Month: July 2022

Summing up the research conducted on thousands of patients over decades, Joanna Moncrieff, a professor of psychiatry at University College London, didn’t equivocate.

“We can safely say that after a vast amount of research conducted over several decades,” she said, “there is no convincing evidence that depression is caused by serotonin abnormalities.”

The response came in the shape of triumphant yelps of ‘I told you so’ from many scribes who, well, told you so.

The issue attracted their attention in the first place because pharmaceutical companies have built a mighty industry on the theory that low levels of serotonin in the brain cause depression. Medical schools went along, churning out psychiatrists trained to treat depression with, among other drugs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs).

The most popular of them is Prozac. In the first 15 years after it was licensed to treat depression in the US, Prozac was prescribed to 40 million patients worldwide, generating sales of $22 billion. Now, another 20 years later, SSRIs keep many a pharmaceutical company in lucrative business.

This was bound to attract criticism that the industry is feathering its own nest at the expense of patients’ health. The critics had a point, and now they have every reason to feel vindicated. Yet they tend to oversimplify the issue, which does nobody any good.

It’s true that doctors have been dispensing SSRIs and other antidepressants like Smarties, but the question is why. Why do they continue to prescribe Prozac if they suspect, as many have for years, that it’s no more effective than a placebo?

First, placebo effect is still an effect, and doctors aren’t allowed to prescribe a placebo. When a patient presents with depression, doctors, who seldom have more than a few minutes to spend on each appointment, feel they have to prescribe something, especially if the patient was already used to Prozac.

In many cases, the patients report a positive effect, so neither they nor the doctors feel like delving too deeply into the pharmacological nuances. Especially since no one seems to be able to define the phenomenon of depression with scientific precision.

Regulating authorities divide depression into three stages, mild, moderate and severe. This is dubious, and not just for purely medical reasons.

For mild and moderate depression is often indistinguishable from unhappiness, a word that has largely disappeared from our everyday lexicon. Modern people insist on medicalising everything that displeases them, and certainly lousy moods.

They have been brainwashed to expect happiness as an inalienable right, a natural state of life. That is, of course, a fallacy. Suffering is an essential part of the human condition and, in Christendom, the formative part.

Yet most people these days don’t recognise this because they don’t believe in life everlasting. They believe in a paradise on earth, where suffering is something abnormal – an illness, in other words. And illnesses, except the terminal ones, ought to be treatable with drugs.

In parallel, people have been immersed into a sea of psychobabble, courtesy of Freudian quackery. Deprived of anything supernatural, they try to find something superpersonal within themselves, which is a logical impossibility.

Thus they step on a never-ending path leading to assorted therapeutic charlatans and then on to doctors, who can do everything the charlatans do. But they can also prescribe drugs, and most of them feel it’s churlish to refuse. After all, they too have eaten the poisoned fruits of the same tree.

None of this means that genuine, clinical, depression doesn’t exist. It always has, and in the past this condition was called ‘melancholia’, from the Greek for ‘black bile’ (that’s another extinct word, by the way, outshouted by psychobabble).

Patients presenting with melancholia, which would now be called clinical depression, would be hospitalised for several weeks, with their condition studied from every possible angle. They would then be treated with a combination of therapy, drugs, in the old days mostly those boosting the level of noradrenalin, and, in extreme cases, electric shocks.

The critical thing to keep in mind is that, after all the billions spent on assorted genome projects and decades of the brain, we still know next to nothing about the human brain, hardly more than Greek physicians did in the old days.

One thing we don’t know is what causes depression. But we do know that it can be either exogenous or endogenous. The first is caused by external factors, such as bereavement, loss of a job, Joe Biden as the leader of the free world. The second has no such cause. It’s purely internal. It just is.

Exogenous depression has every chance of being mitigated by that great therapist, time, or else disappear altogether when its cause is no longer there.

Endogenous depression, on the other hand, is definitely a medical condition, and it can be extremely serious – made even more so by our ignorance of its cause. Hence it must be treated, not dismissed as a case of self-indulgence.

If SSRIs work, then it doesn’t matter if they are no more effective than a placebo. If they are effective at all and reasonably well tolerated, few doctors will begrudge a prescription to a stricken patient.

Moreover, though melancholia has always been rare, it’s now rarer still, and mainly because doctors reach out for their prescription pads with nonchalant ease. When patients are treated with SSRIs or other antidepressants the moment the first symptoms appear, the progression of the disease may well be slowed down.

Some 16 per cent of the people in such Western countries as the US, France and Britain are regular users of antidepressants. Somewhere within that inordinately large group are those few whose disease would have become severe had they not started popping those pills, placebo effect or no.

Exogenous depression, however, especially when it falls into the mild-to-moderate area for which SSRIs are indicated, isn’t readily distinguishable from that ever-present scourge of the human condition, unhappiness.

A priest, a friend or simply a stiff drink (Laphroaig is my chosen tipple) ought to provide sufficient therapy in most cases, along with some mental fortitude, good taste and refusal to succumb to perverse modern fads.

Yet it’s true that some people genuinely can’t cope with their unhappiness, and if SSRIs help, then few doctors would – or should – refuse to prescribe them on philosophical or moral grounds.

The problem isn’t with prescribing SSRIs, but with overprescribing. And the critics are absolutely right: mountains of Prozac moved on demand, often without the slightest medical justification, add up to an existential catastrophe – and often to a medical one.

For while the beneficial effects of SSRIs are up for debate, the side effects aren’t. Dr David Healy has been writing about them for years, and his book Let Them Eat Prozac (2006) describes the dangers exhaustively.

One such is that an excessive dose of SSRIs can turn depression into a mania. In fact, SSRI users are disproportionately represented in the ranks of American mass murderers, those who shoot up schools or shopping malls just for the hell of it. And some SSRI patients may become not homicidal but suicidal.

If a drug has any effects, it has side effects, and those of SSRIs can be horrendous. That’s why they should be reserved for genuine medical conditions, not to treat bored housewives who fear that hubby-wubby is playing away from home.

However, dogmatic denunciation of all SSRI scripts is as ill-advised as any extremism. Commentators inclined to this failing grossly oversimplify the issue, as all extremists tend to do. Most of the points they make about SSRIs are valid – but their wholesale conclusions aren’t.

Considering Diana’s history of amorous generosity, it’s to be expected that Harry’s paternity would be up for gossipy debates.

Rumour has it, for example, that she graced King Juan Carlos with her favours during an official royal visit to Spain. Since Diana also met Mandela, whom she worshipped with the fervour of a teenage groupie, could it be that…?

Admittedly, Harry bears a greater facial resemblance to some other putative daddies, such as Captain Hewitt. But, judging by his keynote speech at the UN General Assembly, he is a true heir to Mandela’s spiritual legacy – and far be it from me to put biology before spirituality.

Actually, there was nothing Harry said about that legacy that isn’t repeated every day on the pages of The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian and other similar publications. Such papers form a lay church empowered to canonise secular saints.

Once canonised, a saint is exempt from not only criticism but even honest study. Worshipping genuflection is the only acceptable stance.

Though Harry remained physically upright throughout his speech, he was genuflecting inwardly. He started by sharing an insight into how horrible Mandela must have felt during his 27 years in solitary confinement. The impression Harry conveyed was that St Nelson had suffered a racist injustice.

In fact, the African National Congress, led by Mandela until his 1963 trial and after his 1990 release, was a terrorist Marxist organisation. As such, it was armed and otherwise supported by communist countries, especially Cuba and East Germany.

East German Stasi helped the ANC set up ‘Quatro’, the detention centre across the border in Angola. There dozens of anti-Marxists were tortured and murdered. Many were ‘necklaced’, with a tyre filled with petrol, placed over their necks and set on fire.

In the same spirit of international cooperation, the ANC also received assistance from our own dear IRA. In an arrangement allegedly negotiated by Gerry Adams himself, the IRA sent its bomb-making experts to train aspiring ANC murderers, thereby greatly improving their efficiency.

It was murderous activities that landed Mandela in prison, not his abstract love of justice and freedom. But any mainstream media would be as likely to mention such facts as Al Jazeera would be to announce that there is a God other than Allah, and Mohammad isn’t his prophet.

Harry then mentioned how intimately his work is intertwined with the plight of Africa, presumably referring to his deals with Netflix and Spotify. One wonders how many of the millions he earns there he’ll share with the starving Africans so close to Harry’s heart.

Having thus established a solid base of ANC credentials, Harry struck out globally. Ours, he said, is a “painful year in a painful decade”. The pain comes from a “global assault on democracy and freedom.”

The assailers were identified as Putin’s war in the Ukraine, the US Supreme Court that had “rolled back constitutional rights” and global warming.

In some places, Harry informed us, “water is quite literally rising”. While I tried to figure out the difference between water rising literally and figuratively, Harry pressed on.

“Our world is on fire”, he said, citing the heat wave in Europe as unassailable proof. By the same logic, snow covering parts of Provence this April was proof of an Ice Age. Harry, God bless him, doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate, but he doesn’t let such incidentals hold him back.

Lest we feel despondent and hopeless, Harry then struck an optimistic note: there is an organisation that can save the planet from hellfire and literally rising water: “We must count on the UN”. That “is not up for debate and neither is the science.”

Since global warming is history’s first scientific discovery made not by scientists but by the organisation so dear to Harry’s heart (I mean the UN, not the ANC), he is right to delegate the solution to the same people. They got us into this mess, they should get us out of it.

As to the science not being “up for debate”, I wonder how deeply Harry has studied the issue. Judging by his general education, I suspect everything he knows about science could fit into Meghan’s powder compact, with enough room left for a few grams of coke (considering where they live, I assume they use it).

Yet that’s not a licence to mouth arrant nonsense. Serious scientists not only argue against global warming but debunk it outright for the hoax it is. Over 30,000 American scientists have issued a paper to that effect, which has been kept away from the public by the kind of papers Harry reads.

Instead, he should read the two books on this subject by the Australian climatologist Ian Plimer. Harry probably wouldn’t understand a word of it, but he may at least get the general idea that the science is indeed up for debate.

Little as he appears to know about science, he knows next to nothing about American constitutional history and understands even less. Otherwise he’d know that the Supreme Court’s decision Meghan hates actually affirms constitutional rights, rather than rolling them back.

SCOTUS delegated some of the federal power to the state level, thereby acting in the spirit explained in, among other sources, the Federalist Papers. Before running off at the mouth on such issues, Harry should make a modicum of effort to learn something about them… Oh well, forget it.

Actually, Harry reinforces my belief in heredity, at the same time dispelling rumours about the side of the blanket he was born on. For at exactly the same time, his legal father, Prince Charles, was boasting he had been right all along: a couple of hot days prove climate has been warming up steadily for centuries.

Hence Charles may well be the tree that Harry didn’t fall far from; one can detect faulty genes at work. And of course Harry has his mother’s mind. Diana thought with the organ not originally designed for that purpose, and Harry uses the male equivalent with the same élan.

I shudder at the thought of this man being sixth in the line of accession. Americans are welcome to him, hope they keep Harry there in eternity.

Any conceivable answer to this question will be arbitrary – even one provided by Erik von Kuehnelt-Liddihn (d. 1999), one of the most astute political thinkers in my lifetime.

“For the average person,” wrote the great man, “all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”

Kuehnelt-Liddihn’s books and articles took my intellectual virginity when I found myself in the West as a 25-year-old neophyte. Thus it’s with a sense of loving trepidation that I dare embellish his thought with my own arbitrary offerings.

To that end I crank up the time machine I always keep handy for such eventualities. That device instantly transports me to Paris, circa 1793, and deposits me on a different vehicle, a creaky cart trundling to the Place de la Révolution (Place Louis XV to me then, Place de la Concorde to you now).

There, in the shadow of the guillotine, I am greeted by Charles-Henri Sanson, a professional executioner who decapitated some 3,000 people in a career spanning 40 years. Another minute, and my head too will roll into the red-stained wicker basket.

However, while I still retain the use of it, the same question crosses my mind: When did the rot set in? How could this civilisational calamity become possible? (In reality, my thoughts would have probably turned towards more personal problems, but this is a hypothetical situation.) The question would have been legitimate even though I wouldn’t have had any advance knowledge of either World War.

The trip has been instructive. Having now come back to 2022, my head still topping my neck for the time being, I realise the decay didn’t start with the French Revolution. That event violently pushed the rot to the surface, making it visible to the multitudes. But the rot was already there, eating away at history’s greatest civilisation.

Any social explosion is preceded by social erosion. Revolutions may triumph within a few days, just as Vasily Rozanov described it in 1917 (“Russia faded away in two days, three at the most”). But for a storm to bring a house down, it has to be rickety in the first place.

Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom, was built on the foundations of another revolution, one that started in the outskirts of the Roman Empire during the reign of Tiberius. Unlike all other revolutions, it burst out in people’s minds, not in city squares.

Yet like all revolutions, it proved divisive. Some people joyously marched to the new tune, others plugged up their ears with their index fingers.

This isn’t hard to understand, for most people found the demands of Christianity too onerous. The morality of the Beatitudes sounded like an unreachable ideal, so unreachable that they even refused to try. And most rejected the freedom offered by Christ because, like any other freedom, it came packaged with concomitant responsibility.

This, many felt, was a yoke around their necks. Anyhow, it wasn’t the freedom to pursue salvation they craved but the licence to pursue bread. That’s why, as Chesterton once put it, “The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult – and left untried.”

As a result, many people, and their number grew constantly, cast themselves in the role of resentful pariahs. By the time Christendom reached its peak in the 13^th century, anticlericalism had built up enough capital for the masses to start collecting the interest.

Their seething resentment was ready to strike out, armed with either the broadsword of violence or the rapier of mockery. Both weapons saw the light of day, if not in that order.

Thus the personage of a corrupt, lustful, crooked monk, priest or nun was ever-present in Southern European literature, from Rabelais and Boccaccio to Diderot and Voltaire. The Zeitgeist demanded witty denunciations, and even writers who were themselves devout, such as Boccaccio, had to comply.

Christendom was eventually caught in the two-pronged pincer thrust of post-Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. If the former did its subversive work slowly and by stealth, the latter was fuelled by a febrile revolutionary zeal similar to that of the subsequent French upheaval.

Luther and Calvin should have thought twice before throwing out the baby of ecclesiastical, apostolic Christianity together with the bath water of clerical corruption, graven images, indulgences and the rest. They should have sensed that the West wasn’t strong enough to withstand such a deafening explosion, that the shock waves would never become properly attenuated.

Yet revolutionaries are always driven men, blinkered to everything on the periphery of their tunnel-vision zealotry. Balanced thought, sagacity, foresight, an ability to see how nuances can undermine any idea, regardless of its intrinsic worth – such qualities are alien to revolutionaries of any kind.

By the time the French beheaders were ready to take a wrecking ball to the structure of Christendom, it was already tottering. Its foundations had been eaten away by the termites of Renaissance humanism and Reformation fanaticism, its walls shaken by the American Revolution.

Kuehnelt-Liddihn spent much of his life in the US, where for 35 years he was a columnist at National Review, then the bastion of American conservatism. Perhaps partly for that reason he followed Edmund Burke by denying the American Revolution a place in this subversive continuum.

At the risk of being smitten by a thunderbolt from the conservative heaven, I disagree with both of them. Obviously, the American Revolution was different from its French successor, although it produced a comparable number of victims if we legitimately regard the Civil War as its second act.

But the same strains of civilisational malaise came to the fore there as in France: post-Renaissance humanism, Reformational resentment of ecclesiastical and aristocratic tradition, Enlightenment secularism underpinned by exaggerated faith in human goodness.

Unlike, say, the Bolshevik revolution, the American one appealed not only to the nihilist in man, but also to the philistine. The two types dominate modernity, but neither had any role to play in forming Western civilisation. Both are hostile to it, consciously or otherwise.

The prominence of the philistine in US history made it a prosperous country and, in a world ruled by the philistine, prosperity redeems all sins. But the nihilist isn’t dead there; he is merely dormant.

The signs are he is beginning to rise from his slumber, perhaps to remind Americans that all revolutions are delayed-action bombs. The charges may stay buried in the ground for centuries, but expect a big bang sooner or later.

All this is offered with humble apologies to the spirits of Burke and Kuehnelt-Liddihn. I hope they realise that my disagreements with them in no way diminish the veneration I feel for them both.

London losing its theatres is like Paris losing its Michelin-star restaurants, Venice losing its canals or Amsterdam losing its opium dens (aka coffee shops).

For centuries, people from all over the world have been forming a beeline for the West End, pursing their lips in anticipation of yet another theatrical tour de force. Great English actors of the past, such as Burbage, Garrick and Keene, are still venerated as if they were our contemporaries.

English theatre produced history’s greatest playwright, but Shakespeare didn’t just waft in from thin air. Tall trees don’t grow in the desert – they grow in large forests of shorter trees. Artists are the same: they grow to sublime heights only if the cultural soil is gloriously fertile, with lesser talents sprouting luxuriantly to prop up a genius.

Now that soil has been strewn with coarse-grained salt to destroy the crops and make sure nothing will ever grow there again. The tactic was first used by victorious Roman soldiers thus punishing vanquished Carthage.

For Carthage, read London theatres. And for Roman soldiers, read fascism.

In this context I’m using the word broadly, in the sense of boundless powerlust expressed through wanton destruction driven by conscious innovation. Objectionable here isn’t the noun but the adjective.

That art doesn’t stand still is axiomatic. Today’s composers couldn’t possibly write like Bach, today’s novelists like Fielding, today’s painters would look like silly epigones if they adopted Duccio’s style. The ineluctable logic of art demands innovation.

Any great art represents an organic accumulation of innovations over centuries, if not millennia. Yet not all development is organic. Some was imposed by evildoers whose conscious objective was to destroy, not to create.

Modernism, though not ipso facto wicked, can be easily used to such wicked ends, in politics as well as in art. Fascism is as good a term as any to describe this tendency, with art in this instance imitating politics.

The Italian poet and painter Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (d. 1944) illustrates this point perfectly. For the founder of Futurism merged within his person both artistic and political fascism, thereby emphasising their natural affinity.

A prolific essayist as well as a poet, Marinetti wrote the bible of artistic vandalism, the Futurist Manifesto (1909), and co-authored the Fascist Manifesto 10 years later. A true polymath, he left no artistic turn unstoned, including theatre.

His main idea was to replace traditional playhouses with variety theatres, the better to mock theatrical tradition into oblivion. When it came to laying down his ideas, Marinetti didn’t mince words:

“Variety theatre is to destroy everything solemn, sacred, serious in art. It promotes the impending annihilation of immortal works by altering and mocking them, by producing them as if they were nothing special…

“It’s essential that all logic in Variety productions be eliminated, that they be made excessively bizarre, with every contrast amplified so much that everything bizarre dominates…

“Interrupt the singer. Accompany the aria with swearwords and insults… Force the audience in the stalls, gallery and boxes to take part in the action…

“Systematically defile classical art on stage, by, for example, producing Greek, French and Italian tragedies in one evening, abbreviated and comically merged together…”

The disembodied spirit of Marinetti is hovering over the West End, making sure the formerly great theatres there follow his prescriptions to the letter. And they don’t disappoint.

Some of the greatest heights of man’s genius are being brought down to earth and stamped into the manure of woke vandalism. Destroying “everything solemn, sacred, serious in art”? Will do, Tommaso. “Systematically defile classical art”? Not a problem. “Producing great plays as if they were nothing special?” Just say the word. “Altering and mocking immortal works”? Nothing to it.

Thus the grim, fearless warrior Agrippa appears on London’s premier stage as a flighty girl wearing a short dress and high heels. Ophelia, dressed in torn jeans, gyrates on a bed to the sound of the ghetto blaster she is holding to her ear. White men are routinely portrayed by black women (doing it the other way around would cancel the director faster than he could say ‘cultural appropriation’). Claudius slaps Hamlet around, with Nazi-clad guards pointing their Schmeissers at the audience. Buckets of red paint are emptied on Richard II’s head.

As if committed to proving that real art can’t thrive in fascist settings designed to destroy it, fewer and fewer actors are any longer able to enunciate the lines properly or even intelligibly. Or perhaps they just sense how incongruous Elizabethan prose sounds in the mouths of youngsters dressed for a drug-fuelled rave in a seedy Soho club.

There are only so many female Agrippas and black Cleopatras that people can take without running a simple cost-benefit analysis through their heads. The cost is the best part of £100 per ticket (much more for musicals). And the benefit is complicity in the fascist takeover of a great English institution.

More and more people are saying thanks, but no thanks. As a result, many West End theatres, where in the past it was next to impossible to get a ticket, are now playing to empty houses. Some are shutting their doors for ever.

Fascism of any kind pretends its body is healthy, but a close look will always reveal signs of cadaverous decomposition. In the good, if in this case still metaphorical, tradition, the great London theatre is forced to dig its own grave.

Before long it too will start rotting and decomposing, its soul ripped out in line with Marinetti’s diktats.

One of the dominant features of modern political discourse is passing appetites as rights.

Thus, for example, instead of saying “I’d like to have paternity leave”, a modern man is likely to say “I have a right to a paternity leave”.

We are reaping the poisoned Enlightenment harvest. Billed as the Age of Reason, that period and its aftermath debauched reason like no other. The concept of ‘rights’, natural, inalienable or otherwise, reflects the crepuscular thinking of those self-proclaimed enlighteners.

A real, otherwise known as natural or inalienable, right presupposes no concomitant obligation on anyone else’s part. The rights mentioned in the American Declaration of Independence, those to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, score two out of three on that test.

The pursuit of happiness was understood in the Lockean sense of the pursuit of estate, which is to say wealth and property. This right, if exercised legally, doesn’t impose an obligation on anyone else and thus qualifies as legitimate.

So does the right to life. Your life isn’t contingent on anyone else’s consent to grant it (let’s leave God out of it). Hence your right to it is indeed inalienable.

By contrast, the right to liberty is problematic. First, unlike life and the pursuit of estate, liberty is hard to define. One man’s liberty is another man’s licence and a third man’s anarchy.

However defined, liberty is a matter of an intricate multi-lateral consensus. Claiming it usually involves limiting the liberty of others, something to which they may or may not agree. Had the framers of the Declaration used the word ‘freedom’ instead of ‘liberty’, they would have been on a safer intellectual ground.

For, unlike liberty, freedom exists within, not without. Our right to it is natural and inalienable because freedom comes from our relation to God (I know I promised to leave Him out of it, but you know better than to believe me), not other men.

Even when a right is indisputable, it leaves room for casuistic abuse. Is the death penalty a violation of the natural right to life? Is abortion? How is it that the proponents of the latter are almost always opponents of the former and vice versa, with this right invoked in each case?

In general, the term ‘rights’ is at best useless in any serious inquiry, and at worst harmful. It certainly flings the door wide open for wicked ideologies to barge in.

Today we are served up any number of rights: to marriage, education, health, development of personality, leisure time, orgasms, warm and loving family or – barring that – warm and loving social services, employment, sex change, abortion on demand and so forth.

These ‘rights’ are all bogus since they fail the test of not presupposing a concomitant obligation on somebody else’s part.

Thus one’s right to employment would mean something real only if there were someone out there who consents or is obligated by law to give one a job. One’s right to a developed personality presupposes an obligation on somebody else’s part to assist such development. My right to free education entails your obligation to pay for it.

Far from being natural, all these rights become tangible only if they are granted by others; and anything given can be taken away, so there go all those pseudo-rights alienated right out of the window.  

The subversive potential of rights is best illustrated by the US, where this concept was codified in the founding documents. Now the country is tearing its social fabric to shreds, with various groups slashing it with the jagged knife of rights.

One instantly apparent problem is that most of these ‘rights’ clash with one another. It doesn’t even matter whether the rights are real or bogus.

For example, a group claiming its right to be equally represented in the workplace denies the owner’s rights to the pursuit of estate (aka happiness) and, arguably, to liberty as well. How do we solve this conflict? Who wins?

Why, whoever screams more loudly, practises name-calling with more febrile passion, threatens violence most credibly. The language of rights, if used with abandon, replaces thought with hysterics, debate with swearing, civility with savagery.

Everything becomes a matter of political rough-and-tumble, including matters that logically should be outside politics. Law is one such, and that too has been thoroughly politicised, meaning, inter alia, dumbed-down.

Take the on-going, raging debate about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn its 1973 ruling on Roe vs Wade. This issue touches on various disciplines: constitutional law, philosophy, biology, theology, morality – and it can be argued on any or all of these grounds.

Yet the debate has been solely reduced to the matter of rights, with the predictable result. It has descended into name-calling, spasmodic fits, verbal and often physical violence. The matrix is simple: If you are [for, against], then you are [choose an appropriate term of abuse, shout it at the top of your lungs].

In reality, the decision to overturn Roe vs Wade corrected a flagrant constitutional wrong. Supreme Court judges ruled in 1973 that the US Constitution conferred the federal right to have an abortion, thus striking down any number of local laws.

Anyone scrutinising that document, along with volumes upon volumes of commentary, will be hard-pressed to find a single mention of abortion or the right thereto. Nor is it immediately clear how anything indeed mentioned there can be interpreted as a licence to abortion on demand.

But the shrill yelps of rights rendered Their Honours deaf to the demands of their day job: judging the constitutionality of legislation. Roe vs Wade was an exercise in political activism, not constitutional law.

The judges established their impeccable modern credentials by arguing the toss on medical grounds. Nowadays everything that can’t be politicised must be medicalised. If the two can be brought together, so much the better.

A woman, argued Their Honours, is more likely to die as a result of childbirth than an abortion. Statistically, they were right, although in 1973 the incidence of either procedure causing death was low to the point of being negligible.

One way or the other, the Constitution doesn’t say that Supreme Court judges should assume personal responsibility for maternal health. If Their Honours felt morally obligated to fight for that cause, they should have done so in their spare time, while staying within their remit during office hours.

That constitutional folly was corrected on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade. Rather than getting bogged down in dubious medical data and succumbing to political pressures, today’s judges did their proper job.

They ruled that the right to abortion wasn’t “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition” and was unknown in US law until Roe vs Wade. It thus should leave the domain of the federal constitution to become a matter for individual states to decide.

Hence their ruling was purely judicial, having nothing to do with either asserting or denying the right to abortion, nor, for that matter, the right to life. Yet that’s not how it has been taken.

The issue hasn’t been put to rational, civilised debate. It’s being argued in the streets. The debating parties aren’t academics with leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, but shrieking, violent fanatics ready to do murder for their ‘rights’.

Ideas Have Consequences, wrote Richard Weaver in 1948. They certainly do, and the feebler the ideas, the deadlier the consequences.

Therefore, in the spirit of the cancel culture so dear to my heart, I suggest the word ‘right’ in the sense of entitlement be expurgated from all dictionaries. Anyone using it in any context other than indicating direction, should be fined for speaking under the influence of ideology.

When Jean-Claude Juncker, former president of the EU, had one of his few sober moments, he came up with a brilliant aphorism nailing all modern politics to the wall.

“We all know what to do,” he said. “We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

In other words, a real statesman can never get a job in politics. Yet last night’s debate of Tory PM hopefuls proved him wrong.

Do you think there were five contestants on that Channel 4 stage? Yes, that’s what everyone thinks.

But there also was a ghostly presence there, visible and audible only to the chosen few. If you aren’t one of the elect, I’ll be happy to share with you what that ghost of a statesman communicated.

When asked “Can any politicians be trusted?”, the ghost laughed. “Trust a modern politician,” he said, “to act as one. That’s all.

“He’ll make any promise to appeal to the electorate his focus groups identify as the best hunting ground. Can he be trusted to keep any of his promises? Don’t be silly.”

The second question was related to the first: “Is Boris Johnson an honest man”. The ghost replied with a question: “He’s a politician, isn’t he? Say no more.”

From the general to the specific: “What about trans rights?”

The ghost was unequivocal: “As British subjects, transsexuals must enjoy all the same rights won by the people over the two millennia of their history. Yet neither they nor any other minority group should be entitled to any bespoke rights custom-made for them.

“Gender dysphoria is a real, if extremely rare, medical disorder. It must be treated and, in the most extreme of cases, the treatment may require surgery.

“Yet biologically, morally and legally, the afflicted person retains his sex at birth. A man may identify as a woman, a dog or a tree – but as far as I am concerned, he remains a man.

“If he can’t come to grips with his genetic makeup, he deserves sympathy, compassion and psychiatric help. But he doesn’t deserve any special rights. All in all, this is a non-issue, and any sane society would see it as such.”

All that was by way of starters. The questions then got into the area of meat and potatoes. “How will you approach the burning economic matters, such as taxes, cost of living, inflation and public spending?”

“You said matters, plural,” replied the ghost. “But the problem is singular, one. Our economy has been used as a political plaything, a top that politicians can spin around for one purpose only: to gain and keep power.

“To that end they have been bribing the people with their own money, so that they’ll vote the right way. No serious economic management has been in evidence since the war, although at least Margaret Thatcher tried.

“Promiscuous government spending is corrupt and corrupting on many different levels, economic, social, intellectual and moral. Its unstated but true purpose is to increase the power of the central state, meaning that of a self-serving elite.

“That has created a vast underclass, nourished and kept afloat by our unaffordable, morally defunct welfare state. Every premise on which it’s based is socialist and egalitarian, which is to say wicked.

“In the service of this wicked idea, the state extorts, when you add up all the taxes, duties and levies, at least half of what the people earn. This is sold to the public by bien pensant virtue-signalling, which is in fact an evil perversion of Christian charity.

“The people have been brainwashed into accepting the notion of helping the less fortunate. They fail to discern the real meaning of the welfare state: expropriating the more fortunate, that is anyone who works for a living – while shifting even more power to the growing central state.

“We must have welfare, helping those who genuinely can’t help themselves: orphans, the ill and the indigent old. Civilised countries can’t have their citizens dying of want or lack of care.

“But that’s a far cry from a rapacious welfare state, with the government effectively acting as the provider father making the real, what modern savages call biological, father redundant.

“Real welfare is the second most essential function of the state. The most essential one is security, protecting the people from foreign enemies and domestic criminals. To perform those functions effectively, it should be sufficient to finance the public sector to the tune of 20 to 25 per cent of GDP – maximum.

“That effectively means cutting taxes by half. And I mean all taxes, starting with corporate ones. That would stimulate both domestic and international investment, helping Britain compete against all other countries.

“A corresponding drop in taxes on income and consumption would drive up consumer demand, making the British economy grow healthy and robust.”

The moderator gasped: “But how can we reduce taxes when the inflation rate is heading towards double digits?”

“This is an economically illiterate question,” smirked the ghost. “Inflation is caused by high government spending, which can only ever be funded by endlessly increasing the money supply.

“The way to reduce inflation is to do exactly what I proposed: cutting in half the state’s share of GDP. Tax reduction is a way of achieving that, a benefit such a fiscal measure would offer the people.”

“But wouldn’t that destroy public services, including the NHS?”

The ghost wouldn’t allow his train of thought to be derailed. “The only thing that would destroy is public disservices, including the NHS,” he said. “Britain is the only major Western European country with a fully nationalised medical service. Alas, rather than being the envy of Europe, the NHS is its laughingstock.

“The good British people have been brainwashed into believing the NHS is free. Yet it’s as free as the slab of cheese in a mousetrap.

“The NHS is a system of financing medicine, and it’s more wasteful and less effective than just about any other. Its problems can only be solved by changing the system.

“An alternative system must resemble the combined European system of public and private participation, financed by massive tax incentives, rather than massive tax extortion. I’ll be happy to submit a detailed proposal in another medium, one more conducive to serious discussion than to swapping meaningless bytes.”

“Are you at least committed to the net-zero undertaking of the Tory Manifesto?” asked the visibly shaken moderator.

“I’m committed to tearing up and binning that economic suicide note,” replied the ghost.

“First, the whole notion of climate change is unscientific and anti-historical. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the Earth has been hotter than it is now for over 80 per cent of its lifetime.

“Romans, for example, neither powered their chariots with fossil fuels nor freshened their air with aerosols. However, at the time they ruled England, in the 1^st century AD, vineyards thrived in Scotland, meaning it was considerably warmer then.

“Moreover, since carbon enables plants to grow more abundantly, the most prosperous periods in history coincided with the highest levels of carbon emissions, and vice versa.

“I bet none of the other contestants in this beauty pageant has read a single serious scientific study of the subject, especially an omnibus one. If they had, they’d be less eager to kowtow to the vociferous group of neo-Luddites venting their resentment of our civilisation.

“Serving that ignoble cause, they are prepared to destroy the British economy, for make no mistake about it: a modern industry can’t survive if powered by windmills.

“We must build our nuclear industry, half-destroyed by the very reprobates who are now screaming climate change. We must become self-sufficient in energy, and if it takes fracking to achieve that, then so be it.”

The moderator was speechless, but I couldn’t contain myself any longer. “How do you expect to get elected on this kind of platform?” I shouted at the screen.

“I don’t,” smiled the ghost. “I’m a ghost, a figment of your imagination…” And then he vanished in front of my very eyes.

My sense of reality restored, I poured myself a drink and toasted Jean-Claude Juncker. A useless politician, but he did have a way with words.

The other day a close friend asked me to comment on the similarities between the Soviet Union of my youth and the Britain of my old age.

These are less numerous than the differences, but it’s not the number but the relative weight that matters. And one similarity is beginning to outweigh the differences.

Over 20 years ago I wrote my book How the West Was Lost, in which I commented on ‘glossocracy’, the use of language as a mechanism of tyrannical power. In the West it’s the dominant mechanism, in the Soviet Union it was supported by physical coercion, but that’s a matter of technicalities.

The glossocratic mechanism can be activated in any number of ways, both proscriptive and prescriptive. The former is telling people what they can’t say. The latter is telling them what they must say.

A push for glossocratic tyranny tends to start out as proscriptive, but once all resistance has been overcome, the diktat will ineluctably become prescriptive. Both the USSR circa 1972 and the UK circa 2022 vindicate this observation, with Britain still lagging somewhat behind but closing the gap fast.

In the Moscow of my youth, any number of functionaries, all linked with the KGB at least tangentially, practised the art of asking a pointed glossocratic question. That wasn’t a request for information, but a trap. One such question was asked by KGB officers recruiting potential snitches: “Do you consider yourself a Soviet man?”

That was a yes or no question, or rather a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ one. If you said no, not really, you weren’t a free man claiming a divergent political allegiance. You were an enemy, to be dealt with in any number of ways, all detrimental to your physical wellbeing.

In my parents’ generation a no answer to that question spelled a death sentence, executed either immediately or over a few agonising years in a concentration camp. When I became a sentient, if not yet sapient, being in the ‘60s, such an outcome was unlikely, though not impossible. But in any case you could forget about ever having a fulfilling professional life.

If you said yes, the trap slammed shut: “In that case, don’t you want to help us, the embodiment of Sovietism?” Anyone answering yes would gain some physical benefits, but lose for ever any right to self-respect and the respect of his friends. I knew several men who made that Faustian transaction, and they were all sullen pariahs.

What I’ve described was an extreme situation, but a Soviet man had to field hundreds of related questions every day of his life. Most didn’t have the guts for defiance. They’d offer the desired answers on cue and eventually proceed to volunteer variations on the same theme.

Anyone who ever lived in a permanent state of nausea induced by glossocratic emetics ends up developing a well-honed diagnostic ability to detect the early danger signs. In today’s Britain, and the West in general, these aren’t even particularly early any longer.

For illustration, I suggest you watch tonight’s TV debate among the candidates for Tory leadership and therefore Number 10. The aspiring PMs won’t be answering genuine questions designed to clarify their stand on important issues. They’ll be trying to sidestep glossocratic traps.

“Can you define a woman, minister?” will be one such. The answer will have to come from the available menu: Item A: “A woman is somebody born as one or made into one artificially.” Item B: “A woman is anyone who identifies as such.” Item C: “A woman is a person born as one biologically.”

The reply C is correct factually but not politically. Any candidate offering it will step into the trap and have his political ankle crushed.

You don’t need my prompting to imagine the fetid storm sweeping the next day’s papers. The culprit denies trans rights, which has to mean he is a homophobe, misogynist, fascist, racist, reactionary, colonialist… Let’s just say it won’t be only mud that the papers will be slinging.

The actual arguments pro or con won’t come into play at all. This isn’t about debate aimed at establishing, God forbid, the truth of the matter. It’s about pushing the button to activate the glossocratic mechanism of tyranny.

Someone opting for A or B won’t be out of the woods either. He’ll be surely if incongruously accused by woke hacks of being woke, and probably not sincere enough in his wokery. The hypocritical populist is trying to appeal to the left fringe of the Tory Party, promising to do their bidding if elected… and so forth, you know the drill.

Hence ‘debate’ is a misnomer. Grown men and women won’t be trying to elucidate Britain’s future under their stewardship. They’ll be hopping, jumping, veering, bending themselves into contortionist shapes whenever they detect a glossocratic trap, be it trans rights, economy, defence, taxation, climate, the NHS, you name it.

No one laying those traps will really care what those sweaty people on the podium think. The trap-layers will be merely asserting their glossocratic power, secure in the knowledge they’ll win in any case, however their questions are answered.

Similarly, KGB officers asking a poor wretch whether he considered himself a true-red Soviet man knew perfectly well he didn’t. If he did, they wouldn’t have had to ask.

They were implicitly saying that yes, we know you hate us, but we don’t give a damn. We are after an exercise of our power to make you say – and eventually do – what we want. As long as you play the game by our rules, you can go on indulging your onanistic dissent in private, see if we care.

This is an exact parallel of what happened to Penny ‘Thunder Thighs’ Mordaunt when she faced the fashionable trans trap, lurking in the question of what made a woman. Penny knew it’s impossible to change one’s sex, her interrogator knew it, Penny knew the interrogator knew and so on.

Yet they both also knew that wasn’t the real question. The real question was: “Are you ready to submit to glossocratic power?” Penny answered in the affirmative: “Absolutely.” Her actual words were “A trans woman is a woman, and a trans man is a man”, but what she really meant was that she was happy to become a slave to glossocratic masters.

A real debate about real issues is no longer possible in any public space, not just in a political beauty pageant in front of TV cameras. Even the university, an institution specifically created as a vehicle to be driven towards the truth, has been reduced to an instrument of glossocratic tyranny.

A scientist who produces research proving the strictly biological basis of womanhood would be ‘cancelled’, possibly sacked. A climatologist proving, facts in hand, that global warming is a subversive, unscientific hoax, will be boycotted. An economist unfolding spreadsheets showing that ‘renewable’ energy can’t power a modern economy, will have to retrain as a supermarket manager.

Science doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter. Only glossocracy does – as it did in the Soviet Union, albeit in a more virulent form.

The object of terror is to terrorise, wrote Lenin. By the same token, the object of tyranny is to tyrannise. When a political or ideological objective takes precedence, it will ride roughshod over everything real: truth, honesty, integrity, beauty, morality.

Thus glossocratic tyranny is by its nature nihilistic. For all its sanctimonious virtue-signalling, it’s out to destroy everything seen as a potential obstacle to its triumph, including the genuine creative impulse that needs freedom to survive.

Creativity is like a poppy – when taken out of its natural habitat, it dies. If we allow glossocracy to thrive, Britain (and the West in general) will become bone-crushingly dull first, beggared second, downright evil third. The Soviet Union became all those things, if not necessarily in that order.

A message to Penny Mordaunt: If you are unsure what a woman is, dear, look in the mirror. That’s what the female secondary sex characteristics look like, and they are produced by the primary ones – not by a consumer choice.

Can you name a single Western European country that has a succinctly expressed national idea? Britain? France? Holland?

Germany had one back in the 1930s, but few would give her a retrospective pat on the back for it. You may say that was an example of a bad national idea, but I can’t for the life of me think of a good one. (For fear of alienating my American readers, I’ll for once leave their Declaration of Independence alone.)

This isn’t to say that civilised countries stand for nothing. It’s just that they stand for so many things that any attempt to express them in a few sentences will fail. It’s impossible to unscramble the ganglion of synapses accumulated over centuries in the national mind. When such attempts are made, they deliver nothing but vulgar statements of jingoism.

A civilised nation can be defined historically and existentially, but never ideologically. When it can be so defined, it’s not civilised.

Characteristically, an attempt to codify a national idea will fail even if undertaken by a clever man. For example, the émigré religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (d. 1948) wrote a whole book The Russian Idea, in which he described the 1936 Soviet Constitution as “the most democratic in history”.

Called ‘Stalin’s constitution’, it was actually written by one of the top Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin. By way of gratitude, Stalin had him shot two years later.

“The Russian messianic conception,” wrote Berdyaev, “always exalted Russia as a country that would help to solve the problems of humanity and would accept a place in the service of humanity.”

Therefore, “recent changes in Russia, the changed attitude to religion and to the country’s traditions, make it not only possible but right for Christian Russians to rally to the Soviet government.”

The same government, in other words, that had already murdered 60 million Russians (including tens of thousands of priests and millions of their parishioners) and enslaved the rest. Not bad for a religious philosopher and, incidentally, the darling of Soviet dissidents.

If you think I’m going too far back, you’ll be happy to know that the Russian national idea has recently been worded concisely and cogently, at last. The man who achieved that improbable feat is Ivan Okhlobystin, one of Russia’s best-known personalities.

Looking at Ivan’s CV, one realises how little one has accomplished. Even Renaissance men like Leonardo would feel humbled.

Okhlobystin’s Wikipedia entry describes him as an “actor, director, script writer, playwright, writer, TV show host, radio show host, politician, ordained priest in the Russian Orthodox Church”.

In his 55 years, Ivan has starred in some 50 films, scripted 22 others, appeared in countless TV shows, written 12 books, served as parish priest – and still found time in his manic schedule to define the Russian idea.

I shan’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here is that elusive idea according to Ivan:

“The Ukraine must disappear, the West must be brought to its knees and forced to do penal labour for the benefit of the Russian Empire, the rest of the world must prove its support for us and share our concept of the future for some two hundred years to come. This is precisely how the Russian idea sounds today. All other ideas are from the devil.”

Berdyaev was a celebrated philosopher and accomplished stylist, yet even he fell short of Ivan’s rare ability to say so much in so few words. Berdyaev had to envelop the same basic concept in a fog of prolixity, whereas Renaissance man Ivan cuts right to the chase laconically and forcefully.

If you ever wonder why so many Russians support Putin’s bandit raid on the Ukraine, just reread Ivan’s credo. This isn’t the rant of a drug-addled madman, but a sample of the intellectual fare fed to the Russians round the clock in every available medium. All other dishes are strictly off the menu.

“The Russian messianic conception” has been a dominant idea in that country since the 16^th century, but at least under the tsars it wasn’t the only one. In 1917 it, in a different guise, ousted all competition and has ruled the roost continuously in one form or another ever since, with only a couple of years’ hiatus in the early 1990s.

The great literature of which the Russians are justifiably proud expressed this messianism with greater mastery than Ivan did, but with no more equivocation. Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Turgenev all glorified the saintly Russian peasant towering spiritually and morally over the godless West. And, especially in his Diaries, Dostoyevsky pushed that notion into the territory adjacent to one later occupied by such Germans as Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels.

When such sentiments are planted at the grassroots, sooner or later they’ll produce a bountiful harvest. All it takes is fertilising the soil with uncontested fascist propaganda, while sprinkling it with herbicides to exterminate all dissent.

Please ponder this next time you read yet another hack saying that the problem lies just with Putin, not the Russian people. Putin has effectively marshalled the attitudes residing in the Russian breast. But he didn’t put them there.

This is enough to make you believe in reincarnation. When asked last week how he thought his war on the Ukraine was going, Putin said, “Everybody should know that, largely speaking, we haven’t yet even started anything in earnest.”

Commentators immediately began to speculate what he might have meant by that, and I’ll offer my version shortly. But what first caught my eye was the uncanny historical parallel.

A similar line was uttered by the naval hero of the American Revolution, Captain John Paul Jones. Jones was a Scot who upheld a fine tradition of his native land by moving to America, becoming a naval officer and fighting the English.

In one battle he found his flagship Bonhomme Richard (France’s gift to the insurgents) being blown to bits by a British frigate off the coast of England. When the English captain demanded his surrender, Jones famously presaged Putin’s aphorism by saying, “I have not yet begun to fight!”

Having won that battle, the sea wolf found himself unemployed after the victorious Revolution. In search of action, he went to Russia, where Catherine the Great promoted him to rear-admiral. Jones distinguished himself during the Russo-Turkish War, where his flagship was named – brace yourself! – Vladimir. An amazing coincidence or what?

History is screaming parallels, is anyone listening? To finish with Jones, he was soon embroiled in a scandal involving a 12-year-old girl, lost his commission and eventually died in Paris, near Luxembourg Gardens.

Now his alter ego Putin echoes the celebrated gesture of defiance, indicating he has far-reaching plans. Having already lost 35,000 soldiers dead, plus thousands more of the so-called separatists and the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, Putin is barely warming up.

For what? Here I beseech you yet again to listen to what he is actually saying. Westerners have been conditioned to be sceptical about their politicians’ promises, but that’s democracy for you. Dictators don’t have to curry favour with the electorate, which is why they tend to mean what they say.

We’d be well-advised to take Putin at his word, just as Britain and France shouldn’t have dismissed Hitler’s wild threats as mere braggadocio. So what is Putin saying?

Right from the start he has been explaining that his “special operation” isn’t a war on the Ukraine. It’s only the prelude to Russia’s war on Nato, meaning the West in general.

As usual, the West was slow on the uptake, but the message is beginning to sink in. At the recent Madrid Summit, Nato leaders have undertaken to beef up their rapid response contingent in Europe from 40,000 to 300,000. They have also belatedly begun to increase their defence budgets, and even Germany is making tentative steps towards at last acquiring an army.

Observing the performance of the Russian army in the Ukraine, neither Putin nor any of his generals can be confident about the prospect of taking on all of Nato in a conventional confrontation. They know, and Nato knows, and everyone knows that such a clash would result in a quick rout of the Russian forces.

Putin is holding a losing hand, but he does boast a strong trump: nuclear weapons. Western observers keep speculating along the lines of “Will he or won’t he?”, but that’s the wrong question to ask.

The right question is, “Can he do anything else?” And the only possible answer is no. Putin can’t withdraw from the Ukraine tail between his legs – such abject retreat would go against the grain of the very essence of his aggressive, fascist regime.

Such regimes always go all the way, or die trying. They need victory as both self-vindication and self-defence.

In Putin’s case, his determination is also predicated on his youthful experience as a street gang member in his native Leningrad. Since I used to run away from similar gangs to those Putin used to run with, I know that those chaps would rather lose their life than their face.

They function according to their own code and their own ethic, with neither countenancing defeat. A defeated gangster loses respect, meaning he loses everything – including his life.

If Putin has no hope of winning a conventional clash with Nato, and since defeat isn’t an option, he has to go nuclear. How nuclear is a big question, and I for one doubt he’d go all in from the start. More likely is that he’d begin with some low-yield tactical weapons, as a statement of intent. He’d first brandish a razor, holding a loaded gun behind his back.

I don’t have the benefit of access to Nato’s intelligence reports, but Putin’s public pronouncements, and those of his stooges, give a sufficient clue to his intentions, and also his targets. Such pronouncements go beyond the de rigueur threats to turn America into a Stalin Strait separating Canada from Mexico or to sink Britain with a couple of big bombs.

Hidden in the pile of such verbal manure are the pearls of real information. One such is that the likely targets of the first nuclear strikes will be the Ukraine, Poland and one of the Baltic states, most probably Lithuania.

Another is that Lukashenko’s Belarus is likely to be used as the launchpad. There are many indications of this, starting with the constitutional changes Lukashenko announced on 28 February, four days after the kick-off of the “special operation”.

One such was allowing the permanent presence of Russian nuclear forces on Belarusian territory. Belarus of course inherited some Soviet nuclear weapons after the 1991 break-up of the Soviet Union, which she then relinquished to Russia in 1994.

Now the country was ready to reclaim such weapons under Russian control, effectively turning Belarus into what I’ve described as Russia’s launchpad. A few days ago, Lukashenko reiterated his invitation, which effectively means Belarus is no longer subject to the conditions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This was accompanied by a slow but steady redeployment of Russian nuclear-tipped Iskander missiles closer to the Belarusian border. That process gathered speed after Lithuania blocked the supply of sanctioned goods to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg.

Western leaders have been reacting to these developments with characteristic vacillation – or at least so it seems to those of us who aren’t privy to classified data. They are doing their utmost to avoid any direct confrontation between Nato and Russian forces.

Their military aid to the Ukraine is significant and vital, but it doesn’t enable the Ukrainians to take the war to Russia. Nato doesn’t arm them with many long-range weapons, and the few that do reach the Ukraine come in exchange for the promise not to fire them into Russian territory.

At the same time one continues to hear Western leaders begging Zelensky to relinquish a large chunk of his territory for the sake of a peace treaty. In addition to cowardice and immorality, this shows a woeful misreading of the situation.

First, Zelensky or any other Ukrainian leader will never accept such terms, not after losing thousands of lives and seeing their cities reduced to a good replica of Dresden, circa 1945. More important, they wouldn’t accept such a deal because they know Putin wants all of the Ukraine, not a part. Give him time to catch his breath, and he’ll come back in force.

Nor can such a treaty be on the table because Putin doesn’t want it either. He may be after all of the Ukraine, but only as a step along the way, not the final destination. Take him at his word, and let me spell it out for you: P-U-T-I-N  I-S  F-I-G-H-T-I-N-G  N-A-T-O,  N-O-T  U-K-R-A-I-N-E.

Yes, Putin is already fighting Nato, but Nato isn’t fighting Putin. It’s like the Phoney War preceding the Battle of Britain: the war was in full swing, but the Allies pursued the ostrich strategy of pretending not to notice it.

When Putin says he hasn’t “yet even started anything in earnest”, he is lying: he has. But Nato hasn’t, and the sooner it does, the less devastating will the consequences be. Nato can’t afford to be like a child who covers up his eyes and believes that whatever is scaring him is no longer there.

When Putin takes a leaf out of John Paul Jones’s book, he means it. The earlier and more decisive Nato’s response will be, the better chance it’ll have to sink Putin’s ambitions.

I wonder if Western strategists are considering a preemptive strike on Belarus the moment those Iskanders cross the border. If they aren’t, they should: if they allow a nuclear broadside, an Armageddon beckons.  

You may wonder what tennis has to do with life, specifically yours. After all, chances are you neither play the game nor watch it, not regularly at any rate.

So why should you waste your time reading about youngsters chasing fuzzy yellow balls around a patch of Wimbledon grass? Simple. Think of it as another exhibit in the indictment of modernity.

The charge is total – and totalitarian – primacy of ideology over everything else. One of the pieces of corroborative evidence is enforcement of equality where no parity exists.

Men, women, others are all supposed to be proportionately represented and equally paid – regardless of achievement, industry or competence. Justice, morality, even commercial common sense need not apply, and there I was, thinking modernity is obsessed about money. So it is, but not when it clashes with ideology.

Thus men and women are paid exactly the same prize money at the four Grand Slam events, of which Wimbledon takes pride of place. This year’s winners got just over £2 million each; the runners-up half that.

A labourer worthy of his hire and all that – justice, modern style, was done. However, comparing the two finals, men’s and women’s, even a casual watcher would have known that in this case, as in so many others, modern justice actually means injustice.

It even has nothing to do with the supposedly relevant principle of equal pay for equal work. For the work put in by the men and the women was as equal as chicken salad and chicken manure.

The most obvious thing first: the men’s final took four sets played over 3 hours 1 minute. Had it gone to five sets, it would probably have lasted more than four hours. The women’s final was a three-setter lasting 1 hour 47 minutes, which was about as long as it could have gone (women don’t play five-setters). Hence Novak Djokovic’s hourly wage was much lower than that of Yelena Rybakina, the women’s champion.

And if you compare the total time on court over the whole tournament, poor Novak got paid less than half of Rybakina’s pro rata earnings. Let’s hear it for gender equality.

Yet it’s not just about quantity but also quality. For the Djokovic-Kyrgios final was tennis at its most brilliant, with most points won by a cluster of good shots, not lost by silly errors. Facing one of the biggest hitters on the men’s tour, Djokovic committed only 17 unforced errors in four hard-fought sets.

By contrast, the Rybakina-Jabeur final was greatly inferior even to some club matches I’ve seen. And in terms of net play it was inferior to some club matches I’ve played.

The girls couldn’t hit two shots in a row, even when they weren’t going for winners. In earning her £2 million, Rybakina committed 33 unforced errors – that’s a set and a half just thrown away. Those few shots she did manage to get over the net and between the white lines carried more weight than Jabeur’s cream puffs, which is why she won. Watching that kind of tennis was painful.

Her opponent noticed that Rybakina’s mobility wasn’t that of a professional athlete. Hence Jabeur tried to hit one drop shot after another, but she wasn’t good at it. Any male player would have changed his strategy, but Jabeur – world number two! – had only one string to her bow, if that.

When she did push Rybakina into a corner, the latter was patently unable to retrieve her central position after hitting the ball. So she kept whacking Hail Mary shots, hit or miss, mostly miss.

All this shows that the women haven’t spent enough time either on the practice court or on the running track. They haven’t mastered the professional technique of hitting the ball with consistent power and placement, and neither are they physically up to scratch.

Someone like Djokovic demonstrably has put in the required time, which cuts his pro rata wage even more compared to Rybakina’s. Equality reigns supreme.

Some of the commentators were professional players who know infinitely more about the game than I do. They could compare Djokovic and Rybakina, or men’s and women’s tennis in general, stroke for stroke – and offer their instructive conclusions chapter and verse.

So did they? Of course not. The totalitarian ideology won’t let them. They were equally effusive about both finals, which was tantamount to cheating the audience of expert opinion. Yet the subject of prize money did come up, regularly.

However, not one commentator pointed out the glaring injustice of equal prize funds. Instead – are you ready for this? – they kept lamenting that, yes, the Grand Slam events do strike a blow for gender equality. But if you look at other tournaments, you’ll see that women’s prizes are merely 85 per cent of the men’s. Clearly, there’s some work to be done yet.

The work I’d like to see done is cutting women’s prize funds to no more than half of the men’s, or a third, if justice is really to be served. Be that as it may, tennis tournaments are organised by independent organisations under the aegis of the ATP or the WTA, which don’t answer to any governments either.

So how does the woke brigade of tennis propose to force those tournaments to increase women’s prize funds? The same way they pushed through gender equality at the Grand Slams: through rabid propaganda and unrestrained political pressure. It worked once, it’ll work again.

Speaking of Rybakina, she was only allowed to compete at Wimbledon because she is listed as a Kazakh, not Russian. Russian players were banned from this year’s Wimbledon because the organisers didn’t want to give Putin a chance to gloat should one of them win.

Now, Rybakina is a Russian girl, born and bred in Moscow where she has lived all her life, and where she is still living. I’m not even sure she has ever visited Kazakhstan. However, in the past 10 years that country’s government has started buying Russian athletes wholesale to boost its own international prestige.

No residence requirements exist. A Russian athlete can simply agree to represent Kazakhstan in return for generous financial support, which is what Rybakina did some six years ago.

I watched her match in France, and the commentators kept saying that she didn’t just represent Kazakhstan, but was d’origine Kazakh. Clearly, they had never seen any persons of Kazakh origin, who tend to be less blonde than Rybakina and somewhat shorter than her six feet.

One such person, the president of the Kazakhstan Tennis Association, was in attendance, and he celebrated Rybakina’s triumph like a winner of a prole TV game show. He wasn’t the only one.

The Russians celebrated even more wildly. Shamil Tarpishchev, Putin’s tennis coach, who happens to be under personal international sanctions for links with organised crime, bleated that “Yelena is ours.”

So she is, and the triumphant articles in the Russian press somehow omitted her links with Kazakhstan. Thus Wimbledon’s ploy didn’t work, but at least the intention was laudable.

I wonder how much of her £2 million Yelena will have to kick back to Tarpishchev and his jolly friends. Quite a lot, would be my guess, but I’m sure she’ll have enough left not to sweat on the practice court, learning how to hit the ball in consistently. Add to this her forthcoming modelling contracts, and Djokovich will seem like a pauper.