Month: September 2015

Are you cultured? I am not, judging by the 40 questions asked by a recent survey. Then again, 29 of them have nothing to do with culture, as I understand it.

Surveys in this genre must be taken with a grain of salt and, ideally, also with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila. However, they do reflect the popular perception of the area under investigation and, when it comes to culture, the popular perception is frankly idiotic.

For cultured people, aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual pursuits define their personalities. For today’s lot, they are an aside, something to chat about at a party once food, money and DIY have been exhausted.

For our philistines, culture denotes what tasteless vulgarity used to mean to civilised people. At best, philistines identify with culture something that has nothing to do with it, such as preference for some TV shows over others or being obsessed with food.

In fact, 11 of the 29 silly rubrics have nothing to do with food. To wit, you aren’t a cultured person if you don’t: host dinner parties; know about cheese; know about cuts of meat; visit farm shops; drink ‘proper’ coffee (not instant); grow your own fruit and vegetables on an allotment; know how to pronounce ‘quinoa’; use chopsticks over a knife and fork; only eat local produce; get food from supermarket ‘finer’ ranges; drink herbal tea.

None of these has anything to do with culture, properly defined, and some reflect nothing but tree-hugging faddism, with a slight leftward slant.

For example, show me a man who drinks herbal tea, and I’ll show you a man who can talk seriously about alternative lifestyles. And, much as I’d like to establish my cultural credentials by keeping an allotment, doing so in London would mean an expenditure of time that can be more profitably used writing, reading and listening to music.

One of my most cultured friends would fail on all those foodie criteria, except using chopsticks – and then only because he plays concerts in the Far East. Conversely, it’s easy to imagine a rank philistine ticking every one of those boxes with a flourish of his Mont Blanc pen.

Then we have several TV rubrics supposed to separate the cultured wheat from the barbarian chaff: watch documentaries; watch Question Time; don’t skip the news when it’s on TV; watch tennis or cricket; watch Antiques Road Show.

I watch tennis and some of my friends watch cricket, but we wouldn’t lay a claim to culture on that basis. It’s just some mindless entertainment a busy mind needs as much as sleep. I also know ignoramuses who devote their lives to watching sports.

TV news, Question Time and Antiques Road Show are the antithesis of culture, while any decent book will tell you more than any documentary about any subject. And some refined people I know don’t own a TV set at all, which presumably places them in the culture stakes below any council-estate dweller.

Then there’s ‘cultured’ entertainment: go to the ballet; go to the theatre; read a book before the film comes out; watch films with subtitles; go to music festivals.

As the low end of high culture, ballet has more to do with entertainment. Some people have no access to ballet performances, some have no money to pay the extortionist prices – and some of them are infinitely more cultured than any ballet master I’ve ever met.

Going to the theatre is also difficult for people who live in the country or those whose budgets don’t stretch to £50 a ticket. Reading a book before the film comes out betokens ignorance of the incompatible difference between the two genres.

If a film is based on a classic, cultured people would have read the book anyway. If it’s based on trash, as most are, then the book isn’t worth reading. In either case a film should be assessed on cinematic merits, not faithfulness to the book.

Stressing films with subtitles presupposes that any foreign film is better than an Anglophone one, which is nonsense. Most French films I’ve seen in the last 20 years are pretentious rubbish, and I could name dozens of superb English and American films produced during the same period.

Music festivals, especially nowadays, are designed not for music lovers but for philistines who need to be seen or have nothing better to do on holiday.

Our reading habits are tested by only two useless rubrics: own a library card; read Wikipedia articles. I doubt any one of my well-read friends owns a library card. And though Wikipedia is a useful source of reference, its effect on culture is more negative than positive.

A cultured person is also supposed to be characterised by his shopping habits: go to vintage markets (why on earth?); collect music on vinyl (what kind of music, and what’s wrong with CDs?); wear bow ties and brooches (not many people wear both, some wear one or the other, and some of them are cultured, with no causative relationship anywhere in sight.

Then there are miscellaneous items, such as: enjoy crosswords or Sudoku (?), get the conundrum on Countdown (I’ve no idea what Countdown is) and – my favourite – put on an accent to pronounce foreign words.

This is tolerable only when someone is a native speaker or at least fluent in the language. Otherwise it’s nauseatingly pretentious, as in the case of broadcasters who insist on replacing every ‘z’ in a Spanish name with a ‘th’, often incorrectly.

So there you go: I’ve been put to shame. My only consolation is that I’m in good company.

 

Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley got the ball rolling when he apologised for saying that white lives matter as much as black ones.

I don’t know how closely you follow US politics, but saying something like that could end the career of any presidential candidate. By ‘something like that’ I mean anything that in any way, no matter how inoffensive, may be perceived as ‘insensitive’.

Insensitive, that is, to any faddish passion consuming any mob, provided that said passion is febrile, widespread and, above all, politically correct.

In this instance the politically correct passion wasn’t just febrile but downright explosive. It was set off by the activist movement Black Lives Matter, meaning the lives of black criminals shot by white policemen.

An officer may be returning fire, saving a hostage’s life, trying to protect himself from a knife thrust – the circumstances of each such case are unimportant. If the policeman is white and the criminal is black, America will be consumed by fiery riots expertly whipped up and stoked by professional rabble-rousers – such as the Black Lives Matter group.

Speaking at a rally of leftie (‘liberal’ in American political slang, where words tend to mean their exact opposites), Mr O’Malley was greeted with the thunderous braying of “Black lives matter!”

The candidate, erroneously feeling amply protected by his impeccably ‘liberal’ credentials, decided to expand the notion. “Black lives matter,” he agreed – and then added the potential career-ender: “White lives matter. All lives matter.”

You what!?!? White lives?!? All lives?!?!? Who do you think you’re talking to? Where do you think you are, you insensitive whitey? This is a LIBERAL gathering! Context, man! In this context ONLY black lives matter, and if you don’t apologise you won’t get away with your own white life, at least its political incarnation.

Following a nation-wide fit of hysterics, a grovelling apology ensued. “I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or to communicate,” wept O’Malley, “that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to the issue.”

Especially those of us who seek the Democratic presidential nomination, which Mr O’Malley can now kiss good-bye. Upholding the sanctity of human life, whatever the colour of the body housing it, isn’t just insensitive or archaic. It’s borderline criminal.

Our lot wouldn’t be outdone in the apologies stakes. We have our own context, much more advanced than the Yanks can boast. There the typological answers to the Black Panthers and the Weathermen of yesteryear provide the deafening din to accompany politics, but they don’t yet control either major party.

In Britain, our second largest party, Labour, officially called Her Majesty’s Opposition, is already in the hands of the extreme, loony Left. Obviously, in the course of their distinguished careers, all its senior figures have said publicly things that a civilised person wouldn’t even utter at a boozy dinner party.

A short catalogue of their aphorisms would make the party unelectable even in the likely conditions of a financial meltdown come the next general election. Hence it’s important to get the mendacious apologies in early.

Shadow Chancellor (Labour’s second in command) John McDonnell led the way. He didn’t mean to say back in 2003 that IRA terrorists should be “honoured” for their “armed struggle”. Presumably he meant to say they should be hanged, but his tongue committed one of those Freudian slips that can be ever so embarrassing.

Neither did Mr McDonnell refer to Bobby Sands, him of the chicken supper fame, as a hero. Or, if he did, it was another slip of the tongue for which he apologises most abjectly, “from the bottom of my heart”. He was actually giving his recipe for a hero sandwich, and Bobby’s name came up inadvertently.

While at it, Mr McDonnel also apologised for his “appalling joke” about Margaret Thatcher. The humorous aside had been an expression of his heart-felt desire that he could go back in time for the sole purpose of murdering Mrs Thatcher, as she then was.

What he really meant was that he wanted to perform this unlikely backward leap in order to honour Mrs Thatcher and rebuke those IRA consumers of hero sandwiches who almost succeeded in murdering her with that Brighton bomb in 1984, which was one thing you can’t pin on Bobby Sands, who died in 1981, but wasn’t a hero anyway, while Margaret Thatcher was.

The joke, said Mr McDonnell (or should one call him ‘Comrade’?) has “ended my career in stand-up”. He really shouldn’t give up so easily: I’m sure his full economic programme will be a laugh. And if he ever becomes our Chancellor, we’ll all be rolling in the aisles – of the airliners taking us as far away from The People’s Republic of Britain as one can get.

Now, in the spirit of the time, I’d like to apologise unreservedly yet insincerely for any offence my remarks might have caused. I don’t know what came over me.

 

Do you ever get the feeling you haven’t lived? I do, every time I read yet another sex-crime story in the papers.

I’ve never considered myself particularly prudish, and I’ve probably done enough in the area of romance to earn the fires of hell in eternity.

What gives me some consolation is the hope that repentance does work, and the thought that quite a few others are bound to be ahead of me in the post-mortem queue to the frying pan. Just witness this morning’s story.

A lesbian university student (let’s call her LUST for short) groomed her silly classmate (SIC) on the net and the phone by pretending to be a man. The SIC girl went along enthusiastically and immediately started sending LUST nude pictures of herself, as one does these days.

Before long the couple began having sex, and you’d think it would be hard for LUST to continue to pass for a man in close quarters. But human ingenuity knows no barriers.

LUST came up with a cock-and-bull story, as it were, that ‘he’ had been disfigured in a car accident and couldn’t let ‘his’ lover see ‘him’. Hence for two years SIC had to be blindfolded during sex. LUST would strap her breasts down, wear a cap concealing her long hair and consummate the mutual passion with a prosthetic penis.

After two years of such amorous activity, SIC got suspicious, removed her blindfold and recognised her indefatigable lover as her female classmate. She screamed and, again as one does these days, went to the police.

At the ensuing trial LUST maintained that SIC had been aware of the charade all along, and the two had been playing an elaborate sex game by mutual consent.

SIC, on the other hand, insisted that she was heterosexual and could cite many sexual encounters to prove it. On balance, she claimed, she’d rather be raped by a man – it would have been less traumatic.

LUST’s defence team tried to convince the jury that SIC’s version was totally incredible, but to no avail. LUST was convicted of sexual assaults, with sentencing put off until a psychiatric examination.

Now, even though I’ve never been on the receiving end of either a prosthetic penis or a natural one, I still can’t help feeling that a sexually experienced woman this side of clinical retardation would be able to tell them apart over two years of non-stop blind trials.

But that’s not the most salient argument against the conviction. Just consider SIC’s behaviour throughout the ordeal. (In our progressive times focusing on the victim’s contribution to sexual assault may itself be an imprisonable offence, but I promise not to tell anyone.)

A university student, a girl from a decent family, is contacted by a stranger and, after a few electronic exchanges, sends him nude shots of herself. She then agrees to have blindfolded sex with the man she has never seen.

Call me a stick-in-the-mud coward, but I wouldn’t accept a similar proposition from a strange woman. What if she’s a murderer? Sadist? Castrator? Cannibal? I mean, I don’t really know her, do I?

One would think that a woman would feel even more vulnerable and demur from such a blind encounter. SIC, however, didn’t. Hence I’d say she has only herself to blame, or at least also herself to blame, and please don’t report me to the cops.

Then again, no physical assault took place. SIC was tricked, not forced, into sex, and was a willing, if misled, participant for two years. LUST was doubtless immoral, but was she criminal?

What happened to the old notion of all being fair in love and war? Open any collection of bawdy Renaissance stories, say by Aretino or Boccaccio, and you’ll read all sorts of stories about an aspiring lover using the cover of darkness to pass himself for a lady’s husband.

Those stories were mostly heterosexual, but in this one the principle is the same, although the details are more Baroque than Renaissance. Even if we, along with the court, accept SIC’s story on faith (which I must admit I don’t), she should have been told to go home, not to be so stupid again and never to plunge headlong into kinky sex with strangers she can’t see.

But we don’t live during the Renaissance, a period that was naughty but still residually sane. We live in a madhouse called modernity, and old certitudes no longer apply.

Everybody is entitled to victimhood and can claim it at the drop of a hat or, in this case, a blindfold. And modern jurors are conditioned by our brainwashing feminist propaganda to accept a victim’s definition of her status, no matter how improbable or insane.

I’d suggest that the sheer improbability of picking at random twelve persons impervious to the moral and intellectual perversions of modernity is coming close to invalidating the jury system. No one can mete out justice without a clear understanding of what justice is.

Nowadays the prosecution can get convictions, or the defence acquittals, by invoking the shibboleths of feminist, racial, homosexual or any other fashionable propaganda as extenuating or even exculpating circumstances. Our adversarial court system is being increasingly reduced to a contest between two fads, not two evidential cases.

Whoever wins or loses such sham trials, the ultimate losers are all of us. You – and a hopelessly square me.

Luke 8:17 reads like a current report on the West’s failure to protect classified information: “For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest; neither any thing hid, that shall not be known and come abroad.”

Some 500 years before Jesus prophesied the West’s lax security, the Chinese strategist Sun Tsu talked about the need to “mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy”, a tripartite task that presupposes secrecy.

Actually no great strategic talent is required to reach the same conclusion. Common sense would suffice – and this is a faculty woefully absent in Western governments.

Just look at the Manhattan Project, the super-secret American programme to produce nuclear weapons during the Second World War.

One would assume that no scientist even remotely seen as a security risk would be allowed anywhere near the Project, an assumption that the US government quickly dispelled. The Project was filled not only with left-wing sympathisers but even with known members of communist organisations.

One such was its head Robert Oppenheimer, who was self-admittedly “a member of just about every Communist front organisation on the West Coast.” Amazingly Oppenheimer was eventually given a security clearance, and only lost it, along with his career, a few years later.

Numerous scientists involved in the Manhattan Project were suspected of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. The Italian communist Bruno Pontecorvo turned a suspicion into certainty by fleeing to the Soviet Union in 1950. Others, such as Fermi and Szilard, were probably also involved, though this was never proven. One way or the other, it’s hardly surprising that American atomic secrets didn’t stay secret for long.

This was hardly an isolated incident. Fast forward to 1999, when Eastern European nations began to join Nato. The military and security officers of these countries (not to mention the former constituent republics of the Soviet Union) were trained in the Soviet Union or at least under close Soviet supervision.

Professional training was only part of the process. At least as important was political indoctrination, whose objective was to brainwash trainees into unwavering loyalty to the common anti-Western cause.

There’s little doubt that some Eastern European officers didn’t really feel the loyalty to their Soviet masters they had to profess. However, there’s even less doubt that some did.

Suddenly, over the next few years, they all found themselves at the heart of Nato, with full access to its classified information. Sun Tsu probably spun like a top in his grave.

The spinning must have reached its red-line RPMs in 2008, when Nato appointed the Hungarian Sandor Laborc to lead its Committee for Security and Intelligence.

Gen. Laborc is a career KGB man and honours graduate of the KGB Dzerjinsky Academy in Moscow. Throughout his seven-year course, he was constantly vetted by his Soviet superiors who were rather adept at the art of interrogation.

They were satisfied with Laborc’s loyalty to his spiritual motherland. And Nato’s powers-that-be were equally certain that their secrets were safe in Laborc’s hands. One finds it hard to imagine how differently Nato would have acted had it been committed to self-liquidation.

This brings us to today’s news that Jeremy Corbyn has graciously agreed to take his place on the Queen’s Privy Council, to which he is entitled as the new leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition. With this post comes access to top-level security briefings – this though even some in his own party regard Comrade Corbyn as a security risk.

Now the concept of Her Majesty’s Opposition doesn’t mean opposition to Her Majesty and everything she represents. Yet Comrade Corbyn has throughout his career made no secret of his visceral hatred for the monarchy.

His loyalty is cordially pledged to Her Majesty’s enemies: IRA, Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS terrorists, Putin at his most aggressive, the international brotherhood of Trotskyists and other anti-Western fanatics.

In his new position he’ll campaign for the dissolution of Nato, the abolition of the Trident and nuclear weapons in general, the de facto disbanding of our armed forces. As a symbol of his ideas on national defence, Corbyn has announced he’ll wear a white ‘peace’ poppy to the Cenotaph this year, rather than the traditional red flower of the Royal British Legion.

This creature will now be able to lay his hands on most of Britain’s and Nato’s secrets. Are we sure he won’t use them the way Manhattan Project communists used the atomic secrets?

It should be self-evident that the right to participate in the British political system must be contingent on loyalty to it. A manifestly subversive fanatic should be allowed to scream off a soap box, but any nation not bent on suicide would keep him a ranting distance away from top political offices.

Yet our democracy run riot is no longer capable of keeping at arm’s length those who, given half the chance, would destroy it. Nor can we any longer keep our secrets out of the grubby hands of men whose loyalty is manifestly pledged to our enemies.

 

 

In a globalised world, Britain’s disasters will rebound on everyone, and make no mistake about it:  Corbyn’s elevation to Labour leadership is disastrous.

To Marx the spectre haunting Europe was that of communism, but he was only partly right. Communism is only a facet of a larger entity: evil. 

At the heart of all evil regimes, regardless of what they call themselves, lies the desire to destroy everything good in Western tradition and push everything rotten to its extreme. Hence they’re less different than they’re the same.  

If you question such a lack of taxonomic discrimination, consider those around the world who hail Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent.

Putin’s propaganda praises Corbyn for his hostility to Nato, affection for Russia and opposition to the West’s sanctions over the rape of the Ukraine.

Jerry Adams, the IRA murderer-in-chief, describes Corbyn as “a friend of Ireland and the Irish peace process”. This means a friend of the IRA murderers to whom Blair’s government surrendered.

The French Trotskyist newspaper Libération is ecstatic: Corbyn’s election is “a turning point”. France is spinning on a similar turning point, with Hollande turning the most productive Frenchmen away.

Argentine president Kirchner praises Corbyn for his support of Argentina in her struggle for “human rights”, “equality” and “political sovereignty”. In other words, Corbyn wants Argentina to annex the Falklands, which in a sane Britain would be regarded as treasonous.

Hamas extols Corbyn for voicing “solidarity with the Palestinian cause”, i.e. the extermination of Israel and everyone in it.

Greece’s ruling party Syriza is happy that Corbyn’s election “sends messages of hope to the people of Europe” – the same messages, presumably, as those sent by Syriza itself.

For Spain’s Podemos Corbyn represents “a step forward towards a change in Europe for the benefit of the people.” Specifically of the people who’re still grieving that it wasn’t Stalin who won the Spanish Civil War.

Different parties, different nations – but they all share the same loathing for Britain. This isn’t a xenophobic ethnic distaste; it’s the hatred of everything Britain represents in their eyes.

They detect the same animus in Corbyn, thereby displaying greater perspicacity than some of our pundits, including the supposedly conservative ones.

For example, Peter Hitchens, like all apostates, must be feeling latent guilt towards his erstwhile Trotskyist comrades. Thus he praises Corbyn who “obviously believes what he says”. (Neither Lenin nor Hitler was particularly duplicitous either.)

“Ken Livingston is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage,” continues Hitchens. “Ukip appeals to the same impulse.” With one minor difference: Ukip wants to preserve Britain; Corbyn yearns to destroy it.

Before you decide that Hitchens is completely, rather than partially, off his rocker, what he means is that people are dissatisfied with mainstream politicians. That’s true, and they have every reason to be.

Similarly, Germans had every reason to be dissatisfied with the Weimar Republic. Yet not all of them became Nazis or Communists. Those who were neither fools nor knaves remained conservative, aghast at both the red and brown extremes.

Hitchens allows that he dislikes “many of Mr Corbyn’s policies – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU.”

It follows contextually that he doesn’t dislike those of Corbyn’s policies he left unmentioned: wholesale nationalisation, abandoning our nuclear deterrent, encouraging unlimited immigration, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, getting rid of the monarchy, uniting Ireland, leaving Nato.

Even if this inference isn’t wholly correct, and Hitchens dislikes some of those policies as well, he redeems Corbyn “for the honest way he states them.”

Hitler was equally honest when he stated his intent to murder all Jews, and there’s something sinister about Corbyn’s announcement that, given the chance, he’ll introduce a Ministry for Jews.

New government bodies are required when new problems arise that can’t be handled by existing institutions. There are no such problems with British Jews, who neither are nor perceive themselves to be anything less than an integral part of our nation.

The problem exists only in the minds of virulent anti-Semites, such as Corbyn, who lists Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists among his friends.

The Ministry he proposes will serve the same purpose as similar organisations served in Nazi Germany: isolating and marginalising Jews. The Nazis graduated to genocide, but I doubt Corbyn will go so far. He’ll just encourage evil-doers in the Middle East to do the job for him.

Corbyn, with honesty so appealing to Hitchens, unites in his personality the red and brown ends of political evil. And, contrary to what one reads in the papers, he’s not a throwback to the past.

Evil, either brown or red, is on the march everywhere in Europe, from Italy to Hungary, from France to Germany, from Russia to Spain, from Greece to – evidently – Britain.

Hence Corbyn is merely a symptom of a pandemic threatening the world. One fears it may be like tuberculosis: when symptoms appear, it’s too late to do anything about the disease. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The spectre of evil is haunting Europe

 

In a globalised world, Britain’s disasters will rebound on everyone, and make no mistake about it:  Corbyn’s elevation to Labour leadership is disastrous.

 

To Marx the spectre haunting Europe was that of communism, but he was only partly right. Communism is only a facet of a larger entity: evil. 

 

At the heart of all evil regimes, regardless of what they call themselves, lies the desire to destroy everything good in Western tradition and push everything rotten to its extreme. Hence they’re less different than they’re the same.  

 

If you question such a lack of taxonomic discrimination, consider those around the world who hail Jeremy Corbyn’s ascent.

 

Putin’s propaganda praises Corbyn for his hostility to Nato, affection for Russia and opposition to the West’s sanctions over the rape of the Ukraine.

 

Jerry Adams, the IRA murderer-in-chief, describes Corbyn as “a friend of Ireland and the Irish peace process”. This means a friend of the IRA murderers to whom Blair’s government surrendered.

 

The French Trotskyist newspaper Libération is ecstatic: Corbyn’s election is “a turning point”. France is spinning on a similar turning point, with Hollande turning the most productive Frenchmen away.

 

Argentine president Kirchner praises Corbyn for his support of Argentina in her struggle for “human rights”, “equality” and “political sovereignty”. In other words, Corbyn wants Argentina to annex the Falklands, which in a sane Britain would be regarded as treasonous.

 

Hamas extols Corbyn for voicing “solidarity with the Palestinian cause”, i.e. the extermination of Israel and everyone in it.

 

Greece’s ruling party Syriza is happy that Corbyn’s election “sends messages of hope to the people of Europe” – the same messages, presumably, as those sent by Syriza itself.

 

For Spain’s Podemos Corbyn represents “a step forward towards a change in Europe for the benefit of the people.” Specifically of the people who’re still grieving that it wasn’t Stalin who won the Spanish Civil War.

 

Different parties, different nations – but they all share the same loathing for Britain. This isn’t a xenophobic ethnic distaste; it’s the hatred of everything Britain represents in their eyes.

 

They detect the same animus in Corbyn, thereby displaying greater perspicacity than some of our pundits, including the supposedly conservative ones.

 

For example, Peter Hitchens, like all apostates, must be feeling latent guilt towards his erstwhile Trotskyist comrades. Thus he praises Corbyn who “obviously believes what he says”. (Neither Lenin nor Hitler was particularly duplicitous either.)

 

“Ken Livingston is right to call Mr Corbyn Labour’s Nigel Farage,” continues Hitchens. “Ukip appeals to the same impulse.” With one minor difference: Ukip wants to preserve Britain; Corbyn yearns to destroy it.

 

Before you decide that Hitchens is completely, rather than partially, off his rocker, what he means is that people are dissatisfied with mainstream politicians. That’s true, and they have every reason to be.

 

Similarly, Germans had every reason to be dissatisfied with the Weimar Republic. Yet not all of them became Nazis or Communists. Those who were neither fools nor knaves remained conservative, aghast at both the red and brown extremes.

 

Hitchens allows that he dislikes “many of Mr Corbyn’s policies – his belief in egalitarianism and high taxation, his enthusiasm for comprehensive schools, his readiness to talk to terrorists and his support for the EU.”

 

It follows contextually that he doesn’t dislike those of Corbyn’s policies he left unmentioned: wholesale nationalisation, abandoning our nuclear deterrent, encouraging unlimited immigration, imposing an arms embargo on Israel, getting rid of the monarchy, uniting Ireland, leaving Nato.

 

Even if this inference isn’t wholly correct, and Hitchens dislikes some of those policies as well, he redeems Corbyn “for the honest way he states them.”

 

Hitler was equally honest when he stated his intent to murder all Jews, and there’s something sinister about Corbyn’s announcement that, given the chance, he’ll introduce a Ministry for Jews.

 

New government bodies are required when new problems arise that can’t be handled by existing institutions. There are no such problems with British Jews, who neither are nor perceive themselves to be anything less than an integral part of our nation.

 

The problem exists only in the minds of virulent anti-Semites, such as Corbyn, who lists Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists among his friends.

 

The Ministry he proposes will serve the same purpose as similar organisations served in Nazi Germany: isolating and marginalising Jews. The Nazis graduated to genocide, but I doubt Corbyn will go so far. He’ll just encourage evil-doers in the Middle East to do the job for him.

 

Corbyn, with honesty so appealing to Hitchens, unites in his personality the red and brown ends of political evil. And, contrary to what one reads in the papers, he’s not a throwback to the past.

 

Evil, either brown or red, is on the march everywhere in Europe, from Italy to Hungary, from France to Germany, from Russia to Spain, from Greece to – evidently – Britain.

 

Hence Corbyn is merely a symptom of a pandemic threatening the world. One fears it may be like tuberculosis: when symptoms appear, it’s too late to do anything about the disease. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A teenage pupil of a C of E school set out to address a terrible injustice: her school A-level music syllabus covered 63 composers, of whom – are you sitting down? – all are MEN.

I don’t know how well they teach music at her school, but their standards of indoctrination in the fine points of PC jargon are highly advanced.

The silly girl (and all teenagers are silly by physiological definition) must be a star pupil, for she wielded terms like ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’ with nothing short of grown-up fluency.

Now any grown-ups in a position of power ought to have told the PC twit not to bother her empty little head with stupid ideologies and concentrate instead on her studies. But hey, it’s the 21^st century we’re living in, remember?

Hence the twit’s campaign was avidly supported by The Girls’ Day School Trust, leading academics and even some composers. As a result, the school issued an abject apology and vowed to amend its ways.

The twit gloated with indecent joy: “They automatically saw the need to rectify this and are making changes as soon as possible for the new course. They are also reviewing their other qualifications to ensure they are diverse and inclusive.”

Now on a roll, she submitted a list of female composers whose omission formed a gaping hole in her musical education: “I’d like to study Clara Schumann to learn about her piano music. That would be interesting.”

Now Clara, one of the best pianists of her time, herself didn’t consider her compositions to be interesting enough. They were mostly little nothings she knocked off for her recitals, as was then a common practice. Essentially Clara wasn’t even a minor composer – she wasn’t a composer at all.

This she realised and stopped composing, dedicating her life instead to performances, mainly of the music by two towering geniuses: her husband Robert and her admirer (probably also lover) Johannes Brahms.

But of course a little girl whose brain isn’t yet even wired properly can judge such matters better than Mr and Mrs Schumann. She’s armed with a progressive ideology denied 19^th century musicians, and that gives her deeper insights.

Judging by some Radio 3 programmes, the twit is actually quite precocious, for plum-voiced announcers also seem to think that Clara’s compositions were every bit her husband’s equal. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times that Clara, a victim of her pre-PC time, didn’t have proper recognition because as a woman she was denied her basic right to be taken seriously.

I haven’t been privy to the twit’s full list of unjustly ignored female composers, but I do know that, in addition to Clara, it also included pop musicians Annie Lennox and Carole King, who have about as much to do with music as they do with Grand Prix racing.

But can you imagine the ensuing hysteria if our educational boards were to announce that only classical music would be taught academically, because no other music is a proper academic subject? My imagination doesn’t stretch that far.

Anyway, having read the article, my concert pianist wife, my professional mezzo-soprano friend and I tried to compile our own list. Scraping the bottom of the barrel, we came up with only two composers of note.

One was the sublime 12^th century composer Hildegard von Bingen, a Catholic nun. The other is an interesting contemporary composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Putting me to shame, the girls also managed to name half a dozen others, mostly sub-minor 19^th century figures filling the timeline demarcated by Hildegard at one end and Sofia at the other.

But the two names worthy of study could teach the twit quite a few things about fields other than music, and dollars to doughnuts, as Americans say, they probably didn’t even make her list.

Hildegard von Bingen, named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedict XVI, lived in an era not known for its commitment to women’s rights – quite the contrary.

Yet Hildegard didn’t complain about this injustice. She was too busy founding Benedictine monasteries and convents, writing poems, liturgical songs, scientific works, philosophical tracts – and some of the most moving music ever written.

If she lived in a misogynist (to use modern jargon) time, Gubaidulina lives in a misogynist country, Russia. As an ethnic Tartar she has probably suffered a fair share of double-whammy discrimination.

Yet she didn’t complain either, and anyway Russia hasn’t been blessed with Equal Opportunities Commissions instituted to process such complaints. Instead she wrote her spiritual, mystic music profoundly alien to the regime both in its content and modernist form.

True talent will out no matter what, and these two women must be studied in any serious music course not because they are women, but because they are serious musicians. Primary sexual characteristics just aren’t a sufficient qualification.

Would I be able to explain this to the PC twit hung up on ‘gender inequality’ and ‘normalised sexism’? Probably. But not so she’d understand: the cancerous corruption of modernity has in her case reached Stage IV.

 

 

I don’t mind atheists – we all have a right to moral and intellectual aberrations. Such as eschewing revealed religion for a silly superstition based on neither revelation nor scientific evidence.

What’s less acceptable is people spouting hostile, militant nonsense at the top of their lungs, especially if they try to pass harangues for a serious argument.

This brings me to Philip Collins’s article Ignore the Slippery Critics of Assisted Dying. Obviously to Collins and other haters of religion, anyone unwilling to knock out every cornerstone of our civilisation only deserves pejorative designations, of which ‘slippery’ is one. Hence the title is par for the course.

As is the half-witted ‘philosophy’ Collins uses to justify his support for the cull of the crumblies. “Life is the capacity to realise certain capacities,” he writes, and it’s good to see that his style is in harmony with his crepuscular thinking.

Any sentence that starts with the words ‘life is…’ is suspect. Whatever follows is almost guaranteed to be gibberish. For example, one could say that life is a cucumber: today’s it’s in your hands, tomorrow up your rectum. Or else life is a hotel: we arrive, stay for a while and then check out.

However, these and a million other silly possibilities one could think of would still be preferable to what passes for the meat of Collins’s argument:

When a person no longer has the capacity to mobilise his capacities in realising the full range of certain capacities he would otherwise have the capacity of realising, doctors should kill him with his consent.

The rest is Collins’s attempt to couch his visceral hatred of religion in quasi-intellectual terms, and he lets his febrile emotions overrun his already modest intellectual ‘capacities’.

Thus he takes issue with Archbishop Welby’s objections to assisted suicide being merely “pastoral”, as opposed to “religious”. In the next sentence the confused reader realises that by pastoral Collins means secular, but then one doesn’t expect terminological precision from the likes of him.

One is almost led to believe that, had His Grace expressed his objections in more theological terms, Collins would jump up and salute. Yet considering that he lists God among “some implausible things”, it’s rather unlikely that a theological argument would sway Collins’s ideological hatred of the founding tenets of our civilisation.

One also gets the impression that Collins sees the line of demarcation between philosophy and theology as being sharper than it actually is. The bill to legalise assisted dying, he says, “should attract the support of philosophers just as it is drawing the opposition of theologians.”

Knowing something about the subject on which one pontificates is clearly no longer a professional requirement at The Times. If it were, his editors would have pointed out to Collins that an atheist philosopher is very close to being an oxymoron.

A real philosopher, whatever his immediate interests, can’t avoid asking himself ontological questions about the nature and origin of being, as distinct from existence. Such philosophical questions can only have two types of answers: theological or unsound.

For the theologian the existence of God is the beginning of the argument; for the philosopher, the end. But sooner or later they’ll always converge, at least partly.

The theologian will maintain that, outside of God, questions of being can be neither answered nor indeed asked. The philosopher will try to do both and will only agree with the theologian after many a futile attempt. But agree he will, out of professional integrity if nothing else.

A philosopher, even if he himself doesn’t espouse the Judaeo-Christian understanding of life and the attendant ethics, will know that in the West the only alternative to Judaeo-Christian morality isn’t some other morality. It’s none.

That’s why a philosopher will begrudgingly agree with the theologian that, when society sees a man as the sole sovereign of his life, such a society will start by endorsing suicide and will end up countenancing murder.

The eternal barrier to murder is the same as to suicide: the realisation that human life is sacred. Remove the barrier, and assisted suicide will become first advisable, then legal and then compulsory. The already tenuous difference between assisted suicide and murder will disappear.

Collins mocks “some mysteriously redemptive purpose for which suffering is a surrogate”. This purpose is only mysterious to ignoramuses like him. Even educated atheists know that redemptive suffering was the starting point of our civilisation – and treat it with the same reverential respect they feel for the civilisation.

Collins feels no such respect, partly because he knows little about our civilisation and its heritage, including rhetoric. Hence instead of a coherent argument he treats us to a soppy story about his father, whose suffering at the end of his life could have been prevented by a lethal injection.

“Unlike religion,” clamours Collins, pressing his atheist credentials, “[assisted suicide] will actually ease suffering.” Quite. So will murder. And the similarity between the two dwarfs the trivial differences.

 

“Only an idle fool would convict Jane Austen of bad grammar”, runs the Times headline of yet another panegyric to illiteracy produced by Oliver Kamm.

By contrast, a clever, busy chap like Ollie has no time for fine distinctions among ‘convict of’ and ‘accuse of’ or ‘charge with’, either of which would have fit his sentence better.

What Ollie has plenty of time for is a systematic campaign based on a linguistic philosophy he summarises thus: “[Grammar] has many rules and the way to find out what they are is to examine how native speakers use their own language.”

Exactly which native speakers are we talking about, Ollie? Tattooed Millwall fans? Smug Times columnists? The average of the two? Since, on this evidence, there’s little intellectual difference, the grammatical extremes must also be converging.

Real grammar, Ollie, is not only descriptive but also normative. Anyone who asserts that whatever native speakers say is correct because they say it is effectively declaring all norms to be invalid.

I’ve heard this view expressed before, though never by someone with pretensions to expertise. “Language,” they’d say, “is just a means of communication.” To which my usual retort is that linguistic norms are precisely what makes communication precise or indeed possible.

If native speakers say ‘masterful’ instead of ‘masterly’, or ‘appraise’ instead of ‘apprise’, no communication occurs because what the listener understands is different from what the speaker thinks he’s saying.

Ollie is scathing about those who criticise William Hague “for the supposed error of discussing whether he or Tony Blair held ‘the best job’. The sticklers insist that the comparative must be ‘the better job’. What hogwash.”

The sticklers are right and Ollie is illiterate, or at least ignorant of the difference between a comparative and a superlative. In the cited sentence, ‘the better job’ would mean the better of the two jobs, one held by Mr Hague and the other by Mr Blair. ‘The best job’ would mean one better than all other jobs. Either option is possible, so how is the listener to know which one is meant?

Quoting great writers’, in this case Jane Austen’s, solecisms as support for Ollie’s cherished grammatical populism is disingenuous. Jane Austen et al create their own language universes in which they are the deities establishing all the rules.

Sometimes they use bad grammar on purpose, to achieve a stylistic effect. Sometimes they do so out of carelessness, caused, say, by that second sherry before dinner, time pressure or the late hour of the day. Either way, simple mortals haven’t earned the right to the same latitude that great writers enjoy and silly mortals demand.

Encouraging such latitude is guaranteed to produce generations of tongue-tied, monosyllabic functional mutes – exactly the type churned out by our oxymoronic comprehensive education.

But hold on, Ollie takes exception to that assessment. He extols “the generally high standard of English language teaching in schools”. A less permissive grammarian would be tempted to say ‘…of English taught in schools’, which would make the sentence more mellifluous of sound if no less wrong of thought.

Here we leave the domain of grammar to enter that of ethics. Ollie, I’m like, where was you brung up, mate? Wasn’t you teached not to lie? Or is you deaf as well as dumb? Djahmean? Wha’ever.

A short walk through the streets of any British city, and not necessarily its bad part, will disabuse anyone of the notion that in our schools English is taught well, or indeed at all. One would get the impression that we’ve reverted to the primordial era, well before man received the gift of coherent speech.

Never mind the streets: listen to our newscasters who, if unprompted and unscripted, have trouble talking in correct sentences. What regularly comes out of their mouths is “people who were sat at the table”, an ugly usage of recent provenance, doubtless inspired by Ollie-style laissez-parler.

I’m sure he’ll spring to the defence of that usage with the same energy he showed a few months ago when supporting the reply “I’m good” to the question “How are you?”.

To display the power of his convictions, he’d now probably answer this question with that liberally egalitarian Americanism. Glad to hear you’re good, Ollie. But you’re clearly not well.

The waves of refugees threatening to engulf Britain amount to a crisis. Like all crises, this one begets debates, debates beget rhetoric and rhetoric begets oversimplification.

As any veteran of verbal jousts will tell you, a debate is no place for rational, nuanced arguments. It’s a place for fiery slogans and endlessly repeated mantras.

Both sides to the present debate give ample proof of this observation. One side, reduced to the absurd by Yvette Cooper, issues a blank invitation in the shape of the poster ‘Refugees welcome’. The other side screams NIMBY, citing the fiscal and demographic ramifications of accepting thousands of migrants.

The first position is as meaningless as befits Yvette Cooper. For, if left unqualified, ‘Refugees welcome’ may be tantamount to national suicide.

How many and what kind of refugees are welcome? In a pre-election interview Ed Miliband put no limit on either, which partly explains why Yvette now sits on the back benches. Does she share Ed’s view?

Since most refugees in question are Muslim, are we prepared to increase our Islamic population even further – in the knowledge that most Muslims are hostile to our civilisation and all are alien to it?

Our population is already five per cent Muslim, and some sources cite numbers closer to 10 per cent. The aforementioned waves of migrants approach 400,000, and before long they’ll reach the typhoon power of millions. Does Yvette feel we should welcome, say, a million or so?

If she does, she remains loyal to the political memory of her guru Blair. Now safe in his coupon-clipping retirement, Tony cynically admits that he imported millions of Muslims on purpose, to smash the traditional voting base of the Tories.

In other words, he was prepared to destroy Britain, debauch her whole history and rip the traditional social and cultural fabric to tatters to improve Labour’s electoral chances. If achieving that worthy goal meant turning a great, formerly Christian country into a giant kasbah, then so be it.

It’s good to see that Yvette is willing to continue her mentor’s fine tradition of demographic sabotage. Those of us who detest Blair and reject his legacy ought to transfer some of the rancour to his politically surviving acolytes.

But does that mean we should amend Yvette’s slogan to ‘No refugees are welcome’? Our answer to this question should be leavened with mercy and some sense of guilt.

There’s no doubt that many of the refugees aren’t really refugees but economic migrants. There’s even little doubt that some of them are ISIS infiltrators. But equally clear is that many of them were made homeless, stateless and hopeless by – well, us.

This is another part of Blair’s subversive legacy that ought to make us withhold snap decisions. Because, but for the criminal stupidity of Anglo-American ‘nation building’ in the Middle East, we’d have a trickle of Muslim immigrants, not a tidal wave.

It was American and British bombs followed by ‘boots on the ground’ that turned the region into a murderous chaos unfit for human habitation. Since we made that blood-filled bed, to what moral extent can we refuse to lie in it?

The dictators that our democracy-obsessed nation-builders deposed kept some sort of lid on the bubbling Islamic passions. The passions have now splashed out, scorching the region and sending a human spray over to Europe.

Hence the slogan ‘No refugees welcome’ is as bad as its opposite. We can’t just say ‘let them drown in the Mediterranean or starve to death, see if we care’.

This kind of obtuse, merciless resolve would in the long run compromise Britishness more than a generous but limited welcome would, for Christian mercy has always softened the British proclivity for rational, actuarial calculations.

Such is the principle, and it’s so easy to establish that one is amazed so few parties to the debate have managed to do so. The logistics are much harder.

To invite people to our home we must have a home left to invite them to. So how generous and how limited a welcome should we extend? How do we separate the refugee wheat from the economic (or terrorist) chaff? Let’s be absolutely clear about this: without such vetting we’re back to Yvetting, an accelerated national suicide.

The answer is, I don’t know. However, it’s obvious that some order and patience must be brought into the proceedings. There has to be one centre for all refugees to wait their turn, and no traditional DP camp would be big enough.

My earlier suggestion of using a Greek island for this purpose still holds, and this project must be financed either wholly or at least greatly by the rich Muslim states. It’s clearly within the capacity of the EU to exert pressure both on them and on the Greek government – in fact extortion is about the only thing the EU is good at.

Then each case must be considered individually, which will take months if not years. In the end we’ll accept a few thousand people in genuine need – and reject many more. And, to make sure that no further waves reach our shores, we must do all we can to repair the damage we caused to the region.

This is the price of our geopolitical folly, and we have to pay it out of decency. But we mustn’t kill ourselves out of decency – or to please wicked dunces like Yvette Cooper.

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk and devout Christian, refused to issue licences for homosexual marriages because they “conflict with God’s definition of marriage”.

There are only two objections to her statement possible even in theory. One: there is no such conflict. Two: either way, God’s definitions don’t matter.

The first objection would be clearly nonsensical: both Testaments treat homosexuality as an abomination, which a priori invalidates homomarriage. This leaves only one objection on the table, one that Kentucky authorities indeed invoked.

The objection was so strong that it had to be delivered in the form of a custodial sentence – nothing less would have driven the point home with sufficient force. Since the US Supreme Court had ruled on 26 June that homomarriage is a constitutional right, Mrs Davis was sent to prison.

She took her punishment meekly but with dignity, as Christians have been doing for 2,000 years. “It is not a light issue for me,” she said. “It is a heaven or hell decision.”

That draconian measure looks particularly brutal against the backdrop of our time, when burglars are routinely spared jail. Clearly, their crimes are innocuous compared to the felony committed by Mrs Davis.

So they are, for burglars only hurt individuals. Mrs Davis, however, attacked the very foundation on which every modern state rests, emphatically including the USA.

What to her is a matter of heaven or hell is to the state a matter of life or death, and it’ll defend itself with every means at its disposal.

The modern state, pioneered by America, came into being when a jolt of anti-Christian energy was injected into Western civilisation. All resulting states may have evolved slightly different positive desiderata, but they all converge at the negative end: the urgent need to wipe out every vestige of Christendom.

Leave any of them intact, and no modern state, whatever its manifest politics, would be able to function. The Founders and the Framers understood this with prescient clarity, which is why the very first constitutional amendment, ostensibly providing for freedom of religious worship, in fact “erected a wall between religion and state”, to cite Thomas Jefferson’s gloating boast.

With a few minor exceptions, all those distinguished gentlemen were non-Christians, or rather anti-Christians – regardless of whether they called themselves atheists, agnostics or deists.

Yes, they were prepared to let their citizens worship God in private. But under no circumstances would they allow Christian tenets to exert one iota of influence on public affairs.

In due course the modern state bifurcated into its philistine and nihilist variants (championed in their purest forms by the USA and the USSR), but, in terms of their treatment of Christians, they differ only in methods, not principle.

Some, like the Bolsheviks, will massacre priests and their parishes en masse; some, like the Founding Fathers, will allow Christian worship provided it doesn’t lead believers to defying the state.

Christians may be allowed to live – as long as Christianity stays dead as a moral, social and especially political force. On this condition no modern state run by the motley crew of our today’s Baracks, Daves and Françoises will ever compromise.

However, even as Christians are imprisoned for refusing to sacrifice their faith at the idolatrous altar of state worship, many still regard America as a Christian country. This misapprehension is widespread not only in the country itself but also among the outlanders.

They base their judgement mainly on the frequency with which the plastic figurines called American politicians scream “God bless America!”, the Pledge of Allegiance to ‘one nation under God’, the slogan ‘In God we Trust’ appearing on dollar bills (which medium leaves little doubt of the deity in the message) and the statistics of church attendance. Of these only the last one merits any consideration, the others being simply risible.

Gallup polls suggest that 37 per cent of Americans are church-goers. Whether we accept this finding or rely instead on the self-reporting online surveys indicating a lower figure of 22 per cent, the number is still impressive.

My point is that, even if church attendance were 100 per cent, it wouldn’t have the slightest effect on government policy. The state would remain aggressively atheist even if its every citizen were devoutly Christian.

However, even those statistics are meaningless unless we understand clearly what kind of people go to what kind of churches.

About 23 per cent of the US population describe themselves as evangelical Christians, and one suspects that most of them are the happy-clappy folk who express their piety by speaking in tongues, jumping over pews, and dancing shamanistic jigs in the aisles.

I find it hard to see them as bona fide Christians, though my priest friends will probably say such cynicism will make me burn in hell.

Mrs Davis’s religion is described as apostolic, which could mean Catholic, Anglican (or Episcopalian, which is in communion with Anglican) or Orthodox. Whatever it is, the state’s hostility to specifically apostolic Christianity has from the time of the Founders been even stronger than to any other confession.

Hence the brutal treatment of Mrs Davis. She hasn’t quite been thrown to the lions or crucified upside down, but prison is a good modern equivalent, conveying the same message: the state, not Christ, is God.