Month: July 2015

Warm waves of euphoria are wafting over George Osborne, whose crack-papering budget is being hailed as the apex of sagacity.

Actually its chief feature is that it’s less damaging than Ed Ball’s would have been had he been in a position to draft one.

While improving Tory ratings and paving the way to George’s personal ascent, his budget doesn’t mend the structural flaw of our economy: having to service a national debt inexorably heading towards two trillion, if at a slightly slower rate than under Labour.

The only way to alleviate the problem is to halve our public spending, which effectively means eliminating the welfare state. This George hasn’t done, and neither he nor any other Chancellor will ever do it.

The prosperity we seem to be enjoying is phoney and therefore transient. The major reason we have it at all is that our ties with the moribund EU aren’t quite so strangulating as they would be had we joined the euro.

Young George’s talents are held in such high esteem that, now our economic woes seem to be over and some of his time has been freed up, he has been given an additional role: renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU.

George outlined his goals in a recent interview, in which he demonstrated he has every quality required in a modern PM: mediocre intellect, a rubbery elasticity of conscience and a single-minded devotion to power for its own sake.

He sees his new mission as “convincing ourselves that it is right for Britain to remain in the EU”. ‘Ourselves’ meaning whom? George and Dave are already convinced they want a sizeable piece of tangible power, which in Europe resides in the EU.

What George means is that he wants to convince those who aren’t sure that Britain’s best interests lie in becoming a cross between a German gau and a French département.

Only one trick has worked historically: lying that we’d be wealthy inside the EU and destitute outside it. This lie must be set up by another one: claiming that the EU is devoted to the economy above all else. Yet those even remotely familiar with EU history know that it’s a political project, not an economic one.

This is proved by the existence of the euro, a mechanism by which the economies of 19 countries have been to various extents sacrificed for a political cause: the creation of a European superstate run by an unaccountable, seemingly supranational, bureaucratic elite.

‘Seemingly’ is the key word there, for the hub around which the EU revolves is the Franco-German partnership cemented at Vichy circa 1943.

Germany is clearly the senior partner in this Vichy-washy arrangement, with France still reeling from the collective Stockholm syndrome she suffered in 1940. Like Patty Hearst falling in love with her SLA rapists, France is now eager to bring up Germany’s rear, kissing it as she goes along.

Hence any claim that the EU pursues purely economic goals is mendacious. And George can do mendacious with the worst of them: “But for Britain I always felt that the central attraction of European Union membership was the economic one.”

When 40 years ago I joined my first tennis club, its chief attraction was scantily dressed girls one could ogle and, at a braver moment, try to pick up. However, I discovered that ultimately that wasn’t what the club was about.

“I prefer to talk about [the EU] as a single market of free trade,” said George, as I preferred to talk about the tennis club as a pick-up place until realising that one had to play tennis.

“It’s free trade with the rules that enable the free trade to be a real success,” continued George. This suggests there was something unreal about Britain’s past success built solidly on the free trade the country more or less pioneered – amazingly without abandoning her sovereignty.

George’s remark sounded as if he foresaw Britain’s relationship with the EU becoming a purely economic one, and the interviewer asked if that understanding was correct.

A modern politician’s answers to such question are a Möbius strip, not a straight line. Hence George answered neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but merely paraphrased what he had said before.

That merry dance continued throughout, with the interviewer paraphrasing the same question and George paraphrasing the same answer, adding the odd irrelevant bit, such as “the security work that we do with the French” (I’d be embarrassed to mention this in the present situation, but I am not the PM-in-waiting).

The only way to have a purely economic relationship with the EU is to be outside it. It’s no more possible for a member to have such a relationship with the EU than for, say, Armenia to have had it with the USSR.

George knows this of course – and doesn’t care. The purpose of his and Dave’s machinations is to keep Britain in the EU at any cost, thereby perpetuating their own power and that of the wicked elite to which they pledge allegiance.

By George, the man’s ready to be our next PM. One just hopes that, when he occupies the post, it won’t be called ‘gauleiter’.

 

 

Our true opinion formers are neither politicians nor businessmen nor even pundits, though some of them may have a bit of influence.

But not nearly as much as ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’. It’s possible to define those in either category as people I’ve never heard of, but this definition isn’t precise. After all, many of those who are unknown to me are also unknown to everyone else, other than their own families, friends and colleagues.

Even though I’m stuck for a tight definition, I can easily discern certain qualities ‘TV personalities’ and ‘celebrities’ have in common. They, with probably some exceptions of which I’m lamentably unaware, are stupid, immoral, photogenic and devoid of any talent or attainment recognised as such throughout the first 5,000 years of recorded history.

Since Katie Hopkins is both a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’, she possesses all those fine qualities to a hypertrophied extent, a fact she has to keep advertising in order to remain a ‘TV personality’ and ‘celebrity’.

Her latest gem came in a Radio Times interview. When asked what she’d do if she ruled the world, Katie came up with a masterpiece.

She’d solve the world’s most pressing problem, she replied, which is that “We just have far too many old people. It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.”

One can accept that Katie’s frank self-assessment has led her to believe that some people are in no way superior to dogs intellectually or morally. What has escaped her attention is that, for old times’ sake if nothing else, human beings do enjoy a special status in the animal world.

So special in fact that some sticks-in-the-mud still believe – and the law still grudgingly accepts – that human life is so valuable as to be sacred, while dogs’ lives aren’t.

Moreover, the memory of two satanic creeds of modernity, Bolshevism and Nazism, still hasn’t been expunged. Some – one hopes most – people may be put off by the prospect of killing 20 million people, which is roughly the number of those who may be classified as ‘old’ in Britain.

No such problems for our TV personality. The solution, she explained, is easy: “Euthanasia vans – just like ice-cream vans – they would come to your home… They might even have a nice little tune they’d play… I’m super-keen on euthanasia vans.”

Alas, Katie’s chosen solution to all our troubles lacks novelty appeal. It was the Bolsheviks who pioneered the use of such vans as a solution to pressing problems, in their case political rather than demographic ones. The design was as simple as all things of genius.

A hose was attached to the exhaust pipe and routed into the back of the van, which was hermetically sealed. The vehicle was then densely packed with political undesirables and locked up.

The driver would start the engine, those inside would begin banging against the van walls. After a few minutes the noise would die down. The driver would wait a while longer to make sure, then the van doors would be opened and the operators would unload the blue corpses, their faces distorted by the kind of grimaces Goya depicted in his Capriccios.

The innovation was so effective yet simple that it found a broader use when the Nazis took over. Cooperation between the NKVD and Gestapo started immediately, long before the world was treated to the spectacle of the Pact.

The SS and Gestapo knew they had a lot to learn. After all, by the time Hitler came to power the Soviets had been practising mass murder for 15 years, and the Germans respected their accumulated know-how.

As part of the friendly exchange, the technologically-minded Germans presented their Russian colleagues with a state-of-the-art machine for pulling fingernails. The Soviets in their turn taught the Germans how to save valuable ammunition by using ‘euthanasia vans’.

The idea caught on, and the Germans put it to wide use in Eastern Europe. In time they abandoned the practice in favour of one that utilised the advances of their chemical industry, and ‘euthanasia vans’ went the way of all outdated gadgets.

But now our own ‘TV personality’ has revived the concept, so far only in theory, as an ideal but alas still unattainable goal towards which we must strive.

It’s comforting to observe how euthanasia fans and birth-control enthusiasts converge in their longing for mass murder. Margaret Sanger, for example, the founder of Planned Parenthood who coined the term ‘birth-control’, was capable of uttering pearls like “Coloured people are like human weeds and are to be exterminated.”

Sanger, who in her day was even more of a celebrity than Katie is now, didn’t mind letting wrinklies die a natural death. But modernity is nothing if not progressive, and it fell upon our own ‘TV personality’ to take Sanger’s idea to the next level.

What kind of society would allow such deranged monsters a public platform and an adulating audience? The single-word answer can be found in Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph: Circumspice.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Repeat after me, 10 times: NOTHING unspeakable done by any ethnic or religious group comes from its character or history.

Good, now you’re ready to be a modern person, for you’ve just enunciated the core belief of PC modernity.

Though applicable to any group, these days it’s most widely practised in relation to Islamism, as Islam is fashionably known.

Hence Muslims regale us with videos of thieves having their hands chopped off because it sounds like a good idea on the spur of the moment – not, repeat NOT, because they take on faith Koran 5:36: “As to the thief, male or female, cut off his or her hands: a punishment by way of example, from Allah, for their crime: and Allah is Exalted in power.”

Similarly, if you listen to any Russian chauvinist, Bolshevism had nothing to do with the Russians.

Never mind peasant revolts, ranging from local Jacqueries to full-scale wars, that started a few years after Russia became Russia and continued non-stop throughout the country’s history.

Never mind the aristocratic uprising of December, 1825, the attacks on the government throughout the 19^th century, the murder of the reforming Tsar Alexander II by predominantly Russian terrorists, the escalating bloody war between government and society throughout Nicholas II’s reign – indeed anything showing any Russian roots of the Bolshevik nightmare.

No, all Bolsheviks were Jews and other aliens who landed from Mars in such huge numbers that, without any support from the native population, they managed to kill about 15 million people while Lenin (his grandfather a baptised Jew!) was still alive and before Stalin – Georgian! – got going.

As to Nazism, I once had an entertaining conversation with an American Germanophile professor of political science. The good professor indignantly denied my suggestion that Nazism had something to do with the German character.

Trademark Germanic bellicosity, first mentioned by Caesar in his Gallic Wars? Nonsense!

The obsession of German mythology with sylvan mysticism, all those witches, hobgoblins and blood-thirsty Erlkönigs? Rubbish!

General propensity for paganism, which makes the Reformation intelligible? Claptrap! 

German Romanticism, as typified by Wagner, glorifying all of the above and adding a touch of virulent anti-Semitism to spice things up? Nothing of the sort!

Having run out of possibilities, I had to ask if, in the professor’s learned opinion, Nazism actually happened and, if so, what if anything had caused it. He reluctantly answered yes to the first question and refused to answer the second.

Nothing caused Nazism. It just happened. Out of the blue (or brown, as the case may be).

As a believer in the First Law of Thermodynamics, expressible in layman’s terms as ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes out of nothing), I disagreed and we left it at that.

Then recently I came across Joachim Raff.

In 1863 this German-Swiss composer won a prestigious prize from the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde for his 70-minute symphony To My Fatherland.

Frankly, I haven’t heard this work and nor am I ever likely to do so. What caught my eye was the composer’s programme notes:

“First movement: Allegro. Image of the German Character: ability to soar to great heights; trend towards introspection; mildness and courage as contrasts that touch and interpenetrate in many ways; overwhelming desire to be pensive.

“Second movement: Allegro molto vivace. The outdoors: through German forests with horns-a-winding; through glades with the sounds of folk music.

“Third movement: Larghetto. Return to the domestic hearth, transfigured by the muses and by love.

“Fourth movement: Allegro drammatico. Frustrated desire to lay a foundation for unity in the Fatherland.

“Fifth movement: Larghetto – allegro trionfale. Plaint, renewed soaring.”

Now try to replace the word ‘German’ with ‘British’, ‘French’, ‘Italian’ or any other adjective denoting nationality, and you’ll instantly find out how futile such an exercise is. Nothing but ‘German’ fits.

There we have it, the German character in a nutshell. A useful illustration to my argument with the American professor, wouldn’t you say?

The rattle of jackboots and the Sieg Heil!!! roar of millions of throats can be heard loud and clear. Or else my ear is oversensitive, my taste for historical causality overdeveloped, and my sensibilities hopelessly retrograde.

My American friend probably thinks so. 

Obama’s triumphant tour of the African half of his roots was marred by Mike Huckabee, Republican presidential candidate.

Now I dislike any politician of a certain age who insists on being known by the diminutive version of his Christian name. However, Mr Huckabee’s ability to rile Obama entitles him to calling himself even Mickey if he so chooses. This is what he said:

“This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history… he would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven.

“We forget Iranians have never kept a deal in 36 years… There’s no reason to think they will suddenly start doing it.

“The Iran deal is a bad deal, bad for America and bad for Israel.”

Obama was so incensed he had to interrupt his Kenyan tribal dance in mid-step. The drums fell silent, and only the president’s voice was heard once he had regained command of it.

That statement, said Obama, “would be considered ridiculous if it weren’t so sad…” And his acolyte Debbie Wasserman Schultz described Mr Huckerbee’s statement as “grossly irresponsible”.

This is good knockabout stuff, but it falls short of being a cogent argument. Trying to offer one, Barack Hussein proved he is as hard of hearing as he is hopeless at rhetoric.

“I have not heard another argument [against] that holds up.” That makes the president deaf, for every conceivable medium all over the West has been screaming devastating arguments against the deal.

These come from strategists, armament experts, political analysts, weapon inspectors – not all of them in the pay of the Republicans, Mossad or aliens from the planet Islamophobia.

But hold on, Obama has an argument of his own: “99% of the world thinks it’s a good deal.”

I congratulate the president on the proficiency of his polling service. Surveying a population of six billion in such a short time is a feat of monumental proportions.

So monumental in fact that one is tempted to think that no such poll has been conducted, and Obama’s calculation was pulled out of the portion of his anatomy he shakes when whirling to the sound of African drums.

But do let’s suppose for the sake of argument that what he said is true. In that case, his statement is a classic rhetorical fallacy, known as argumentum ad populum (if many believe it, it’s true.)

Of course modern, and especially American, politics is based on fideistic worship of majority opinion, which is one thing that’s wrong with modern politics.

But forget generalities of rhetoric or politics. Forget even Mr Huckabee’s oratorical flourishes that are as hyperbolic as to be expected from a politician in the throes of a campaign. Forget also the variously disparaging adjectives used by Obama and his retinue to describe Mr Huckabee’s statements.

Let’s just look at the points he made and, rather than calling them (and him) names, see if they’re true or false. Mr Huckabee believes this is a rotten deal because:

1) Iran has been trying to get nuclear weapons for decades.

2) Iran’s leaders honestly say such weapons will be used to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, presumably killing every Israeli.

3) Since Iran is a major sponsor and perpetrator of global anti-Western terrorism, her acquisition of nuclear weapons presents a danger not just to Israel but to us all.

4) Contrary to what Obama claims, the deal involves a great element of trust, for its provisions for verification are inadequate.

5) However, Iran is untrustworthy in view of her record of breaking or sabotaging every agreement she has signed since 1979.

6) Judging by the Iranian leadership’s publicly expressed belief that the deal constitutes America’s surrender, and huge Iranian crowds celebrating it with ‘Death to America’ chants, Iran’s view of it is different from Obama’s.

7) Hence the deal is awful first because it puts at the ayatollahs’ disposal billions that may be used for nefarious purposes and, second, because it practically guarantees their acquiring a nuclear capability within a decade.

8) Therefore Obama’s deal with Iran may well lead the world to nuclear holocaust.

These eight points, unchallengeable factually or intellectually, unpack the epigrammatic brevity of Mr Huckabee’s statement. Obama may call it what he wants, but I’ll call it what it is: true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In his capacity as the Lords’ Deputy Speaker and Chairman of the Privileges and Conduct Committee, Baron Sewel, 69, was in charge of enforcing good behaviour in the Upper House.

His own behaviour, however, didn’t always meet the high standards whose guardian he was. The other day Lord Sewel resigned his posts after starring on hidden camera.

The video depicts His Lordship snorting cocaine through a rolled £5 note while cavorting with two prostitutes in his Dolphin Square flat. It’s unclear whether the pink bra His Lordship wore in some of the sequences belonged to him or was borrowed from one of his friends for hire.

Personally, I’ve never felt the need either to own a brassiere or to put one on after removing it from a woman, but I realise that some men have more sophisticated tastes. So my hat’s off to Lord Sewel.

As each of the young ladies comes with a £200 price tag, they set Lord Sewel back £400 – unless they came cheaper for two. As well they should have done, for the session came complete with valuable political insights.

Between sex acts his Lordship took breaks, understandably prolonged on account of his venerable age. Rather than wasting the downtime, he imparted on the young ladies some unsolicited pearls of political wisdom, enlightening them on the fine points of his colleagues.

Cameron, he said, “is false. He makes one-off commitments and cannot deliver… He just shoots from the lip… He’s the most superficial, facile Prime Minister there’s ever been.” The garment Lord Sewel sported when offering this observation takes nothing away from its accuracy, as far as I’m concerned.

Boris Johnson?  “A public school upper class twit… an a***hole [to be regarded as such up North]”.

One suspects that, being a career Labour man, His Lordship probably feels that all public school chaps fit this description. If so, he’s patently wrong. But there’s no gainsaying his judgement that Boris will be viewed in those terms “in Preston, in Burnley, in Manchester”. Why, I even know some people in higher-rent parts of the country who feel the same way.

Lest one might accuse Lord Sewel of bias against Tory politicians, he also took a swipe at the man to whom he owes his political career, Tony Blair.

In fact, he attributed the present, most pleasingly disastrous, state of the Labour Party to Blair’s dragging the UK into the “pointless” Iraq War: “He went to war because of this sort of love affair with George Bush… Blair fell in love with George Bush, absolutely.”

Love-related metaphors must have really rolled off His Lordship’s tongue under the circumstances, but one does detect a grain of truth in his diatribe. He might have added that Blair could give Cameron a good run for his money in the “facile and superficial” stakes, but party loyalty must have kicked in at that point.

In fact, he partly exonerated Tony by opining that his apparent obsession with money is inspired by his wife Cherie, who’s money-mad because she “comes from a working-class Liverpool background”.

One may think that the implicit contempt for such a lowly descent sounds odd when coming from a Labour peer, but in fact it’s par for the course. No one seriously thinks that there’s anything labour about the parliamentary Labour Party, or indeed anything conservative about the Conservative Party or anything liberal and democratic about the LibDems.

Blair, in fact, has a background similar to Cameron’s, and I’m sure that, just between them and a Krug bottle, they talk about the proles in equally derisory terms. And when Nick Clegg stops over for a quick glass, he must join in the fun.

Once Sewel got on a roll, there was no stopping him. The Labour leadership contest is “in a f***ing mess”. Again his judgement can’t be faulted.

Jeremy Corbyn is “a typical romantic idiot… Useless.” True, although I’m not sure about the ‘romantic’ bit. Communists are in my mind associated not so much with romanticism as with concentration camps, but hey, Sewel is a Labour man after all.

“Andy Burnham… goes whichever way the wind is blowing.”

Yvette Cooper is “not strong.”

Liz Kendall, whose name Lord Sewel couldn’t recall offhand, “is just too naïve”.

In short, “there’s nobody bright enough, or who has the leadership qualities…” And they’re all more or less run by union bosses like Len McCluskey who is “a f***ing idiot.” Yes, among other things, I’d be tempted to add.

And the SNP leaders aren’t much better. Alex Salmond, for example, is a “silly pompous prat.” And so on in the same vein, until His Lordship’s amorous vigour was restored by cocaine, and the young ladies stopped shirking and started working.

I don’t know if afterwards they agreed that the session was valuable in more than just monetary terms. I certainly think so – it’s not often that one can hear a politician talk in such an uninhibited fashion, or tell the truth about the sorry state of British politics.

Perhaps all our parliamentarians ought to be obliged by law to wear bras. Except of course the female MPs, who are likely to regard such a diktat as an expression of latent misogyny and the male desire to dominate women.

 

This, as the British cyclist Chris Froome found out, isn’t a figure of speech, at least not just that.

On course to win his second Tour de France, Chris has got up the nose of many a French spectator. They vent their frustration through other orifices, by spitting on the cyclist as he speeds by and throwing urine in his face.

Such acts don’t just defy fair play, a notion that has left a negligible imprint on the French mentality. They are actually against the law.

It’s hard not to notice in general, and this summer in particular, that commitment to observing the law is in France somewhat understated.

There’s a riot season on, or rather a current spike in one contiguous riot season. Access to the Channel Tunnel is regularly blocked by rioters taking advantage of the French take on labour relations.

Some thugs represent various unions, some just express their pent-up hostility, some others come along for the ride out of a peculiarly Gallic sense of fun. All are breaking the law, with the law looking on with avuncular kindness.

Cars are overturned and burnt, tyres are set aflame, with noxious fumes turning the Tunnel into a low-scale answer to gas chambers, revolting stuff is smeared over the road surfaces, frenzied crowds clash with the police on the rare occasions that the police try to interfere, thousands of refugees attack British vehicles – all of this is going on practically non-stop.

France, I’d like to remind those who may be forgiven for thinking otherwise, is a core country of our civilisation. One can’t help realising this when walking through, say, our local cities of Auxerre and Bourges.

The British simply don’t have places with such a concentration of monuments to a once-great Western civilisation; nowhere in England can one see so much unspoilt and lovingly preserved medieval grandeur.

The loving preservation is a phenomenon of rather recent standing, it has to be said. Following their Walpurgisnacht going by the name of the Revolution, the French spent the next century busily destroying the very same Romanesque and Gothic buildings – 80 per cent of them, according to the late, great medievalist Régine Pernoud – that enchant today’s cultured visitors.

But the remaining 20 per cent is still more than any country, with the possible exception of Italy, possesses. We certainly have nothing quite like it – but then neither are our more modest towns consumed by the wildfires of riots to anywhere near the same extent.

England – and les autres Anglo-Saxons who have come out of England the way Eve came out of Adam’s rib – has something the French and other continentals don’t have: intuitive respect for the law.

This, I dare say, is more important than great buildings only those few endowed with real aesthetic sense can properly appreciate. For being governed by just laws accepted by consent is a factor of freedom, whose fruits are equally nourishing to everybody.

The French will tell you that they too have the rule of law, but that’s not exactly true. What they have is the rule of lawyers.

For, in contrast to English Common Law based on precedents accumulated over centuries, the French have positive law, one imposed by government. Hence the two legal systems are vectored in the opposite directions: from bottom to top in England, from top to bottom in France.

This has been the case since God was young but, under the organic governments of Western civility, the French kings’ need for legislative activism was limited – their power was mainly restricted by their own conscience, which in turn was guided by the Church.

With the advent of a society inspired by the Masonic slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité (personally, I would have preferred Aligoté, but I wasn’t asked) it all changed.

Lacking an organic claim to legitimacy, the revolutionary government – and all its kaleidoscopically changing successors – flooded the population with a deluge of laws, constitutional or otherwise.

All in all, in the 226 years since 1789 France has had 17 different constitutions, an average of 13.2 a year (to be fair, the latest one goes back 57 years). As to the number of different laws spawned by the constitutions, one would need a mainframe computer to calculate those.

Most of those laws come from the fecund minds of avocats who bang their clever heads together to devise legislation that’ll hasten the arrival of paradise on earth.

I’m not qualified to judge the level of legal thought that goes into this process and nor am I particularly interested. What is to me patently obvious, however, is that this system doesn’t foster a visceral, intuitive respect for the law – of the kind the English used to have predominantly and still have residually.

Positive law has one visible social effect: it divides people into ‘us’, those who are supposed to obey the laws, and ‘them’, the powers represented by the clever lawyers sitting on the Conseil d’État and similar bodies.

The ‘us’ will obey the law not out of respect but out of fear, and fear alone isn’t a sufficient inducement. When the ‘they’ lose the spunk to disperse riots with unrestricted violence and ship the organisers off to some hellhole like Devil’s Island, there exist no mechanisms strong enough to stop the outrage.

England has built a solid capital of justice, accepted as such by all. We are living off the interest on that capital, rapidly frittering it away. But at least there’s some left, and we must both give thanks and remain vigilant.

 

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barack Hussein, who owes 100 per cent of his ascent to 50 per cent of his genes, has generously given Britain the benefit of his geopolitical wisdom.

Britain, he hectored, ought to stay in the EU because that’ll give the USA “much greater confidence in the state of the transatlantic union”, and America hasn’t got “a more important partner than Great Britain”.

Britain must stay, explained Barack Hussein further, because the EU “has made the world safer and more prosperous”.

Now one suspects that Barack himself knows little about the EU and understands even less. But it’s shocking that his advisers failed to point out how ignorant and idiotic that statement is in general, but especially at this time.

There’s a war going on in Europe at present, with the EU comfortably sitting on its thumbs. At the same time, EU policies are directly responsible for the burgeoning social unrest across Europe, accompanied by a rapid rise to power and influence of various extremist parties.

And it’s bizarre to talk about the world made more prosperous by the EU at a time when most economies within it are in the doldrums. Never mind Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Ireland or Eastern Europe, but even Germany’s economy is at a point of stagnation, and France’s well beyond that point.

None of this would be worth talking about if Barack Hussein shooting off the lip were an isolated event. But in fact the USA has for the past hundred years been a passionate, if not always open, advocate of a world government or its near approximations.

The motives behind this passion are often misunderstood, especially by people who think simplistically that America pursues nothing but commercial interests. From that standpoint it’s indeed hard to understand why the United States has always been a supporter of the manifestly anti-American United Nations, or, for that matter, of European federalism.

After all, the express economic purpose of the EU is to create a protectionist bloc aimed against America. Is America cutting off her nose to spite her face? Not at all.

The United States is more than just a giant commercial concern with an uncertain cultural background. It is the messianic flag bearer of modernity. And modernity loves uniformity of any kind.

The Americans aren’t just international traders but also international proselytisers. As such, they know that a single government would probably be easier, and definitely quicker, to convert to their way of life than many sovereign governments.

For a single European state can never be a traditional European institution. Its links with any culture, be that local European or general Western, are severed. Its traditional patriotic loyalties are nonexistent. Its only loyalty is pledged to the internationalist political elite and, if this elite isn’t Americanised already, it can be trained to be. If training proves difficult, it can be bought or browbeaten.

A single world (or European) government can be achieved only by an irreversible destruction of the traditional political and legal institutions. These institutions are, of course, traditional in form only. Their substance has long since been perverted by modernity.

Still, even if they’re nothing but a skeleton, there’s always the danger that some unexpected upheaval may put new flesh on the old bones. Hence the Americans will welcome any political development that’ll push traditional Western institutions closer to extinction.

Incidentally, the Americans’ unswerving devotion to the EU gives the lie to their much-touted commitment to fostering worldwide democracy. Even European federasts stop short of making the demonstrably false claim that this institution has anything to do with democracy. In fact, its whole political modus operandi is about as undemocratic as it’s possible to be this side of North Korea.

One begins to suspect that the word ‘democracy’ inscribed on the American banners under which so many Americans  died in the Middle East is nothing but a slogan of imperial expansion.

If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, fine too. Whoever is president at the moment will talk about ‘peace and prosperity’ instead.

And speaking of Americans dying, Barack Hussein isn’t better at arithmetic than at geopolitics. “If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism,” he said, “it’s less than 100”.

His calculator is as out of kilter as his moral sense. For using Muslim terrorism as a pretext, the USA set out in 2003 to bring democracy to Iraq, predictably succeeding only in creating a sea of blood.

Drowning in it have been, according to The US Department of Veterans Affairs, tens of thousands of Americans killed, along with untold and uncounted millions of other nationals, and we haven’t seen the end of it yet.

This ill-advised action created, and is continuing to create, enough local employment opportunities for Muslim terrorists not to seek much action in North America or Europe – for the time being.

But Obama sees the only downside of his presidency in his failure to take a few peashooters away from his own people. He doesn’t realise that his policies, and those of his predecessors, are directly responsible for the howitzers, soon to be loaded with nuclear charges, aimed at the West.

I’m terrified that at this critical juncture of history the West’s most powerful nation is led by this… Sorry, I’ve promised my wife not to swear in writing.

As a firm believer in progress, I’m convinced that, ever since Darwin created mankind, it has been going through a series of incremental improvements.

Imagine a steady climb from level ground to the top of a shining peak – that’s mankind progressing through the centuries. We may or may not have reached the very top yet, but we’ve certainly established a toehold within reach of the summit. 

Hence today’s head of Trinity’s philosophy chair is a deeper thinker than Plato and Aquinas put together, Tracy Emin is a better artist than either Piero della Francesca or Vermeer, Richard Branson is a more intrepid explorer than James Cook, and Justin Welby is a better Archbishop of Canterbury than Thomas à Becket.

To put this – only possible! – view of history to a test, I looked at the lyrics of one of the songs that enable the Trinidadian-American rapper Nicky Minaji to earn about $10 million a year. Here’s the refrain of the song (kindly posted on Facebook by a reader of mine):

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

You a stupid hoe, you a you a stupid hoe

Allow me to translate for the uninitiated: ‘hoe’ in this context is not the garden implement, but rather a certain ethnic, and therefore ‘cool’, way of pronouncing the word ‘whore’. However, you mustn’t assume on this basis that, when Father Christmas shouts ‘Ho, ho, ho’, he’s referring to three women of easy virtue.

‘Progress’ is of course a relative and dynamic concept. It signifies upward movement from a certain starting point, arbitrarily picked from the past.

That’s why I ignored the rather dubious absolute quality of Miss Minaji’s grammar and poetics – after all, poets, as we know, are entitled to some licence. Instead I set out to compare her lyrics with a reference point taken from the 16^th century.

Of course the temptation is strong to compare Miss Minaji’s output with a Shakespeare sonnet, just as he himself compared his beloved to a summer’s day. But that wouldn’t be fair: one should compare the like with the like.

So here are the same number of lines from the lyrics of a 16^th century song written by an anonymous minstrel who, at a guess, didn’t earn an equivalent of $10 million a year:

This sweet and merry month of May,

While Nature wantons in her prime,

And birds do sing, and beasts do play

For pleasure of the joyful time

I choose the first for a holiday,

And great Eliza with a rhyme:

O beauteous Queen of second Troy,

Take well in worth a simple toy.

There, you must agree that the notion of progress has passed the test: the poetic sensibility and sheer artistry of the modern verse is clearly superior, wouldn’t you say?

And if you’re still unsure, I suggest you listen to the CD of Alfred Deller singing 16^th century songs, most of them of folk provenance. Your faith in progress, as represented by modern rap, will be reinforced to tungsten strength.

It goes without saying that our morality has been progressing in parallel with our vocal music. And tolerance is such an important part of morality that, for all intents and purposes, it may be its full modern synonym.

To wit: the multi-talented if unfunny comedian cum political guru Russell Brand has just referred to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in writing as a “f***ing Kraut Nazi”. Yet in our progressive – and tolerant! – time he has suffered no adverse consequences other than a few disapproving words from those who, unlike me, are suspicious of progress.

Going back to the non-progressive and intolerant 16^th century, one wonders what would have happened to a jester who said something along the same lines about Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I – to say nothing of her song-writing father King Henry.

My off-the-cuff guess is that Russell Brand’s typological ancestor would have been merely drawn and quartered, if he was lucky. Now just imagine the hirsute Russell Brand, along with Nicky Minaji, being dragged to the block, where a muscular chap sporting a leather mask is taking practice swings with his axe…

No, don’t imagine that. The thought may prove to be too attractive – and too non-progressive for words.

 

   

 

 

                        

 

Many Brits, mainly those on the political right, are so fed up with our own spivocratic government that they go blind. The fetid slush on the other side looks like green grass to them.

This explains their attraction to Putin. The sentiments behind it are irrational, more akin to some perverse secular faith than to any conscious preference.

Hence rational arguments make no inroads on the believers’ creed. “Yes,” they acknowledge the obvious facts, “but at least he looks after his people.”

Yes, but apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play? goes a macabre American joke. But at least there was a play on. However, Putin looking after his people is a figment of ignorant imagination primed by a well-oiled propaganda machine.

Two examples of Putin’s medical care, if I may. One involves Iosif Kobzon, a popular crooner, known as ‘Russia’s Frank Sinatra’ since I was a child. Alas, singing isn’t all Kobzon is known for.

After ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, he entered two new fields of endeavour: politics and organised crime, which in Russia are unbreakably fused into one.

Kobzon is a senior Duma member, while his involvement in the other aspect of Russian life earned him a ban on entry to the United States long before the current sanctions. His unswerving support for the annexation of the Crimea and the brutal attack on the Ukraine added most other Western countries to the doors now shut to Kobzon.

That’s where medical care comes in. Like most rich Russian criminals, Kobzon gets his treatment abroad. Or rather he did, until the sanctions kicked in.

Since the singer cum criminal suffers from cancer, effective medical care is for him a matter of life or death. And he knows that life isn’t an option, given the state of Russia’s medicine.

However, his friend Putin has announced urbi et orbi that the West can take its sanctions and shove them (I’m trying to reproduce the style of Vlad’s chosen mode of self-expression). Russia is self-sufficient in everything, including her medicine that’s leading the West by a wide margin.

Apparently not only Kobzon but all other Russian Mafiosi, sorry, I mean businessmen, disagree – in deed, though of course not in word. None of them would be caught dead in a Russian hospital (pun intended), which is why Kobzon appealed to his friend Putin to put some heat on the recalcitrant Westerners, which Vlad so far hasn’t.

Alas, it takes an awful lot of money to be treated abroad. This option is off limits for those Russians who, no matter how successful in their own fields, don’t earn millions.

Such as Oleg Bogomolov, member of Russia’s Academy of Science (RAN), an equivalent of our Royal Society. Yet he has access to the RAN clinic, which is infinitely better than the hospitals available to hoi polloi.

According to a story running on a banned Russian website, a month ago the academician checked into the hospital for a thorough check-up, something he, no longer a young man, did annually. Feeling fine, Bogomolov spent his first few days in hospital writing scientific papers.

Then things began to deteriorate. Suffering from dizziness and nausea, Bogomolov was moved to intensive care.

A fortnight later hospital officials rang the scientist’s family and told them to pick up his personal belongings as he wouldn’t need them any longer. The family promptly collected two plastic bags containing the patient’s clothes, books, unfinished articles, leftover food.

Out of idle curiosity they wondered what the doctors were doing about the academician’s health – only to be told there was nothing anyone could do. Both kidneys had stopped working, and the only thing to do was to wait for the end.

The inquisitive relations inquired why nothing had been done about the patient’s kidneys for a fortnight. The Head Surgeon demanded that the petitioners turn off their mobile phones and put their pens away before answering that the academician himself had refused treatment – orally, which is why no evidence of the refusal exists.

The family couldn’t get their heads around their dear relation dying after receiving no medical help for a fortnight. They were clearly going to do something about it, which is why that very evening they were informed that a life-saving operation had been performed successfully.

Three days later the family were told to take the bed-ridden and half-conscious academician home. They refused, and managed to make the President of RAS write a letter pleading that his colleague be allowed to stay in hospital for a while longer.

This Bogomolov was grudgingly allowed to do, and he’s still in his semi-private room. The family are paying for his food and also for a private nurse, since this – highly privileged! – hospital has only one nurse per 30 patients. As I write, the doctors are still trying to kick Academician Bogomolov out.

So Kobzon knows something that Putin’s Western groupies don’t. Putin’s Russia, this ugly hybrid of Third Rome and Third Reich, looks after her people the Third World way.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trotskyism is a disease that causes irreversible damage. A sufferer may renounce it and show every sign of health, but that’s like renouncing cancer in remission. A relapse is always possible.

Anyone wishing to contest this observation could do worse than read Peter Hitchens’s articles. Unlike his unlamented brother Christopher, Peter makes some conservative noises, and many of them ring true. But the Trotskyist cells are still alive, gnawing at his mind.

Thus he correctly criticises our Middle Eastern policy, saying that the American attempt to democratise Iraq, in which we participated, has plunged the whole region into a blood-soaked chaos, while our overthrowing Gaddafi pushed criminal foolishness to a whole new level.

So far so good, the problem is identified correctly. Alas, then comes the solution part.

“The Iranian people long for Western friendship. Properly treated, they could be our best ally in the region.”

Yes, everyone knows how much Iranians love the West. One can only compliment them for the stoicism with which they have been concealing their feelings ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution (abetted by the USA, it has to be said).

Like a schoolboy bullying a girl he secretly fancies, Iranians mask their adoration of the West by regularly marching, in huge numbers, and chanting ‘Death to America’. ‘Death to Britain’ is another popular tune.

The words are thunderous, but the actions are louder. Iran supports, finances and conducts global terrorism against Western powers. This proceeds in conjunction with her government’s sustained efforts to add an apocalyptic dimension to terrorism by acquiring nuclear weapons. To give credit where it’s due, the ayatollahs never bothered to conceal what the intended targets are.

First such weapons would self-admittedly be used to wipe Israel, our only real ally in the region, off the face of the earth. Then the turn would come of Saudi Arabia, our other Middle Eastern ally, although Hitchens is correctly unhappy with that particular alliance.

And then Iran, now dominant in the Middle East and in possession of mid-range nuclear-tipped missiles, could start talking to the West in the language of blackmail, fluently spoken and perfected by her best friend Russia.

Hence the West imposed sanctions designed to depress Iran’s economy to a point where staving off starvation, rather than developing new technologies, would be the government’s priority.

Now, displaying its typically ignorant and craven cynicism, the West has agreed to repeal the sanctions in exchange for Iran’s support against ISIS and obviously lying promise not to develop nuclear weapons – a promise made by a historically mendacious and possibly half-crazy government.

Hitchens’s comment on this abject surrender, which may well result in an all-out nuclear war? Thus spake the (ex-) Trotskyite:

“It’s worth noting, as well, how hard the supposedly wicked and evil Kremlin worked to help us get the nuclear agreement with Tehran.”

The word ‘supposedly’ means that, to Hitchens, the kleptofascist KGB government of Russia is in fact not wicked or evil. It’s virtuous, so much so that it helped to put the world in danger of a nuclear holocaust out of sheer disinterested altruism – sorry, I mean “to help us get the nuclear agreement with Tehran”.

Hitchens’s love affair with Putin is nothing new, and it must be replete with homoerotic longings, so far, one hopes, unrealised. Otherwise it’s impossible to explain how nothing the object of Hitchens’s affection does ever makes a dent in the pundit’s passion.

Murdering Hitchens’s journalistic colleagues by the gross doesn’t lower the amorous pitch. Neither do similar murders in and around London, some of them with nuclear weapons. Neither do three aggressive wars started by Putin, including the on-going one against the Ukraine. Neither does his mafia economy, which has made him personally one of the world’s richest men.

Neither does… well, anything – including Putin’s efforts to further the Middle Eastern interests of his criminal regime by clearing the way for Iran to become a nuclear power.

Hitchens bizarrely hails his paramour for this, contextually also welcoming the treaty Putin facilitated, the one putting not only Israel but the whole world in grave danger.

Verily I say unto you, you can take a boy out of Trotskyism, but…