Month: January 2016

Mostly scoundrels, is the answer to that one. And also Oxfam.

Caring about one’s own wealth is fine, provided one doesn’t care about it too much, at the expense of one’s soul. However, caring about someone else’s wealth betokens at least two deadly sins, envy and greed.

That’s why those who refer to socialism as the religion of envy have a point. The salient observation is that Western communicants of this creed typically don’t want to enrich the poor.

They want to impoverish the rich (however broadly this category is defined), provided they themselves can parade their flaming conscience all the way to the bank. There are all sorts of alliterative terms on both sides of the Atlantic to describe this type, such as ‘limousine liberals’ or ‘Bollinger Bolsheviks’.

It’s in this context that Oxfam’s cri de coeur can be properly understood. This global confederation of poverty charities is worried about a lamentable fact that in reality is neither lamentable nor a fact.

According to Oxfam (and Credit Suisse), the top one per cent have as much wealth as the remaining 99 per cent of the world combined. For Oxfam it goes without saying that this situation is both deplorable and remediable.

The implicit belief is that a man who has to make do with a million pounds is severely disadvantaged compared to someone who has a billion. Yet such a pauper would only feel that way if he were consumed with envy, thereby forfeiting any claim to sympathy.

What should matter to a decent person is having enough for himself and his family, rather than having as much as his neighbour. But then giant corporations, especially those in the charity gig, don’t think like decent people. Their aspirations are akin to those of our governing spivocrats; their goals are mostly self-serving and destructive.

The methodology by which Oxfam arrived at that calculation is questionable: wealth is interpreted not, say, as the means of acquiring the civilised amenities of life but strictly as the difference between personal assets and liabilities.

Hence a City stockbroker earning £300,000 a year, having a £2,000,000 portfolio but carrying a £3,000,000 mortgage on a Kensington semi is dirt-poor compared to a Chinese de facto slave only earning enough to buy a cup of rice a day but not owing anyone a single Yuan.

But leaving that aside, Oxfam ought to be reminded of absolute rather than relative wealth (or poverty) as being the sole valid criterion of economic wellbeing. And more equality usually doesn’t mean less poverty: it’s always easier to equalise at the lowest common denominator.

For example, economic inequality in Victorian England was smaller than it is in England today, and yet only an intrepid commentator would suggest that there was less poverty then.

Oxfam’s business is relieving poverty, not reducing wealth, yet both methods can narrow the gap that so worries this venerable organisation. Of the two expedients, the second is easier while the first is more moral, but our top charities aren’t unduly concerned about morality.

So fine, I’m prepared to accept for the sake of argument that economic inequality is so evil that any method of reducing it is worthy, including dispossessing the offensive one per cent.

Since, as we know, charity begins at home, I propose to get the ball rolling by reducing, or ideally cutting out, the salaries of those running and operating our top charities, including Oxfam.

Charities, after all, are supposed to channel aid to its ultimate targets, not into their own pockets. Alas, both here and in the US a typical major charity appropriates between 65 and 90 per cent of all donations for its own use.

Here, for example, are the top executives’ salaries at Britain’s major charities: 

1. London Clinic £850,000 to £860,0002. Nuffield Health £770,000 to £780,000

3. St Andrew’s Healthcare £750,000 to £760,000

4. Wellcome Trust £590,000 to £600,000

5. Royal Opera House £566,000

6. Anchor Trust £420,000 to £430,000

7. City & Guilds £400,000 to £410,000

8. Legal Education Foundation £360,000 to £370,000

9. Children’s Investment Fund Foundation £350,000 to £360,000

10. Church Commissioners for England £330,000 to £340,000

Oxfam’s top executive pockets a mere £125,000 a year, which is modest by these standards but still quite far removed from the breadline. Am I alone in thinking this is outrageous?

In fact such practices are par for the course. They vindicate the main economic principle of modernity: giant organisations, commercial, governmental or charitable, operate chiefly for the benefit of their managerial elites, whatever their ostensible remit or declared goals.

Reversing this trend should be the first step the Oxfam brass could take to their coveted aim, reducing economic inequality.

I expect an announcement shortly that henceforth they’ll forgo their salaries and work solely to assuage their conscience and indulge their taste for justice. You know, the way charities used to work before socialist corruption set in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This may sound paradoxical. Surely it’s not losing but winning that takes skill and athleticism?

Technically, yes. But look at it this way: why would a player want to throw a match? For example, I’ve been playing tennis for 40 years without ever once losing on purpose.

The only possible reason for doing so would be the player or his friends betting heavily, and against the odds, on his opponent. Now, since I’m the only person who has ever bet on my tennis matches, the temptation to throw one has never arisen.

Only professionals find themselves in the privileged position of being able to cheat for money and, by the sound of it, quite a few take advantage of it. And it does take a lifelong effort to get to professional level.

A whistleblower has just released documents suggesting that 16 top-50 players have thrown matches over the last decade. The details haven’t yet been released, but in such cases detection is easy. Casinos know all about it, which is how they flush out blackjack card-counters.

What gives counters away is their irregular, seemingly irrational, betting patterns. When a croupier knows that the pack is stacked in favour of a player who then quadruples his bet, the dealer realises that the player knows it too. And the only way of knowing is to count cards.

Investigation specifically into tennis corruption started in 2008 and characteristically involved a Russian player, Nikolai Davydenko, then ranked fourth in the world.

The Russian was playing the 87^th-ranked Vassallo Arguello and, sure enough, Davydenko was coasting. He easily won the first set and was up a break in the second.

Suddenly there came such an outburst of heavy betting on Arguello that after a while bookies had to stop taking any more bets. Davydenko promptly forfeited the match, and the winners tried to collect.

However, Betfair, an online betting exchange, voided $7,000,000 in bets, the first time it had ever done so, and informed the ATP that something dodgy was afoot. Most of the winners were traced to accounts in Russia, where sports corruption stands tall even against the backdrop of a generally criminalised economy.

An investigation was triggered, but the evidence was deemed insufficient and the player wasn’t suspended. However, if you’ll pardon a cliché, the absence of evidence isn’t always the evidence of absence. It’s certainly not proof of innocence, as anyone familiar with O.J. Simpson’s first trial will confirm.

At the time at least a dozen leading players came forward complaining that they had been approached by criminals with offers (or threats) to throw matches. Again most offers and threats were enunciated in guttural Russian accents.

The present scandal hasn’t yet reached a stage at which the culprits are named. However, it’s already known that Russian criminal syndicates are behind the current round of corruption as well.

In the good tradition of English empiricism, one must respond to the perennial underlying question: ‘So what are we going to do about it?’

That’s an easy question to answer. In the good, if relatively recent, tradition we’re going to cover up the corruption wherever possible and perhaps slap a few wrists that stick too far out to be covered up.

What should be done, apart from punishing those immediately guilty, is a different matter. First, a general comment.

Any social order ought to be arranged in a way that encourages the good parts of human nature, which most of us have, and discourages the bad parts, which we all possess.

Anyone who has ever visited a race course or a casino, looked at the people’s contorted faces and heard their demented shrieks will know that betting brings out the worst traits of human character. Such activities should be banned, or at least not widely legalised, as a matter of principle.

The argument that betting will then simply go underground doesn’t quite wash. Laws exist not only to penalise harmful activities but also to express society’s attitude to them. Some laws may not be enforced, some may not be enforceable, but they all serve a social purpose, either positive or negative.

Second, the global syphilitic contagion of Russian criminality must be checked.

Russia is the first major economy that’s founded, organised and operated almost entirely on Mafioso principles. Hence it befouls everything it touches, inflicting moral damage not only within its own domain but everywhere it’s allowed to operate.

England is one such place, with our government acting on the moral dictum first formulated by Emperor Vespasian: pecunia non olet. Money doesn’t smell.

We welcome dirty Russian money (and all serious Russian money is dirty) without being overly inquisitive about its source or excessively bothered by its attendant gifts, such as corruption and a spate of Mafia-style hits all over London and the home counties.

We weigh billions pumped into our economy against a dozen corpses here or there and find the balance acceptable. The heavy, cumulative moral damage isn’t allowed to tip the scales. This isn’t something we weigh any longer.

The ball is in our court, yet we don’t even try to hit it. Careful it doesn’t hit us, where it hurts.

Before I tell you about an interesting current discovery, it’s not only Russian generals who tend to die in mysterious ways, defying every conceivable statistical pattern. In the past at least, their Eastern European colleagues used to join the fun.

For example, the last two months of 1984 saw the demise of the Defence Ministers of five (5) Warsaw Pact countries, including the Soviet Union. The generals all died of cardiac arrest.

Would it be preposterous to suggest that such a concentrated outbreak of fatalities bucked statistical odds?

Assuming that the sudden epidemic of cardiac arrests among those generals wasn’t entirely coincidental, one is entitled to ask questions, such as why and who.

The historical context helps in venturing a guess or two. For the mid-eighties was the time when power in the Soviet Union was passing from the Party to the KGB, a process later called glasnost and perestroika.

The Soviet army was the KGB’s traditional rival, not to say mortal enemy. ‘Mortal’ isn’t a figure of speech here, for both sides played for keeps.

For example, in 1937-1940 the secret police killed tens of thousands of army officers, including three out of the five marshals. The army won the next round, by purging the secret police in 1953-1955, with tanks bringing Moscow to a standstill.

In the 1980s the pressure came to a head: the KGB was reaching not just for huge power, but for all of it. This message was communicated unequivocally in 1982, when the KGB chief Andropov became Secretary General, dictator for all practical purposes.

It was he who decided to act on the ideas first put forth by his mentor Lavrentiy Beria, the secret police chief murdered in 1953 following a coup in which the army played a decisive role. Enter perestroika, developed to its logical end by Andropov’s protégé Gorbachev.

For obvious reasons the army felt uneasy about that development, and of course what happened in the Soviet Union was faithfully mirrored in its satellites. The armies throughout the communist bloc were restless, the secret police typically ruthless.

The spate of 1984 cardiac arrests among Defence Ministers must have been a visible result of that invisible struggle, at least this is the only way I can make sense of the attendant statistics.

And now the Russian political scientist Andrei Illarionov has released some captivating new data.

He tabulated every death of a Russian general from 1991 to 2015, and the pattern rings 1984 bells. Altogether 42 generals died during that period – with only three of the deaths possibly attributable to natural causes.

The rest are mostly suicides, along with traffic and other accidents, all easy to stage. What leads to this subversive thought is the curious distribution of those deaths from year to year, with statistical probabilities again fleeing for their lives.

In the first 11 years of the observed period, from 1991 to 2001, only nine Russian generals died, less than one a year. Yet in the very next year, 2002, the curve peaked to nine dead generals – as many as in the previous 11 years combined.

In the subsequent five years, to 2007, only one general died, but then the tempo picked up noticeably. In 2008-2013 15 generals went to that great battlefield in the sky, an average of 2.5 a year.

Then, in 2014, another peak came, with six generals dying that year. Another three deaths followed in 2015.

Why such statistically improbable peaks in 2002 and 2014?

The first of these years saw the culmination of the Second Chechen War, started by Putin to consolidate his power, or rather that of the KGB junta he fronts.

One could assume that those generals died in battle, but that assumption would be wrong. For 2002 was the year when the army ceased operations in Chechnya, with the relay baton passing to the KGB and Interior Ministry special units. Putin’s storm troopers, in other words.

Thus the KGB (under its new moniker) was superseding not only all civil authority (at present 85 per cent of Russia’s top government officials come from the KGB/FSB), but effectively military authority as well.

It wouldn’t be beyond the realm of the possible to imagine that fighting generals resented that development, and that Putin resented their resentment. A conflict was in the air, which by the looks of it Putin either preempted or won.

The second outburst of senior officers’ mortality, in 2014, coincided with the predatory war against the Ukraine, with the army again playing second fiddle to FSB troops and paramilitaries. Again it’s easily conceivable that some generals were unhappy, and the unhappiest of them couldn’t be allowed to live.

It’s a truism that statistics often lie. That may be, but at times they do hint at the truth. In this case, the truth is gruesome.

And yes, 2016 is only a couple of weeks old, but Colonel-General Igor Sergun, head of Russia’s military intelligence, has already died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 58.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following a meeting of Anglican primates at Canterbury, the US Episcopal Church has been drummed out of the Anglican communion.

Said communion thereby lost almost two million communicants, which has to be a serious matter. The reason for the split was also serious: homosexuality or, to be more specific, the Episcopalians’ permissive attitude to it.

This is the culmination of an old problem that became apparent in 2003, when the Episcopal Church consecrated a practising homosexual as Bishop of New Hampshire. The Anglican Church doesn’t require celibacy from either prelates or parish priests, but an open practice of perversion was hard to swallow, as it were.

It has taken the Anglicans 12 years to muster sufficient resolve, but now the Episcopal Church has been suspended.

In the process, the primates also refused to endorse homomarriage, constituting as it does a “fundamental departure from the faith and teaching” of Christianity. Marriage to them is still unfashionably a union between a man and a woman, not any two or more mammals of the male, female or other sex. So far so good.

Then the fun started. For Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, saw fit to apologise to the homosexual ‘community’ for the measure and the meeting’s general tenor, of which contextually he disapproved.

“I want to take this opportunity,” he grovelled, “to say how sorry I am for the hurt and pain, in the past and present, the church has caused.”

Without pointing fingers or naming names, the Archbishop blamed the hurt and the pain on the conservative African bishops and some British fossils, who remain uncomfortably stubborn in their upholding of Christian doctrine:

“[This] makes us look out of line in the US and UK… but not in many other parts of the world… there are different views in different places.”

Different people in different places are indeed entitled to their own views. But they aren’t entitled to their own doctrine, which, for old times’ sake, is supposed to be universal.

His Grace doesn’t seem to realise this, as he fails to understand a few other fundamentals too. Exactly what line is the Anglican Church out of in the US and UK?

The line drawn in the sand by homosexual activists and our governing subversive spivs who crave the image of leftie, populist ‘cool’? If so, and this is the only line that fits the context, the world’s top Anglican prelate clearly thinks the Church must take its cue from every secular fad, no matter how pernicious and perverse.

Not everyone has to be a believing Christian, but one would think this a job requirement for an archbishop. Hence His Grace is institutionally required to follow the reactionary entreaty first enunciated on that Jerusalem hill:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

His Grace must feel that, if Jesus had the good fortune to occupy the honourable post of Archbishop of Canterbury today, he’d doubtless phrase differently: “Let men, especially homosexual men, so shine their light before you, that you may see their good works, and glorify everything they do in or out of wedlock.”

Yet it’s not the secular world that’s supposed to teach morality to the Church but the other way around. However, when this was undoubted, the Anglicans were led by great pastors and theologians, not jumped-up oil traders, the ecclesiastical answer to our politicians.  

Trying to kowtow to the more objectionable secular fads, the Anglican Church has already forfeited most of its tenuous claim to being an apostolic confession – ordaining women as priests and consecrating them as bishops took care of that.

If His Grace Welby and like-minded hierarchs have their way, lighting the path to perdition, the C of E will soon forfeit its claim to being a Christian church altogether. Perhaps it could then be rolled into the Department of Social Services, or else the Ministry of Diversity.

Meanwhile, I expect reciprocity from the leaders of the homosexual ‘community’. If prelates are apologising for not allowing homosexuals to marry in church, those activists ought to apologise for waging war on family, common decency and the institution of marriage.

I’m not holding my breath though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s how many European Jews have fled to Israel in 2015, almost 80 per cent of them from France.

It’s one thing when Jews emigrate to Israel because they want to. It’s quite another when they run for their lives because they feel they have to.

The Holocaust made the previously unthinkable possible. The current, overwhelmingly Muslim, anti-Semitic attacks make it likely.

Having lost half their population to the previous outburst of racial hatred, the Jews are understandably alert to the slightest signs of a brewing repeat performance. They aren’t being oversensitive, for assaults on Jews have become a daily event in Europe.

Synagogues vandalised, Jewish cemeteries desecrated, Jews abused – it’s not quite Kristallnacht yet, but the signs are worrying for those who can read them.

The other day, after a Muslim fanatic attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete, the Marseille Jewish authority told the Jews not to provoke assaults by wearing skullcaps in public.

Now France has the highest Muslim population in Europe, and the link between such demographics and anti-Semitic incidents is causative.

Except that saying so out loud isn’t the done thing, just as covering up Muslim rapes all over Europe is. A modern tongue, twisted out of shape by the PC dicta, can’t utter the simple words: more Muslims, more crime – including anti-Semitic attacks.

That most Frenchmen aren’t anti-Semitic is as true as it’s irrelevant. Most Germans weren’t anti-Semitic either, but that arithmetic wasn’t much consolation to the six million victims.

It wasn’t just they who died during the war; the total count was closer to 50 million. The difference between the two numerals ought to suffice to make an observation that holds true irrespective of time or place:

A society that fails to nip anti-Semitic escapades in the bud doesn’t just acquiesce in the suffering of Jews. It signs its own death warrant.

It’s true that most outrages are perpetrated not by the indigenous population but by Muslims – most of whom aren’t part of the indigenous population even if native-born.

But that doesn’t exculpate anyone else personally or society collectively. Millions of Muslims should never have been allowed to settle in the West, for they’re viscerally and doctrinally hostile to everything the West stands for.

True, the Holocaust was perpetrated without much Muslim participation. But anti-Semitic violence on that scale was an aberration both to Western morality and religion. Since, unlike the Koran, the founding documents of our civilisation don’t prescribe violence towards Jews, the West was able to lick its moral wounds after the war.

The wounds have now reopened because the West has proved too weak to protect itself against an influx of aliens first, and their propensity for criminal behaviour second. We’ve failed to inform the newcomers that our civilisation isn’t just different but also better than theirs. More important, it’s indeed ours, we like it and intend to keep it by any means at our disposal.

These could include deportation of undesirable elements, stiff sentences for any crimes, especially Islam-inspired ones, ending any Muslim immigration, summary closure of any mosque in which a single anti-Western or anti-Jewish word is uttered.

Alas, a civilisation needs to have self-confidence to act with such resolve, and in the West today that commodity is lacking. That’s why anti-Semitic violence shames us all, not just the Muslims in our midst.

That’s why also we must brace ourselves to face the consequences of our frailty. For it’s not just the Jews who find themselves at the receiving end of Muslim violence.

If Marseille Jews are told not to wear skullcaps today, tomorrow all women will be told to cover themselves head to toe in shapeless black garments (ideally masking the face too) not to provoke rape.

And then people will start taking the law in their own hands. Street battles, like those between the fascists and the communists in pre-war London or Berlin, are far from impossible today.

This could well create troubled waters in which assorted extremists will then fish, and we’re already witnessing the strengthening of the extremists’ electoral muscle all over Europe.

An economic crisis, something certain to happen in the next few years, can provide an ideal backdrop for violent anarchy to descend on Europe.

Though history teaches everything but complacency, complacency seems to be the only lesson we’ve learned. That’s a mistake, for a society unprepared to defend its civilisation doesn’t deserve to keep it.

 

Daniel Finkelstein, The Times Associate Editor, doesn’t think so. In another fulsome encomium to the late David Bowie, he writes: “…pop, with Bowie at its head, saw that consumerism isn’t base and philistine. It can be the ally of artistic endeavour. Commerce, liberty and art, arm-in-arm. That was the great David Bowie.”

Earlier in the piece, Finkelstein opines that Bowie was “undoubtedly one of the artistic geniuses of the past 50 years”. Chaps like Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Glenn Gould or James MacMillan don’t get a look in. The genius slot is occupied.

That Finkelstein knows about art as little as he does about football (about which he writes a regular column), and understands even less, is evident. That he doesn’t even understand the words he uses, equally so.

For consumerism is indeed base and philistine when it’s applied to the higher reaches of the human spirit. For example, when love equates consumerism, it’s reduced to the base level of a Soho whorehouse.

However, Finkelstein’s meaningless waffle wouldn’t merit a comment if it didn’t reflect a wider problem, a malaise that has both afflicted and defined the modern world: a catastrophic loss of mind and soul.

Finkelstein kindly provides an exhaustive illustration of this tragedy, which he however doesn’t see as such: “The most revealing… was his [Bowie’s] response to the question ‘Who are your heroes in real life?’… Bowie replied, truthfully and insightfully: ‘The consumer’.”

If Bowie’s ‘insights’ had been meant to mock Bach, he could have inscribed his CDs with ‘The glory is the consumer’s’, just as Bach inscribed his scores with ‘The glory is God’s’. The difference in motivation is obvious, as is the difference between real art and its modern, philistine perversion.

Anyone needing further persuasion of the difference between art and non-art could do worse than compare a recording of anything at all by Bowie (or any other purveyor of pop) with anything at all by Bach, say his aria Mache dich, mein Herze, rein from St Matthew Passion.

The former is a lewd, primitive caricature of art; the latter, art produced by a genuine creative impulse emulating the outburst of divine energy that brought the world into existence. It’s not for nothing that both Judaism and early Christianity frowned on non-verbal artistic creativity.

A man assuming the role of a creator seemed to them a hair’s breadth away from usurping the role of the Creator – an unspeakable heresy. For example, Clement of Alexandria (d. circa 215) wrote that art contravened not so much the second commandment as the eighth: by displaying creativity, man was stealing God’s prerogative.

Even in pre-Christian times music was seen as something more than just a product to be consumed. Thus Plato: “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

This isn’t the right medium to ponder the philosophical, theological and moral implications of music, or art in general. Suffice it to say that referring to pop effluvia by the misnomer ‘music’ testifies to nothing but the paucity of language.

We often use the same words to describe phenomena that have nothing in common. One man loves God, another loves a woman, a third loves fish and chips – language lags behind the notion it designates or else races far ahead of it.

Hence the likes of Lord Finkelstein see no contradiction between describing Bowie as ‘an artistic genius’ and quoting his cynically crass comment on the identity of his heroes.

Do you think Bach would have answered the same question with ‘Duke Johan Ernst’, Mozart with ‘Prince Lichnowsky’ or Beethoven with ‘Archduke Rudolph’? Yet those were the ‘consumers’ of the most sublime music ever written, the greatest testimony to the divine origin of man.

Pop, on the other hand, supports Darwin’s slapdash theory by only testifying to the simian origin of man, or rather some men. Bach proves the ape isn’t our past; pop proves it’s our future: by severing all links with divinity, man is rapidly forgoing his humanity as well.

Believing, as Finkelstein does, that art can be mass-produced exclusively for commercial purposes betokens woeful ignorance and semantic confusion. Both conditions are lamentable, but not nearly as much as the disease of which they are merely symptoms.

 

P.S. In the spirit of crass commercialism that so fascinates Lord Finkelstein, may I remind you that such issues are pondered at depth in my book How the West Was Lost, now available as a paperback from Amazon or directly from the publisher, I.B. Tauris, London.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Church of England hasn’t been into canonisations for a while but, judging by the front-page eulogies in the press, an exception may be made in David Bowie’s case.

Allow me first to declare a personal interest in David Bowie: there is none. When he was alive I knew he had something to do either with pop music or the drug trade, not that there’s much difference between the two.

Now he’s dead, I’ve found out he was actually some kind of singer of, putting it kindly, ambivalent sexuality and a strong propensity to snort cocaine. In short, he possessed perfect credentials to be eulogised as ‘a legend’ and ‘a great musician’.

Obeying the dictum of speaking no evil of the dead, I shan’t say much else about his personality, especially since even the panegyrics fail to portray it as anything other than trivial. I’m interested in Bowie not for what he was but for what he represents.

Judging by the scraps of his songs one can’t help hearing on every broadcast channel, he wasn’t a great musician. He wasn’t a musician at all. His ilk are merely both the totems and the shamans of a pernicious, toxic cult.

The purveyors of this cult overtly or implicitly favour satanic paraphernalia to dress up their rites, a cross between a Nuremberg rally and an orgy. Typically they perform in clouds of billowing smoke, hinting at hell with little subtlety.

Their puny musical content is drowned in the clinically deafening din of electric and electronic instruments, belting out the same three chords on which the whole structure of pop ‘music’ rests.

The accompanying roar coming from thousands of throats doesn’t reflect fine musical sensibilities. It’s a hateful chant of cult worshippers, the battle cry of victorious barbaric modernity.

Pop music expresses the true nature of modernity, which is more or less circumscribed by its hatred of Western tradition. Both the shamans and the worshippers of the cult seek, wittingly or unwittingly,  to destroy our civilisation, even though they don’t mind availing themselves of the riches it can deliver.

In fact, pop has become big business, perhaps the biggest of all. Illiterate, tone-deaf adolescents can become billionaires overnight, provided they can tickle the naughty bits of culturally inept audiences in a particularly effective way. They belch their anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank, oblivious to the paradox, perhaps even unfamiliar with this three-syllable word.

At the beginning pop remotely resembled music, but that was quickly lost. More and more, it began to acquire overtly satanic characteristics. More and more, it began to appeal not just to the darker side of human nature but to the sulphuric swamp concealed underneath it. Pop went the weasel of our civilisation.

Pop’s appeal is quasi-religious, in the same sense in which the antichrist is the negative image of Christ. While Jesus died on the cross to redeem our sins, the apostles of the new cult would commit suicide or else die of alcoholism, drug overdose or in due course of AIDS. At a pinch even cancer, of the kind that killed Bowie, can qualify as a trampoline to redemptive immortality. 

Improbably, the dead shamans are portrayed as a kind of innocent victims of some unidentified enemy who contextually can only be ‘the establishment’. Worshippers of the new cult pretend not to realise that they themselves are the establishment now. Iconoclasm always lives on even after the icons have been smashed.

Hence all those Jimmy Hendrixes, Freddie Mercuries, Amy Winehouses and David Bowies gave their lives for a good cause. They are martyrs at the altar of anomie and hatred.

Amazingly, even our formerly reputable newspapers not only praise the cultish martyrs but claim they set a great example for Christian churches to follow. Hence Hugo Rifkind, whose idiocy stands out even against the generally abysmal level of The Times, says the late Bowie could teach the Anglican Church the meaning of tolerance towards LGBTI people:

“LGBTI stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex’. Bowie, at times, appeared to be at least three of those things, and arguably four. Still… those whom the church left ‘abandoned and alone’, he championed and made his own.”

Tolerance means accepting with equanimity something one dislikes. You and I may be tolerant of cannibals, but a cannibal wouldn’t be. He’d be one of them.

Thus those who practise sexual perversions find it easier to be tolerant of such practices than would those who find them distasteful. Obviously, Mr Rifkind is so carried away by his own anomie that he’s unable to notice that he’s talking in logical solecisms. He’s just dying to state his credentials as someone who belongs.

That the Bowies of this world find mass adulation indicts not so much them as all of us. A society that can see them as anything other than an unpleasant sideshow fails aesthetically, culturally and philosophically. Above all it fails morally, and that is a truly serious matter.

Still, those of us who know how must pray for David Bowie’s soul – which will be a true test of tolerance.  

 

 

 

     

 

 

This morning I rang my friend Dave to ask him a few things, but found him unable to talk. He’s in deep mourning for David Bowie, whose death, mumbled Dave, courageously fighting tears, is “a great loss”.

Dave also referred to his deceased namesake as “a music legend”, which humbled me deeply. I thought no name of a music legend, from Bach to Offenbach, would fail to ring a bell with me but now, thanks to Dave, I know I was wrong.

Hence, even though I wasn’t entirely sure who David Bowie was, I readily agreed he was a legend and offered my condolences. My probing questions could wait, I said to Dave.

Now Dave is a lovely chap, but he has this little idiosyncrasy: an aversion to giving straight answers to straight questions. I don’t hold this against him – he’s a politician after all.

Since exercises in futility aren’t part of my fitness regimen, I hardly every ask him yes or no questions face to face. However, there’s no harm in doing so in writing – this medium gives Dave time to ponder the queries and respond to them as evasively as only he can.

Actually I’m maligning the poor chap. Sometimes he does give straight answers to questions, as he did yesterday when asked if his government had made any provisions for leaving the EU should the referendum go that way.

Dave’s reply was long and couched in political cant, but anyone fluent in that language could discern a firm ‘no’ underneath. This has led some commentators to accuse Dave of irresponsibility, which only goes to show how little they understand my good friend.

Dave isn’t irresponsible; he’s confident. He knows he can make sure the right people will never cast wrong votes. And even if they do, he’ll always be able to count on his Brussels ringmasters to invalidate the referendum and tell us to vote again until we get it right.

In fact, the first three questions I’m about to pose to my grieving friend deal with that very issue. After that, it’s free-for-all, in no particular order: 

1. Do you really think ‘Brexit isn’t the right answer’?

2. Is there one rational reason for Britain to stay in the EU (your desire to be EU president one day doesn’t count as one such reason)?

3. Are you going to use bogus concessions from the EU to trick the electorate into voting to stay?

4. Does reducing our armed forces to the pre-Napoleonic level compromise our security?

5. Are various crimes committed by Muslims in Britain and elsewhere in any way motivated by Islam?

6. Is Britain really enriched by an uncontrolled influx of migrants from hostile cultures?

7. In the light of current events, do you have any second thoughts about the Schengen Agreement?

8. Is regaining control of our borders more important than being on good terms with Angie and Rumpy-Pumpy?

9. Does comprehensive education work, in the sense in which education is supposed to work?

10. Is the £140 million you’ve committed to replacing vile council estates adequate to the task? (It’s only enough for 1,400 flats – on average, one flat costs £100,000 to build.)

11. Does the NHS really benefit from the systematic growth of the administrative staff at the expense of frontline doctors and nurses?

12. Is waiting a fortnight for a GP appointment a good medical practice?

13. Considering that no other European country has a wholly nationalised medicine, do we really know something they don’t?

14. Is there any value to an economic recovery almost entirely driven by borrowing and the inflation in the paper values of properties?

15. Is homosexual marriage consonant with our history, tradition and morality?

16. Is the fact that over 200,000 abortions are performed in Britain every year consonant with those things?

17. Is the welfare state, which effectively replaces the father, good for the family?

18. Is it good for society that half of our children are born out of wedlock?

19. Is it possible to run the country without such ministries as those for communities, sports, culture, diversity, women and so forth?

20. Is Islam really a religion of peace?

No sooner had I finished putting these down on paper that I e-mailed the list to Dave, asking him facetiously if he’s capable of giving unequivocal yes or no answers. He proved that he is, by instantly replying ‘No!’.

 

 

The way German Muslims chose to celebrate New Year’s Eve rather diminishes one’s confidence in their acceptance of sexual equality.

Nor can one be entirely sure that Muslims in general are imbued with the Western ethos governing matters of the flesh. Our Muslim friends don’t seem to get their heads around the fact that here in the West men ask for permission before having sex with women.

Whether the permission is conveyed semantically or semiotically doesn’t really matter – the woman must be a willing and therefore equal partner.

Men imposing themselves on unwilling women can’t possibly regard them as equals or indeed as humans. Women to them have to be chattels or inanimate objects. A man doesn’t ask a cup whether it wants to have tea poured into it, does he?

My friends Barack Hussein, Dave and Angela explained to me that it’s sheer coincidence that the men raping women en masse all over Europe happen to be Muslims.

That tendency has nothing to do with Islam. Gangs of young Muslim men coordinate group attacks on women across Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland not because they are Muslims but because they’re young men. Young men do that sort of thing, don’t they?

Yes, well, they may, sometimes. Similarly young men steal, fight in bars and kill. But – how can I put this without the God of Political Correctness smiting me with his vengeance – such behaviour isn’t regarded as normal, partly because it has no scriptural support in Western religions.

However, and I do realise we’re still firmly lodged in the realm of sheer coincidence, scanning the Koran and the hadith one gets the impression that these scriptural documents, while not explicitly condoning rape, may be interpreted as implicitly not discouraging it either.

“Your women,” says the Koran 2:223, “are your fields, so go into your fields whichever way you like.” Islamic scholars maintain, and I’m sure they’re right, that the verse has to do with the creative variety of ballistic possibilities open to enterprising Muslim men.

But one can also see how some men may see this verse as an endorsement to going into the field with the help of several friends holding the field down while awaiting their turn.

The Koran, 2:228, explains that “Of course, men are a degree above them [women] in status.” Speaking, you understand, purely hypothetically, isn’t it possible that as a result a young man would form in his mind a simple syllogism: I am above both women and china cups in status. I don’t ask a cup whether I may pour tea into it. Ergo…

In any case, one shouldn’t mollycoddle women because, according to the hadith, they are evil to the point of being diabolical: “Evil omen is three things: the horse, the woman and the house.” If so, why not rape a woman? Or for that matter a horse? (One doesn’t see any immediate way of raping a house, except perhaps having it furnished by a modern interior designer.)

And further: “The Prophet said, ‘I looked at Hell and saw that the majority of its inhabitants were women.’” Hence raping them is a kind of witch hunt, striking a blow for the Prophet – an easy inference, don’t you think?

The Koran 4:24 puts an interesting spin on the Seventh Commandment: “And forbidden to you are wedded wives of other people [so far so good] except those who have fallen in your hands [as prisoners of war].”

This verse was interpreted in the Middle Ages as a direct encouragement to raping women in front of their POW husbands. Now one has to say out of fairness that this practice wasn’t limited to the Islamic world. It also affected adjacent areas influenced by it, such as Russia.

Hence the Kievan prince Vladimir, before he baptised Russia in 988 and subsequently was canonised, had indulged in a spot of public rape too.

For example, in 978 he asked for the hand of the Polotsk Princess Rogneda, which to him didn’t necessarily imply an exclusive relationship (the libidinous prince had 800 wives and concubines). When the proposal was rejected by the girl’s parents, Vladimir captured Polotsk, killed the recalcitrant parents and raped Rogneda in front of his cheering troops.

However, after his baptism Vladimir became more restrained, realising that his new religion frowned on raping women even if they happen to be captured in battle. Islam doesn’t seem to have a similar injunction.

So yes, keeping my finger on the pulse of our PC modernity as I always do, I’m willing to accept that the spate of rapes being perpetrated by Muslims across Europe has nothing to do with Islam. But are you?

Do you also believe it’s purely coincidental that the Swedish city of Malmö, which is home to 100,000 Muslims, has more violent crime in general and rape in particular than the rest of Scandinavia combined?

No, I didn’t think so. This means you aren’t fit to live in a modern world shaped by my friends Barack Hussein, Dave, Angela et al. Abandoning all subterfuge, neither am I.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s distressing to see a boy cry when he’s old enough to be a man. Yet my friend Barack Hussein’s tears were so convincing that even old cynical me couldn’t stop laughing.

What caused Obama’s lachrymose display was the 2012 shooting at a primary school in which 20 children and six adults were killed.

Of course the sole reason for that tragedy was the wide availability of guns, explained the president. And the real culprit wasn’t the chap who pulled the trigger but the pernicious gun lobby that had osmotically communicated the message that open season on children had started.

Hence there was only one thing left for old Barack Hussein to do: bypass Congress and introduce gun control measures through the back door, by executive order.

As a clinching argument, he volunteered the information that he had never owned a gun. Well, even though I’ve never owned a dog, I don’t think they ought to be banned, but then idiotic non sequiturs are the stock in trade of today’s politics.  

The Republicans in Congress screamed bloody murder, as it were. They said the proposed measure was unconstitutional and I’d agree on general principle, what with a gaping deficit on my part of any detailed knowledge about US constitutional subtleties.

What I do know, having perused John Lott’s comprehensive study under the self-explanatory title of More Guns, Less Crime, is that the relationship between the availability of guns and crime rate is inverse.

Hence, unless someone disputed and refuted the reams of in-depth statistical evidence gathered by Dr Lott, ascribing the tragedy that so moved my friend Barack Hussein simply to the availability of firearms is frivolous and manipulative.

But then ‘frivolous and manipulative’ are words that these days adequately describe any public display by any public official anywhere in the West. Nothing new there, though Barack Hussein’s tears get top prize in the histrionics stakes.

Anyone who believes that anything short of applying thespian techniques à la Stanislavsky or else chopping a mound of onions can make a modern politician cry hasn’t studied modern politics closely.

Thus what caught my eye was precisely the cloying, tasteless sentimentality of Barack Hussein’s act, not its puny intellectual content. But then the truth dawned on me.

The moisture streaming down Barack Hussein’s cheeks wasn’t tears of grief. It was tears of joy, satisfaction of a job well done and well rewarded.

It’s just an unsubstantiated thought of mine, but Mr Obama must be an off-the-books employee of the gun-maker Smith & Wesson, or else a secret holder of a large block of shares in the company. Why else would the contents of his speech have been leaked beforehand if not to boost gun sales in anticipation?

If that was the real purpose of Barack Hussein’s action, then it has succeeded spectacularly. Shares in Smith & Wesson have jumped up to their highest mark since 1999, and the Obama family fortune must have moved in the same direction.

If my hypothesis is correct, then this is, and will remain, the only tangible effect of Obama’s announcement. I mean, you don’t really think gun crime will go down as a result, do you?

If you do, I can only quote one of Mr Obama’s predecessors in office by suggesting you read my lips. Murder, by firearms, knives, fists, feet, axes, bottles or what have you, will always be with us not because criminals have access to the aforementioned expedients but because we have criminals.

Therefore the way to reduce the number of murders is to reduce the number of criminals, not the number of guns. And the way to reduce the number of criminals is to destroy or at least mitigate the social conditions that breed them, the welfare state springing to mind first, the laxity of the punitive system second, the stranglehold on effective policing third and so forth.

Of course, just like the poor, criminals will always be with us, for such is the imperfection of human nature. However, human nature is equally imperfect in Switzerland, where there are practically no murders even though every man has a gun, and in Britain, where guns are outlawed and yet the crime rate is going through the roof.

It’s the task of just government to create conditions that discourage the bad part of human nature and encourage the good. This isn’t a goal that can be achieved by legislating against firearms, knives, fists, feet, axes or bottles. And it can be severely jeopardised by governments acting on institutionalised ignorance, dishonesty and self-serving demagoguery.

However, it would be fitting if my friend Barack Hussein, having started his presidency with an ill-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, were to end it with a well-deserved Oscar.