Month: April 2018

https://www.facebook.com/The.Russian.Federation/videos/10157193691648539/

This 7-year-old girl featured in Russia’s Talents, a contest programme on one of the country’s top TV channels.

As you can see, Russia is still producing gifted thespians – and geopolitical prodigies. For the doggerel recited by the little girl with so much mastery, if slightly histrionic emotiveness, repeats what Putin’s grown-ups are screaming at the Russians every minute of every day.

 In a few poignant lines the girl explains the history of relations between Russia and the West, analyses the present situation with remarkable insight, issues a deterrent warning to the West and explains the innate moral and spiritual superiority of Russia.

 She tells the West in no uncertain terms to control its urge to occupy Russia, thereby acquiring more terrain for baseball diamonds, rugby pitches and golf courses – or else.

To those with ears to hear, she also tells everything there’s to know about Putin’s Russia. Those who are deaf to such overtones will doubtless nod their agreement – but I’ve undertaken not to say nasty things about Peter Hitchens today.

 I’ve translated the doggerel verbatim, without bothering with rhyme and meter. But if you watch the video, you’ll be able to appreciate the ringing pathos of the oration:

Dear overseas neighbours, well-fed, haughty like gods,

Don’t wake up the Russian bear, let him sleep peacefully in his den!

Don’t stop his reigning and ruling, eating and drinking while his heart still beats.

You can’t even imagine how this will backfire on you.

Many times you’ve already kicked him, humiliated him, smeared him with dirt,

Crucified him on the Russian birch tree, burned him with fire, drowned him in the swamp.

Yet when you already trembled sweetly, certain of victory, the Russian bear’s mighty roar thundered at your doorstep.

Why do you, brothers, fly out of your homes attracted by the aroma of Russia’s land, to tear it from the bear’s paws?

For how many years have your papers been overflowing with wily thoughts,

Saying “What rights do we have to one sixth of the planet?”?

We’ve been sent here by God’s will, and we haven’t besmirched our honour in any way.

And it’s not up to you to judge us – we haven’t stolen our wealth.

Ladies, gentlemen, senors, senoras, don’t stumble over the line,

Don’t tease the Russian bear – your tricks will backfire on you.

You’ll cheat him hundreds of times, take his last penny at the boozer.

With you, any favour has to be paid for; gold bars are your gods.

Your creed is divide and conquer; your truth is the truth of brute force.

You’re used to lording it over your flock, putting in the grave those you don’t like.

But a Russian sees everyone as his brother, rejecting greed and lies.

For him, Truth trumps all, and Justice is dearer than anything.

Because in any hell, where no one else will survive,

The Russian will suddenly rise out of the ashes, out of the morass and road slush,

Blow away the smoke of the bloody battle, wash his eyes in a limpid stream,

Pray to an icon and then burst into your place one night.

And, before you turn your lights out, he’ll ask you, summing up the past,

“Why did you come to my Russia? Do I owe you anything?”

Those who seek new lands for baseball, rugby or golf,

Read a few stories about Napoleon and Adolf.

Tone down the volume of victorious bugles, you’ll have to answer for your folly!

Don’t wake up the Russian bear – if you don’t, you just might get away with your life.

Then again, you might not.

Let me tell you, this little girl is going places. Unless of course Shakespeare had a point, when he made his Richard III say: “So wise so young, they say, do never live long.”

Writing in The Mail, Peter Oborne makes it clear that he has no time for the neoconservatives, which shows his heart is in the right place.

And even if it isn’t, far be it from me to argue. After all, I wrote a whole book about this political perversion (Democracy as a Neocon Trick), in which I described it thus:

“Neoconservatism is an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, American chauvinism (not exclusively on the part of Americans), expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic verbiage on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot – all mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to broader electoral support.”

Mr Oborne rightly blames the neocons for inspiring the criminally stupid 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he regards as “the most morally shameful international disaster of recent times”.

I’m not sure about the superlative, but I have no doubt about the general sentiment. Obsessed with what they see as the absolute good of American-style democracy, the neocons – and, more important, the governments they form or inspire – refuse to acknowledge that trying to export it by force is guaranteed to replace nasty regimes with evil ones.

Anyone with elementary knowledge of modern history and half a brain not overridden by a pernicious ideology will realise that an Ayatollah is the only realistic alternative to the Shah, the Muslim Brotherhood to Mubarak, tribal ISIS cannibals to the Ba’athist regimes in Iraq and Syria, Erdoğan to a secular government beholden to the army. A George Washington isn’t an option on the menu in any of those places.

Mr Oborne’s analysis of the criminal folly of the 2003 invasion is hard to fault, as is his heart-felt regret that those directly responsible for it, Messrs Bush and Blair, haven’t been shamed and ostracised. My preference would be tried and convicted, but again this is a difference of detail, not principle.

Where Mr Oborne goes terribly wrong is in the conclusions he draws from his correct analysis. He seems to see a definite parallel between Iraq c. 2003 and Syria c. 2018. Yet these parallel lines vindicate Euclid by refusing to converge.

That the invasion of Iraq was criminally stupid doesn’t ipso facto make the on-going action against Assad’s chemical installations ill-advised. Failure to see the vital differences between the two is neither grown-up nor clever, and here Mr Oborne comes close to expunging himself from my good books.

A more appropriate parallel could be drawn with the devastation of Belgium in the First World War. I don’t think any of the warring parties had much against Belgium qua Belgium. It just so happened that they sorted out their differences using Belgium as a battlefield.

Granted, the parallel isn’t impeccably accurate. For the regime of Assad’s Syria is malevolent in ways that the regime of Albert I wasn’t. Specifically, Albert I didn’t use chemical weapons against his own people, and Assad has.

That action is in clear violation of every international law, specifically one of 1997 that bans not just the use but even the possession of such weapons. Laws mean nothing if they can’t be enforced, and the cruise missiles fired by the US, Britain and France may be seen as an equivalent of police truncheons and handcuffs.

Yet, at the risk of sounding like a cynical champion of realpolitik, I’d suggest it’s reasonably clear that the punitive action springs not from moral outrage, but from a clear strategic objective, one that Mr Oborne seems to think is lacking (“Western governments seem to have little idea of the long-term purpose of any intervention in Syria.”)

The objective. Mr Oborne, is to check Putin’s steady escalation of aggression against the West. There are risks involved, and Mr Oborne is alert to them: “… there is a genuine danger of an escalation to military confrontation between the United States and Russia.”

Moral equivalence strikes again. That’s like saying that there was a genuine danger of an escalation to military confrontation between Nazi Germany and Britain in 1940. While Putin isn’t exactly Hitler, not yet anyway, he’s the active agent in this escalation. Just like in Britain c. 1940, a refusal to confront the escalation would be tantamount to surrender.

Anyone blessed with elementary analytical ability will see that Putin is probing the West with a bayonet (Lenin’s phrase, by the way), just grazing the skin for the time being. Emboldened by the West’s nonexistent or feeble responses to a series of monstrosities he committed in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea, the Ukraine, London and Salisbury, the KGB colonel is on the lookout for other potential beneficiaries of Russia’s unmatched spirituality.

Just like his attacks with nuclear and chemical weapons launched on British soil, the good colonel is sending messages, gauging the replies. Egging Assad on to drop poison gas (kindly provided by Russia) on Douma is one such message. The cruise missiles hitting Syrian targets even as we speak is one such reply.

Our message seems to be “thus far but no further”. If we react this way to the gassing of 40 Syrians, Vlad, how do you suppose we’ll react to an attack on NATO members or for that matter the rest of the Ukraine?

Unlike the folly of 2003, our stance is reactive and defensive, while Putin’s is consistently aggressive. He himself described his life’s philosophy in the nostalgic recollections of his Petersburg youth, when he self-admittedly was ‘a common street thug’: “I learned always to hit first.”

That he has done, and not only first, but also second, third and fourth. But I do hope he gets the message – and that the message isn’t just a bluff: it has taken a while, but Western allies are now prepared to fight back.

But if Mr Oborne wishes to entertain us with stories about the neocons, I’m happy to listen. Why, I can even add a few of my own. But today’s situation isn’t about neocons, and nor is it about Syria.

It’s about the West trying to prevent a major war, not provoke it, as Mr Oborne (and many Putinistas on both the left and the right) seems to think.

Getting dyslexic in my dotage. Scanning the papers the other day, I saw what I read as an article about a chemical attack on the Duma, Russia’s sham parliament.

Oh well, I thought, wouldn’t be my first choice of a debating technique, but a silver lining and all that… The matter turned out to be much worse than that, and there was no silver lining to a gas cloud.

Falling victim to a chemical attack wasn’t the Duma but its homophone Douma, a town near Damascus. It was Assad’s forces that dropped the gas, but the weapon, training in its use and inspiration came from his paymaster and wirepuller Russia.

President Trump immediately declared that retaliatory missiles were coming, but showed consideration in delaying the action a few days to give the Syrians and Russians time to clear the targeted bases.

Showing no gratitude whatsoever, Putin declared that the missiles would be shot down, and the bases whence they came would be taken out. One such facility is the RAF base in Cyprus that Mrs May intends to use as a show of support for the Atlantic alliance. The situation is fraught.

That’s why some friends are asking me the question in the title. Now I’m honoured to be regarded as a seer, but my crystal ball is perennially cloudy. I find it hard to predict the future in every detail, though discerning the general trends on the basis of the past and present is easier.

It’s because Western governments and analysts failed to do just that some 30 years ago that the question in the title can be legitimately asked today. At that time the West was in the throes of orgasmic hysteria over glasnost, perestroika and eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev, who before being brought to Moscow by Andropov, had run the most corrupt province in the Soviet Union, was elevated to secular sainthood, a status he retains to this day. (His Stavropol province in North Caucasus was the clearing house for the billions’ worth of contraband, including drugs, coming in from Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Yet Gorbachev stood out even against that backdrop – hence his nickname ‘Mickey Envelope’ (Mishka konvert.)

Blinded by the fall of what Reagan correctly called ‘the evil empire’ and hoping to get fat on what Bush and Thatcher called ‘the peace dividend’, the West failed to see the obvious: the empire might have collapsed, but the evil lived on. Yet we can no longer discern evil because we don’t really believe it exists.

Nothing tipped our governments off, not even Gorbachev’s response to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The explosion had been clearly seen by US satellites, and Geiger counters were already going haywire in Sweden, but Gorbachev continued to deny everything.

His newspapers were describing the gasps of horror in the Western press as “provocative hype, whose sole purpose is to cause yet another outburst of anti-Soviet hysteria.” Replace ‘anti-Soviet’ with ‘anti-Russian’, and you recognise the language, don’t you? This is verbatim what Putin and his Goebbelses scream after we take exception to each new monstrosity committed by Russia, including the Skripal affair and now the gassing of civilians at Douma.

When the constituent republics began to break away from the Soviet Union, Gorbachev sent the Spetsnaz in. The perestroika hounds then applauded his restraint: Gorbachev’s thugs murdered only hundreds of people, not the hundreds of thousands the previous reigns would have claimed.

I agree that the difference was important, especially for those hundreds of thousands who could have been killed but weren’t. But the secular canonisation of Gorbachev and his regime was a bit premature, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, the Soviet Union has collapsed, I was writing at the time (mostly in The Salisbury Review), but I shudder to think what these people will come up with next. Now we know the answer, though at the time even some of my friends were expressing a touching concern about my mental health.

Had we realised at the time that no peace dividend would be paid out, we wouldn’t have disarmed as catastrophically as we have. And we would have taken every measure not to expose ourselves to the hybrid warfare now being waged by Putin.

Nor would we have pumped untold billions into Russia, in the naïve hope that drawing the country into world trade would defang it. Any kind of investment into Russia’s beggared economy should have been made contingent on its verifiable steps to remove itself as a factor of danger in the world.

Europe should also have made itself less dependent on Russian hydrocarbons, which could have been done in many different ways, from fracking to building more nuclear power stations to encouraging the Arab states to increase production. If you don’t behave, our message to the Russians should have been, you can eat, drink and drive your oil.

None of this was done, nor even considered. Instead we were doing everything possible to help Russia create troubled waters in which it could profitably fish.

Stirring up chaos all over the world is clearly the strategy of Putin’s criminal regime, which destination is being reached by a series of incremental steps, each bolder than the previous one. We could have stopped him in his tracks long ago – we had enough economic and diplomatic tools at our disposal to do that.

But we didn’t – not when Putin’s men blew up several apartment blocks, killing 300 Russians, to provoke the genocidal Chechen war; not when they shot up a school taken over by Chechen guerrillas, killing 334 people, mostly children; not when they pumped poison gas into a hijacked theatre, killing 170 hostages along with the attackers; not when they began murdering dissidents.

Rather unpleasant, that, was the general reaction. But it’s their internal affair, isn’t it? True. But that way of handling Russia’s internal affairs should have told us all we needed to know about the evil nature of Putin’s regime. Had we realised it then, no sane man would have thought that evil would happily stay within its own national borders.

It didn’t. Certain of his impunity, Putin attacked first Georgia and then the Ukraine, by grabbing the Crimea followed by the country’s eastern provinces – allegedly to protect the Russian population there. Amazingly though, most of those Ukrainian Russians fled the carnage not to Russia but to the free parts of the Ukraine.

Then came Syria, where the Russians have conducted themselves with their hereditary KGB brutality. Yet again Putin is engaging in the kind of brinkmanship that our craven, vacillating behaviour has encouraged.

Is it all our fault then? No, it isn’t, not all. But some of it undoubtedly is, in the same sense in which a house owner is at fault if he invites illegal entry by leaving his windows open and his doors unlocked at night.

And now comes the question in the headline, to which my resounding answer is “I don’t know”. Yet I do know that only a show of strength can prevent a war now, or especially in the future. Bullies don’t respond to reason. They respond to a punch on the nose, or at least a credible threat of it.

If the West backs down yet again, the bully will strike again – and again. And at some point there will be no alternative to disaster. I pray that one still exists.

Most commentators struggle to define Putin’s Russia in either positive or negative terms, as what it is or what it isn’t.

The options are numerous: Russia is/isn’t like Nazi Germany, is/isn’t like Stalin’s USSR, is/isn’t like Al Capone’s Chicago. True enough, while Putin’s Russia has elements of all of those, it’s not exactly like any of them.

For example, Max Hastings defined Russia, positively, as simply a gangster state and, negatively, as neither Hitler’s Germany nor Stalin’s Soviet Union. That’s as accurate or inaccurate a definition as many others, including the modifier ‘kleptofascist’ I usually prefer.

The problem is that Putin’s Russia is a unique state, without close parallels in history. There have been gangster states before, and there have been states run by the secret police. But I can’t think of a single other major country where organised crime and secret police were organically fused to form the governing elite.

Since Putin’s Russia is a one-off, it defies any efforts at comparative taxonomy – unique things always do.

For example, if someone who has never tried avocado asked you to describe its taste, how would you go about it? You’d probably say “It’s like…” – and then you’d stop. It isn’t like anything. It’s a one-off.

The French say “comparaison n’est pas raison” – even though their favourite philosopher Descartes insisted that all knowledge is comparative. Both points of view are valid: comparisons are seldom sufficient, but often helpful.

So let’s look at some helpful comparisons that apply to Putin’s Russia.

It obviously isn’t exactly like Nazi Germany c. 1935 in every respect, but there are similarities. The ideology holding Russia together isn’t internationalist, as it was, for example, under Lenin, but, similarly to Nazi Germany, national-patriotic, based on the uniqueness of the Russian volk.

Obviously, all countries are unique to some extent. Yet the way Putin’s propaganda uses the word, it means not just ‘different from…’ but ‘better than…’, well, anybody, and certainly all the Anglo-Saxon vermin.

Russia is touted as being more spiritual, more moral, less corrupted by material concerns – all without corroborating evidence, and usually in direct contradiction to it. That unique status, according to the propaganda, entitles Russia to a special dispensation in the world, including a carte blanche to kill anyone Putin doesn’t like.

Another similarity is revanchism: seeking restitution for a historical injustice as a way of uniting the nation.

For Putin, this is the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he describes as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”. For Hitler, it was the Versailles Treaty, which, unlike the disintegration of the giant concentration camp that was the USSR, really was unjust.

Then there’s the much-vaunted concentration of the national spirit within the person of the leader, whose will replaces the law. The concentration was greater in Hitler’s Germany c. 1935 than in Putin’s Russia, but, being residually Western, the lawlessness was less pronounced. Until later in Hitler’s reign, the courts still retained some independence, which they don’t in Putin’s Russia.

Law enforcement in Hitler’s Germany did try to enforce the law until the run-up to the war. The police would pursue inquiries into the affairs of Hitler’s cronies, for example, and resist the attempts by the SS to muscle in.

That’s not the case in Putin’s Russia: the police are completely criminalised and protect their own patch by doing exactly what they are told. And the courts rubberstamp the predetermined verdicts, which didn’t happen in Germany c. 1935, at least not in criminal cases.

And let’s not forget the methods. Unlike Lenin and Stalin, Hitler (c. 1935) didn’t indulge in mass murder. The violence of his regime was expressed on a smaller scale, usually through the paramilitary SA, who harassed and sometimes murdered Hitler’s opponents and independent journalists.

This is exactly the model followed in Putin’s Russia. Some opponents are sent to prison on trumped-up charges, but most are harassed off the books by paramilitary gangs that resemble Hitler’s stormtroopers. Thus there’s no need to ban all dissident publications – it’s enough to have some editors and key journalists (about 200 of them on Putin’s watch) maimed or murdered for those publications to toe the line.

All fascist regimes rely on whipping up mass hysteria by unlimited propaganda, but Putin’s propaganda resembles Hitler’s most closely, being more technically accomplished and subtle than, say, Stalin’s.

Such fascist methods amply justify the second part of the ‘kleptofascist’ tag I attach to Putin’s regime. But, in search of historical analogues for the first part, we should turn away from Hitler’s Germany, or Stalin’s USSR, and towards Lenin’s Russia and the ‘stagnation’ period of the moribund Soviet Union, say its last 15 years.

When the Bolsheviks grabbed power, they didn’t think for a second they’d be able to retain it. Their aim was to rob Russia of her wealth and then use the money to foment revolutions in Europe.

Following Marx, Lenin believed that a single country could only be used as the springboard for a global (what Trotsky called ‘permanent’) revolution. Lenin summed up this internationalism in conversation with his comrade Bonch-Bruevich: “Remember, old boy: I spit on Russia. I’m a Bolshevik!”

Should the glittering prize be won, Marx’s prophesies would come true. If not, the plundered loot would enable Lenin and his immediate coterie to live in luxury somewhere exotic (Bukharin quite fancied Argentina, for example).

What followed was a wholesale robbery of a major country by its own government, the first such heist in history. The news of the plunder was leaked, and in April, 1921, The New York Times exploded the information bomb:

In 1920 alone, 75 million Swiss francs were sent to Lenin’s account in just one Swiss bank. Trotsky had 11 million dollars in just one US bank, plus 90 million francs in his Swiss accounts. Zinoviev kept 80 million Swiss francs in Switzerland, Dzerzhinsky had 80 million francs, while Hanetsky-Fuerstenberg had 60 million francs and 10 million dollars – the list went on and on.

Russians were then starving to death, and any one of those accounts could have sufficed to feed them. Hoover’s American Relief Administration saved millions of human skeletons from death by spending just $20 million in 1921-1922 – at the time when Bolshevik leaders were pumping millions into their US and Swiss accounts.

(For details, see Sean McMeekin’s book History’s Greatest Heist.)

When Stalin took over, de facto in 1923 but totally in 1929, any hopes of a world revolution had disappeared. Instead Stalin set out to turn Russia into a mighty empire capable of conquering Europe on its own.

The change in direction changed the slogans: communist ones were gradually supplemented, and during the war practically replaced, with national-patriotic ones.

The vector in the flow of money changed too: rather than flowing out of Russia, it now had to flow in. Lenin’s greedy comrades were physically obliterated, but not before revealing their foreign account numbers and passwords (Stalin’s interrogators could be rather persuasive).

After the war, Stalin practically stamped out any private looting. The nomenklatura were given all sorts of privileges, including country houses, limousines, western goods and so forth, but they were discouraged from complementing those with private initiative.

That changed towards the end of the Soviet Union, when the party nomenklatura again began to thieve on a Leninist scale. The vector of money flow was again reversed, with the party relying on the KGB’s conduits and those of organised crime to convert their looted riches into western currencies, mostly dollars.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, foolishly accepted in the West as a triumph of liberal democracy, was in fact the replacement of the old nomenklatura with a new one, formed by the vastly empowered and utterly corrupt KGB now fused with the structures of organised crime.

While for the first 10 years or so the state was still nominally led by the party bosses, albeit those with strong KGB links, Putin’s advent put paid to subterfuge. The KGB, now called FSB/SVR, took over de jure – and the looting of Russia picked up its already frantic pace.

The fascist methods mentioned above are now used to maintain the elite’s hold on absolute power. But the power itself is used mainly to pump billions, actually trillions, out of Russia, to provide a safe haven for the elite should things go sour, as they certainly will.

Some members of the elite have been allowed to settle in the West, as leaseholders of the plundered wealth. But the freehold belongs to Putin and his immediate entourage, with the oligarchs’ wallets hospitably flung open whenever Putin needs some extra cash.

That’s why the latest sanctions, those aimed at Putin’s cronies (meaning Putin himself), are particularly rankling. Under attack is the junta’s raison d’être, using the West as a safe depository of their loot.

The Russian people now have a conflict. On the one hand, they have been house-trained to accept the thundering fascisoid rhetoric of Putin’s propaganda, backed up by a fascisoid foreign policy complete with aggression and assassinations. On the other hand, they hate the ‘oligarchs’, whom they correctly identify as looters of the nation’s wealth.

How that conflict will be resolved is anyone’s guess. It’s possible that Putin will try to ratchet up the -fascist aspect of his regime, to preserve the klepto- part. Yet it’s also possible that he’ll offer some token concessions – provided they don’t damage his muscular image inside Russia.

Interesting times ahead, I dare say. I just hope they don’t become too interesting.

As someone who moved to London from New York 30 years ago, I have to be proud of what my adopted, and beloved, city has achieved.

Though London has led New York in just about every crime category for as long as I’ve been here, New York has stubbornly clung to leadership in the murder rate.

That’s no longer the case. Under the sage leadership of our present Mayor Sadiq Khan, ably supported by the aptronymically named Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, London has shot (and stabbed) its way into the lead.

The issue is very much in the news, with every pundit identifying the causes and offering solutions. Most of them make some sense, but gaps remain.

For example, the welfare state is seldom mentioned as one of the causes, although it’s an obvious one. Yet most commentators err against logic by lamenting our growing, crime-ridden underclass, while refusing to see the welfare state as a reason for it.

Also, a commentator has to be rather far on the right to identify mass immigration of cultural aliens as a contributing factor, though that’s another obvious and logical reason.

After all, billions of people in the world don’t see the sanctity of human life as an absolute tenet, rather than one contingent on the religion or ethnicity of each particular life. Without overstepping the boundaries of logic, one has to believe that a great presence of such people in a community is likely to skew the murder rate upwards, an a priori assumption amply supported by empirical evidence.

Failures of our education get a frequent mention too, on both sides of the political divide. Indeed, reading newspaper reports one gets the impression that knives have outstripped textbooks as essential accessories of school paraphernalia.

True enough, scholastic tables show that British schoolchildren are close to the European bottom in numeracy and literacy, only ever doing better than the rest of Europe in pregnancy tests. This doubtless has an effect on crime.

The importance of the two-parent family also comes up often, and rightly so – although that again gets more of an airing in the conservative press. It’s not immediately clear why this issue has to be politicised, but it is: nowadays everything is.

However, it’s counterintuitive to believe that an unemployed woman with five children by eight different men is as likely to keep her progeny from crime as a male accountant happily married to a female teacher. But hey, ideology is like God in one respect: it works in mysterious ways.

The proposed remedies vary, depending on what the commentator sees as the key problem and where his political sympathies lie. Yet one possible ingredient in the mix of solutions never gets a mention anywhere, left, right or centre: the death penalty.

One is led to believe that the British had a Damascene experience in 1965, when they realised in a flash that the death penalty for murder was no longer morally acceptable.

While accepting, on pain of ostracism, that in the 1960s Britain achieved the kind of moral epiphany that the previous 5,000 years of recorded history had been denied, one still ought to be allowed to make a few observations.

First, the death penalty wasn’t regarded as off limits in the formative moral code of the West, the Scripture. When society and community were more than just figures of speech, the moral validity of the death penalty wasn’t in doubt.

It was understood that murder sent shock waves throughout the community, and the amplitude of those destructive waves could be attenuated only by a punishment fitting the crime.

The death penalty for murder was then seen as affirming, rather than denying, the sanctity of human life. People didn’t believe that an arbitrary taking of a life could be redeemed by any length of imprisonment, even if accompanied by counselling.

That’s one salient point in favour of the death penalty; deterrence is another. The deterrent value of the death penalty is often disputed, a long argument I’d rather not enter here. However, there’s no argument that the death penalty deters the executed criminal from killing again.

This is no mean achievement, considering that in the 53 years since the death penalty was abolished, more people have been killed by recidivists released from prison than the number of murderers executed in the 53 years before the abolition.

Admittedly, even a sound conservative may argue against the death penalty, citing, for example, the corrupting effect it has on the executioner – or else doubting the right of mortal and therefore fallible men to pass irreversible judgement.

Such arguments are noble, but they aren’t modern arguments. For it’s not just the death penalty that today’s lot are uncomfortable with, but punishment as such. More and more, the moderns betray their Enlightenment genealogy by insisting that people are all innately good and, if some behave badly, they must be victims of correctable social injustice.

One detects a belief that justice is an antiquated notion, and law is only an aspect of the social services. And so it now is, for it appears to be subject to the same inner logic as welfare, whereby a government activity invariably promotes the very mode of behaviour it’s supposed to curb.

If the single-mother benefit encourages single motherhood and the unemployment benefit promotes unemployment, then by the same token it’s the crime-fighting activity of the modern state that makes crime worse.

This is the case because the state proceeds from a false metaphysical premise. It refuses to admit that human good has to coexist dialectically with human evil – and some evil is irredeemable, in this life at any rate. To the moderns, there’s no worse fate than death, a belief that had been held in contempt when perdition was still accepted as real.

What upsets me about this whole situation isn’t so much the absence of the death penalty from the statute books as the absence of any further debate from the papers. In the very least, it ought to be acknowledged that both sides have a point, and the points merits discussion.

It’s not as if every existing law is accepted as chiselled in stone. For example, when in 2013 legal homomarriage got to be seen as a welcome addition to the laws, which in this area had remained unchanged since they were first codified, Dave Cameron (a Tory!) campaigned for it fanatically and successfully.

So can we at least talk about the advisability of the death penalty? No, of course not. These aren’t Victorian times, as the moderns will helpfully remind us. That much is true: in the 1880s and ‘90s murder was practically nonexistent in London.

We were visiting my wife’s mother, and it was she who broke the news, by responding to my cheerful “Good morning!” with: “The Princess of Wales is dead!”

“And I didn’t even know she was ill,” I said rather insensitively. “It was a car accident, in Paris,” said my mother-in-law, obviously shocked. “And Dodi?” “He’s dead too!”

That created an inner conflict for me. My Christian side insisted that I at least feign grief. My secular side, on the other hand, heaved a sigh of relief. Diana died, I thought, so that our monarchy may live a little longer.

De mortius nil nisi bonum and all that, but, once Diana realised that ‘being me’ wasn’t always compatible with her constitutional role as our future queen, she seemed to have devoted every effort to hurting the monarchy.

Whether she did that out of spite or out of sheer silliness is an ultimately moot question. It’s only really interesting to the coterie of Professional Friends of Diana, vociferously led by Rosa Monckton (Mrs Dominic Lawson).

Anyway, the week following the death of the PC Princess-Goddess united all decent people. We were brought together by an acute sense of tragedy over the untimely demise of British sanity.

Even as Diana’s ‘beautiful body’ (in Julie Burchill’s expert evaluation) still lay oozing ichor onto the grimy cement of a Paris tunnel, the nation fell prey to mass necrophilia expertly whipped up by the press.

By the end of the week, hysterical hagiography for halfwits scaled dizzying depths, and there was no getting away. Pursued by nightmares of anorexic, HIV-positive lepers splattered all over the rain forest by land mines, I remember lying awake at night, fantasising about driving my fist through Tony Blair’s diabolical grin as he uttered the words ‘people’s princess’.

It took several years for the royal family to repair the dents to their dignity kicked in by that manipulative, self-serving woman who had no sense of her role in Britain’s history and constitution.

And now the Diana hysteria, bottled for a few years, is about to pop the cork and splash out again. This time the object of public frenzy will be Prince Harry’s fiancée Meghan Markle, who has already laid down a marker for becoming a Diana Mark II.

One would think that the royal family would have learned the lesson the first time around, when Edward VIII married an American actress with a rather colourful past. The monarchy suffered a heavy blow then, and only HMG’s resolute interference managed to avoid a catastrophe, if not embarrassment.

In general, the old tradition of princes marrying other royals, or at least the offspring of high aristocracy, makes sense. Unless trained to do so from the cradle, it’s hard for a young woman to squeeze her hormone-rich personality into the straitjacket of disciplined service demanded of the royals.

‘Service’ is the operative word, for, now they’ve been divested of executive power, the royals’ sole duty is to serve the realm in every way they can. Various charitable and ceremonial projects are vitally important, but by far the most critical service they can provide is maintaining the dignity and honour of the throne.

For the throne is one of the few things that still make Britain British; it’s the adhesive moulding the generations past, present and future into a recognisable continuum. Without the monarchy, Britain may thrive or it may collapse. But one thing for sure: it won’t be Britain any longer.

Any newcomer to the dynasty ought to remember that, though this noble service is well rewarded, it also imposes certain demands. These are especially harsh on today’s people, trained to believe that their own selves are uniquely important and can’t be sacrificed for something nebulous they can’t quite get their heads around.

Diana and her sister-and-law Fergie are prime illustrations of this, and both damaged the dynasty by refusing to subjugate their private urges to the public good. And now Prince Harry, fifth (soon to be sixth) in the line of succession, is bringing another divorced American into the family.

We all know the path B-actresses tread to stardom, and one can only hope Meghan was different, or at least more discreet than most. Chances are, however, that before long we’ll be treated to the kind of stories and photographs that Her Majesty might find distasteful in her granddaughter-in-law.

That, however, would be a minor irritant, not much more damaging than those long shots of a topless Kate appearing in a French magazine a few years ago. The real harm may come not from what Meghan has done in the past but from what I fear she may do in the future.

The past and present aren’t infallible predictors of the future, but they don’t often go wrong, especially when supported by stated intentions. That’s why I fear that Meghan will play her new role according to the script she has followed for years.

Specifically, she has never seen a ‘liberal’ cause she couldn’t love and support, displaying well-publicised energy in doing so. Hence I shudder reading Andrew Morton’s biography of Meghan, in which he confidently promises that she “will make the monarchy seem more inclusive and relevant to multicultural Britain”.

Thanks to the young princes, our monarchy is already ‘inclusive and relevant’ enough, in fact more so. The monarchy, along with the church, represents a factor of constancy, which by definition makes it a conservative institution.

Conservative doesn’t mean unchanging, and God knows our monarchy has changed a lot over the centuries. But whatever changes it has undergone (or suffered, depending on your point of view) have been gradual. It’s not the monarchy’s function to accommodate leftish impulses of an American B-actress who believes in her inalienable right to speak her mind, such as it is.

Mr Morton probably doesn’t even realise how scary he sounds when writing that: “According to family friends, Meghan was intrigued by Diana not just for her style but also for her independent humanitarian mission.”

He turns fear into dread when quoting Meghan’s childhood friend, who says that: “She was always fascinated by the Royal Family. She wants to be Princess Diana 2.0.”

Of course she does. And, call me a scaremonger, I’m almost certain she’ll succeed.

As someone who spent 30 years in advertising, I consider myself an expert in the eponymous technique. But I have to admit that no adman has ever achieved the subtle mastery displayed by The Times today.

The paper was covering the story of yet another miscarriage of justice perpetrated by our legal system, although it clearly doesn’t see it as such.

Richard Osborn-Brooks, 78, was in bed with his disabled wife, when an armed burglar broke into his London flat. The thug forced the pensioner into the kitchen, where a scuffle ensued, in the course of which the criminal was fatally stabbed.

The report makes it unclear whether he was stabbed with his own sharpened screwdriver or a kitchen knife. One way or the other, he died, his accomplice fled, and Mr Osborn-Brooks was charged with murder.

This is what I, or for that matter any sane man, would call a gross miscarriage of justice. Surely a man has a right to protect his family, himself and his property by whatever means at his disposal?

That’s how things used to be in Britain, when an Englishman’s home was still his castle, rather than an arena for social engineering. That’s how things would be in any country where law and justice haven’t yet gone their separate ways.

But, once the balance of power swings from the individual to the state, the state insists on having the monopoly on violence.

After all,  freedom-minded individuals, if allowed to protect themselves from criminals, may at some point decide to protect themselves against the state. That can’t be allowed, and if preventive measures leave people at the mercy of criminals, then so be it.

Of course, self-defence would be unnecessary if the legal system could protect people on its own.

But in a statist society, the state doesn’t see this as its first priority. Its first priority is to protect itself, and that includes emasculating the population by force-feeding the state’s ideology. Ours is based on denying evil and assuming equal virtue all around.

If some people don’t act in a virtuous way, they need help. Hence the police and the penitentiary system increasingly become extensions of the social services, and the whole legal system appears to be designed for the criminal rather than his victims.

That’s why the police in London is led by the useless, not to say actively subversive, Commissioner Cressida Dick, whose only qualifications for the job seem to be based on her sex and sexuality. And that’s why we have the outrage of early release from prison, with some 10 per cent of all London murders being committed by criminals on parole.

In a country where the state can legally extort more than half of the people’s income, the people’s right to protect their property isn’t really recognised as real. Burglary is now seen by many as a kind of redistributive tax, which is why most burglaries aren’t even investigated.

And in any case, we’re supposed to give a thug who has put his foot through our window the benefit of the doubt. How dare we attack him if he ‘only’ came for the TV set? The counter question I always ask is “And how do I know that?”

It’s my moral right – and if my wife is at home, my duty – to assume the worst: the thug has broken in to kill or rape. He isn’t entitled to benefit of the doubt – if he’s penetrated my house with criminal intent, he has left his civil rights outside. That’s how it should be.

Is this how The Times has covered the story? You know that’s not the case by just looking at the title of their article: Pensioner Arrested Over Death of ‘Burglar’.

Why quotation marks? In this context, they’re the same as the negative particle ‘not’. The implication is that the poor young man wasn’t really a burglar. He must have dropped in for a cup of tea, and the beastly pensioner killed him just for the hell of it.

In the very first paragraph the criminal is described as “an alleged burglar armed with a screwdriver”. I dare say, if he’s uninvited and armed, he’s no longer just alleged. Yes, in the legalese language of the courts he remains alleged until convicted. But a newspaper isn’t a court of law, is it?

Most of the rest of the article is a compendium of interviews with the neighbours, who all describe Mr Osborn-Brooks as an extremely nice man.

What does that have to do with anything? He could be the male reincarnation of Mother Theresa or a dyed-in-the wool bastard – it’s utterly irrelevant to the case.

The only relevant question is whether or not he was within his right, moral and legal, to protect himself and his wife from what he could reasonably judge to be a murder attempt.

So was he? Here the paper provides misleading information: “The law allows homeowners to use ‘reasonable force’, which may include a weapon, to protect themselves from intruders. The test applied by prosecutors is that they did what they honestly thought was necessary.”

First, the law no longer talks about just ‘reasonable’ force. That was the case until 2004, when John Monckton, a wealthy financier from a good family, was murdered by a burglar in an expensive neighbourhood.

At that time ‘reasonable’ force was defined as exactly matching that offered by the burglar. The homeowner was allowed to defend himself with a knife against a knife or with a baseball bat against a baseball bat (not with a gun against a gun: we aren’t allowed to have guns).

That has every hallmark of a rotten law eventually boiling down to arbitrary judgement. What constitutes reasonable force? What about resisting a knife with a baseball bat or a baseball bat with a knife? What about a frail old man using either implement on a huge young thug waving nothing but his football-sized fists?

Such questions began to be asked after the Monckton murder, and in 2013 the phrasing was changed, marginally for the better.

Now we’re allowed to use ‘disproportionate’, even lethal, force to repel an intruder. Sounds good, doesn’t it? A thug breaks in, you do what you must, including killing him if that’s what it takes.

Oh, if only things were as simple as that. The law leaves an out for itself by stating that ‘grossly disproportionate force’ is still illegal. Who decides? Well, the state, of course.

In this case the state has decided that an old man who stabbed an armed burglar should be charged with murder, which charge carries a life sentence. The force he used has been judged to be grossly disproportionate.

What force would have been simply ‘disproportionate’ or, for that matter, ‘reasonable’? Letting the thug get on with it, hoping he only came to steal, not to kill or rape?

The article raises no such questions. It’s completely even-handed in judging evil and an attempt to defeat it. I can only applaud the technical mastery involved in such even-handedness.

The paper doesn’t lie – it deceives by omission. The reader is supposed to feel sympathy for the dead young man, who may or may not have been a ‘burglar’. Allegedly.

And Mr Osborn-Brook may spend the rest of his life in prison. As far as the state is concerned, there’s nothing alleged about his crime.

When I moved to Britain from the US 30 years ago, I had an amusing conversation with an impeccable English gentleman.

I don’t recall how we got on that subject, but I mentioned in passing that American blacks tended to be left-wing. “They are left-wing because they are black,” opined my interlocutor. “No, it’s the other way around,” I replied. “They are black because they are left-wing.”

It was one of those flippant paradoxes in which I like to indulge from time to time. But there was also a kernel of truth there, for traditional markers of identity are these days superseded by politics.

In fact, everything is. Our politics used to be defined by the votes we cast and the views we expressed. Now everything is politicised, including the clothes we wear and the food we eat. A chap wearing a legible T-shirt and lunching on a tofu burger with bean sprouts on the side doesn’t even have to open his mouth for us to guess his politics, does he?

The same goes for race and sex (and of course language: anyone using ‘gender’ as anything other than a grammatical category has to be left-wing).

Institutional race discrimination in America and Britain no longer exists. In fact, the races discriminated against in the past tend to enjoy preferential treatment at present. Implicit or explicit quotas that used to apply to the maximum number of minority members in the workplace, now apply to the minimum number.

This is called affirmative action in the US and reverse discrimination in the UK. In both places the hope (forlorn, in my view) is that the emollient balm of present mollycoddling will ease the residual pain of past suffering.

Everyday racism does exist even in Britain, not to mention Texas, where I lived for 10 years. This no doubt stokes up the rankling resentment over things of yesteryear like slavery and riding in the back of the bus (my black friend in Houston had to do that when a teenager).

But resentment isn’t cancer. It can be self-controlled, which some people are more prepared to do than some others.

That’s where political convictions come in, for left-wing politics is weaned on resentment or even, at its extreme, hatred. Political conservatism, on the other hand, rises above such incidentals.

By way of illustration, look up on YouTube the old issue of the US show The Firing Line. Its host, the influential conservative writer William F. Buckley, interviews Thomas Sowell, arguably the greatest social and economic philosopher of his time.

Dr Sowell happens to be black, and he grew up in a dirt-poor North Carolina family, when Jim Crow was in force. His contacts with white people were so limited that, as he writes in his autobiography The Personal Odyssey, he didn’t even know that blond was a hair colour.

No doubt he remembered all that even after he made his way to Cornell, the Chicago School of Economics and Stanford. It’s even possible that he still feels some residual resentment – he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t.

But because he is a conservative Dr Sowell clearly doesn’t define himself as black first and foremost. His race is just a fact of his biography, one of many and not the most important one. His attitude probably runs along the lines of “Yes, I’m black. So what?”

“So what?!?” exclaim politicised blacks. “So you aren’t black at all. If you don’t let your negritude define your whole life, you’re a traitor to your race.”

Real, which is to say politicised, American blacks call people like Dr Sowell ‘Uncle Tom’ or else ‘coconut’ (black on the outside, white on the inside). Our equivalents use Bounty in the same meaning.

In the process, they weirdly apply the philosophy of Jim Crow racists (“a drop of tar, all black”). A man like Barack Obama, whose mother was white, is routinely described as black, not half-black – an image that he himself cultivated as a way of getting to the White House. Mr Obama would have done exactly the same even if he were an octoroon. Blackness is now more political than racial.

This was emphasised by the American woman Rachel Dolezal, who lied about being black to become a prominent activist in the NAACP.

Exposed in 2015, Miss Dolezal defends herself by insisting she’s indeed black – by convictions if not by ancestry. I applaud her: she’s one of the few public figures who have dared to elucidate the true nature of race in today’s world.

The same goes for sex. A conservative woman, especially one in a prominent political position, is seen by the Left as not quite womanly.

When I lived in the US, feminists insisted that no woman could occupy a high post in government. “What about Jean Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN?” “Oh well, we’re talking about women…” was the typical reply.

Mrs Kirkpatrick wasn’t really a woman because she wasn’t a left-wing feminist – not just because she eschewed the allure of femininity to advance her career. Margaret Thatcher, for example, suffered the same fate even though she was an extremely feminine and flirtatious woman.

Neither the chromosomes nor the looks nor the behaviour had anything to do with it. For womanhood, like race, has become a political statement – at least among today’s trend-setters.

Thus, say, Diane Abbott is a woman, and Margaret Thatcher or Baroness Cox isn’t. And if you disagree, you’re a stick-in-the-mud retrograde (just like me).

Trumped up accusations of rape show a certain bias towards wealthy celebrities. I’m sure this is a sheer coincidence – because, if I weren’t so sure, I’d have to suspect bad will on the accusers’ part.

And should I dare express such feelings in public, I’d be accused of (charged with?) misogyny at least, and probably racism, homophobia and xenophobia into the bargain, the assumption being that anyone guilty of one must also be guilty of the whole cluster.

The coincidental tendency to target wealthy celebrities has most recently manifested itself in Northern Ireland, where two international rugby players, Messrs Jackson and Olding, have been cleared of a spurious rape charge.

The two players and their friends were celebrating something or other in the VIP section of a popular Belfast nightclub. There they picked up a few girls with dubious claims to the requisite VIP status.

The party moved on to Jackson’s house, where, according to the claimant, they “kissed consensually” and then ended up in his bedroom, accompanied by Olding. The next day the two athletes exchanged boastful notes about “spit-roasting” the girl.

As Olding put it, “pumped a bird with Jacko last night, roasted her”.

If you understand the culinary reference, you don’t need my explanation, and if you don’t, you’re better off remaining in your state of innocence.

Anyway, the girl claimed she had been raped, the two young men faced trial, the proceedings dragged on for two years, their careers were ruined, and last week the jury acquitted them after deliberating for just under four hours.

The defence was on to a winner. First, there was the general consideration that the imputed cooking method is hard to force on a woman without subjecting one of the perpetrators to the risk of mutilation. Second, and most important, there were eyewitnesses.

One of them, another VIP girl, walked in on the threesome in progress and reported no distress on the girl’s part, quite the opposite. The eyewitness was invited to join the fun but declined, which speaks highly of her moral fibre.

I haven’t read the transcripts of the trial, but the evidence presented by the defence must have been overwhelming for the jury to acquit after so little deliberation. After all, the jurors were under heavy political pressure to convict: rape and all other forms of unwanted sexual attention have moved to the forefront of politicised crimes.

Case open and shut, one would think. Well, one would think wrong.

First there was an outburst of rage in the social media. One irate girlfriend of an Olympic athlete accused rugby players in general and those two in particular of treating women “like meat”.

That’s probably true, but irrelevant in this context. If there’s no rape involved, and the sex is consensual, then it logically follows that the women involved agree to being treated like meat. If they then bring up a spurious rape charge, the man’s meat becomes the same man’s poison, but it doesn’t make him a criminal.

Then the demonstrations came, in Belfast and other Ulster cities. The feminist demonstrators carried placards saying “I believe her”. What was the basis of such credulity?

Did they examine the evidence and find it wanting? Did they interview the counsel? Did they possess information that hadn’t made it to court? Did they uncover new witnesses?

Of course not. It’s just that the placards were abbreviated to the detriment of the message. What the demonstrators really meant was that they believed any woman accusing any man of rape, regardless of evidence.

Hence the demonstrators pursued not justice but a political cause that, if allowed to vanquish, would destroy the foundations of our legal system and therefore society. And good riddance, according to the feminist groups.

One such posted a message on Facebook, saying that our criminal justice system is “not fit for purpose when it comes to dealing with sexual crimes.” Right. It’s good enough to deal with murder, robbery and GBH, but not with rape.

What’s the nature of this disparity? As far as I know, the legal method is the same in all cases. In our adversarial system, the prosecution presents the evidence and arguments for one side, the defence for the other, and the jury decides whose evidence and arguments carry the day.

What makes rape trials so special? Yes, they often boil down to his word against hers, which makes it hard to build an ironclad case. But the same situation arises in other trials as well, if less frequently. And anyway, in this trial there was enough eyewitness evidence not to rely on the defendants’ word.

It’s hard to get rid of the impression that the only legal system that would satisfy the feminists would be one in which the middlemen, the police and the courts, would be eliminated altogether. Anyone accused of rape would be automatically presumed guilty as charged and go straight to jail, Monopoly style.

In this context, I was truly shocked by the announcement made by Cressida Dick, the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police.

The Met, said the Commissioner, would no longer blindly believe rape complaints. Of course, she reassured the feminists scorned, “It is very important to victims to feel that they are going to be believed.”

However, “We are, of course, likely to believe you but we are investigators and we have to investigate.”

Does this mean that until now the Met has acted as merely a clerk processing papers on the way to the courthouse without even bothering to check the evidence? No wonder our legal system has blown millions on hundreds of spurious rape cases, like the Belfast one, that should never have reached the courts.

A country in which politics trumps justice is one in which both suffer irreparably. Witness the fact that London has overtaken New York in murder rate, the only crime category in which we have hitherto lagged behind.

Perhaps if the Met spent more time on chasing murderers and less on… Well, I’d better stop here before I too find myself in the dock.

An irate reader of mine complains that I ascribe the eponymous faults to anyone who disagrees with my assessment of Putin’s kleptofascist junta.

That would indeed be rude – unless it were true. I argue it is; the reader believes it isn’t, but without offering any arguments.

He seems to proceed from the assumption that any opinion on this or any other subject is equally valid and therefore meriting a public airing, especially if it tallies with his own.

I, on the other hand, would go so far as to suggest that no opinion merits a public airing. Only sound judgements do, and they differ from opinions in that they offer an intelligible interpretation of reality based on facts.

This distinction is largely lost these days. We’re all supposed to be created equally knowledgeable, intelligent and good. Suggesting that someone may be remiss in any part of that triad implicitly attacks the presumption of equality all around, which is the most cherished shibboleth of modernity.

Yet suppose I were to express an ‘opinion’ that the monster who recently bludgeoned an octogenarian to rob her of her meagre possessions isn’t to blame – for whatever reason. He felt betrayed by society, the victim had jostled him in a bus queue, he didn’t mean to kill her, she had attacked him first, she’s a xenophobe and homophobe – you name it.

How would most readers describe me then? I suspect they’d use the adjectives in the title above. Take your pick: mad, in that I would have lost touch with reality; bad, in that I would have displayed the moral sense of a skunk; stupid, in that I would have lacked the basic cerebral skill to draw conclusions from the known facts.

Yet Putin’s Western fans, such as my irate reader, display all these faults, albeit on a much greater scale. After all, Putin explicitly threatens to obliterate life on earth, which the hammer-wielding monster has neither the means nor, seemingly, the desire to do.

Madness is usually characterised by obsessive behaviour and a divorce from reality. To diagnose the condition, we must first establish the reality of Putin’s regime and then see to what extent his fans are divorced from it. The task is easy.

I describe this regime as kleptofascist, demonstrably so. First the klepto- part.

The Kremlin junta ably led by Putin himself has amassed close to two trillion dollars in various personal offshore havens, with half of it in the US, a quarter in the UK and the rest spread wide, from Panama to the Channel Islands.

This money has been brazenly stolen from the Russian economy, specifically from those 20 per cent of the population, many of them pensioners, who are starving below the poverty line of about £100 a month (the Russians’ own data).

My favourite bit of current news is Vice Premier Shuvalov, whose annual salary of some £90,000 hasn’t prevented him from amassing half a billion’s worth of properties in London and the Home Counties.

Such is the klepto- reality and denying it is a symptom of madness, especially since even Russian putinistas don’t bother to do so.

Now the –fascist part. As my irate reader points out, correctly but irrelevantly, the word has been widely misused by the Left to describe the Right. But that doesn’t remove the word from the lexicon – it still denotes something specific if used correctly.

As it is in this case, for Putin’s regime shows every characteristic of fascism:

Populism combined with chauvinism; externalising evil in alien groups or countries; sacralisation of power: internalising the good of the nation within the person of the leader; state control of the media and their almost exclusive use for propaganda purposes; the leader’s will replacing the rule of law; violent suppression of dissent; acquisitive aggression against neighbours; eliminating all legal means of removing the leader from power; allowing political opposition for window-dressing only, if at all; burgeoning militarisation, used either for actual aggression or blackmail.

Even a cursory familiarity with the last 20 years of Russian history will show how emphatically Putin’s junta ticks all these boxes. Anyone who doubts this should acquire such cursory familiarity – for example, by scanning my pieces on this subject over the past few years. This labour would be rewarded by a compendium of hundreds of facts, along with textual references and video links.

Such is the reality, or rather some of it. For I’ve left out the most relevant part.

In all those traits Putin’s Russia is no different from other Third World kleptofascist regimes, such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. There is, however, a crucial difference: unlike them, Russia is threatening the West directly – for example, by amassing troops at the borders of NATO members and threatening to do to them what she has already done to the Ukraine.

Moreover, every day brings new discoveries of the electronic war Putin’s junta is waging against the West, spreading lies and disinformation aimed at subverting our institutions and sowing discord between us and our allies. And any student of warfare will tell you that disinformation is as potent a weapon as any of those that go bang.

To wit, the last man hanged in Britain for treason had never betrayed any of the country’s secrets. It was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, the mouthpiece of Nazi propaganda in English. (Peter Hitchens, ring your office.)

Electronic war is still war, and so far only one side has been fighting it. But in addition, Putin’s junta indulges in crimes that have throughout history been regarded as a legitimate casus belli.

The latest one is the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and, by way of collateral damage, a few dozen British bystanders. Here Putin’s useful idiots come up with several lines of defence.

They either claim that there’s no proof of Russia’s responsibility for the crime; that killing traitors is Russia’s internal affair; and that British and other Western governments have ‘overreacted’.

Now, useful idiots would deny Russia’s culpability even if Putin had been caught personally spraying Skripal’s doorknob with novichok. However, millions of criminals have been convicted on much thinner evidence than the evidence in this case.

Russian officials, including Putin himself, had issued numerous threats of murder by poisoning towards all ‘traitors’, and Skripal by name. Then Skripal was poisoned with a nerve agent of uniquely Russian provenance. Hence Russia is the only country that had the motive and the means to carry out this assassination attempt.

All this is circumstantial evidence that may or may not be sufficient to convict in a court of law. But it’s certainly sufficient to believe that Russia has a case to answer: no court would dismiss such a case for lack of evidence.

Yet Russia hasn’t answered the case, or rather has answered it with sarcasm, rudeness, lies and threats – including one of global extinction. The same applies to other murders the Russians have committed on British soil, including that of Litvinenko.

Then too there were lying denials and accusations that Britain was conducting a witch hunt by slandering Russia’s pristine morality and unmatched spirituality.

Of course the easiest way to prove their point would have been to allow Scotland Yard to interrogate the suspected murderers. However, the Russians refused to extradite them and instead co-opted the prime suspect Lugovoi into their sham Duma, where he enjoys parliamentary immunity.

Our useful idiots routinely echo Putin’s propaganda verbatim, including, in this case, references to Skripal as a ‘traitor’. Well, one side’s traitor is the other side’s hero.

For example, we consider Philby a traitor, while the Russians gave him medals and displayed his portrait at Lubianka among other KGB heroes. So it depends on which side Putin’s useful idiots support, and they leave one in no doubt on that score.

Then again, whatever Skripal’s moral fibre, no murder a foreign power commits on our soil, especially of a British subject, is that power’s internal affair. This is so basic that one is almost embarrassed to have to mention it.

As to our government’s supposed ‘overreaction’, I’d suggest that it was both limp and belated. Yet one realises that to this lot any reaction would constitute an overreaction. We’re supposed to sit idle as their role model commits acts of nuclear and chemical terrorism.

Should Western governments have reacted resolutely to Russia’s nuclear terrorism on British soil in 2006, Putin’s junta might not have felt emboldened to proceed to the next steps.

The naked aggression against Georgia in 2008 and the Ukraine in 2014 might not have happened, those 298 people aboard the Malaysian airliner would still be alive, and Sergei Skripal wouldn’t be dying.

Instead, Western governments introduced token sanctions that badly hurt ordinary Russians but had no effect on the ruling junta. For example, when the Rotenbergs’ assets were frozen in the US, Putin simply paid them the same amount from the public purse, thereby blithely stealing more billions from the poor.

This time around, HMG expelled 23 Russian ‘diplomats’, and the Russians retaliated with tit for tat expulsions. However, the US and 20 other countries followed suit, presenting a united front and sending an unequivocal message that further heinous acts would not go unpunished. It’s not much, but it is something.

Such is the reality of Putin’s Russia. If his Western fans don’t know it but still have warm feelings about the KGB colonel, they’re fools. If they know it, but still love Putin, they’re knaves. And if they ignore reality altogether, they are mad.

The other day, a perfectly conservative friend offered an explanation. These people, he said, are so obsessed with their hatred of the EU, that they desperately look for idols wherever they can be found.

That’s indeed an explanation. But it isn’t an excuse. For surely any obsession that overrides reason and morality is in itself a symptom of madness?

Our putinistas ‘argue’ the case by delivering a long litany of opprobrium heaped on every post-Thatcher government (the sainted Lady herself is above criticism, although she did sign the Single European Act). I agree with every accusation they voice, and happily add a few of my own.

However, I can’t for the life of me see how any sane man can build a logical bridge between our several past governments, bad, weak and, in Blair’s case, downright wicked as they have been, and their love for Putin’s kleptofascist regime.

They should realise that I pay them a compliment by calling them mad or stupid. These, after all, are congenital conditions they can’t help. An alternative to that would be calling them ghouls longing for fascism – or else Putin’s paid trolls.