Month: February 2016

The Nazi poison infecting most of Europe in the 1940s had a longer half-life than we like to claim. It left a legacy of all sorts of sinister ideas and practices.

For example, the current idea of a European federation revolving on a Franco-German (or, to be precise, Germano-French) axis goes back to the fruitful cooperation between Nazi, Vichy and other European bureaucracies during the war.

Still in its embryonic state, the notion of a single pan-European state was pithily expressed by Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who during the war served as Reichskommissar for the Netherlands: “The new Europe of solidarity and co-operation among all its people will find rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic boundaries are removed.” My friends Angie and Jean-Claude would readily sign their names to this heartfelt statement.

A Nuremberg noose prevented Seyss-Inquart from seeing his dream come true in the new guise of the European Union. But the political philosophy he so ably brought to life in the Low Countries left more than one poisonous legacy.

The Nazis firmly believed that individual lives had nothing but utilitarian value. The extent of their usefulness to the state was determined by, well, the state. If the value was perceived as negative, the state felt it had the right to take the useless life away the better to maintain the spiritual health of society.

Gypsies and especially Jews had to be expelled, exterminated or otherwise removed from the Aryan body brimming with spiritual health – that much was instantly obvious not only to Nazi leaders but, at the time, to most Germans.

But Jews and Gypsies weren’t the only offensive groups. Also blocking the way to achieving the Nazi muscular ideal of mankind were homosexuals, cripples and the mentally ill. By virtue of their deformities they forfeited their right to life, which point was driven home by the cyanide-loaded syringes wielded by German doctors.

That medical procedure was called ‘euthanasia’, which means ‘good death’ in Greek. Indeed, what could possibly be better than killing a few thousand for the noble goal of producing a GM race of unbounded mental and physical health?

The underlying belief that it’s neither God nor the person but the state that has the ultimate sovereignty over human life is common to every brand of socialism, national, international or ‘democratic’ (‘democratic socialism’ is the oxymoron to end all oxymorons). The wording will differ, as will the scale on which this principle is implemented. But the principle will remain the same.

Hence in 2002 Seyss-Inquart’s former bailiwick became the first European country to legalise euthanasia, albeit only for terminally ill patients expressing a “voluntary and well-considered request” to be done in.

Without going into the philosophical and – God forbid – theological aspects of that cannibalistic law, suffice it say that many so-called terminal cases are marginal. Even when all the doctors involved agree that the patient is on his last legs, miraculous recovery may still happen. (Much as I hate using myself as an example, doctors thought my Stage 4 cancer was terminal. Since then you’ve been exposed to 10 years’ worth of my vituperative prose.)

The issue of “voluntary and well-considered request” becomes even murkier when the patient suffers from a mental, rather than physical, illness. By definition, his competence to issue such a request has to be doubted – as should be the ability of psychiatrists to agree on an unequivocal diagnosis in this notoriously obscure branch of medicine.

Yet nothing would hold back the irrepressible Dutch. Between 2011 and 2014 the Dutch state put to death 110 mental patients, of whom some were only diagnosed with autism. (Altogether 5,036 patients were put to ‘good’ death there in 2014 alone.)

Analysing 66 of those 110 cases, psychiatrists from the National Institute of Health concluded that in many instances consulting physicians disagreed on how precisely the legal criteria had been met. Moreover, doctors proceeded with euthanasia in the 37 cases where patients had refused potentially effective treatments.

No one was bothered by the logical inconsistency of it all. If the patients were so mad that they had to be put down for their own good, and ultimately for the good of the state, how could they be deemed sufficiently compos mentis to decide on accepting or rejecting treatment?

This is the thin end of the wedge being driven into the very heart of our civilisation. If there is one founding principle that can be regarded as its cornerstone, it’s the certainty that every human life is sacred – and only God can decide when it ends.

Remove this understanding, and the ostensible differences among all those socialisms, state, national, democratic, international or Soviet pale into rhetorical triviality. They are distinctions, not differences.

The primacy of the state over the individual underpins all modern states – whatever modifiers they attach to their names. We have Holland to thank for continuously reminding us of this fact.

May I suggest that, if at times you act eccentrically, as many Englishmen do, you watch yourself very closely when visiting Holland, especially if you’re of a certain age. By getting off the plane at Schiphol, you may implicitly forfeit personal sovereignty over your life.

My friends will probably find it hard to accept me as a champion of temperance, and in fact I’m slightly hung-over even as I write this.

Having thus established my residence in a glass house, I’d nevertheless like to throw a stone or two – though not at drinking as such, and not even occasional heavy boozing. Few of us are without that particular sin, and this has been thus ever since Eve left some fruit juice out in the sun, for Adam to taste it a few days later and find the effect unexpectedly pleasant.

Not even Jesus held a dim view of drinking in an appropriate context. If he had, he would have turned that water into Ribena, not wine, much to the chagrin of the Cana newlyweds and their guests.

It’s only when endemic drinking stops being a problem in se and becomes instead a symptom of a catastrophic social and cultural malaise that it provides a fit subject for serious contemplation. Such, I’m afraid, is the situation in Britain now.

The story making the rounds at the moment is of a middle-aged female QC, regarded as a top legal mind, caught in flagrante delicto with a 51-year-old solicitor. The pair had had a boozy lunch and decided to consummate the resulting affection against the wall of Waterloo station at the height of the evening rush hour.

The top legal mind had her knickers around her ankles and the solicitor was similarly exposed when the lawyers were arrested for outraging public decency. They were held overnight and issued a caution, which both accepted.

However, six weeks later the top legal mind applied to have her conviction quashed, claiming she had been a victim of sexual assault. This status, unlike that of a willing participant in hanky-panky, entitles her to lifelong anonymity, and the top legal mind must have cottoned on that having her name splashed all over the papers might hinder her assent to damehood. The example of Graeme Stening, her partner cum would-be assailant, is vivid enough.

This sordid incident wouldn’t be worth talking about if it weren’t so depressingly symptomatic of the cultural catastrophe under way in Britain.

I can’t for the life of me imagine a top Queen’s Counsel, say, in the 1970s allowing herself to behave so swinishly no matter how much she drank. Nor do I recall seeing even in the 1980s scores of middleclass professionals throwing up along the whole 2.5-mile length of King’s Road (one of the city’s most upmarket streets, for the out-of-towners among you) every Saturday night.

Neither did many restaurants on the continent exhibit ‘No British groups’ signs in the their windows, as they nowadays do in, for example, Prague. The practical Czechs must have figured out that the profits they might realise from British stag or hen parties won’t cover the inevitable cost of a clean-up possibly followed by refurbishment and fumigation.

The footage of British proles turning places like Ibiza into hell on earth is depressing enough, but booze-fuelled anomie evidently transcends class divides – as anyone can testify who has seen photos of our young royals staggering out of nightclubs in the wee hours. They too talk about ‘going clubbing’, and there I was thinking it was a transitive verb demanding the question ‘Whom?’.

The English are a drinking race, and always have been. But in the past they didn’t drink with the aggressive purpose of smashing to bits the civilisation that makes them English. For civilisations are mainly defined by the inhibitions they impose on human behaviour.

When those inhibitions go out of the window, so does the civilisation. When a middle-aged woman fast-tracked for a damehood gets so blotto that she’s arrested for copulating in a crowded public place, she isn’t just breaking the law. She’s avidly breaking her civilisation.

I remember those office parties (I retired from that nonsense 11 years ago) when we had to send girls from good families home in taxis and tell the drivers where to go because the girls themselves couldn’t remember where they lived. The drivers were also pre-paid for cleaning out the likely vomit.

These weren’t unfortunate accidents. The girls (and of course the boys) actually planned to drink themselves unconscious in front of their colleagues; this was the effect they were after. Before they passed out, some sex play often ensued, as if a drunken stupor was a precondition for passion.

It saddens me to have to chart a route bypassing pubs whenever driving home on a weekend night. When central London throws more drunks under car wheels than central Moscow does nowadays, it’s not drinking as such that’s the problem any longer. So please join me in a mournful glass to commemorate a great civilisation fallen victim to modernity.