Month: July 2015

 A young man with a degree in engineering from Tennessee University hired a Ford Mustang and drove it to a US Naval Reserve Centre. There he pulled out a gun and opened fire through the perimeter fence.

Four marines were killed on the spot, three more wounded, and the young engineer was himself shot dead.

The FBI say that the man’s motives are unclear, which is a serious matter. After all, as any reader of detective novels knows, a thorough investigation of a crime is impossible without establishing the motive.

Mercifully, I’m here to help, taking advantage of the omniscient powers with which God endowed me. The FBI are looking for a clue, one paltry clue, but I in my munificence can give them not one, not two, but three ironclad clues:

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez. Each of the three parts of the murderer’s name is a clue; each is an ample explanation of his action. Put them together, and the police don’t have to wrack their brains about the motive. It’s there for all to see.

The FBI hastily issued a statement saying that the murderer had no links with international terrorism. That could be true, unless one regarded, with ample justification, Islam itself as a terrorist organisation.

The FBI are of course under explicit orders from the very top not to indulge in such sweeping generalisations. What they meant was that the murderer had no established links with ISIS – as if Muslim terrorism started with this gang and has been monopolised by it.

This is the current line, or rather the current lie. Yet it was incessant acts of Muslim terrorism that provoked the First Crusade as far back as 1096. Narrowing our perspective, most of the world’s flashpoints over the last 20 years have involved Muslims –  long before the world was graced with ISIS.

Specifically one could mention the conflicts between Bosnian Muslims and Christians, Côte d’Ivoire Muslims and Christians, Cyprus Muslims and Christians, East Timor Muslims and Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians in Ambon Island, Kashmir Muslims and Hindus, Kosovo Muslims and Christians, Macedonian Muslims and Christians, Nigeria Muslims and both Christians and Animists, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims in Iraq and throughout the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, Chechen Muslims and Russians, Azeri Muslims and Armenian Christians, Sri Lanka Tamils and Buddhists, Thailand’s Muslims and Buddhists in the Pattani province, Muslim Bengalis and Buddhists in Bangladesh, Muslims and Protestant, Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Orthodox Christians in Kurdistan.

Yet not just the FBI but we all are under orders not to find, nor even to look for, any links between Islam and terrorism. “Islam is a religion of peace,” repeat Dubya, our own Dave and of course that walking argument against affirmative action, Barack Hussein Obama.

On what evidence have you, gentlemen, reached this conclusion? The probable answer would be that only a relatively small number of Muslims have a propensity for shooting US marines and flying planes into tall buildings.

However, using the same logic it would be possible to insist that no link existed between Nazism and genocide because only a relatively small number of Nazis gassed Jews. Nor could Bolshevism be held responsible for the acts of those relatively few who murdered millions in its name.

One piece of crucial evidence that’s routinely ignored is the way terrorists themselves describe their inspiration. Almost invariably they attribute their state of mind to the guiding hand of Allah.

The Chattanooga murder is no exception. In the immediate run-up to his crime he inundated his blog with helpful explanations. Here’s one:

“Take his (Allah’s) word as your light and code and do not let other prisoners, whether they are so called ‘Scholars’ or even your family members, divert you from the truth. If you make the intention to follow allahs way 100 per cent and put your desires to the side, allah will guide you to what is right.”

Here’s another: “Brothers and sisters don’t be fooled by your desires, this life is short and bitter and the opportunity to submit to allah may pass you by.”

Obviously it didn’t pass him by, even if the opportunity to learn English syntax did. But of course, should an intrepid policeman take the murderer at his word, the skies will open and the god of political correctness will smite the transgressor. This god knows no mercy.

One expects an outburst of spurious explanations of the murder, many focussing on the availability of firearms. Introduce gun control all over the Western world, and Islam will have no option but indeed to act as a religion of peace.

I’d say that the arguments for banning guns after the Chattanooga shootings are as powerful as those in favour of banning airliners after the similarly inspired 9/11. It’s such woolly, politicised thinking that prevents the West from stamping out Muslim terrorism once and for all.

It’s impossible to treat a disease without establishing a correct diagnosis. And it’s impossible to diagnose correctly without understanding the aetiology of the likely underlying cause.

In the absence of such understanding the patient may die. By the patient I in this case mean the West, if you’re wondering.

 

 

 

That is, Dave knows. You may not, especially if you’re a reactionary, racist, homophobic, misogynist global-warming denier (a conservative, in other words).

You may think that what’s wrong with Britain is exactly what Dave thinks is right.

Such as the NHS, so envied by all other European countries that none of them has tried to emulate it.

Or our comprehensive education that kindly doesn’t overburden young minds with superfluous knowledge, such as how to read and write.

Or our economy that has every characteristic of a pyramid scheme.

Or our army dwindling down to the size of a barely adequate police force.

Or the tectonic demographic shift caused by uncontrolled immigration, most of it from the low-rent part of the world.

Or trading our sovereignty for the honour of becoming a province in the EU.

Or… well, you can probably mention other things along similar lines. But that’s because you don’t know.

Dave knows, and he has generously shared his knowledge with Times readers. Britain has only one serious problem: women getting paid less than men.

First Dave expressed a heartfelt hope that his two daughters will “experience gender equality in the workplace when they start their careers”.

Eton obviously didn’t teach Dave that ‘gender’ is merely a grammatical category, and the word he meant is ‘sex’. Then again, I don’t think he has to worry about the earning potential of Nancy and Florence, ‘gender equality’ or no. Dynastic privilege will take care of that.

Then Dave modestly took credit for the growing number of women in business, politics and even the army, which he described as “a cause for celebration”. But “the job is not complete. The Commons is nearly a third female; it should be half.”

This is misogynist discrimination if I ever heard it. Just half, Dave? When women make up 50.7% of our population and men a paltry 49.3%? Where’s the ‘gender equality’ in that? (And if a man became a woman, would he/she be entitled to an automatic rise?)

It must be exactly 50.7% and never mind any other characteristics we expect in our legislators, such as integrity, courage, intellect, patriotism, honesty.

Now let’s talk turkey, which is to say money.

Dave acknowledges that the ‘gender gap’ for full-time workers under 40 is almost zero. But some discrepancy still exists, and “I’m determined to close this gap.”

One might think that the government can only close this or any other pay gap in the private sector by mandating how much companies must pay, and to whom. This in effect amounts to crypto-nationalisation, and I thought Miliband lost the general election.   

Dave is going to force companies with more than 250 employees to “publish the gap between average female earnings and average male earnings. That will cast sunlight on the discrepancies…”

It’ll also cast a dark spell over morale in the workplace, but then Dave has only ever worked in politics. And average earnings is a meaningless concept anyway. On average, Bill Gates and I make millions every year, so what does that tell you?

It’s likely that whoever owns a company with 251 employees draws a seven-digit income, all in. If he has the misfortune of being male, how many female employees would need to have their salaries quadrupled to close the gap in average earnings?

Dave’s right: there’s work still to be done. And – are you ready for this terrifying statistic? – “while they are 47 per cent of the workforce, women are just 34 per cent of managers, directors and senior officials.”

The gap doesn’t seem inordinately large, considering that such jobs require long hours, and some women between 25 and 40 still haven’t given up on childbirth and the ensuing care. Of course in Dave’s ideal world the burden of childbirth would be equally divided between men and women, but science hasn’t quite reached that point yet.

But not to worry; Dave has it sorted. First the outrage: “when women have children, many cannot afford to go back to work full time… That then prevents them from moving through the ranks.” Then the solution: making childcare tax-free, which would be “worth up to £2,000 per year for every child”.

Excellent idea. But Plato and Marx had even a better one: taking all children away from their mothers and making them wards of the state. That way their minds can be shaped to fit the state’s needs, not their mothers’ silly ideas.

While Dave’s proposal is different in technicalities, it’s identical in substance: mothers have no business bringing their children up, reading them fairy tales, teaching them right and wrong. Someone else will take care of all that.

Actually, this present brainstorm dovetails neatly with Dave’s other pet project, homomarriage. Two women marry each other and presto! – no children, they can both “move through the ranks” with no outside distractions.

Aren’t we lucky to have as PM a real Tory who knows exactly what’s wrong with Britain and how to put it right? 

The American people wouldn’t want to interrupt their pursuit of happiness by dying prematurely. But America is a modern democracy, which means people’s wishes don’t count.

Such matters are decided by a self-perpetuating elite made up of politicians, parasites feeding off the politicians and some influential businessmen. If we narrow the concept of ‘the Americans’ down to that group, the question becomes not only relevant but indeed urgent.

So do they? I don’t know. But neither do I know what they’d be doing differently if provoking a world war were indeed their goal.

Countries wishing to avoid war invariably take certain steps. First, they identify the flashpoints. Second, they do whatever necessary to douse the incipient flames: diplomatic pressure, a show of strength designed to discourage aggression or, in extreme cases, a pre-emptive strike.

Yet the West, as led by America, is moving in the opposite direction: it doesn’t apply sufficient diplomatic pressure; it’s showing an ever accelerating weakness; and it’s making not only a pre-emptive but even a retaliatory strike look increasingly unlikely.

The two major threats to world peace are unquestionably Islam and Russia. And everything the West is doing not only doesn’t discourage them from putting a match to the powder keg but positively begs for it.

With Islam, America, goaded by the neocons, first launched an ill-considered attack on Iraq. This plunged the country into a blood-soaked chaos, with much of the rest of the region soon to follow.

This action betokened the Americans’ ignorance of the outside world, a vacuum of knowledge filled by neocon ideology: a mixture of proselytising American supremacism with intellectual inadequacy.

In a nutshell, American democracy is the ideal that every nation, regardless of its history, religion or culture, yearns to reach. This includes the Muslim world that’s only being kept from bicameral parliamentarism by a small cadre of extremists, best described as Islamists or Islamofascists.

No problem with Islam as such is the mantra – this in spite of the fact that Muslim aggression against the West has ebbed and flowed for 1,400 years. It ebbs, when Islamic passions are weak and the West is strong. It flows, when it’s the other way around.

In 2003 America instantly impassioned Islam, which until then had been kept in check by its own evil but secular regimes. Such is the immediate origin of Isis (the long-term origin goes back to Islam’s founding). And Isis is a source of global danger that the Americans have no idea how to counteract.

Since their fiasco in Iraq has spoiled their taste for direct military involvement, the best they could come up with was the divide et impera stratagem of using Shiite Iran against Sunni Isis.

As payment, Iran, the world’s principal instigator of anti-Western terrorism, has effectively been given carte blanche to develop nuclear weapons – and all the cash she needs to do so.

Since everyone knows who the first target of an Iranian A-bomb will be, Israel, sold down the river by Obama’s administration, will have to prevent extinction all on her own. Since only tactical nuclear weapons can bust Iran’s underground reactors, Israel may have to resort to those – with consequences both dire and unforeseeable.

Hence America’s actions since 2003, and especially her current craven deal with the Ayatollahs, creates a clear danger of a world war.

Russia is another flashpoint, and here Western actions are just as suicidal. This started with triumphalism over the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union, which perceptive observers (modesty prevents naming one) knew at the time was essentially a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB.

Once the KGB grasp on power was consolidated by Col. Putin’s rise, only the naïve could expect history’s most evil organisation to change its spots. Even those who didn’t fit that description to begin with were dumbed down by the neocons’ assurances that the Russians, like the Muslims, were desperate to become a USA Lite.

Hence the West’s response to Putin’s aggressive wars against Chechnya, Georgia, then the Ukraine. The first two incurred no reaction other than some mildly disapproving noises. The third one, more of the same, plus a few token sanctions.

Meanwhile Russia has launched a vast rearmament programme, unprecedented since the 1970s. The programme, to be completed by 2020, emphasises strategic arms, of the kind Russia doesn’t need to fight the Ukraine.

Russian troops are massed along the western border, while the Duma is currently debating the legality of the three Baltic republics’ declaring their independence in 1990-1991.

I’d say the legality of that action stacks up well against Stalin’s 1940 conquest of the Baltics after his criminal pact with Hitler. But one way or the other, the Baltics are Nato members.

Since Nato’s charter states that an attack on one member is an attack on all, KGB aggression must be discouraged. This can only be done by making the KGB government realise that, should such an attack occur, Nato will go to war and it’s strong enough to destroy Russia.

Instead the West is disarming at a rate suggesting the intention to surrender. This is accompanied by appeasement noises and mild sanctions of no deterrent value.

The West, ineptly led by America, clearly hasn’t learned the lesson of Munich: appeasement invites aggression. And, unlike Nazi Germany, KGB Russia is a nuclear power, of which Putin’s propagandists remind us every day.

No, I don’t think the Americans want a world war. But their ill-informed, weak-kneed policies are making it likely.

 

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 A French diplomat present at the Brussels negotiations between Greece and the EU, most of which took place in Donald Tusk’s office, described them as “extremely hard, even violent”.

That piqued my interest, for I know that my friend Angie likes it rough… negotiating, that is, what did you think I meant? So I rang Angie up and asked her to send me the transcript of the session, swearing to her on the eurozone’s grave to keep it off the record.

She kindly obliged, and here are some excerpts, strictly between you and me:

Angela Merkel (AM): Alexis, you know ve’ve got veys to make you sign. He who signs goes home. He who doesn’t sign goes Luft. Like in ze old days.

François Hollande (FH): Easy, Angie, if it pleases you. No need to get upset. Alexis is going to sign. Aren’t you, Alexis mon ami? We don’t want to make Angie angry, is that not so?

Alexis Tsipras (AT): Yes, but this thing with loo paper…

AM: Sei still, you Greek schwein! Two-ply Klopapier is a vaste of Papier! Das ist ausgeschlossen! Out of ze question! Zat’s how your whole economy vent down ze toilet!

AT: Speaking of which, may I be excused for a minute? I need to, you know…

AM: You need to sign zis, zat’s vhat you need, and you’re not leaving ze room until you do. Verstehst du? Ve’ve got veys to make you verstehen!

AT: At least let me to talk to Junk… Jean-Claude Juncker, that is. Why isn’t he here?

AM: He’s pissed as a Furz, zat’s vy.

FH: Now, now, Angie, mon petit poussin, let’s not be crude. Jean-Claude is otherwise engagé, let’s put it this way. And he hates being called ‘Junk’.

AT: If I sign this, they’ll have my you-know-what for keftedakia, meatballs, back home! We owe hundreds of billions, for Zeus’s sake! What kind of difference will an extra ply on a bog roll make?

FH: You forget, mon ami, what our teacher Mao taught: un voyage de mille kilomètres starts with a single step. Mao tells you everything you need to know about the economy. So take this one step…

Donald Tusk (DT): And if you don’t take it, psa krew, I’ll beat the living gówno out of you, like we do at football matches…

FT: Spare us your childhood memories, Don, mon ami. There’s no besoin existentiel ou immanent to beat the living merde out of notre ami Alexis. He’ll sign, is that not so, Alexis? You’re not going to hold this deal over papier toilette?

AT: It’s not just that. It’s that my people voted in the referendum…

AM: You know vhat you can do with zat referendum, Schweinhund? Use it for Klopapier! Single-ply!

FH: Angie, doucement, s’il te plait… We’ve avancé past the papier toilette, single- or double-ply. And Don, mon ami, let go of Alexis’s lapels. Can’t you see he is agreeing with you?

DT: If this piece of gówno doesn’t sign, his dupa is grass!

AT: Please, I need to call my people in Athens…

AM: Go ahead, call away, Dummkopf. If you can still afford to call long distance, that is.

AT: But there is no phone in the room…

DT: If there were, I’d shove it up your dupa!

FH: Doucement, Don, doucement, Angie. Comment dites-vous en Anglais? Easy does it. Oh, so sorry, Alexis… it was an accident. Angie didn’t mean to hit you, did you, Angie?

AM: Hit? I’ll kill this Abschaum! I’ll send him back to Greece to be a goatherd! Himmelherrgott!

FH: You must comprendre, Alexis, this hurts Angie more than it hurts you. She’s only doing this for your own good…

This is all my friend Angie sent me in strict confidence. The transcript is regrettably incomplete, but we know how the scene ended, even if the overall soap opera is still on-going.

As the lead paragraph in The Times story put it: “Greek leader gave in to every one of Merkel’s demands in brutal talks behind closed doors.”

Hence prospective British visitors to the birthplace of selective democracy would be well-advised to take several rolls of two-ply loo paper with them, if that is the type they prefer.

Meanwhile, I’d like to congratulate my friend Angie on her astonishing attention to detail. Sunday trading, bakery deregulation, sell-by date on milk – nothing escaped her probing eye, no square of Greek loo paper was left unturned. She has done her great nation proud.

I hasten to reassure Alexis’s few fans: physically he’s very much alive and, one hopes, in good health. Politically, however, he’s that proverbial doornail.

Or at least he would be in any place where parliamentarism has any meaning. The brave new EU isn’t one. No parliament there, including the European one, does much more than wielding the rubber stamp.

In any country with a sovereign parliament, a PM who calls a national referendum, campaigns for and gets the consensus he wants, then goes against it by succumbing to external pressure, would have tendered his resignation already.

But, by surrendering to EU blackmail, Alexis may have earned himself an elevation to the inner sanctum of the pan-European mafia. He’ll never make Don, but he may be allowed to hang on as caporegime.

I watched some of Merkel’s press conference at breakfast, and she almost made me choke on my croissant. In the good tradition of modern politics, Angie never answered a single question directly.

Whatever the question, the reply was the same: the deal is done, Greece has agreed to be like Germany, her communist government can be trusted to oversee this conversion, the €350 billion debt will eventually be paid off, even though only €50 billion’s worth of public assets will be sold off. Details? Don’t you worry about them. Our finance ministers will thrash them out, that’s what we pay them for.

Angie sounded like a demented godfather (godmother?) making you an offer you can’t understand. 

Jean-Claude Juncker, Junk to his friends, was much more forthright. “Grexit is gone!” he screamed triumphantly, the decibel level typical of a man who has had a few during an all-nighter.

That’s what it’s all about. Angie, Junk, Tusk et al don’t care how many more billions they stuff into the shredder known as the Greek economy, nor about how much worse the already ailing European economies will get as a result.

Like a mafia family going to the mattresses, they don’t stop to think about the possible casualties. The family must survive at any cost. Grexit is gone! What else is gone with it is of no consequence.

You’ll be happy to know that some of the billions to be splashed against the Greek wall will come from our own pockets. But the brunt will be borne by the Germans, who don’t normally exhibit indifference to money among their salient characteristics.

One wonders how much longer Angie herself will survive as capodei tutti capi. Granted, things like national sovereignty, tradition or even basic honesty are these days pure phantoms, vague memories of European childhood. But money is real life, and at some point the Germans may wake up to what’s going on.

And Greece? Well, that soap opera has many instalments, and we’re nowhere near the end yet.

Like Red China back in the ‘50s issuing dozens of ‘final’ warnings to Taiwan, the federasts may heave a sigh of relief and congratulate themselves on having been able to shove their own Final Warning No. Whatever down Greece’s throats. Yet in a few months new final warnings will be needed and, more to the point, new billions.

Politics can trump economics, but only at the cost of destroying it. The very notion of 19 different economies sharing a single currency pegged to the monetary unit of by far the strongest one is sheer madness.

Such an undertaking can only succeed if the 19 economies become one. But fusing 19 countries into a single economy is only possible if they are also fused into a single nation, one with a single government, a single leader, a single monetary and fiscal policy, a single set of laws, a single army, ultimately a single people.

That’s what so many commentators mean when saying correctly that the EU isn’t an economic but a political project. But it isn’t just any old politics – it’s the nasty type.

Because the EU is founded on lies, every statement issued by it, including this morning’s effluvia, is a lie. And any political union based on lies and bribery will eventually have to dissolve or else use brute force trying to keep itself together.

The Zollverein, the 19^th century tactical inspiration for the EU, set the good example. Prussia used bribes and lies to unite the German states under her aegis, but when one of the states, Schleswig-Holstein, refused to play along, military aggression saw the light of day.

This is the choice the EU will face sooner or later, probably sooner. When another country – be it Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland or possibly even France – goes the Greece way, and neither Germany nor the IMF is any longer able to find the trillions needed, the EU will either have to self-liquidate or plunge the continent into a major war.

If history is anything to go by, evil political setups never leave without banging the door. I hope our own china won’t shatter inside the cupboard as a result.

Six days is a long time in politics, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, Alexis Tsipras’s ideological cousin.

Didn’t Tsipras go all out for the No vote in the bailout referendum on 5 July? Didn’t he get what he wanted? And didn’t the No refer to exactly the measures he’s now proposing in order to get another handout from the EU?

Then again, when an EU member holds a referendum, its results are only accepted if they suit the EU. If they don’t, the country is ordered to have another referendum – and keep doing it until she gets it right.

In this case, the EU hasn’t even bothered to do that. Its underhand dealings with Tsipras are proceeding as if no referendum had taken place. This is another useful reminder we ought to keep in mind: in the unlikely event the Brexit referendum returns the right result, it’ll be ignored.

However if the combined weight of Dave’s/EU’s Goebbels-style propaganda gets the In vote, Britain may never get another chance to regain her sovereignty.

But to get back to Greece, sitting down to write this piece I promised myself not to resort to cheap puns based on the country’s name: no suggestions that euros ought to be printed on Greece-proof paper and especially no wondering how many palms have been Greeced for Tsipras to come up with his 13-page SOS.

But it’s impossible for any halfway intelligent person to think that the unfolding saga is strictly aboveboard.

Essentially, contravening his voters’ wishes, Tsipras has agreed to pretend that, in exchange for another €53.5 billion in EU lucre, he’ll make sure that the Greeks will abandon their very ethos and, economically speaking, turn into Germans.

Specifically, they’ll raise taxes, cut social expenditure, eventually pay off their debts of hundreds of billions in whatever currency you care to name, and in general adopt the kind of approach to matters economic that they’ve never practised since Pericles, and probably not even then.

In her turn, Angela Merkel, who calls the EU tune because she pays the piper, will pretend that she believes Tsipras, against all historical, psychological and common-sensical evidence.

Just as two wrongs don’t make a right, two lies don’t add up to truth. The Greeks will gratefully take the €53.5 billion, provided Angie can twist the Bundestag’s arm to cough it up. Then this amount will sink without trace into the same hole that has already gobbled up €240 billion’s worth of two previous bailout packages.

There’s a pipeline well-hidden in the hole. Through it many of the proffered billions will be instantly pumped into discreet offshore accounts seemingly owned by numbers. Hiding behind the numbers will be the flesh-and-blood parties to the deal, mostly Greek but some EU functionaries as well.

The rest of the money will simply be frittered away by Tsipras’s or someone else’s socialist government. The situation will again come to a head soon, at which point a new pack of lies will be put together. Let the poor Greeks die so the eurozone may live.

For there’s no doubt whatsoever that the poor will, as usual, bear the brunt, which they always do in socialist economies.

Writing in The Mail, Alex Bummer, who understands economics unusually well for a journalist, shows that his understanding of socialism is less reliable. “It is a mighty poor form of socialism,” he writes, “when it has been the most vulnerable people in society who are the hardest hit.”  

But that’s what socialism is all about. Mr Bummer makes a typical mistake here: he confuses the socialists’ slogans with their practices. It is, however, more productive with people in general and socialists in particular to look not at what they say but at what they do.

Such an inspection will show that all socialist economies (which is to say all modern economies) have the widest gap between the rich and the poor. And, the less developed the socialist economy, the greater the gap, the harder the poor are hit.

For example, in the 19^th century, the era of dog-eat-dog capitalism, the average ratio of income earned by US corporate directors and their employees was 28:1. Yet in 2005, when socialism had made heavy inroads into the post-New-Deal US economy, this ratio stood at 158:1.

If such is the situation in America, you can imagine how socialism operates in Greece, which in her approach to the economy is typologically closer to Muslim caliphates than to Western social democracies.

We shouldn’t wonder about the cynicism of both parties to the deal, which may well go into effect tomorrow. Since the EU is founded on lies and blackmail, it can sustain itself only by lies and blackmail.

In this instance the blackmail is mutual. The EU is blackmailing Tsipras by promising to plunge Greece into an economic catastrophe, and himself into oblivion, if he refuses to proffer all the right lies. But Tsipras gets his own back, by blackmailing the EU with dark hints at accepting Vlad’s cash (and naval bases) if the EU refuses to take Greek lies at face value.

The whole thing is more reminiscent of dealings between two mafia families than of legitimate diplomacy. But hey, it’s the EU we’re talking about.

 

 

My trusted Chambers defines the word as “to be entitled by merit”. This goes to show how out of touch lexicographers can be.

These days ‘deserve’ means something else. When someone says “I deserve X”, what he really means is “I don’t deserve X, but feel entitled to it anyway.”

If I were compiling a lexicon of modern usage, my entry for ‘deserve’ would say: “deserve v.t. not to deserve, receive without earning. See also living wage, George Osborne, glossocracy, Greece ”.

When our politicians mandate that employers must pay their workers “a living wage” because “hard-working people deserve it”, one is tempted to reply that obviously they aren’t hard-working enough, because otherwise they’d earn a living wage without relying on governmental coercion.

In a free country, wages ought to be determined by the market, not state fiat. Doing it the modern way isn’t only morally wrong but also economically unsound.

Employers who can’t afford to pay the decreed wages may decide not to hire a chap, who’d then probably dip into the state’s coffers. And even if a mandated wage doesn’t have such an immediate effect, it’ll still work as a time bomb ticking away.

Employers aren’t going to eat the extra cost of hiring. They’ll pass it on to consumers, which will have a negative knock-on effect on the economy, ultimately leading to more unemployment.

Moreover, such dictatorial practices throw the market out of kilter. This has been invariably shown to hurt the economy in every country where the government tries to play, not merely referee, the economic game.

As if to prove that human intelligence is regressing, such economic basics had been known even before the Industrial Revolution got going in earnest.

Thus, for example, Edmund Burke: “the moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.” I won’t bother to cite similar statements by Adam Smith and other economists: such quotations could fill a book.

It’s up to the market to determine how much workers should be paid. So it does, by making companies, be it banks looking for managers or restaurants looking for waiters, compete for qualified personnel as fiercely as they compete for customers.

In order really to deserve a living wage, a youngster should study hard at school and acquire marketable skills. Then he’ll earn a decent income without giving the state an opening to put its crushing foot down and give the economy a bum steer.

‘Deserve’ is only one of many words that nowadays mean the opposite of their dictionary definitions. ‘Justice’ is another.

The dictionary says it means “the awarding of what is due”. Yet, when modified by ‘social’, justice means awarding something that’s not due – injustice, in other words. If Britain were to function according to the principles of properly defined social justice, a quarter of our population, systematically corrupted and undereducated by socialists, would starve to death. 

‘Liberalism’ is another trans-semantic word. When it was coined, it meant limited government, personal liberty, laissez-faire economics at home and free trade abroad.

As used today, it means replacement of individual responsibility with collective security, various degrees of command economy, as much state control and as little personal liberty as is achievable this side of concentration camps. Thus liberal means illiberal.

The same goes for cognates of ‘liberal’, such as ‘national liberation’. When applied to places like Rwanda, it designates a transitional stage between colonialism and cannibalism. When applied to the ‘former Soviet Union’, it stands for a shift from de jure to de facto Russian control. When applied to Asia, it means Mao, Ho and Kim.

Yet again the dictionary definition falls by the wayside. Words no longer mean what they really mean. They mean whatever modern tyrannies need in order to impose their power on the individual.

Lewis Carroll realised this was coming, which is why he made Humpty Dumpty conduct this dialogue with Alice: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” 

Nothing short of prescient, that.

 

P.S. By way of illustration, tennis star Caroline Wozniacki has been knocked out of Wimbledon by Garbine Muguruza. The match was played on Court 4, which according to Miss Wozniacki was unjust (see ‘justice’ above).

She said women “deserve” (see ‘deserve’ above) to be featured on Centre Court, but don’t get the same opportunities as men.

Centre Court has a capacity of 15,000, much greater than the outside courts. Now which match would 15,000 tennis lovers rather see: the crushing bore of Wozniacki-Muguruza or, say, the sublime QF five-setter between Gasquet and Wawrinka? Yes, quite.

Miss Wozniacki clearly uses ‘deserve’ in the Humpty-Dumpty sense of the word.

 

P.P.S. It hasn’t taken long. People are already quipping that euros should be printed on Greece-proof paper.

Little girls are so touching, don’t you think? That’s why their father should touch them, recommends a subsidiary of Germany’s Ministry for Family Affairs.

The rather bossy recommendation comes in its two 40-page brochures entitled Love, Body and Playing Doctor, the first one talking about children from 1 to 3, the second about those from 4 to 6.

The kind of touching this august body has in mind would have landed Daddy in the pokey anywhere in the West not so long ago, and in some places it still would.

For what’s meant here isn’t just a hug or a pat on the head, accompanied by the lapidary if rhetorical question “So who’s Daddy’s gorgeous little girl then?”

“Fathers do not devote enough attention to the clitoris and vagina of their daughters,” laments the 1 to 3 booklet. “Their caresses too seldom pertain to these regions, while this is the only way the girls can develop a sense of pride in their sex.”

Such neglect is so bereft of reciprocity that it’s plain wrong, continues the Ministry: “The child touches all parts of their father’s body, sometimes arousing him. The father should do the same.” Fair is fair, and never mind the grammar.

It has been a long time since I was a tot, or indeed the father of one. But, if memory still serves, back in the old days mutual masturbation wasn’t seen, or recommended by governments, as an essential part of paternal care for infants.

Morally, that sort of thing was regarded as degeneracy; technically, as incest; legally, as a crime. It was generally believed that an infant girl’s development would be better served by Daddy ‘devoting attention’ not to her clitoris but to another organ: her brain.

Let’s just ponder the tectonic social, moral and cultural shift that has had to occur for the government of a Western country to have come up with such a swinish call to incest, delivered with a typically German attention to detail.

For this criminal act isn’t an isolated event. It’s Zeitgeist, as those Family Affairs degenerates would call it.

To wit, 11-year-olds in Borken, Germany, were last year ordered in class to draw the cross-sections of male and female genitalia.

Apparently, however, children in that sleepy town hadn’t yet acquired the sophistication we expect from our little ones. This they proved when two impressionable tots fainted, while some others hyperventilated. All in all, 10 children were taken to hospital.

In France the parents of a little girl were fined a hefty amount. Their crime? They failed to bring their daughter up properly. The little one rushed out of the classroom when shown an “educational” (pornographic) film about coitus. Such squeamishness was treated as culpable absenteeism.

In Switzerland parents demonstrated against their four-year-olds receiving graphic tuition in the facts of life. As part of that valuable education, the precocious kiddies were taught “how it is, when one doesn’t know exactly whether one is male or female. They can then consciously choose their sexuality, just as they do with religion.”

But, though they may choose their sexuality, they don’t choose their religion, or rather they choose none. That is the whole problem, the impelling force behind the shift. For religion isn’t all about what people do on a Friday night or Sunday morning. It’s also about the way man defines himself.

If a father sees himself as the creature God made in His image and likeness, then he’ll raise his daughter to be proud of her humanity, not her vagina.

He’d try to instil in her certain eternal truths that can be best absorbed in a state of innocence, the longer-lasting the better. He’d try to teach the little girl that life has a profound meaning, and her genitals aren’t the place where it can be found.

If, however, a man believes that, when he dies, he turns to fertiliser and that’s it, then life to him can have no meaning – or rather the process of life becomes its own meaning.

Deriving as much pleasure out of every moment from the earliest possible age becomes the ultimate desideratum. In fact, the very definition of pleasure has to be pushed downwards, ideally all the way down to the crotch.

So why wait until the girl grows up and, God forbid, marries, reactionary as such a possibility may sound? Why waste the valuable years between 1 and 3, when she can receive hands-on tuition in what her clitoris is for? No reason at all.

Such is the ledger sheet of our much-vaunted progress, ladies and gentlemen. On the credit side, children operating computers with nothing short of wiz-kid dexterity. On the debit side, fathers encouraged to masturbate their one-year-old daughters.

When you try to calculate the balance, keep in mind that, devoid of their moral character, those same children may well grow up to use their computer skills for all kinds of nefarious purposes. Such as launching ICBMs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My wife objects to crude similes, but this one is too accurate to resist even at the risk of incurring her opprobrium. The EU is indeed like a dog’s vulva: it locks members in and doesn’t let them get out.

That’s what more civilised pundits mean when they say that the EU provides no mechanism for exit. The Union was designed to outdo the planned lifespan of the Third Reich: an eternity rather than a paltry thousand years.

Yet the people who run this wicked organisation now openly admit that Greece has plunged it into its worst crisis ever. Roger Boyes, an intelligent commentator by the modest standards of The Times, agrees.

He fears the same thing that makes people like me rejoice: that Greece may somehow loosen the gripping EU muscles and get out, delivering a potentially lethal blow to that whole setup.

Mr Boyes doesn’t seem to realise that what afflicts the EU isn’t a curable disease but a fatal genetic disorder. But when it comes to describing both the symptoms and the likely immediate outcomes, he’s accurate enough.

If Greece left, the Balkans would be likely to slide away from the West and towards Russia, an end towards which Putin is working tirelessly.

Hence it may be in the West’s interests (brace yourself for more crudeness, a metaphor this time) to say about Greece what Lyndon Johnson once said about Edgar J. Hoover: “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.”

And yes, Mr Boyes is absolutely right that Grexit would encourage both leftwing anti-austerity groups across southern Europe and also the populist parties, all of which Mr Boyes lumps together. I’m not sure Ukip will be happy to find itself mentioned in the same breath as, say, Front National, but some of the party’s traits do invite such a lack of discrimination.

Mr Boyes blames the current situation on the German obsession with fiscal discipline, as if it were ipso facto a bad thing. Yet both economic prudence and basic morality demand that individuals and states pay their own way, and describing this principle as austerity, especially when the term is coloured with a pejorative tint, is wrong. I’d call it economic common sense.

By insisting on it, the Germans are absolutely right in theory. How to apply the same theory to vastly disparate economies in practice is a different matter altogether, and here common sense seems to have abandoned the Germans.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of economics could have told them that uniting the economies of Greece, Benelux, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal and so forth into a single unit is a non-starter, while imposing a single currency, in reality the deutschmark, on them is cloud-cuckoo land.

Or so it would be if the euro were just a currency. It’s not though. It’s a force supposed to keep Europe united under Germany’s sway, and in this it more closely resembles not the deutschmark but the Waffen SS.

The Waffen SS failed in its mission, and so will the euro. It’s bound to, and pretty much for the same reasons.

Angie Merkel is faced with unenviable choices. She may stick to her economic guns and force Greece out of the eurozone, which will create immediate economic chaos, and probably not just in Greece. These are exactly the troubled waters in which assorted fascists, from Putin to Le Pen, could profitably fish – Mr Boyes is right about that.

Or she could abandon her principles, which would be nothing new either for the EU or for Angie personally. After all, she had a nomenklatura position in East Germany’s Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands, which, administrative window dressing apart, meant the Stasi. And both Germany and especially France routinely exceed the statutory EU borrowing limits.

Such an aboutface would again mean giving wrong ideas to countries like Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy, probably France, certainly the Eastern European members. It would also mean an honest admission that the EU is strictly a political construct having nothing to do with economics.

Such a combination of honesty and realism would be most out of keeping with Angies’s character and the very ethos of the EU. So damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t – not a good position for the aspiring pan-European gauleiter to find herself in.

Mr Boyes acknowledges this conundrum (I told you he was intelligent). What he fails to do is to offer a good way out, indeed any way out. 

This may not be good news for Roger Boyes’s journalistic integrity, but it’s excellent news for those who agree with me in my moral, political and historical assessment of the EU. There is, nor can there be, a good way out.

It’s not for nothing that I chose such a crude simile to describe this abominable construct. It deserves nothing more elegant.

    

 

   

Having grown up in a country that rivalled Nazi Germany in promoting the cult of a strong leader, I have an intuitive aversion to the notion.

The intuition is backed up by ratiocination and several decades’ worth of observation accrued in countries that are more civilised than either the Third Rome or the Third Reich.

In such countries a longing for a strong leader only appears when society is weak. Seeing the liberties they enjoy being eroded, people bizarrely hope that the situation will improve should they be blessed with a leader strong enough to take their liberties away altogether.

For make no mistake about it: taking liberties away is what strong leaders do. Such men are typically free of self-doubt: they know exactly what the people need, which is usually the opposite of what the people want.

A strong society is one that doesn’t care how strong or weak the leader is. It’s one that wants the government to be small and inconspicuous enough to get out of society’s way and let people get on with their lives.

The British used to understand this better than any other nation, but this understanding is being buried under the rubble of an imploding Western civilisation, one that used to be called Christendom.

Suddenly the British have lost their formerly sure grasp of political fundamentals. Instead of trying to nurse our ailing society back to its erstwhile strength, they call for a strong leader in the Stalin or Hitler mode.

Not by name, of course. No Tory pundit or Ukip politician has to my knowledge explicitly extolled the Führer or General Secretary. But they do so implicitly, by bemoaning our absence of a typologically similar leader.

Just look at the outburst of almost erotic love our supposedly conservative writers feel for Tsipras, who has every potential to become a communist dictator, a sort of Stalin Lite. Yes, he was democratically elected, but so was Hitler.

How would you like your elderly mother being treated by a physician who has Dr Shipman’s portrait on his office wall? My guess is you’d look for a doctor who has different objects of adulation.

Yet we hear hosannas sung to Tsipras, who only recently removed a portrait of the mass murderer Che Guevara from his office wall.

To wit, Peter Oborne, who spoiled an otherwise good article in The Mail by this conclusion: “Marxist or not… Tsipras has been patriotic and bloody-minded enough to stand up for his people against the bullies of the European Union.”

Obviously, the EU getting a bloody nose must please anyone who understands the wicked nature of that geopolitical abortion. But do let’s keep things in perspective: Tsipras lives by an evil ideology, which makes him an evil man.

His actions have coincided with our interests – just as Hitler’s attack on Russia 74 years ago coincided with our interests at the time.

Yet I doubt that even The Mail, which had been openly pro-Nazi until the Luftwaffe started pounding British cities, would have run an article saying “Nazi or not, Hitler has been patriotic and bloody-minded enough to stand up for his people against the bullies of the Soviet Union.”

Even more worrying is the widespread adoration of Putin as another ‘strong leader’ Britain so lamentably lacks. Granted, most people are ignorant about the true nature of Putin’s Russia. But even some of those who know the facts still hold the KGB colonel up as a shining example for all to follow.

Every time I refer to Putin’s regime as kleptofascist, which is exactly what it is, I get irate readers screaming back that they wish we had a strong leader to look after us as well as Putin looks after his people.

Since when have Englishmen acquired this need to be looked after by a strong, fascist-type leader? Exactly what in the 1,000-odd years of England’s political history has pre-conditioned the people to develop this perverse urge?

Putin, gentlemen, doesn’t look after his people – he is rapidly reducing them to the kind of browbeaten automata they were under Stalin. The people he does look after are himself and a dozen close cronies, billionaires like him, all proud of having served in the organisation with the blood of 60 million on its hands.

Just look at the international ratings Russia enjoys under his strong leadership. In the rule-of-law category Russia stands at Number 92 out of 97 countries rated.

In upholding fundamental rights, Russia’s rating is 82, one behind the Emirates.

Russia ranks a derisory 148^th out of 179 on freedom of the press, which is widely regarded as a guarantor of liberty. That rating places Putin’s Russia below Bangladesh, Cambodia and Burundi.

Russia is Number 127 on the corruption rating, where she finds herself in a nine-way tie with such bastions of legality as Pakistan and Gambia.

These are all telltale signs of a fascist country, while Russia’s economy shows every trait of a corrupt Third World dictatorship: a small elite enjoying nabob-style luxury thanks to its control of the natural resources, a larger, but still by Western standards tiny, middle class living half-decently, and the masses subsisting in penury.

Add to this abortion still being the dominant method of contraception, a near-catastrophic ecology, and no ill Russian with two hard-currency pennies to rub together even thinking of getting treatment in his own country, and the picture is almost complete.

A massive sewer pipeline keeps disgorging tonnes of nauseating propaganda, catering to the Russians’ historic affection for the Good Tsar, and for the moment it’s working. But since when have the English longed for the Good Tsar?

That our government is weak is the least of its problems. It’s intellectually corrupt, amoral and spivocratic. It’s also the portrait our society has in its attic, reflecting its own moral decrepitude, ignorance and soulless materialism.

This is the government we deserve, and God save us from the evil of a strong leader on top of that. As long as society remains weak, a strong leader won’t make it stronger. He’ll make it enslaved.