boast, although, if Moscow mauvaises langues are to be believed, Vlad isn’t immune to their appeal. But then loving children is de rigeur for Russian national leaders, and how they express affection is up to them only.

The frames of ecstatic vocalising babes are expertly intercut with sequences of them making a giant birthday cake and decorating it with the song’s refrain placed within a pink heart shape.

The same shape is formed by the children themselves as they sing, “May you achieve everything you’ve set out to, dear President!”, a sentiment probably not universally shared in the Ukraine.

Not to be outdone, grown-ups also fall over themselves to celebrate the glorious occasion properly.

The singing tots come from Vlad’s native Petersburg where he grew up as what he himself proudly described as “your regular street thug”. But Moscow evened the score by staging an exhibition titled Putin’s 12 Labours, drawing a well-merited parallel between Vlad and Hercules.

One painting rivals Velazquez’s Surrender of Breda as the greatest battle painting of all time. It shows Vlad, loincloth-clad, sword in hand, fighting a giant hydra whose heads are helpfully marked as ‘The USA”, ‘The European Union’, ‘Japan’, ‘Canada’ and ‘Sanctions’. If I were Australian, I’d feel left out, but I am not, so I don’t.

Another, equally majestic, painting depicts Vlad taming the ox of Crimea, so identified on the animal’s side. The defeated beast is twice Vlad’s size, which some may construe as a slight misrepresentation of the actual balance of power. But who says a work of art can’t take a little licence?

Hundreds of thousands of Putin T-shirts are selling like proverbial hotcakes, each depicting the National Leader’s likeness. My silk-screened friend Vlad appears naked to the waist (mercifully from the top), clutching a rifle, strangling a snow leopard, on horseback or simply in full, grinning face.

Similar pictures adorn numerous hoardings strewn all over Russia. Some simply say “Happy Birthday, Our Leader!” but others go further in their commendable zeal.

One caption announces that Vlad is “holier than the Pope”, though a claim to infallibility is modestly withheld. Another describes Putin as “the most polite president”, which is richly merited.

Yes, he has publicly stated his intention to “whack’em in the shithouse”, “hang Saakashvili by the balls” and do many other things along similar lines. Yet none of the nouns was preceded by the modifier ‘f***ing”, and if that doesn’t justify describing Vlad’s politeness in superlative terms, I don’t know what will.

Then again, a devoted subject must be attuned to the Leader’s thoughts and plans. Hence the TV personality Tina Kandelaki declared, to wild cheers from the audience, that “Putin has the essential characteristics to captain a ship the size of our continent.”

One hopes the less polite leaders of Germany and France, not to mention Poland and Latvia, sit up and listen. Before too long their people may also be made to celebrate Putin’s birthday just as effusively.

Or perhaps ‘made’ is a wrong word. All those Russian masses must have been driven to the streets by an outburst of spontaneous enthusiasm, not seen in their country since Vlad’s role model Stalin (or anywhere else this side of North Korea).

However, Vlad has a long way to go. His popularity rating is still languishing at a meagre 87 per cent, way short of Stalin’s customary 103.

But if these festivities are any indication, he’s on the right track. Just to think that this was merely his 62^nd birthday. Imagine the celebrations of a rounder milestone, say his 65^th. It’s just possible that by then every hydra will lose its heads, every ox will be tamed and every snow leopard throttled.

In anticipation I have to apologise for my forgetfulness. Vlad, if you’re reading this, sorry, mate. Never again.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.htmlor, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752

 

Generally I try to refrain from scare-mongering, for fear of frightening my readers away.

So how do some of them repay my self-restraint? By scaring me instead.

One such reader drew my attention to an American article considering the possibility of Muslims using the Ebola virus as a weapon in their 1,400-year war on the West.

My first reaction is always to dismiss such doomsday scenarios out of hand: they’ve too often come from mentally unbalanced individuals or out-and-out madmen.

Yet if a chap had told me 15 years ago that some nice young men would be able to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs, I would have doubted his mental health too.

The problem with modernity is that crazy delusions of yesteryear increasingly become commonplace actions of today.

The same arbitrary 15 years ago I wouldn’t have believed anyone predicting that within one generation we’d have female bishops, jogging archbishops who doubt the existence of God, homomarriage, and human rights for apes.

Yes, I would have said, I share your general misgivings about modernity, but let’s not get carried away when it comes down to the particulars. Let’s use our sense of proportion.

Yet here we are, and any sense of proportion is right out of the window. That’s why one feels duty-bound to consider every future possibility, regardless of how insane it sounds at first.

Thus, in addition to scaring me, my reader got me thinking thoughts and asking questions. Such as:

Are the Muslims really at war with the West?

The answer is an unequivocal yes. Islam is inherently, scripturally and historically an expansionist creed bent on world domination.

Being an Abrahamic religion doesn’t make it well-disposed towards other Abrahamic faiths – quite the opposite.

This is predictable: none are as hostile as exponents of superficially similar but fundamentally different creeds.

Thus Christians of the first several centuries AD were less kind to heretics than to non-Christians. Lenin reserved his vilest invective for other socialists, not for the kind of people he dismissed as ‘noxious insects’, that is non-Bolsheviks. And within Islam, the internecine hostility between its two main denominations fully matches the enmity each feels for the infidels.

The history of Islam shows that its ill feelings towards the West have invariably found practical outlets.

Every now and then, the pent-up energy building up in the Muslim world would burst out in blood-red splashes, with passive hostility becoming active warfare. When repelled and appropriately punished, Islam retreats and regroups – only to come out fighting again when duly resuscitated.

The Muslims are clearly going through an active phase now, and their feeling they are at war with the West is no longer dormant. The fact that the West, corrupted by its liberal silliness, refuses to acknowledge this only makes defeat – or, barring that, massive casualties – more likely.

Would terrorists use biological agents or other WMDs if they had them?

I don’t see why not.

Guerrillas in our midst are much more likely than Islamic states to resort to such apocalyptic weapons. The states would be an easy target for equally apocalyptic reprisals, whereas gangs of seemingly stateless thugs, such as the IS, would have no such fears.

The only way for the West to punish them for such crimes would be to accept that we are at war not with any particular Islamic fanatics but with Islam as such.

The specific punitive measures would then be easy to devise, but Muslims already know that such a development isn’t on the cards. An alliance whose leaders repeatedly spread the lie that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ won’t violate the diktats of Zeitgeist.

Can Western police and intelligence services preempt such an attack?

They have so far. Yet even though the past is a good predictor of the future, it’s not foolproof.

In important ways those services are hamstrung by the same liberal silliness I mentioned earlier. Hence they are prevented from using such prophylactic techniques as ethnic profiling or stop-and-search.

Nor does the track record of such services inspire unlimited confidence. They bungled the run-up to 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London, for example.

True enough, no major terrorist acts on Western soil have occurred since then, but then there had been no air attacks on New York buildings during the previous century of aviation either. There’s always a first time, in other words, if you’ll forgive the cliché.

Also, given the notoriously porous borders of all Western countries, one doubts it would be easy to intercept, say, a suitcase containing a primitive nuclear device or a few vials containing an infected liquid.

I bet that even a morbidly impractical chap like me could find a way of smuggling such items in, especially if money were no problem – which it isn’t for Muslim terrorists, who can always rely on the permanently open chequebooks of our good allies, such as Saudi Arabia or Oman.

How about Muslim terrorists using human carriers of deadly contagion, such as Ebola?

Why not? They seem to have no shortage of people willing to strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to bits, along with a few bystanders.

No doubt the promise of Houri, 72 virgins, in paradise facilitates the recruitment of such martyrs. After all, if a man dreads comparison to such an extent that he prefers virgins and yet balks at paedophilia, paradise may be the only place left to find 72 chaste girls.

Then again, the Arabic word ‘houri’ is a cognate of our ‘whore’, which makes one realise than not only God but also etymology works in mysterious ways.

If a fanatic is prepared to kill himself with Semtex, why not with Ebola? No reason at all. And, if anything, biological agents are easier to smuggle in than plastic explosives.

Could it be Ebola then?

Somehow I doubt it. The purpose of terror is to terrorise, as Lenin explained on the basis of impressive personal experience. It follows that the more victims a terrorist can claim, the better he fulfils his mission.

Ebola, however, is transmitted the same way as Aids: by direct contact with blood or bodily fluids. It’s still possible to use this virus as a WMD, but some other agents are just as deadly but easier to administer.

It’s hard to second-guess murderous fanatics, but they are more likely to consider viruses transmitted through air particles, such as Variola vera (smallpox).

An Ebola carrier would be able to infect only a relatively small number of people, and the resulting epidemic would be limited and containable. Not so with a virus that can be transmitted simply by walking through crowded places.

In any case, my reader succeeded in scaring me. It’s best not to ponder such possibilities, unless of course one works for an organisation whose job it is to keep them purely theoretical.

 

My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html  or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752