Month: February 2022

Don’t get me wrong: as the last general election showed, people are happy to vote for Tory politicians. They just won’t vote for Tory politics.

Successful politicians sense this because they all come with a weathercock attached. They know which way the wind is blowing even if they know nothing else.

Hence, from John Major’s tenure as prime minister (1990-1997) onwards, Conservative politicians, keeping their noses to the wind, have clearly felt that they must out-Labour Labour if they want to rise to high office.

And you know the scary thing? They may well be right.

I’ve been struggling with this realisation for years, which led to this passage in How the West Was Lost, written in the early days of Tony Blair:

“Alan Clark, the late Conservative politician cum pundit, attempted to help by offering in a Daily Telegraph article of a few years ago that ‘Thatcherism is in, and of, the past’, and ‘the Friedmanite orthodoxies… were never entirely accepted.

“‘Almost lost to sight,’ he continued, ‘remain the three principal functions of the state: to ensure that its citizens are secure, that they are gainfully employed, and that they are enlightened.’

“Of the Three Functions According to Alan, the first is another word for social conscience, the glossocratic for socialism; the second is another word for wholesale nationalisation (the only way for a state to ‘ensure’ total employment), the glossocratic for socialism; the third is another word for ‘free’ education, wherein the government makes us pay through the nose for the illiterate nonsense pumped into our children’s minds. That, too, is the glossocratic for socialism.

“The three functions of the state can thus be reduced to one: being socialist. Therefore Clark’s Conservative Party must become, if it is not already, as socialist as New Labour but not quite so socialist as Old Labour, and then one day it may win another election in the name of conservatism…”

I’d love to claim prophetic powers, but this was written immediately after John Major left public life. Therefore the passage was more in the nature of reportage than prophecy.

For, immediately after moving his family photographs into 10 Downing Street, Mr Major, as he then was, swore his commitment to turning Britain into a “classless society”. That desideratum isn’t just mildly socialist or quasi-socialist. It’s downright Marxist.

For any large group (and most of even small ones) arranges itself in hierarchical sub-groups. In due course these sub-groups invariably acquire their own aesthetics, philosophies, general ways of looking at the world and themselves in it.

Since such is human nature, any attempt to create a classless society has to involve breaking up the natural order with wholesale violence. The existing social pyramid must be truncated to within millimetres of its base, with both the middle and upper classes obliterated.

Yet countries that tried this little exercise found out that it was still impossible to turn society into a horizontal, rather than vertical, structure. The social pyramid just wouldn’t go away. It would simply regenerate, with different human types moving up to the top and replacing the massacred millions.

Even Marx treated a classless, communist society pretty much the way Christians treat the Second Coming: as the end of earthly development. Man would no longer travel; he would have arrived. Such is God’s law according to Christ and historical law according to Marx.

Neither believed that the blissful end could be achieved by immediate action, especially political. Both insisted that man must first undergo inner changes, modifying his sinful nature to live down the heritage of original sin (Christians) or exposure to Christendom (Marx).

Major, on the other hand, seemed to believe that a classless society was an achievable objective within his seven-year tenure. ‘Seemed’ is the operative word here. For Sir John, as he now is, is a man of… how shall I put it charitably… understated intellect. That shortcoming usually means that the person finds it hard to use words precisely. Thus he probably meant not ‘classless’ but ‘equal-opportunity’, though that isn’t very clever either.

The only places where genuinely equal opportunities exist are prisons. In conditions of even minimal freedom, people will either be propelled forwards or held back by their abilities, families, upbringing, education and so on. What chaps like Major can’t understand or refuse to accept is that none of those can be equalised across the board.

Any attempt to do so would be identical to the truncation trick above. All families would have to be equally impoverished, all schools equally dumbed-down, all inherited wealth equally confiscated. For down is the only direction in which political action can try to equalise people – and even then it’ll fail. Human nature can be hidden under a black (or red) shroud, but it will still shine through.

This brings us to today’s ‘Tory’ government. It too is singing from the same hymn sheet – although upon closer examination those pages contain not hymns but excerpts from Das Kapital.

The main theme is the same classless society so beloved of John Major, but with a variation. Since today’s lot are marginally cleverer and much better educated, they try to avoid manifestly idiotic usages. ‘Classless society’ is one such, so they expressed it differently, as ‘levelling up’.

Yet the only way a government can level up is by not levelling down. It can only improve the economy by not damaging it. And one doesn’t have to boast an Oxbridge degree in economics (in fact, it’s imperative that one shouldn’t be weighed down by that ballast) to know how the government can bring the economy to its knees.

High taxation, rapacious and therefore inflationary public spending, inordinate growth in money supply, tight regulations – such are the anti-economy weapons in the state’s arsenal. And these are the weapons our ‘Tory’ government is firing in a steady barrage.

Last September Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Levelling Up. Undeterred by his recent divorce (I’ve heard some interesting gossip about its reasons, but I’m not in the gossip business), Mr Gove never misses a beat in his Marxist tune.

Speaking to MPs recently, he defined his objective as “to shift wealth and power decisively to working people”. This shows laudable honesty: since Mr Gove knows that his remit is Marxist in essence, he expresses it in Marxist terms.

No subterfuge, no attempt to hide behind the smokescreen of ‘equal opportunities’, ‘levelling up’ or ‘restoring regional balance’. Power to the people, and workers of the world unite, pure and simple.

If our ‘Tories’ aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting to the left of Labour. People may then vote for Keir Starmer, perceiving him as a sensible alternative to the loony left, aka Tories.

There are signs already that many Tory MPs would prefer Sir Keir to Johnson. That’s why they’ve pounced on Johnson for his remark about Starmer, in his earlier capacity of Director of Public Prosecutions, refusing to prosecute the paedophile Jimmy Savile.

Most resignations from Number 10 and most letters of no confidence from Tory MPs are supposed to have been inspired by that little ad hominem. This, though Starmer’s tenure in that office was by far the most subversive one in history, Savile or no Savile.

No, it’s those weathercocks again. The Tories sense which way the political wind is blowing, and act accordingly. Or perhaps they like their socialism neat, undiluted with quasi-Tory phraseology that they know means nothing.   

Inflation is spinning out of control. So are energy costs. Interest rates are going up. Growth is heading in the opposite direction, with the standard of living manfully keeping up with this plummet.

All in all, the situation is worse than it was in 2008, when everyone was screaming bloody murder and catastrophic crisis. These days everyone would rather talk about prosecco parties at Number 10. (Can’t those spivs afford champagne, for heaven’s sake?)

Our government is profoundly corrupt, in all the wrong ways. That’s not to say that there are right ways to be corrupt – there aren’t. But while some corruption is peripheral, only offending our moral sense, some is fundamental, undermining the core business of governance.

The first kind includes fiddling expenses, pushing through a bill favouring a friend, ignoring restrictions they themselves imposed, bestowing posts and honours for ulterior motives. It’s all sleazy, dishonest and self-serving, but it can’t damage the country in any substantial sense.

By contrast, the second kind, fundamental corruption, can destroy the country, not just damage it. All our post-war governments confirm this observation, more or less. Perhaps Thatcher’s tenure could be exempt, although that’s debatable.

What’s not debatable is that all subsequent administrations have been falling over themselves trying to administer lethal injections to Her Majesty’s realm. The current administration is making a good fist of it too.

It calls itself Conservative, but I can’t think offhand of any Labour government more committed to runaway statism, that hallmark of socialism. To be fair, the Johnson administration was hit by the force majeure of Covid, which necessitated some governmental activism.

Its handling of the pandemic was heavy-handed, perhaps unnecessarily so. But one could argue that under those circumstances overreaction was better than no reaction at all.

Yes, practically shutting the economy down for the better part of two years was ill-advised. But I can’t in good conscience blame the government for its mild case of hysteria – I’m not sure I myself would have been able to keep my sangfroid under those circumstances.

But I definitely blame the Johnson administration for exacerbating the consequences of the pandemic – nay, multiplying them tenfold.

Covid or no Covid, Johnson’s two pet projects, levelling up and net zero emissions, would put the economy under intolerable stress. But pushing on with them at this time is criminally irresponsible, borderline suicidal.

This, even if Johnson genuinely believes that the economic North-South divide can be erased by political action, or that fossil fuels must be phased out within a decade because they destroy ‘our planet’.

The second belief is patently unscientific. All Johnson would have to do is look at the carbon content in the atmosphere (one-eighteenth) and the manmade proportion of it (three per cent). Next he should look at the climatic effects of solar activity, the Earth’s orbit in relation to other planets, tectonic shifts, oceanic and volcanic activity, and thousands of other factors affecting climate.

Then he’d know the whole global-warming theory for the pernicious swindle it is. But he has neither the mind nor, more important, the character to go against the grain of woke orthodoxies, especially those championed by his henpecking wife.

As to the levelling up nonsense, it’s not conservative and therefore not sensible. Markets are like some wild animals; they don’t reproduce, or in this case produce, in captivity. The government should be only the referee, not a player, in the economic game.

This has been known since at least the 18^th century, and not only to professional economists like Smith. Thus, for example, Burke: “The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.”

The examples of aggressively statist economies, none of which has ever succeeded, turn that observation into empirical fact. Another fact, firmly established by experience, is that a government can’t tax its way out of trouble.

When the economy has been dug into a hole, the government should stop digging. That means lowering the taxes to remove, or at least loosen, the yoke they have placed on the nation’s economic neck.

Yet the Johnson administration is doing exactly the opposite. It’s ratcheting up the taxes to administer a coup de grâce to an economy already writhing in pain on the ground. What would be foolhardy at any time is nothing short of criminal in our current situation.

Johnson takes pride in his green credentials, the really pornographic part of the Carrie On film in which he co-stars. The damage he (and the previous governments) is causing goes way beyond economic suicide. It’s also geopolitical self-harming.

For energy isn’t just an economic resource. It’s also a strategic one. Any self-respecting country must strive to be as self-sufficient as possible in securing an uninterrupted supply of strategic resources, especially energy.

Yet not only does Johnson embark on a patently ridiculous campaign to replace domestic fossil fuels with the notoriously fickle sun and wind, but he wants to do it so fast as to guarantee Britain’s dependence on foreign producers of hydrocarbons.

That makes Britain an easy mark for blackmail on the part of those hydrocarbon producers who are our avowed enemies. No, I don’t mean France, although she isn’t acting as a devoted friend. I mean Putin’s Russia, to whose aggression we can’t respond with sufficient vigour for fear of freezing in the dark.

I realise that Johnson and his jolly friends aren’t committing high treason in the technical definition of the term. But what they are committing is tantamount to the worst kind of treachery: they are denuding the country’s defences against both economic and political cataclysms.

As Richard Weaver argues in his 1948 book, ideas have consequences. These days, Westerners in general and Britons in particular find it hard to realise this.

Due to a combination of economic greed and geopolitical myopia, the West has turned both Russia and especially China into global superpowers able to challenge us on every terrain in every part of the globe. Neither country would have been able to do so without the massive influx of Western technology, knowhow and capital.

Russia’s oil and gas production, for example, would be barely sufficient for domestic needs without Western (not exclusively American) exploration, drilling and production technology, and the transfer of the relevant equipment.

Apart from our thirst for immediate and potential superprofits, we have proceeded from the philistine fallacy that every nation is either already like us at heart or desperately wishes to be.

Yet, had we started from the general (and therefore un-British) understanding that nations governed by the KGB (Russia) or communists (China) are evil regardless of the liberal noises they may make, we would have thought a thousand times before building those evil states up to their position of geopolitical prominence.

And now the two evil states are forming an anti-Western axis, with one of them giving Britain a stark choice: either beggar yourself with soaring energy costs or play ball. Johnson’s (or is it the Johnsons’?) energy, and general economic, policy doesn’t just turn Britain into an easy target. It’s practically inviting our enemies to hit it.

Virtue signalling has its price, which is especially steep when there is no real virtue to signal. And now by all means let’s talk about that prosecco.

A vile drink, if you ask me, but that’s neither here nor there.

When rats begin to flee, it’s usually a good indication that the ship is sinking. This homespun wisdom is a useful introduction to the well-orchestrated resignation of five top aides to Boris Johnson.

One, Munira Mirza, No10’s head of policy, has been Johnson’s close lieutenant for 14 years, since his mayoral tenure in London. Her hubby-wubby, Dougie Smith, is also a key Downing Street aide, and has been under three consecutive PMs, so he is unlikely to stay for much longer either.

Miss Mirza’s flight is especially damaging. As one of her colleagues commented, “Munira isn’t so much a stab in the back as a big fucking beheading.” That may be, but Mr and Mrs Smith helpfully illustrate the title of this piece.

Dougie brought to Tory politics his invaluable experience in business. The business in which he garnered invaluable experience was called Fever Parties. Its line of work was organising orgies for London’s so-called ‘fast set’ in Mayfair townhouses, with over 50 couples as happy customers.

Dougie has reassured doubters that his business and political endeavours didn’t “overlap”. I’m not so sure about that – he may not be giving himself full credit. Of course, had he had a prior career as a male hooker, the overlap would be even more complete.

Far be it from me to throw the first stone at a man who tries to stay afloat in our dog-eat-dog world. I’m merely observing that, unless I’m very much mistaken, Messrs Macmillan, Douglas Home and Powell, to name just a few, got into Conservative politics by slightly different paths. Worth further study, that, along with Lady Thatcher’s young years.

Dougie’s wife Munira presents an even more interesting case. Her boss Boris once described her as “capable of being hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”, and he didn’t mean it pejoratively.

Now, all my good friends and most of my social acquaintances are lower-case conservatives who vote for the upper-case Conservative Party (the typographic detail points at a fundamental difference). Yet neither they nor I have ever described anyone in that fashion, not without adding expletives at any rate. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have we ourselves ever merited such modifiers.  

I’m not holding myself and this pre-selected group up as exemplars of conservative virtue. Nor am I casting aspersion on people who are “hip, cool, groovy and generally on trend”. It’s just that those fine qualities aren’t readily associated with conservatism, however you spell it.

Neither is Munira’s CV, if I’m being totally honest. She started her political career as a communist, and I don’t mean this as a general term of abuse describing lefties. Munira was an active full-fledged member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.

In that capacity she regularly contributed to the party’s Living Marxism magazine. When the group dissolved, its core formed the Spiked website, where she too was a bright spark. She also studied for a PhD at Kent University under the professor who had co-founded the RCP.

Thence the mystery began. Munira, along with other RCP staffers, rank communist each, effortlessly floated into the Conservative Party, specifically its Eurosceptic wing. Just four years after that redemptive Damascene experience, Miss Mirza became Mr Johnson’s trusted aid, which trust she betrayed yesterday.

(I remember talking to Gerard Batten, when he was the leader of UKIP. The party should broaden its appeal, I suggested, positioning itself as a real conservative alternative. Gerard smiled ruefully. Far from all eurosceptics are conservatives, he explained. How right he was.)

Being by nature a forgiving sort, I’d have nothing against Conservatives extending a warm welcome to ex-communists. Except that I don’t believe any such thing exists.

When a fully sentient adult, which I assume a PhD candidate must be, remains a communist, that’s a point of no return. An educated woman being a communist activist (not just a passive fellow traveller) in her mid-twenties has to believe in the advisability of murdering millions and enslaving everyone else in pursuit of an evil ideology.

That belief can only spring from an evil emotional predisposition, not ratiocination with its careful weighing of intellectual pros and cons. And unlike ideas, one’s emotional make-up can’t be changed.

(I remember trying to explain this simple idea some 40 years ago to my son, who at that time worshipped Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Soviet spy who had seen the light. The little boy was appalled, a state in which he has remained ever since.)

Yet even if you reject such uncompromising bloody-mindedness, you’ll have to agree with the title above. Conservatism just ain’t what it used to be.

P.S. On a parallel subject, some of our conservative columnists refuse to fall out of love with Putin who, they insist, only murders people all over the world because we’ve treated him without sufficient respect. (I’m so vague on the identities because some readers take exception to my ad hominems against Peter Hitchens.) I wonder what they’ll make of this news.

U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor Jonathan Finer has cited intelligence reports showing the Russians are setting up a mother of all false-flag ops. They are preparing a fabricated video of an explosion perpetrated on a Russian town by dastardly Ukrainians.

The video “would involve actors playing mourners for people who are killed in an event that they [Russia] would have created themselves… [and] deployment of corpses to represent bodies purportedly killed.”

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said disdainfully that similar allegations had been made before, and nothing like that had ever happened. I detect causality there. Can it be that such plans never came to fruition specifically because they had been exposed beforehand? Just asking.

I’m disappointed in my former countrymen though. Do they have to rip off the Nazis’ 1939 Gleiwitz op in every detail? Can’t they think of something new?

Syria, which has killed half a million of its own citizens? No. Iran, which executes protesters? Guess again.

China, which keeps whole ethnic groups in concentration camps? Not even close. North Korea, which is one giant concentration camp? You’re still cold.

Russia, which poisons dissidents like rats, but with stronger substances than rat poison? And which imprisons thousands on trumped-up charges and then tortures and rapes them in prisons? Getting colder.

Belarus, which is even worse? Freezing cold. Kazakhstan, whose chosen response to demonstrations is the command to fire at will? That’s it, no more guesses. You failed.

According to Amnesty International, the most egregious offender is the “apartheid state” of Israel. And she can get into AI’s good books only by committing national suicide.

Such are the conclusions to be drawn from AI’s report that devoted 211 pages to exposing the beastliness of the Jewish state. In fact, as far as AI is concerned, the very fact that it is indeed constituted as a Jewish state exposes its evil nature.

To satisfy the exacting requirements AI applies to human rights, Israel should fling her doors wide open to admit “millions of Palestinians”, meaning Arabs (Israeli Jews have nothing to do with Palestine, and never mind the Old Testament or history books).

This is the exact wording: “Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who were displaced in the 1947-49 and 1967 conflicts, continue to be denied the right to return to their former places of residence. Israel’s exclusion of refugees is a flagrant violation of international law which has left millions in a perpetual limbo of forced displacement.”

For the sake of balance, it would have been nice to remind grateful readers of the nature of the two conflicts that had such dire consequences. In both cases, Arab states joined forces to “drive Israel into the sea”, which is another way of saying “killing every Jew there”.

To the victor the spoils and all that. If the Arabs had the military skills to match their fanatical hatred of Jews, not a single Israeli would have survived. As it was, the Jewish state lived on and even managed to create a little buffer protecting itself from its murderous neighbours.

It’s true that Israel tries “to minimise the Palestinian presence and access to land” within its borders, and I’m sure the Israelis are mortified at AI’s rebuke of that iniquity. And they are even more heartbroken about their inability to correct the injustice while still remaining a Jewish state where Jews won’t be massacred.

As it is, there are 1,900,000 Arabs in Israel, about 21 per cent of the population. They enjoy greater political liberties than Arabs do in any other country of the Middle East, and in fact the Arab party is a key member of Israel’s ruling coalition.

That’s not good enough, says AI. Israel “must recognise the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations.”

Well, there’s the rub. You see, Israel is a Western-type democracy, the only one in the region. If she were to comply with AI’s demand, the demographic shift would be such that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state.

An Arab-dominated Knesset would vote for some sort of Arab mandate over Greater Palestine, Islamic states would move in, and every Jew slow to flee would be murdered. Who would pay the reparations then? But at least AI would be happy: the cause of human rights would have been served.

“There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalised and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people,” says Agnès Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International. Trying to survive is clearly not a sufficient justification.

Far be it from me to accuse Dr Callamard of anti-Semitism. No doubt she is driven by such noble motives as compassion and a quest for justice. It’s in that spirit that in 2013 she publicly accused Israel of murdering Yasser Arafat. If she genuinely believes that, then the massacre of 8,000,000 Israeli Jews would be fair retribution for the demise of that giant of a man.

Since those objectionable Hebrews refuse to accept the suicide pact, they must be punished accordingly. AI calls for an arms embargo against Israel, and for her leaders to be charged with war crimes.

As for the thousands of rockets ‘Palestinians’ fire at Israeli villages in a steady barrage, the report explains that those poor people are “fighting against occupation”, while “certain excesses on the part of the Palestinian administration and armed groups are not the subject of this report.”

All perfectly objective then, the problem is covered in a reasonable and balanced fashion. The overall style and method of argument fall somewhere between Der Stürmer, c. 1940 and Pravda, c. 1970. Yet the report falls short of those publications in graphic standards.

They both enlivened their coverage of Jewish beastliness with cartoons showing disgusting hook-nosed ghouls devouring their victims. Der Stürmer served its anti-Semitism neat, calling a Jew a Jew, while Pravda preferred the seemingly milder term ‘Zionists’. But the cartoons were the same.

Israel is a human construct and, as such, prone to human folly. We are not in this world blessed with perfect governments or institutions. Hence neither Zionism nor Israel should be off limits for criticism, and I’m sure there is much to criticise there.

Hence it’s wrong to equate such criticism with anti-Semitism. However, a simple empirical observation shows that most people who denounce Israel with sustained vigour are indeed anti-Semites.

As the authors of this Amnesty International diatribe clearly are.   

Those who follow the dialectical development of Russia’s amour propre will be aware of the high regard in which the world is ordered to hold her.

Thus we’ve known since the 16^th century that Russia is the ‘third Rome’, combining the high culture of the first one with the religiosity and spirituality of the second.

That makes her immeasurably superior to the decadent West with its materialism, weak-kneed democracy, atheism, corruption, aggressiveness and overall tendency towards homosexuality.

Such despicable traits are especially blatant among the Anglo-Saxons, who personify every Western vice without offering any compensating virtues. At the moment, the worst Anglo-Saxons are to be found in the US, but Britain is almost as bad, though mercifully not as strong.

We’ve known how vile Britain is since the late 18^th century, when the Russian general Alexander Suvorov summed up the situation with two voluminous Russian words: anglichanka gadit (loosely translated, it means “that English dame always craps on us”). That terse and prescient verdict was passed 60 years before the faecal floodgates were flung wide-open in the Crimea, where a small Anglo-French expeditionary force thrashed the mighty Russian army.

But fine, I get it. Russia is superior to the West, especially its Anglophone part, in every respect. But specifically, what puts Russia on such a high moral and spiritual ground? What exactly makes her unique?

You want specifics, you rotten, decadent, corrupt, materialistic, homosexual Anglo-Saxon viper? Russia’s Ministry of Culture is happy to oblige.

To leave no room for equivocation, that august body has published a new directive, “The foundations of the state policy for the preservation and strengthening of Russia’s spiritual and moral values”.

There you can find exhaustive answers to your mocking questions, chapter and verse. But first the directive issues a word of caution:

“Our traditional values are being threatened by the activities of extremist and terrorist organisations, the USA and her allies, transnational corporations, foreign non-commercial organisations.”

This reminds me of one of those universal advertising headlines that can introduce a plug for any product whatsoever: “What we are not makes us what we are” In theology, this method of identification is called apophatic. In sociology, it’s called inadequate.

Never mind proceeding from the negative. Tell us in unequivocally positive terms what traditional values flourishing within Russia have rotted away in the putrid swamp stinking up the air beyond her western border?

If you thought the Ministry Of Culture would be stymied by such interrogation, you have another think coming. So here goes:

“Such traditional values include: life, dignity, human rights and liberties, patriotism, civic virtues, serving the motherland and feeling responsible for her destiny, high moral ideals, strong family, creative work, priority of the spiritual over the material, humanism, mercy, justice, collectivism, mutual assistance and respect, historical memory and continuity, the unity of all the peoples of Russia.”

I hope this has put you to shame. For the Ministry of Culture specifically talks about preserving such traditional values, rather than developing them. That means those values are already robust and abundant in Russia at present, with only “the USA and her allies” threatening their future out of sheer envy and malice.

While accepting that self-assessment unreservedly, one may still ask for clarification. For example, isn’t there a wee bit of conflict between ‘human rights and liberties’ and ‘collectivism’?

Collectivism, after all, implies pooling personal liberties together, which laudable process has historically led to their diminution. (If you wish to research this subject, the key words to tap into Google are COLLECTIVISATION OF AGRICULTURE, COLLECTIVE FARMS, GOLODOMOR, ARTIFICIAL FAMINE and MASS MURDER).

And since the ‘priority of the spiritual over the material’ is a fact of life, where does it leave ‘creative work’? Does this mean the Russians should work creatively only in such fields as theology, philosophy and high culture, while ignoring creativity and indeed work in vulgar material areas?

These, however, are minor points. Since the Ministry of Culture issued this statement on the official government website, every word there must be true to life. Hence all we can do is thank that body for explaining what Russia is – and what we aren’t.