Month: February 2022

Well, perhaps not any old rape but just the statutory variety. You know, when it’s all consensual, but one participant is below the age of consent. Let’s call it sexual assault, to be on the safe side – even if there was no violence involved.

That’s what the lawyers acting for Virginia Giuffre, née Roberts, called it. They brought a civil case, which the defendant, Prince Andrew, has just settled for something like £12 million.

Before we go on, let’s get one stipulation out of the way. Prince Andrew is a louche, not particularly bright man covered head to toe with Jeffrey Epstein’s sleaze, plus some of his own. His close friendship with the likes of Jeffrey and Ghislaine is in itself enough to drum him out of the royal family even if he kept his mitts off Virginia’s body.

Yet he wasn’t charged with befriending wrong people for wrong reasons. He was charged with sexual assault, albeit only in the civil courts. And my contention is that, had the case gone to trial, Andrew’s legal team would have walked it.

One fact currently in the public domain is that young Virginia was, not to cut too fine a point, a prostitute. This precise, stylistically neutral term describes a woman who exchanges sex for payment. I could also think of a few words that are less stylistically neutral, but the gentleman in me won’t allow it.

At the time in question, she was flown by private jet from one mansion to another to have sex with Jeffrey, his guests, possibly Ghislaine and, for all I know, household pets. The jets, mansions, clothes, expensive food and drink, possibly jewellery, probably cash were payments for the sexual services rendered.

Andrew was allegedly one guest entertained by Virginia, and she says Epstein ordered her to make herself available. As someone who strives to use words precisely, I’d like to offer a row of verbs all describing encouragement to action in an ascending sequence of imperativeness: suggest, ask, request, demand, order.

One word, order, stands out of this row. A suggestion may be ignored, a request denied, a demand resisted, but an order must be obeyed on pain of punishment. Whoever issues one must be in a position of institutional authority that enables him to enforce the order and punish non-compliance.

So what would have happened had young Virginia told Jeffrey, in what was probably her natural idiom, to stick his order where the sun don’t shine? How could he enforce and punish?

Virginia wasn’t a soldier who could be tried by military tribunal and shot before the ranks. The only punishment she could have suffered was dismissal from her job as prostitute in Epstein’s employ. She could have been held in breach of an unwritten contract she had entered of her own free will.

Since there was no coercion involved, the only thing that could be held against Andrew is that our daisy-fresh Virginia was at the time a few months short of the age of consent, 18 at that time and in that place.

Thus having sex with her was then against the law. However, that law was manifestly unjust – witness the fact that it was changed soon thereafter. And, as the Romans used to say, “lex iniusta non est lex”, an unjust law is no law.

Only 17 per cent of American girls bring an intact hymen to their eighteenth birthday, which isn’t surprising, considering they (and their British counterparts) have been educated since infancy in contraceptive techniques and sexual ballistics. Let’s put it this way: because sex has lost a moral dimension, Virginia and her coevals couldn’t be confused with Jane Austen’s debutantes.

But did Andrew actually defile young Virginia? Her word apart, the only piece of hard evidence is that notorious photograph, which proves that Andrew did know Virginia, though not necessarily carnally.

Andrew, on the other hand, denies having known her, carnally or otherwise, and claims the photo is a fake. Anyone familiar with Photoshop will know that faking an image in that fashion is a matter of minutes, so the claim is plausible.

However, when the photo first began to make the rounds in 2015, Andrew asked Ghislaine what she thought of it. In response, she sent him an e-mail, saying: “It looks real. I think it is.”

“Looks”? “Think”? Hardly a statement of certainty, is it? If I were Virginia’s solicitor, I’d be much happier with something like “Of course it’s real, don’t you remember, Andy? It was taken just after you bonked her the first time.”

One way to prove the photograph is genuine would be to present the original. However, Virginia claimed she had lost it, and I can’t help thinking that this piece of evidence lacks the strength to convince or convict.

The case against the Duke of York looks so weak that one may wonder why he chose to settle it, rather than going to trial, as was his stated intention. The answer seems obvious.

Dragging the case through public hearings would expose the royal family to even more humiliation than it has suffered already. The rumour has it that Prince Charles leaned on his wayward younger brother to settle, and this rings true. The Queen didn’t want this sleaze to rub off on her Jubilee, and she was understandably eager to draw the line under the whole sordid affair.

As it is, republican noises are getting louder, and I’m worried about the future of our monarchy. Those who think Britain could walk away from it whistling a merry tune are ignorant of the catastrophic constitutional implications.

The monarch is the ganglion on which every constitutional synapse of Britain converges. Tony Blair couldn’t even get rid of the post of Lord Chancellor, hard as he tried. He found, against his subversive instincts, that our ancient constitution would have become well-nigh inoperable as a result.

Removing the monarch would destroy every fibre of Britain’s body politic, which is another way of saying Britain would no longer be British. That’s why Andrew, Harry and all other culprits who jeopardise the dignity and grandeur of our central institution deserve whatever punishment they suffer.

If Andrew lives out his life penniless and friendless, I won’t shed a tear. But that doesn’t make him guilty of sexual assault any more than it makes Virginia the innocent victim of it. That £12 million is payment in the form of pay-off, and its size only means she is a great success in her chosen occupation.  

An obituary is a memento mori, which is why I seldom read them. Yet I read one this morning.

For P.J. O’Rourke was a factor in my life, especially when I lived in America. There were only two publications I read regularly then: William Buckley’s National Review and P.J.’s National Lampoon – the former mostly for ideas, the latter mostly for style. Mostly his.

Some writers are born, some are made, and then there was P.J. O’Rourke. If there are any scribes who don’t envy him, they should cast a critical eye over their own work to improve self-awareness. That done, they’ll start turning just the right shade of green when reading O’Rourke’s prose.

He could do with a couple of words what most writers can’t do with a paragraph; with a paragraph, what most writers can’t do with a page; with a page, what most writers can’t do at all.

O’Rourke’s verve and wit were such that one hung on to every word even when the subject-matter was uninteresting or his treatment of it facile. His prose was so effortless that only another writer could appreciate how much effort had gone into it.

To Hemingway, all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. That doesn’t mean one could draw a direct line of descent from Twain to, say, Faulkner, although I trust literary scholars to draw such lines even in the unlikeliest places.

But it does mean that Twain was the first genuinely American writer. Thanks to him, America stopped being a literary province of England and began to speak in her own voice.  And she spoke her own mind: irreverent, expansive, colourful to the point of being lurid, streetwise, commonsensical, iconoclastic, often anarchic.

I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, “The worst thing you can say about an American is that he believes everything he reads in the papers.” People who don’t believe everything, often anything, they read in the papers end up mocking received opinions, sometimes subtly, at other times savagely.

They submit the world around them to the test of common sense and tragically find it wanting. Some try to delve into the tragedy, others turn it into comedy. They laugh because grown men don’t cry.

“Repudiation of Europe,” the novelist John Dos Passos once wrote, “is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

When repudiation of anything becomes a country’s defining characteristic, its literature has to follow suit – first by decrying or mocking the object of repudiation, then by extending that mode of perception into other areas.

Satire thus became a quintessential American genre, glittering with such stellar masters as Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, Joseph Heller, Tom Wolfe – and P.J. O’Rourke.

It was Thompson who created the style of ‘gonzo’ journalism, with which O’Rourke is usually associated. This largely overlaps with New Journalism of which Tom Wolfe was the most prominent practitioner.

In both, the author creates a protagonist central to every narrative: himself. Of course, one could argue that all writers inject their own personality into their work. Yes, but most do so indirectly, with their own selves refracted through so many facets that only a meticulous analyst could reconstruct the writer behind the writing.

There was nothing indirect about Thomson, Wolfe and O’Rourke. They didn’t even try to feign dispassionate objectivity.

No readers had to work hard reconstructing their personalities. O’Rourke’s was no more hidden in his essays than Huck’s was in Twain’s novel. Extending the analogy, O’Rourke was Huck Finn and Mark Twain rolled into one, both creature and creator.

However, he often pointed out that, while the ‘I’ of his prose is closely related to P.J. O’Rourke, they aren’t identical twins. The ‘I’ either exaggerated O’Rourke’s traits or downplayed them. In fact, those who knew him personally talk about his loving, charitable heart before mentioning his cutting wit.

In his National Lampoon days, O’Rourke was a gag writer who in his mid- to late-twenties retained his rebellious teenage persona. His teenage years were in the 1960s, and O’Rourke was then head to toe immersed in the sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll counterculture.

His writing even 10 years later was that of a clever, talented, naughty boy whose work was funny but devoid of any other than shock value. One could never have guessed there was a conservative trying to break out of that countercultural dungeon.

O’Rourke never wrote too much about his Catholicism, but, judging by his evolution, it was a driving force in his life. Christianity in general, and apostolic Christianity especially, can act as a hoist lifting a sincere believer out of the morass of puerile shenanigans, and with O’Rourke that hoist went into full gear.

He began writing political and social commentary, but without losing either his wit or his youthful ‘gonzo’ style. One didn’t expect original insights from O’Rourke – that wasn’t his métier. He said things one could hear from a clever, conservative stranger in a bar. But no such lonely drinker would ever say them with as much coruscating brilliance.

O’Rourke was an American conservative, which is a very different type from European, especially British, ones. His, typically American, brand of conservatism combined economic libertarianism with social anarchism and fierce patriotism.

As a roving correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (not a well-known haven for conservatives and libertarians), O’Rourke visited most countries in the world and found them all vastly inferior to his own.

He treated Europe in particular with ironic condescension, thereby vindicating Dos Passos and also carrying on the tradition set in motion by the first travel book in American literature, Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. Yet one could still love O’Rourke’s writing just as one took issue with some of his attitudes.

He was first diagnosed with cancer in 2008 and it got him in the end. Expecting that, O’Rourke wrote: “Death is so important that God visited death upon his own son, thereby helping us learn right from wrong well enough that we may escape death forever and live eternally in God’s grace. 

“Thus, the next time I glimpse death … well, I’m not going over and introducing myself. I’m not giving the grim reaper fist daps. But I’ll remind myself to try, at least, to thank God for death. And then I’ll thank God, with all my heart, for whiskey.”

It was as if O’Rourke forgot for a second that he was supposed to be an insouciant, irreverent man about town. Yet at the last moment he remembered, got upset with himself and hastily hit the key in which most of his work had been composed.

I’ll miss him, even though I haven’t read much of him for years. But somehow I’ve always felt the world was a better place, and America a better country, for his presence.

God lavished P.J. O’Rourke with gifts throughout his life. I pray that this will continue after his death.

With this question pragmatic Britons tend to interrupt any extended analysis of economic, political, geopolitical or cultural problems.

When the current Ukrainian crisis is the subject of analysis and I’m the analyst, I reply along the lines of a “whiff of Munich in the air”, a phrase used by our Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Appeasement, I usually say, has never worked as a deterrent to evil regimes.

We need to introduce draconian sanctions on Russia now, for what she has already done, and guarantee even stiffer ones for each incremental step she takes towards the Ukraine. At the same time we must abandon our insanely suicidal energy policy and become self-sufficient, thereby destroying Russia’s exports and, by introducing a trade embargo, also her imports.

The argument that Russia will then begin to sell all her gas to China is refuted by one word: How? To increase the volume of her supplies to China, Russia would have to build a new pipeline, which would take years – especially without the benefit of Western technology. The option of liquefying gas is even more problematic, for Russia’s liquefication technology is primitive.

I could go on, but you get the general idea. Only a show of strength, unity and resolve will stop amoral aggressors. They despise, rather than respect, those who are nice to them.

This sort of mindset, however, is risibly infantile, according to Mark Almond. The crisis can be ended only by an exercise in what he calls in his article “grown-up diplomacy”, which to him is distinct from appeasement.

I happen to know Mark: in 1995 we were both observers at the Byelorussian election. Over dinner in Minsk, I recall outlining to him my understanding of all those glasnosts and perestroikas as merely a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. Russia, I said, is still as dangerous as before or, because we don’t realise this, even more so.

Mark looked around furtively, lowered his voice and said: “We can’t say such things. The most we are allowed is a regret that democracy in Russia isn’t developing as fast as we’d wish.”

I thought that was merely typical middle-class fear of expressing strong views. But then I saw Almond appear on RT over the years, preaching an accommodation based on mutual understanding. Much as analogies with Munich are overused and often imprecise, I couldn’t help drawing one with a British academic, c. 1938, toeing a similar line on Goebbels’s radio channel.

So what does Almond mean by “grown-up” diplomacy? It starts with empathy, feeling Russia’s pain.

“We… have to recognise the anxieties of ordinary Russians. Of course, Nato has no intentions of provoking war with Russia – but both the 19th and 20th centuries saw full-scale European invasions through Ukraine, aimed at Moscow. Both Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 failed, but the wars left deep scars in the national psyche.”

I’m amazed he didn’t count among the deep scars those left by the 1240 Mongol invasion. The scars he did mention, especially the second lot, are made to fester by incessant, round-the-clock Russian propaganda using them to explain the backwardness of the economy and to justify further aggression against neighbours.

Having thus accepted the stigmata of Putin’s suffering, Almond then proposed his grown-up solution: “Kiev [must] agree to local self-government in the Donbas region. It… might satisfy Russia while leaving Ukraine legally intact and give a beleaguered nation a chance to rebuild its economy.”

Vidkun Quisling couldn’t have put it better. Almond’s grown-up idea is exactly what Putin wants, what his propagandists have been demanding at an increasingly hysterical volume. For, rather than “leaving Ukraine legally intact”, this development would put paid to her as a sovereign country.

The Donbas region was occupied by mercenary bandits Putin armed and used as his proxies. They were led by Russian murderers-for-hire, such as Strelkov-Girkin and ‘Motorola’, and I suggest Almond look them up to understand the situation better (provided that’s what he is after).

Putin is demanding that Kiev recognise the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces as independent precisely because he knows this would inject lethal poison into the country’s body politic. As an immediate effect, it would invalidate the Minsk Accords, held as Holy Writ by Putin and his fans. Hence one has to question either the sanity or the honesty of any Western commentator who goes along with that scheme.

Almond is in good company there. Yesterday the communist faction in the Duma submitted an address to Putin, calling for recognition of the two occupied provinces as independent republics.

Almond then goes on to explain “how wretched, criminal and lawless the Ukrainian economy has become… So much money has been sucked out of the system by successive presidents, cronies and mafia bosses [that the people are still poor].”

All this is true, and I had the chance to observe it when doing consultancy work in Kiev in the late 1990s. But this truth, word for word, equally applies to Russia herself and indeed to most, if not all, ex-Soviet republics. Does this mean we ought to sit back and watch Putin rebuild the Soviet Union by force? That’s what Almond must have in mind, for otherwise this information would be irrelevant to his subject.

Another grown-up solution would be to listen to “Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky [who] pleaded with our Prime Minister to crack down on stolen Ukrainian funds flowing through London.”

Stolen Russian funds flowing through London are greater than Ukrainian ones by orders of magnitude. If we cracked down on those, that would act as an effective deterrent… but I forgot. Doing that to Ukrainians is grown-up; doing that to Russians is childish.

“The West has to recognise how wrong we were to shore up Ukraine’s successive shaky and corrupt governments…,” continues Almond. “At the same time, we have to pander to Putin’s ego and let him claim some sort of victory, without betraying Ukraine’s essential rights… The alternative is almost too awful to contemplate.”

Allow me to paraphrase by excising Aesopian phraseology while keeping the real meaning intact: “The West has to recognise how wrong we were to support, however meekly, the right of nations to self-determination in general and the Ukraine’s sovereignty in particular. Since the only alternative to this recognition is war, we must pander to Putin’s ego and let him claim victory by allowing him to gobble up the Ukraine — for starters.”

Reading this, the KGB colonel must be laughing all the way to the bank. For, even without a full-scale invasion, he has already scored a victory, as denominated in US dollars.

The oil price has climbed to $98 a barrel, a seven-year high. The price of gas is shooting up even faster. The trade in those commodities is in Russia totally controlled by Putin and his cronies. Their kleptofascist regime has thus found that, by ratcheting up the -fascist part of that designation, they can boost the klepto- part no end.

Moreover, any crippling sanctions will also hurt the West, especially Europe, and not only by making energy even dearer. For many European countries have foolishly allowed themselves to be exposed to Russian banks.

In the third quarter of last year, Italy and France were each owed $25 billion, and Austria $17.5. Cutting off Russia from SWIFT, which is one sanction widely mooted, would mean instant default on those loans.

My solution to that problem would be to confiscate all Russian ill-gotten assets held in the West. But, having read Almond’s prescriptions, I realise I still have a lot of growing up to do.

P.S. Here’s an example of Russia’s own grown-up diplomacy. When the other day a local paper asked Tatarintsev, Russian ambassador to Sweden, about the possibility of sanctions, he replied: “We shit on Western sanctions.” This is consonant with Putin’s inaugural promise to “whack terrorists wherever they hide, even in the shithouse.” Freud would have a field day with these excremental allusions.

“Americanism,” my American friend once said, “isn’t a nationality. It’s an idea.” That epigrammatic phrase obscures more than it elucidates. Take a French socialist, by way of illustration.

French is a nationality. Socialist is an idea. Our hypothetical chap happens to be both, but his nationality is in no way contingent on his idea. He may change the idea to, say, royalism, while still remaining as French as before, arguably even more so.

And what exactly is a nationality? In Russia, the term stands for ethnicity, not citizenship, which it does in most other places, including Russia herself under the tsars. (Russians were at the time defined by their religion, not ethnicity. Officially, that is. Unofficial attitudes come across in the proverb “It’s not your passport but your mug that gets punched.”)

All Soviet citizens carried internal passports with ‘Nationality’ one of its rubrics. It was filled with words like ‘Russian’, ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Jew’, not ‘Soviet’. That practice has been discontinued but, when one Russian asks another “What’s your nationality?”, he still means ethnicity, not citizenship.

The Russian language has two cognates reflecting this distinction. Both are translated as ‘Russian’, but they mean different things. Ruskiy is ethnically Russian; rossiyanin, a Russian citizen.

Britain also has such differentiating words, though they aren’t cognates: British and English (or Scottish, Irish, Welsh). The former is citizenship; the latter, ethnicity.

Someone born elsewhere can become British, but not English. You either are or you aren’t, the luck of the draw. The chance nature of this was emphasised by that great Empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes: “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

That first prize can be won even by those whose families weren’t English originally. A good friend of mine, for example, has a French surname, and indeed he descends from the Huguenots who found refuge in Britain. Yet my friend considers himself English, and indeed he displays every requisite characteristic: a clipped accent, slightly eccentric dress, club membership and alcoholism.

Britishness can be interpreted narrowly, as a comment on one’s passport; or more broadly, as a statement of self-identification and multiple intersecting loyalties. Thus, though I have two passports, my loyalties are in no way divided: I’m unquestionably British. Why, I’ve even let my US passport lapse, and I pass the Tebbit cricket test with flying colours.

Yet Britishness doesn’t have to be as distinct from Englishness as all that. Neither of them is an ‘idea’. Both are a way of looking at the world, a matter of intuitive assumptions, behavioural patterns and social interactions. None of this can be expressed in a written document, the way the American Declaration of Independence began to express Americanism.

I’m not a great fan of that document, but I love one sentence in it. Actually, not even a whole sentence but a phrase: “We hold these truths as self-evident…” A nation is indeed largely defined by the truths most people intuitively hold as axiomatic.

That’s why it would never occur to my friend to describe himself as French. He is an Englishman who happens to have a French surname. Another close friend has an Irish surname, and indeed his family barrel has more than a spoonful of Irish blood. But he is so proudly English that, when in his cups, he’ll punch you if you dispute that.

The two men are quite different, but many of their intuitive assumptions are identically English and British. That’s why they are English and British (I’m not a great believer in genetic memory and the voice of blood).  

Yet Biden routinely refers to himself as Irish, which, mostly on his mother’s side, he ethnically is. Some of this self-identification is strictly political opportunism. In many parts of America securing the Irish vote goes a long way towards an electoral victory, and Joe is a politician before anything else.

In case of mixed origin, an American politician will automatically choose the more politically expedient component. Thus mulatto Barack Obama calls himself black, hinting at the unlikely possibility that his black father begat him by parthenogenesis.

The issue isn’t that simple though. For one can observe that many Americans have, or at least cultivate, the intuitive assumptions prevalent in the lands of their forefathers. Ancestral feuds figure prominently in that package, and they seem to travel well.

The ethnic aspect in ‘American’ appears to be weaker than not only in ‘French’ or ‘English’, but even in ‘British’. The word doesn’t seem to define a person’s intuitive (as opposed to rational) assumptions to the same extent.

That’s odd, even though the US is platitudinously described as a country of immigrants. No doubt that’s what it used to be, but today some 87 per cent of Americans are born and bred, compared to 86 per cent of Britons. Yet no one calls Britain a country of immigrants, not quite yet anyway.

Biden’s maternal Irish ancestors arrived in America about 170 years ago. One would think that’s long enough for him to stop describing himself as Irish, especially since his father’s family was mostly English.

Yet Biden stubbornly clings to his Hibernian heritage, and not all of that self-identification is disingenuous. Some intuitive assumptions seem to have migrated into his mind from the Emerald Isle.

Hatred of the English is one intuitive assumption that many Irishmen share, or are supposed to. Apparently, Biden’s mother possessed that little prejudice not just in spades but in the other three suits as well.

On her trip to England she once stayed at a hotel whose staff proudly told her that the Queen had spent a night there in the past. Mrs Biden was so mortified that she slept the whole night on the floor, for fear of contaminating her flesh by contact with the same bed where Her Majesty might have slept.

That’s not just an idiosyncratic affectation. It’s virulent hatred, and no doubt Mrs Biden raised little Joe in that spirit. Then again, my mother tried to raise me as a loyal Soviet, in which undertaking she failed spectacularly.

How successful was Joe’s mother in injecting her hatred into his bloodstream? And if she succeeded even to a limited degree, does this sentiment affect President Biden’s approach to foreign policy?

According to Georgia Pritchett’s autobiography My Mess Is a Bit of a Life (I like this spoonerism so much I just might buy the book), Biden’s mother had a profound influence on his life. The talented Mrs Biden exerted that influence even in poetic form, by writing “hundreds of poems describing how God must smite the English and rain blood on their heads.”

I don’t know how much of it has rubbed off on little Joe. Some has, that’s for sure. Otherwise the president wouldn’t have insisted that any trade deal with Britain depends “upon respect for the [Good Friday] Agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.” Taking ethnicity out of consideration, it’s not clear why a US president should base trade policy on how hard the border is between two foreign countries.

Noticing that he seems to have Irish interests close to heart, while sometimes treating Britain cavalierly, some people wonder if Mrs Biden’s influence is affecting the ‘special relationship’. I can reassure them that it isn’t – for the simple reason that the ‘special relationship’ is, and always has been, more in the nature of British wishful thinking than reality.

Using the Lendlease programme as an example, one could argue that the US had a special relationship with the Soviet Union, not Britain. The former got American supplies for free, while Britain had to sell all her gold and overseas assets to pay cash on the nail. And when that ran out, an IOU came into effect. Only in 2006 did Britain finally pay off her special allies.

More recently, Ronald Reagan (who also had Irish roots) refused to share intelligence information with Britain during the Falklands War, and Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger had to disobey Reagan’s orders to do so. Even more recently, Biden ordered unilateral troop withdrawal from Afghanistan without bothering to inform America’s British allies in advance and leaving them in the lurch.

Americans seem to take it for granted that a president’s ethnic origin, no matter how partial and remote, will have at least some bearing on his foreign policy. Yet a Briton would be shocked if Boris Johnson showed a political bias towards Turkey just because he had a Turkish great-grandfather.

The upshot of it is that America and Britain are two countries divided by more than just a common language. The Anglo-Saxons as a homogeneous unity are a figment of French or Russian imagination.  

Little Vova was a babe in arms then, but, as Stephen Glover advised the other day, we must take an historical perspective. He then demonstrated his woeful ignorance of Soviet history, but that’s a different matter.

Yet even many Westerners who have a better command of that subject prove that knowing facts and understanding them are, as they say in Odessa (still in the Ukraine), two big differences.

If all knowledge was comparative to Descartes, outsiders have no way of understanding Putin’s Russian state. There’s nothing to compare it to. A state formed and run by a blend of secret police and organised crime has never existed before – not in Russia, not anywhere else.

How did it come about? What’s the true meaning of the ‘collapse of the Soviet Union’ that, according to a particularly silly neocon, was supposed to spell the end of history?

I knew since the late ‘80s that glasnost and perestroika were nothing but a transfer of power from the Party to the KGB. The knowledge was mostly intuitive because the dozens of well-documented books now available hadn’t yet been written.

However, someone cursed with native understanding of Russia and blessed with a modicum of analytical ability could see enough readable signs. One such was an uncanny similarity between Gorbachev’s programme and one proposed by security chief Beria immediately after Stalin’s death in 1953.

There he was, a monster Stalin introduced to Ribbentrop in 1939 as “our Himmler”, insisting on a whole raft of seemingly liberal reforms. Every sacred cow was being slaughtered: Beria called for disbanding collective farms, loosening the Party’s grip on power, increasing the production of consumer goods, ending the war in Korea, allowing Germany to reunite and so on.

Did Beria suddenly find God? Had he succeeded, Western commentators would probably have seen those proposals in that light. They were as ignorant then as they are now.

Beria’s ideas didn’t come out of the blue. They were new salvos fired in the war that started in December, 1917, when VCheKa, precursor of the KGB/FSB, was founded. From its very inception, that sinister outfit began to compete with the Party for supreme power.

Under Stalin, the NKVD (as it had become) had to resort to guerrilla warfare only – Stalin was too powerful and ruthless. As it was, of the four security heads before Beria’s 1938 arrival, two were executed by Stalin, and plenty of evidence suggests that the other two had some help in their natural deaths.

When Stalin died, Beria made his move. He was driven not by a sudden onset of virtue, but by strategic considerations, something he knew ideologically blinkered Party bosses couldn’t quite grasp.

As a career Chekist, Beria knew how to recruit and cultivate agents. And as a strategic thinker, he wanted to apply that knowledge not to individual Westerners but to the West as a whole. The West, he kept repeating, wants to love us – so let’s make it easy.

Let’s present a more liberal façade, while keeping our hand on the real levers of power. The West will be happy to build up our economy, while at the same time reducing their own military strength. Those capitalists are perpetually demob-happy – give them even a flimsy reason to churn more butter at the expense of making guns, and they’ll grab it with both hands.

His proposals scared the Party bosses and they killed Beria in gangland style, faking his trial post-factum. The Party won and, under Khrushchev, warded off all subsequent attacks from the secret police.

That changed in 1982, when Yuri Andropov, who had served as KGB chief since 1967, took over as Secretary General after Brezhnev’s death. Andropov died two years later, but he still managed to lay the foundation of a KGB state.

The KGB had permeated the whole society even before Andropov. Every sizeable outfit had a personnel department, and just about every such department was headed by a retired or seconded KGB officer. In addition, larger setups also had so-called First Departments, responsible for keeping a vigilant eye on ideological purity.

Those departments employed both retired and active KGB officers. For example, my father ran an engineering company of about 800 employees. His First Department head was a retired KGB general Lebedev, who often regaled me with stories about the good old days at Lubyanka. When I turned out to be a treacherous vermin, it was Lebedev who got my father the sack.

All those officers operated in the open. Everyone knew who staffed First Departments, as everybody knew who was in charge of personnel. Yet KGB representatives only monitored their posts; they didn’t run them.

Andropov changed that by introducing a system of so-called Active Reserve. The idea was to infiltrate ‘former’ KGB officers into every walk of life (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” Putin once said). It was under Andropov that ‘former’ officers moved into the upper echelons of management in industry, commerce, art, literature, sport, you name it.

Gorbachev was Andropov’s man through and through. Though he never held an official KGB position, unofficially he was a KGB man in all but name. Twice he was actually put forth for KGB jobs. The first time was under Brezhnev in 1970, when Gorbachev was supposed to take over the Stavropol KGB branch. The second time was during Andropov’s KGB tenure, when he wanted to make Gorbachev his deputy.

Both times the nominations were blocked, first by KGB head Semichastny, then by Suslov, second only to Brezhnev in the Party hierarchy. But Gorbachev’s political career proceeded apace. It was thanks to Andropov’s patronage that the little-known provincial Party secretary vaulted over several steps in the career ladder to land in Moscow as Secretary of the Central Committee in 1978.

Andropov was grooming Gorbachev as his successor, the man who’d pick up the relay baton of phony liberalisation. Beria lived on in Andropov, as the latter hoped to live on in Gorbachev.

It was under Gorbachev that a KGB state began to take shape. Active-reserve KGB officers started to move up to take over vast organisations de facto, if not always de jure. It was also then that the KGB began to work cheek by jowl with the criminal underworld, especially in the area of transferring the Party’s funds to the West.

The KGB was the only organisation with the requisite international expertise. But the Mafia was invaluable domestically in providing financial conduits lying outside state channels.

Infiltration continued at full speed under Yeltsyn, whose career was as closely intertwined with the KGB as Gorbachev’s. Under the Soviets he was First Secretary of the Sverdlovsk province, whose biggest industry was the manufacturing of nuclear arms.

That industry was tightly controlled by the KGB since birth, midwifed as it was by Beria in his auxiliary capacity as head of the atomic programme. In effect, the Party committee of Sverdlovsk was there mainly to provide services for the KGB, so Yeltsyn was a grown-up too.

At the very beginning of the ‘90s Russia looked like a nascent Western state, whereas in fact the KGB, now FSB, solidified its hold on power. Most prominent politicians, starting with Yeltsyn himself, now had an active-reserve overseer assigned to them.

Yeltsyn’s minder, officially his bodyguard and adviser, was KGB Major-General Alexander Korzhakov. Petersburg mayor Sobchak only rated a lower-rank officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Putin.

Eventually Putin was transferred to Moscow, where he held progressively higher posts, including FSB head, prime minister and, since 2000, president. Putin became Yeltsyn’s successor by promising immunity to the man himself and his extended family, all of whom had been stealing the country blind.

But the FSB was going to win even if Putin had lost. The two other candidates for the post, Yevgeny Primakov and Sergei Stepashin, were also career KGB officers. Incidentally, the FSB hedged its bets in a similar fashion in 2009 when Vladimir Gundyayev was elected Patriarch. Not only Gundyayev but also the other two godly candidates were career KGB agents. (See the Mitrokhin Archive.)

In the later, more alcoholic stages of his reign, Yeltsyn was effectively controlled by the so-called oligarchs, most of whom also boasted at least some KGB links. At that time men like Berezovsky and Abramovich had veto power over government policy and ministerial appointments.

They, especially the former, were instrumental in elevating Putin to a succession of high posts, in the hope of using him as a puppet on a string. The string eventually turned into the garrotte that ended Berezovsky’s life.

Since the other two presidential hopefuls were also KGB/FSB officers, the KGB Collegium, its governing body, didn’t mind who moved into the Kremlin. And had those three been found wanting, they had other KGB colonels to do their bidding.

KGB generals, on the other hand, mostly moved on to run business empires, nominally as seconds-in-command. Colonel-General Filip Bopkov and Lieutenant-General Evgeniy Pitorvanov were particularly prominent in that capacity.

They and their colleagues turned a loose association of the KGB and organised crime into a homogeneous blend, to a point where the two components became indistinguishable. Putin personifies that symbiosis in every detail.

As Sobchak’s deputy, in effect case officer, Putin squeezed Petersburg dry. His black market shenanigans were amply documented (Google SALYE DOSSIER for details), as was his openly stated intention to become an oligarch. “Make dosh,” went his advice to a colleague.

It took Putin just three years at the helm to make the term ‘oligarch’ meaningless. Berezovsky had to flee for his life (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) in 2000; Khodorkovsky, then Russia’s richest man, was arrested in 2003. Divested of political power, the oligarchs became simply rich men whose continued wealth was contingent on their obedience to Putin.

His KGB training was put to good use, especially in his attempt to turn the West into his witting or unwitting agent. Russian trillions poured into Western banks, tax havens, holding companies and brassplates; Russian gas poured into European storages.

Both money and energy are instruments of political, not only economic, blackmail. Swarms of Western politicians, journalists and financiers quickly acquired price tags, greedily eyeing Putin’s loot.

Putin became the world’s richest man, and his confidants are never far from the Forbes List. But, just as the oligarchs’ wealth depends on Putin’s good graces, so does Putin’s wealth depend on political power. Neither fascisoid politicians nor Mafia bosses tend to retire quietly to enjoy their wealth. The moment they lose control, they lose everything – often including life.

To keep political power, Putin needs to rally his own population to some sort of banner. The one featuring the notorious profiles of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin is no longer possible: the idea of a world revolution has lost whatever appeal it ever had.

But, as Stalin discovered after the first setbacks in the war, nationalism can pick up where Marxism leaves off. And Russian (unlike, say, American) nationalism is inherently aggressive and expansionist.

With his KGB instincts, Putin and his coterie knew they had to repackage Marxist aggression as Russian imperialism. So they did, supporting bellicose words and deeds with propaganda of traditional values, along the lines of the slogan ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality’ originally put forth by a minister to Nicholas I.

As a corollary to the real thrust of Putin’s policy, this approach has shown a great recruitment potential not only nationally but also internationally. Such pronouncements were mellifluous music to the ears of Western conservatives and nationalists, who were illogically comparing Putin’s words with their own governments’ deeds.

There’s only one winner in a battle of wits between secret policemen trained to exploit weakness for strategic gains and Western politicians, who have lost any ability to think strategically. Thus Putin has been allowed to run more or less unopposed.

The good colonel proceeds in incremental steps, carefully probing the ground to avoid possible mines. He knows that the merry-go-round he is on never stops, spinning so fast it’s impossible to jump off.

Putin also knows how to scare the West into submission or at best token resistance. For Western people tend to apply to Russia their customary criteria. Comparing their own economies to Russia’s, they think the KGB colonel is bluffing (Stephen Glover’s article the other day is a good example of this folly).

Yes, agreed Putin in a speech the other day. We can’t match up to the West economically, and Nato’s combined strength is greater than ours. But we have nuclear weapons, and we won’t hesitate to use them.

The Russian nuclear arsenal is the razor brandished by a mugger, or else dirty photos produced by a blackmailer. Putin’s trillions and gas are the carrot; his ICBMs are the stick. Waving both in front of the West’s eyes, the KGB colonel is gauging its reaction.

When he likes what he sees, he takes the next step. When he detects strength, he retreats, as he did in 2014 when stopping short of his objective of capturing Kharkov.

What are the signs he sees now? The EU clearly reluctant to check Putin’s aggression even economically, never mind militarily. Nato rejecting any military action in principle. German, French and even British politicians falling over themselves to get into the queue for Putin’s billions. Our hacks spreading Putin’s propaganda through supposedly conservative publications. Hungarians willing to do an Esau, with Russian gas acting as the mess of pottage.

As Europe stands on the verge of a major war, Putin’s KGB training says the op is succeeding. Further violence may or may not be required to bring it to a perfect conclusion – either way is fine with him.

An Anschluss of Belarus and an escalated war of total or partial conquest against the Ukraine won’t just be steps into Europe. They’ll be strides towards a Third World War, for fascisoid aggressors never stop until they are stopped.

P.S. “She must have been sweltering,” is how Peter Hitchens mocks Foreign Secretary Truss for wearing a fur hat in Moscow the other day. “Climate change has made [Moscow] much warmer.”

That may be but, since the temperature there was still below zero when Miss Truss posed in Red Square, a bit of fur was hardly inappropriate. Of course, Hitchens used meteorology both to establish his own credentials (“When I lived there in the early 1990s…) and to hint that Russia is no longer a threat (“The weather is just one of many things which have changed since then”).

I admire the chap for his persistence, while despising him for his sycophancy to Putin.

As a conservative – some will say reactionary – I’m pleased to report that Her Majesty’s realm is nowhere near as atheist as I feared.

Just because people venerate a different God from mine, it doesn’t mean they don’t venerate any. In fact, judging by the public reaction to the Zouma incident, Britain has revived the ancient Egyptian cult of cat-worship.

Starting from the First Dynasty, felines were treated as deities for at least 3,000 years. They were seen as representations of Ra, the sun god. Hence any affront against cats was treated as blasphemy, though I’m not sure what kind of punishment was meted out to the infidels.

However, I do know how such transgressions are punished in Britain and France, now the ancient cult has made a comeback. And so does Kurt Zouma, the French defender playing at West Ham.

The other day Kurt and his brother, also a defender, came home after a kicking session. Both felt it would be fun to extend that activity to a domestic environment. This time, however, Kurt branched out into rugby technique, dropkicking one of his cats.

Both he and his brother laughed as the latter was filming the cat flying across the room. Either Kurt’s rugby technique needs work or else a cat doesn’t have the ballistic characteristics of a ball, but he failed to reach a decent elevation and distance.

Unaware that they had committed a blasphemous act, the Zoumas happily put the video on social networks. That offended the religious sensibilities of cat-worshippers, and these days no offence is taken in stride.

The plagues of Egypt were visited upon Kurt (yes, I know I’m mixing religious metaphors, but at least the geography is spot on). To begin with, the RSPCA stepped in to confiscate Zouma’s cats, including the victim that apparently had suffered no lasting damage.

The same can’t be said for Zouma’s career. His commercial cash cows instantly did to his endorsements what he had done to that poor cat. Then 280,000 cat-worshippers signed an online petition demanding that the blasphemer be prosecuted and sacked from his club. So far David Moyes, West Ham manager, has ignored this demand.

Instead he merely fined Zouma two-week’s wages, which amounted to £250,000. That created an unforeseen problem. Other players, whose mathematical nous proved just adequate to the task of dividing that sum by two, realised that Zouma is on £125,000 a week, more than anyone else at the club.

Hence they demanded immediate pay rises, thereby committing at least two of the deadly sins, avarice and envy. However, since these sins have a different religious provenance, they don’t count.

One player came to Zouma’s defence without in any way condoning the sacrilege. Pointing out that no one is sacking players guilty of racism, central striker Antonio asked a question he thought was rhetorical: “Is kicking a cat worse than racism?”

Rhetorical? Not on your nelly, replied The Mail’s sports writer Martin Samuel: “The answer? It doesn’t matter. They’re both bad. Racism, cat-kicking. There doesn’t have to be a sliding scale of monstrousness.”

One has to see irrefutable logic there. Some 80 years ago, millions of people with surnames similar to Mr Samuel’s were being gassed in ovens. In the 25 years before and some 15 years after that, 60 million people with all sorts of surnames were murdered in another country.

Yet those crimes, monstrous as they are, are no different from cat-kicking. Morality, of which Mr Samuel is an infallible judge, is absolute. If you have that sliding relativist scale, kick it into touch.

The outburst of religious fervour is thunderous in Britain, but it’s even louder in Zouma’s native France. Brigitte Bardot, who has in the recent decades focused on animals the same passion she used to reserve for her co-stars, demanded that Zouma be dropped from the national team and prosecuted.

If the country’s prosecutors comply with that demand, Kurt is looking at up to four years in the clink, what with French laws being stricter than ours in this area of jurisprudence. Still, he should count himself lucky. In the old days, apostates were immolated.

It’s up for discussion whether any religiosity is better than none, provided that alternative cults don’t involve human sacrifice. Without joining the debate, I’ll merely point out that, in the occidental context, animal worship is a relatively recent faith.

It goes back to the time when reason – finally! – arrived in Europe and people started worshipping nature instead of God. Until then, they had treated nature in a purely functional manner. No sentimentality towards animals was in evidence.

In those backward times it was still assumed that nature, both flora and fauna, was there for the sole purpose of serving man, made in the image and likeness of God. But with the arrival of the Enlightenment and its artistic expression, Romanticism, people replaced God with their own reason.

And it told them that they didn’t need the supernatural to pursue the superpersonal. All they had to do was come up with new cults – or else take the old ones off the mothballs.

Hence the rampant anthropomorphism in treating animals (hence also, by the way, the alacrity with which modern secular zealots jump on the climate bandwagon).

Cruelty to animals isn’t nice. But the on-going mass hysteria about Zouma’s unfortunate choice of football is grotesquely out of proportion. After all, in his professional capacity Zouma must have kicked hundreds of human beings, some of them deliberately.

On the other hand, those creatures are unlikely to purr when tickled behind the ear. And nor do they possess any religious significance. Not any longer.

P.S. Mentioning France reminded me that I must apologise to President Macron. In an earlier article I inadvertently stated that he planned to replace the French national anthem La Marseillaise with the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel (O viens, ô viens, Emmanuel).

Until today the Mail columnist Stephen Glover has mostly written on domestic politics, and reasonably well. His is a safe pair of hands – provided, of course, he stays within his area of expertise.

Today, however, he strayed outside it to regale us with his thoughts on the current situation in the Ukraine. That was a mistake.

To start with, Mr Glover adopts the disclaimer strategy honed by his Mail colleague Peter Hitchens: “I don’t dispute that Putin is a thoroughly nasty piece of work… Nor is there any doubt his regime ruthlessly eliminates its enemies both at home and abroad, and opposes Western interests whenever and wherever it can.”

Having got those supposedly irrelevant incidentals out of the way and divested himself of the stigma of servility to Putin, Mr Glover gets on with the business in hand. His message is that “Russia has a case in Ukraine”.

That’s an opinion, and as such of no interest whatsoever until it has been supported with thought and fact to turn it into a sound judgement. It’s his attempt to do so that shows up Mr Glover’s shortcomings.

He knows the way to prevent war and secure lasting peace. “It involves trying to get inside President Putin’s mind, and attempting to understand Russian attitudes towards Ukraine and Nato with a sharper sense of historical perspective.”

All God’s children like historical perspective. Yet this approach requires, as a minimum, some rudimentary knowledge of history, an asset Mr Glover manifestly lacks. By the sound of him, he even lacks access to Google.

Thus he writes: “Before the 1917 Revolution, part of modern-day Ukraine was in the Russian Empire. After 1945, the entire country was incorporated into the Soviet Union.”

The entire country, as it then was, was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922, when the USSR was formed. The Ukraine’s western part at that time belonged to Poland and was detached from her in 1939, when, following their Pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned the country.

Sharpening historical perspective even further, prior possession is no per cent of the law. A cursory glance at the history and geography of Europe will show that the borders of most countries have been shuffled and reshuffled for centuries. This is especially true of Eastern Europe, large swathes of which have been changing hands like well-used banknotes.

Glover’s “historical perspective” is tantamount to a call for that process to continue in perpetuity, which is intellectually feeble and morally defunct. If he acquires access to Google, he should key in TRANSYLVANIA, YUGOSLAVIA or ALSACE for verification.

Or, for that matter, CRIMEA. There Mr Glover complements his historical perspective with an ethnic one. “In 2014,” he writes, “Russia seized Crimea – from 1783 until 1917 part of the Russian empire, and now overwhelmingly ethnically Russian – from Ukraine.”

The Crimea was part of the Russo-Soviet Empire during roughly the same period as India was part of the British Empire. So do we have a valid territorial claim to the subcontinent? As to the ethnic composition of any area in Europe, any argument based on it is even more fatuous than one based on prior possession.

Nevertheless Mr Glover persists: “There are some 8 million ethnic Russians in Ukraine, nearly 20 per cent of the population, many of whom regard the government in capital, Kiev, as hostile.”

How many exactly? When the Russians invaded two predominantly Russophone provinces of the Ukraine in 2014, most of the population fled west, not east. I’ve seen numerous polls showing that most Ukrainian citizens, regardless of their ethnicity, are prepared to die for the Ukraine. Has Mr Glover seen any contradicting surveys? He certainly doesn’t quote them.

But even assuming against all evidence that his observation is valid, so what? I could say with equal justification that “there are some 3.5 million Muslims in the UK, many of whom regard the government in capital, London, as hostile”. Should Britain or any other country make far-reaching geopolitical conclusions on that basis?

And how far is Mr Glover prepared to push the ethnic argument? The population of Riga is about 40 per cent ethnically Russian. That of Narva, more than double that. Should Russia invade Latvia and Estonia then, with Mr Glover’s blessing?

His capacity for empathy is as endless as it is misplaced. “Imagine the feelings of policymakers in Moscow,” he writes. “Nato is already breathing down Russia’s neck. If Ukraine joins the alliance, Russia could face the possibility of American troops, and potentially nuclear missiles, on the other side of a 1,200-mile land border.”

Here Mr Glover is accepting Russian paranoia, more put-on than real, as a legitimate concern worthy of serious consideration. First, I am not aware of any immediate plans to admit the Ukraine into Nato, as I am aware of some members, notably Poland, staunchly opposing any such development.

And in what way is Nato “breathing down Russia’s neck”? Is Nato some kind of Chimera, described by Homer as “breathing forth in terrible wise the might of blazing fire”? In the good tradition of Soviet propaganda, Mr Glover ignores the facts and then confuses cause and effect.

Nato was created in 1949 to defend Europe from an aggressively hostile power. Had Stalin and his heirs not threatened Europe, Nato wouldn’t exist.

When, after 1991, the credulous West got to believe that the threat had disappeared, Nato’s presence in Europe was reduced. Eastern Europe, however, wouldn’t be tricked quite so easily – its experience of Russian history was, unlike Mr Glover’s, first-hand.

When power in Russia passed on to the KGB (84 per cent of the Putin administration and much of Yeltsyn’s made their bones in that, history’s most murderous, organisation), they knew what that meant. Hence they begged to be admitted to Nato, to thwart Putin’s declared aim of reversing what he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20^th century” (meaning the disintegration of the Soviet empire and not, for example, the two world wars).

Even then, the western Nato members only deployed, at most, a few hundred troops anywhere near the Russian border. That symbolic presence only began to be beefed up after Russia’s 2014 aggression against the Ukraine. The more aggressive did Russia become, the more determined Western resistance (more in word than in deed).

A dose of anti-Americanism is unavoidable in such articles, and Mr Glover doesn’t disappoint: “It seems that, not for the first time, we are too beholden to America, which has driven the expansion of Nato and the encirclement of Russia.”

That’s exactly the line taken by Putin’s propagandists, and Soviet ones before that. Russia is encircled by enemies, which justifies her pouncing on her neighbours like a rabid dog. Actually, only five Nato countries border on Russia, covering just about six per cent of the country’s perimeter. That hardly amounts to encirclement, does it?

Mr Glover also echoes Putin’s lies about the nature of the present conflict, with the Ukraine merely providing a battleground for the clash between Russia and the US. This is a fight in which Britain, according to Mr Glover, has no dog.

After all, Russia poses no “existential threat to the West”, because “the Russian economy, smaller than Italy’s, is desperately vulnerable”. The first part of that statement is incorrect; the second, irrelevant.

A plausible scenario could unfold along these lines: Russia, encouraged by Mr Glover’s ethnic approach to geopolitics, annexes Narva in Estonia, a Nato member. That should activate Article 5 of the Nato Charter, saying that an attack on one member is an attack on all.

If Nato acted accordingly, that would spell an immediate “existential threat” to all of us. If Nato ignored its Charter, the threat would merely be deferred. Nato would effectively disband, with the system of collective security going the same way. If that wouldn’t constitute an existential threat, I don’t know what would.

As to the size of Russia’s economy, that would only come into play in case of a long war of attrition – and perhaps not even then. What’s critical isn’t a country’s riches but her concentration of her economic and moral resources in the military area.

A country with a GDP of £10 trillion that spends £1 trillion on defence will be outgunned by a country that spends £2 trillion even though her GDP is only £5 trillion. And a country prepared to take millions of casualties has a definite edge over one for which any such losses are unthinkable.

Mr Glover has to be commended for dreading the possibility of war. However, he must be rebuked for believing that adopting a supine posture of pacifist surrender is the best way of achieving that laudable purpose.

As a champion of “historical perspective”, he ought to refresh his memory on what a similar strategy achieved in 1938. And as a commentator, he should really take his cue not from Hitchens but from Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war.

Fishmonger chain Wright Brothers has commissioned a poll to find out how much its customers know about its product.

The results yet again emphasise the superlative quality of British education. For example, about a third of respondents think that Salman Rushdie is a fish dish, presumably served with chips. (That means, among other things, that they can’t spell ‘salmon’.)

Nearly 20 per cent think prawn cocktail is an alcoholic drink. And 30 per cent think sushi is a fish, though different from Salman Rushdie.

Some 20 per cent refuse to wade through British waters for fear of encountering great white sharks. Those fish are indeed scary but, since they prefer sunnier climes, Britons have more to fear from their own government.

Half of respondents don’t know that mullet is a fish, not just a hairstyle. To my shame, I find myself in the other half, those who know the former but not the latter. About the same proportion are unaware that dogfish actually exists (though fishdog doesn’t) and that fish have noses.

Still, perhaps I was too rash in accusing our huddled masses of ignorance. After all, fish has nothing to do with either first causes or last things. Perhaps, the same people who claim to have tucked into their Salman can’t be bothered about such trivialities.

Perhaps, just perhaps, they skip ichthyology to bury themselves in such seminal subjects as theology, philosophy, counterpoint… No, scratch that thought. I’m sure those same respondents have no clue what theology and philosophy are, and they probably think counterpoint is a knitting technique.

While we are on the subject of pathetic ignorance, I can’t help noticing the abundance of malapropisms in our football commentary, both oral and written.

And please don’t tell me that mocking footballers for their English is hardly sporting. I know that. It’s just that, as a lifelong student (and occasional teacher) of English, I can’t help myself. It’s some kind of Pavlovian reflex.

Thus, Rio Ferdinand, ex-footballer turned commentator, was disappointed in the performance of his former team, Manchester United (who could barely draw with the team currently in last place).

They played well in the first half, but not in the second, which upset their former star. “It wasn’t the performance you want to see; a wholesome performance over 90 minutes,” he sighed.

Oh well, an easy mistake to make, we’ve all done it. It’s that misleading ‘whole’ business, which should really mean ‘from start to finish’. Alas, when you add ‘some’ to it, it doesn’t.

‘Wholesome’ describes a combination of mental, moral and physical health, a sort of state Juvenal described as mens sana in corpore sano. Did Rio study Latin at school? By the sound of him, he didn’t even study English.

Speaking of language, I was amused at the ignorance of our Russian correspondents. One would think that intimate familiarity with the Russian language and ethos should be a job requirement.

Yet they were baffled by a line uttered by Putin at the joint press conference with Macron. When the subject of the Minsk Accords came up, a reporter pointed out that the Russians violate them so regularly that the Accords are for all practical purposes invalid.

“Like it or not, my beauty, you have to put up with it,” replied Putin, which line, rhymed in Russian, confused our pundits. Some guessed he was referring to the Ukraine as ‘a beauty’, but they didn’t know why.

Others, probably prompted by their Russophone colleagues, wrote that this “kind of language… attempts to justify rape”. It doesn’t. The phrase nravitsia, ne nravitsia, spi moia krasavitsa refers to necrophilia, not rape.

On second thoughts, since a corpse can’t by definition give consent, perhaps the difference is slight. The point is that Putin used a catchphrase known to every Russian.

It comes from a chastushka, one of the four-line rhymes that originated in the villages. However, at some time in the sixties the urban intelligentsia got hold of the genre, producing thousands of ditties, mostly obscene, taking the mickey out of, well, everything – including the genre itself and its original practitioners.

The closest English equivalent is the limerick, but with one salient difference. Some limericks are more popular than others, but none of them is universally known. Thus a British politician can’t expect to be widely understood if he adorned his address with the last line of a popular limerick: “And instead of coming he went”.

Some of you may know the whole (wholesome?) thing, but I’m willing to bet some of you don’t. Yet most Russians would have no trouble identifying the provenance of Putin’s gag: chastushkas have a much wider reach than limericks.

The one he quoted is about a chap copulating (the original uses a more robust word) with the corpse of his dead girlfriend, which puts the last two lines into context. This rhyme has most Russians in stitches, something that outlanders are incapable of understanding.

I’ve been trying for the better part of 40 years to convert Penelope to this type of poetry, but in vain. I’ve even translated some chastushkas in rhyme and metre, which labour of love has been rewarded by a polite smile at best. Might as well give up now.

The question remains whether or not the president of a nuclear superpower should make such references in public. What’s permitted at home, over a bottle shared with friends, sounds like extreme vulgarity and crassness when used at a summit press conference.

But who says a KGB officer has to be a nuanced stylist? I wouldn’t even suggest it – any more than I’d insist that Rio Ferdinand learn the meaning of ‘wholesome’.  

Newton found that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Yet even he didn’t grasp the full ramifications of his discovery.

Newton thought his law applied only to the physics of motion. Yet its implications reach further than that, all the way to culture, civilisation, social interactions – life in general.

Thus fascism intensifies anti-fascism, modernism fosters classicism – and woke totalitarianism forces resisters to go to the other extreme.

The more wokers of the world are united in their urge to shove homosexuality or anti-racism down people’s throats, the more likely some people will be to use pejorative terms describing the protected groups.

It’s in this context that one should view the hysterical brouhaha about the comedian Jimmy Carr and one of the jokes he cracked in his concert streamed on Netflix.

Jimmy is arguably one of our best stand-ups and definitely one of the most successful. Part of his appeal derives from the shock value of his humour. He wants his audiences to gasp, look furtively around them and only then laugh.

The shocks he causes slide up the Richter scale in direct proportion to the strength of the original tremors. A joke about cannibalism wouldn’t shock cannibals as much as it would a group of vegans aggressively promoting their diet.

Some of Carr’s jokes are hilarious, some (well, most) are in deliciously bad taste, some aren’t especially funny. But I believe that any artist should be judged on his best work. Thus Mozart is a genius not because he wrote Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, but because he composed, among numerous other masterpieces, the Jupiter Symphony and the Piano Concertos in A Major and D Minor.

Without in any way drawing a parallel between Mozart and Jimmy, when the latter is good, he’s very good. But yes, when he isn’t so good, he makes one wince rather than laugh.

The joke that caused such an outburst of ire went like this: “When people talk about the Holocaust, they talk about the tragedy and horror of six million Jewish lives being lost to the Nazi war machine. But they never mention the thousands of gypsies that were killed by the Nazis. No one ever wants to talk about that, because no one ever wants to talk about the positives.”

I find this joke mildly funny, though Penelope doesn’t. Unlike me, she was properly brought up and hence is reluctant to offend people. I, on the other hand, grew up in Russia, which is to say on the wrong side of the tracks. My jokes are often similar to Jimmy’s, if delivered with considerably less panache and sense of timing.

Yet both she and I had our mothers use gypsies as the bogeymen to scare us with: “If you are a bad boy [girl, in Penelope’s case], the gypsies will come and get you.” It’s on that perception that Jimmy’s joke was built.

Gypsies, to be fair, aren’t the only Holocaust victims Jimmy sees as a fit butt of his jokes (“They say there’s safety in numbers. Tell that to the six million Jews.”). Christianity, especially Catholicism, is another one of his frequent targets. (“If we are all children of God, what’s so special about Jesus?” Or, “When I was a boy, my priest told me ‘When you masturbate, God is watching you.’ I asked, ‘Is he a paedophile too, Father?’”)

Do I find such jokes in bad taste? Yes, definitely. Do I feel offended? Not at all. I make allowances for the context, the intent and the genre. Having done that, I may wince but I won’t be compelled to seek legal or legislative recourse.

After all, even Jesus Christ forgave those who mocked him. All they were commanded to do was stay off the subject of the Holy Ghost: “And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”

Yet we are supposed to be undergoing a constant progress in everything, including morality. The morality preached by Christ is oh so yesterday. We have a new, much more exacting morality, according to which anyone is entitled to feel offended and then seek retribution.

Hence Mr Carr is accused of endorsing the Holocaust, though his detractors still don’t charge him with killing those Gypsies personally.

A petition, called The Genocide of Roma is Not a Laughing Matter, has so far collected signatures of 16,000 people who feel duty-bound to feel mortally offended. The government, in its turn, feels duty-bound to censure anyone who offends anyone.

Dame Melanie Dawes, Chief Executive of the media regulator Ofcam, insisted that Netflix remove the offensive clip from the broadcast, though she stopped just short of demanding that Jimmy Carr be publicly eviscerated.

And Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries thundered that sites airing such offensive material should be held to account, with their owners possibly facing prison terms. She is pushing through a restrictive media bill, and culprits like Mark Zuckerberg have been put on notice.

As I’m writing this after a rather liquid lunch, I feel mellow and accommodating. Hence I’m willing to accept that Carr’s joke has caused some real – as opposed to put-on – damage.

Yet his joke was to a large extent a reaction to what I call glossocracy, a tyranny that imposes its despotic rule by controlling what people say as a way of controlling what they think and ultimately do. If you don’t like ‘glossocracy’, how about ‘woke fascism’?

That’s what’s destroying the last vestiges of our ethos, its cultural, social and political aspects. Things have got so bad that even fundamentally ‘liberal’ people like Jimmy Carr feel they must fight back. Their reaction is nowhere as strong as the action that caused it, but at least they are trying.

More power to them, I say. The real, irreparable damage is being done not by off-colour jokes, but by singular nouns followed by plural pronouns, by diktats on unisex lavatories, homomarriage and the delights of transsexuality, by sermons of socialist medicine, by kindergarten courses in advanced condom studies, by champions of ‘music’ that is in fact an anti-musical cult ritual with strong Satanic overtones.

Theirs is the action; ours, merely a reaction. But if we don’t react as vigorously as they act, it’s curtains for our civilisation – not just for Jimmy Carr’s performances. Newton’s third law must not be repealed.

Even as I write, Manny Macron is talking to Putin in the Kremlin, trying to avert war. A man of far-reaching intellect, Manny knows that this peace mission can only succeed if an equitable balance is found between the interests of both Russia and the rest of the world.

Russia’s, or more specifically Putin’s grievance is, according to Manny, not getting enough respect. Manny doesn’t specify what it is about Putin that’s truly respectable. As far as he is concerned, that’s self-evident.

Putin’s problem, as diagnosed by Manny, is the trauma of not being loved. Perhaps all he needs is a hug – although I don’t think Manny is in Russia strictly to administer this well-known deterrent to aggression.

As he himself explains, “We must protect our European brothers by offering a new balance that can preserve their sovereignty and peace. At the same time this has to be done while respecting Russia and understanding its modern traumas…

“The security and sovereignty of Ukraine or any other European state cannot be a subject for compromise, while it is also legitimate for Russia to pose the question of its own security.”

So it’s not just psychological trauma. Russia also has legitimate security concerns. What if those beastly Ukies, supported by the 82d Airborne, British paras, the French Foreign Legion and the Wehrmacht sweep across the border? The way Napoleon and Hitler did? Harrowing thought, that.

Anyway, I was about to write a cutting, factual and well-reasoned retort, when I realised there was no need. The job has already been done by Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the All-Russian Officers’ Assembly.

I don’t think the good general is a household name for many of my readers, but he has been one of Russia’s top commanders for decades. And throughout that time he hasn’t been exactly known as a dove weaned on the milk of human kindness and pacifism.

Gen. Ivashov is the hawkiest hawk ever to fly across the firmament. He is a confirmed Stalinist, whose feelings about all ethnic groups other than simon-pure Russians aren’t always informed by a commitment to internationalism and racial equality.

Nor is he a friend of the United States. In fact, Gen. Ivashov has on numerous occasions stated that his dearest wish is, and Russia’s strategy should be, to ensure that Canada is separated from Mexico by “the Stalin Strait”, which geographical rearrangement wouldn’t bode well for the inhabitants of the land currently occupying that space.

And it’s this worthy individual who issued a petition on behalf of the Officers’ Assembly, demanding Putin’s resignation. This document makes my efforts superfluous in any capacity other than that of a translator.

Though it pains me to say this, Gen. Ivashov’s reading of the situation is rather different from Manny’s. Perhaps he’s too close to the problem to be as objective as Manny, and neither does he have the benefit of education in France’s grandes écoles. One way or the other, here’s what he wrote:

“What exactly threatens the existence of Russia, and do such threats exist? One can confidently state that they do – the country is facing the end of her history. All the vital areas of life, including the demography, are steadily degenerating, and the population is dying out at a record-breaking speed…

“This, we believe, is the main threat to the Russian Federation. But this is an internal threat, springing from the state’s model, the quality of its governance and the social situation. The threat has appeared for internal reasons: invalid model of the state, complete incompetence and unprofessionalism of the system of government and management, the passivity and inertia of society…

“The situation escalating around the Ukraine is artificial, reflecting the venality of certain internal forces, including those in the RF. As a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, in which Russia (Yeltsyn) played a decisive role, the Ukraine has become an independent state, a UN member that, according to Article 51 of the UN Charter, has the right to individual and collective defence.

“It is natural that, for the Ukraine to remain Russia’s friendly neighbour, Russia should have set an example of an attractive state model and system of government. That has not been done.

“Using military force against the Ukraine will, first, bring into question the very existence of the Russian state and, second, will for ever turn Russians and Ukrainians into mortal enemies.

“We, Russian officers, demand that the president of Russia abandon his criminal policy of provoking a war in which Russia will find herself alone against the united forces of the West – and that he create conditions for complying in practice with Article 3 of the RF Constitution and resign.”

If you aren’t intimately familiar with the Russian constitution, Article 3 specifies that all sovereign power belongs to the people and: “Nobody may usurp power in the Russian Federation. The seizure of power or usurpation of State authority shall be prosecuted under federal law.”

Contextually, one can infer that Gen. Ivashov and the Officers’ Assembly in general believe that Putin is in breach of Article 3. Because he has seized power and usurped state authority he must resign and face prosecution under federal law.

One has to conclude that Gen. Ivashov and his brother officers are virulent Russophobes and paid agents to the CIA, MI6 and Mossad. This conclusion is inescapable for anyone who sees the situation unfolding in Eastern Europe in the terms set by Messrs Macron, Zemmour and Hitchens.

P.S. Every couple of years someone puts my photograph on Facebook. Since it invariably draws more ‘likes’ than my articles, I have to think I missed my true calling. I should have become a male model, rather than a writer. Perhaps it’s still not too late to re-train.