Month: April 2023

My first reaction is to say none. In fact, a human being born with a penis is a good working definition of a man, not of a woman.

But that’s only my uneducated guess. Admittedly I haven’t conducted any surveys, nor, truth to tell, even read them. My reply is based strictly on general principles, and they aren’t always a reliable guide to the truth.

Now, Sir Keir Starmer, the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition and probably our next prime minister, is different from me. He withdraws judgement until he has studied the issue in detail. And then he speaks, with each word carrying the weight of his erudition and also the extra gravitas of his exalted position.

Don’t know about you, but I’m humbled by his authority. And I applaud the conclusion his research led him to. According to Sir Keir, 340,000 British women are blessed with the appendage in question.

To be fair, he didn’t quite put it that way. When asked if women could have penises, Sir Keir begrudgingly admitted that 99.99 per cent don’t.

The rest of it is my pocket calculator speaking. There are about 34 million women in the UK. If only 99.99 per cent of them don’t have penises, then 0.1 per cent do. Translating percentages into absolute numbers, we get 340,000. That’s how many British lasses must show a noticeable bulge in their knickers.

Since you know, and I know, and even Sir Keir knows that this is insane bilge, we have to consider the reasons for his statement. After all, his Tory counterpart, Prime Minister Sunak, gave the same answer I did: none.

So why did Sir Keir lie to us? Now, politicians have been known to tell porkies strictly for electoral reasons. So did Sir Keir state that 340,000 British women have penises because he thinks that’s an election winner? Sort of like promising to cut taxes in half?

On the surface of it, he miscalculated. Every poll I’ve seen says that most Britons agree with Mr Sunak on this subject, not with Sir Keir. So is he cutting his electoral throat to spite his political face?

He isn’t. But to understand why we need to delve beneath the surface.

Over the past few decades, politicians of both parties, ably assisted by the media, the academy and the liberal intelligentsia, have succeeded in effecting one seismic shift, even if they’ve failed in most other undertakings. They’ve replaced actual reality with the virtual kind.

If you remember Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, its protagonist Cincinnatus C. is sentenced to death because in a country where everyone is transparent he alone is opaque. Since in reality people aren’t made of a see-through material, that was a strong dystopic metaphor for virtual reality ousting the actual kind.

In Nabokov’s novel those who remained opaque were sentenced to death. Transparency was elevated to a totemic ideology enforceable by every means possible.

Read wokery for transparency, and virtual for actual reality, and you’ll get the picture. Wokery in the modern West is the secular equivalent of religion in a theocracy, or perhaps of the communist party in the Soviet Union.

Not every denizen of a theocracy has to espouse the state religion, and not every Russian had to belong to the Party. Moreover, neither the former nor the latter even have to believe the dominant ideology. However, they all without a single exception must pay lip service to it.

When that goes on for a couple of generations, interesting psychological mechanisms whirr into life. People may continue to disbelieve, especially when incontrovertible empirical data support their apostasy. But they feel guilty about it.

That sense of guilt is cultivated by total, not to say totalitarian, propaganda they are inundated with from cradle to grave. They know they themselves don’t mean the sanctimonious phrases they utter. But everybody else around them may, for all they know.

So how can they be right and everyone else wrong? Their parents taught them that thinking so is egoistic, immoral or – in modern parlance – uncool. Then their tribal instinct kicks in: no one wants to be a pariah. People feel a compulsion to belong somewhere, ideally everywhere.

They’ve been trained to identify themselves by group membership. It could be something small, a book club, supporters of a football team, fans of a pop group. Or it could be something all-embracing: a religion, an ideology, general coolness as it’s commonly understood.

Every totemic cult comes with its own set of shibboleths. They act as passwords, a sort of Open, Sesame. A man is asked to say the password of the day before he is admitted to the sanctum of the initiated. Most are so well-trained that they know the magic word intuitively. They are also trained to welcome the kindred possessors of that knowledge – and reject those ignorant of it.

Actual reality isn’t allowed to interfere with the virtual kind. Thus, in our example, every sane person knows that hundreds of thousands of British women can’t have penises. But that’s not the point. Facts belong in actual reality, and it has been disfranchised.

Most people are fully paid-up members in the virtual reality club, and they hunger for the company of their own kind. The whole system of today’s one-man-one-vote democracy is based on this presupposition.

Sir Keir knows this. He may not know it in his mind, but that is superseded by his viscera. And those organs combine to send a signal directly to his tongue, bypassing whatever he has for a mind.

He doesn’t have to think. He just knows that, by uttering that idiotic falsehood, he’ll gain more support than he’ll lose. The audience, he feels, has been sufficiently primed to accept make-believe as real and reality as make-believe.

The media act as formulators, promulgators and enforcers of virtual reality. Before it triumphed, a question like “Do women have penises?” couldn’t even have been conceived, never mind publicly asked.

Now it acts as a demand for the password, with the journalist cast in the role of sentry. A politician facing that demand has a stark choice. He has to make an instant judgement of the encroachment virtual reality has made on the actual kind. Is it total or partial? And how partial is that?

If he delivers the requisite password, he thereby announces his allegiance to virtual reality, hoping most people worship at the same totem pole. Conversely, obtusely sticking with actual reality may either win votes for him or lose them. It all depends on how accurately he assesses the public mood.

The very fact that the penile question has become ubiquitous testifies to a collapse of culture, morality, reason, indeed public sanity. Who was the first British prime minister who wouldn’t have laughed in the face of the inquirer? Probably Tony Blair, would be my guess. That gives us roughly the time when virtual reality conquered, or at least began to do so.

A mere generation ago, if that. That’s when Britain was hit with a pandemic of insanity much worse and more durable than any Covid. And that virus isn’t going to die out by itself. It’ll continue to multiply in the medium beneficial to it: our anomic modernity.

One has to pity Joe Biden’s aides. They are falling over themselves trying to dispel the malicious rumours that their employer is virulently anti-British.

That’s a bit like Hitler’s aides protesting in the 1940s that their Führer didn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body. A tall task, requiring more spin than even Nadal can put on a tennis ball.

Anyway, if anyone can appreciate his aides’ conundrum, it’s Joe himself. And what better time to help them out than his pilgrimage trip to Ireland, supposedly to celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Britain’s surren… sorry, Freudian slip. I mean the Good Friday Agreement of course.

And speaking of Freudian slips, the other day Joe visited a pub just south of the Ulster boarder. There he proudly invoked the name of his distant relation, the rugby player Rob Kearney, who, Biden announced, “beat the hell out of the Black and Tans”.

He meant the New Zealand national team nicknamed All Blacks that Kearney destroyed almost singlehandedly in 2016. Now everyone knows that Joe isn’t quite compos mentis. Never the sharpest chisel in the toolbox to begin with, with age he has added senility to his mental deficiencies.

Thus his gaffes and pratfalls are too numerous to mention, although some hacks do their level best to list the whole inventory. Yet not all gaffes are the same.

Slips of the tongue are often caused by a man talking about an unfamiliar subject and replacing a new term with a similar-sounding one lodged in the front of his mind. As an American, Joe knows nothing about rugby, the precursor of American football. Hence the term ‘All Blacks’, helpfully provided by his poor aides, meant nothing to him. The term ‘Black and Tans’, on the other hand, must always be in his thoughts. Hence the gaffe.

The Black and Tans was a British militia, 10,000-strong, recruited into the Royal Ulster Constabulary to quash the 1919-1921 Irish rebellion. They failed, but not before distinguishing themselves for atrocities against civilians. The Irish thus remember the Black and Tans with the same bitterness as they do Oliver Cromwell, who drowned Ireland in blood back in 1649.

Immediately after the island was divided into the British North and republican South, the unit was disbanded and has since sunk into oblivion. But apparently 100-odd years aren’t enough to erase its memory altogether.

That war and all its participants, including the Black and Tans, must still occupy a fair chunk of Joe’s mental capacity, to the exclusion of all those little problems that should typically concern the Leader of the Free World.

In his present state, he has a hard time trying to conceal his palpable hatred of Britain. Biden’s mentality is pure IRA, and I don’t mean Individual Retirement Account. Subterfuge is now beyond Joe’s faculties, which must be why, on the same trip, he also took a selfie of himself with Gerry Adams, the former leader of Sinn Féin.

Now Gerry has always insisted he had nothing to do with the IRA and its terrorist activities. This in spite of numerous witnesses testifying to his past involvement. He was the IRA’s Chief of Staff in the 1970s and a member of its War Council until 2005.

Adams was arrested numerous times, although the prosecutors never managed to make the charges of terrorism stick. Nonetheless his IRA past isn’t so much a rumour as common knowledge.

That’s why he was denied entry to the United States on several occasions. But in 1994, following a campaign led by Senator Biden, President Clinton granted Adams a 48-hour visa to attend a conference in New York. However, he wasn’t allowed to travel farther than 25 miles outside NY, which kept him from South Boston, the hub of IRA fund raising in America.

In short, the case of Biden’s Anglophilia wasn’t helped by his choice of co-model for that selfie. Somebody ought to tell the president that he brings his office into disrepute by so blatantly meddling in the affairs of America’s most reliable European ally.

I’m not sure, however, that Joe would listen. All those tribal resentments so many Americans inherit from their distant European past are especially pronounced in people whose mental capacity is impaired either from birth or by age, or, as in Biden’s case, both.

Such resentments, by the way, don’t exist in Britain, not so that I’ve noticed anyway. One of my close friends is of French Huguenot ancestry, another had a German mother, yet another has roots both in Scotland and Ireland, still another’s descent has Welsh inputs. Yet they all consider themselves English, and their interest in their distant ancestral lands is no greater than mine.

Moreover, they eschew the double-barrel self-identification so rife in America. You can hear ‘French-American’, ‘German-American’ or ‘Irish-American’ all over the place there, but Englishmen remain just English, wherever their ancestors lived.

Mario Puzo of the The Godfather fame once described his clash with Frank Sinatra over the striking similarity between the singer and one of Puzo’s characters. The conflict, explained the novelist, was exacerbated by their heritage. Yes, both were Italian-American, but Puzo’s ancestors came from Sicily, while Sinatra’s from somewhere up north. Even though one of them was born in New York and the other in New Jersey, that sort of geography mattered to both.

Most of the time such particularism is benign and good-natured, although one may be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the glue binding the American nation together is thinner than similar substances in Europe.

But when a president of the United States bases his foreign policy pronouncements and even decisions on his great-great-grandparents’ nativity, that’s neither benign nor good-natured. It’s both pathetic and potentially detrimental to the interests of America and, in this case, Britain.

Those Americans who are horrified by the sight of a clearly incompetent man in the White House talk about compulsory tests of mental ability for all presidential candidates. I’d also add an IQ test to the mix, to exclude Joe for sure and a few others possibly. Dubya, anyone?    

Who was the greatest writer ever? This is one of the silliest questions one can ask.

Unlike tennis players and pop hits, writers and other artists have no official rankings. Ask 100 well-read people and you’ll get 100 different answers, or more (well-read people like to hedge their bets with phrases like “or else perhaps…”).

However, it’s a safe bet that Shakespeare and Tolstoy would get their fair share of mentions in our hypothetical poll. And while many people would come up with their own candidates, few would say those two don’t belong in that company.

Neither writer, however, would – or rather should – make any sensible list of great historians. Nor would the two giants have any posthumous problems with such exclusion. Though both read a fair amount of history and used historical motifs in their work, neither devoted his life to painstaking scholarly enquiry.

Both wrote historical stories, and the noun is more important than the adjective. When the narrative demanded playing fast and loose with facts, they both did. Artistic truth mattered more to them than factual accuracy, and rightly so.

At times, however, the demand to distort history came not from their art but – and here we are getting to a real problem – from their ideology. When that happened, they betrayed not only scholarly integrity but also, much worse, artistic truth.

However, to the powers that be ideology tends to be almost everything, while artistry is next to nothing. Hence, they found the great writers’ ideology useful and canonised their take on history as unquestionably true to life.

Thus many generations of English schoolchildren read Shakespeare’s Richard III as reportage on the Wars of the Roses, while Russian pupils never doubted the historical veracity of War and Peace and its view of the 1812 war.

Should both Shakespeare and Richard III still be alive, the latter could sue the former for libel and win the case hands down. Just recently we got a reminder of that when the Richard III Society republished a lost history text The History of King Richard III by Sir George Buck, roughly Shakespeare’s contemporary.

The Society of Antiquaries certified the text’s authenticity and endorsed its portrayal of Richard as a “just” and “good” king – not the perfidious, murderous hunchback depicted by Shakespeare.

In 1485, Richard lost his battle and his life to the man who thus became Henry VII, the first Tudor king of England. Writing his Richard III drama during the reign of Henry’s granddaughter, Shakespeare was working to what the Soviets later called ‘social order’.

The order was twofold: first to besmirch Richard, then to glorify Henry, whose rights to succession were rather tenuous. The first objective was achieved by depicting Richard as an evil hunchback who murdered those little princes in the Tower. Both parts were mendacious.

Richard had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, that’s all. A real hunchback wouldn’t have been able to wield a heavy 15^th century sword with the athletic agility required to stay alive in many battles, which Richard did.

As to the two young sons of Edward IV murdered in the Tower of London, there isn’t a shred of evidence to connect Richard with that crime. Shakespeare based his play on Sir Thomas More’s account that solely relied on cui bono conjecture.

The Duke of Richmond, later to become King Henry VII, was a Welsh usurper who had a much better reason for killing the little princes. That doesn’t mean he did, but then it doesn’t point an accusing finger at Richard either.

Writing a century after the event, Shakespeare had the benefit of hindsight but ignored it. He knew that Henry’s subsequent reign was tyrannical and generally unsuccessful. And yet he put in his mouth a soliloquy that any Stalinist hack would have been proud of:

O, now, let Richmond and Elizabeth,
The true succeeders of each royal house,
By God’s fair ordinance conjoin together!
And let their heirs, God, if thy will be so.
Enrich the time to come with smooth-faced peace,
With smiling plenty and fair prosperous days!

This is ideological sycophancy at its most emetic. That, however, didn’t prevent Richard III from becoming historical orthodoxy. The artist of genius lent his gravitas to a falsehood.

Three centuries later Tolstoy (who, by the way, detested Shakespeare) did the same in his mendacious, ideologically inspired portrayal of the 1812 war against Napoleon.

Two of Tolstoy’s pet ideas, both false, came into play. The first is that personalities have no role to play in history. The only impetus comes from some mysterious historical forces Tolstoy left unidentified. Those forces move people around like pawns on the chessboard, and the people have no more say in the matter than do those wooden figurines.

Tolstoy borrowed that determinist concept from Joseph de Maistre (who appears in the novel as a minor character). In fact, Tolstoy copied whole pages from de Maistre’s essays without attribution. But he missed the point: de Maistre identified those forces as divine providence. Since the only God Tolstoy believed in was himself, he left that part out.

His other hobbyhorse was the saintly nature of Russian peasants and whichever other Russians came close to that ideal. That’s why he poopooed every foreign officer in the Russian army as an incompetent fool – this though some of them, such as Clausewitz, Stein and Bennigsen, have a different reputation in history. Then again, Tolstoy even managed to show Napoleon as a military nonentity, which took some doing.

At the same time he extolled the senile Field-Marshal Kutuzov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian forces. In the eyes of serious military historians, the latter fought a do-nothing campaign of staggering incompetence which could easily have ended in catastrophe.

As it was, Kutuzov lost the only major battle of the war and as a result surrendered Moscow. (Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov slept through the War Council meeting where the decision to abandon Moscow was taken. In some quarters, such somnolence could be seen as gross negligence, if not outright treason.) Later Kutuzov missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capturing Napoleon and ending the war a couple of years earlier.

However, Tolstoy, ever the dialectician, argues that even the battle of Borodino was actually a Russian victory because the French lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated the Nazis in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

As to the saintly Russian peasants Tolstoy credits as the principal factor of victory, rather than fighting the French, they rose against their serf-owning masters. Peasant uprisings broke out throughout the country, and at the critical points of the war Kutuzov had to send whole divisions out to quell them.

Dumas’s accounts of France’s 17^th century history are another example of history distorted by fictional portrayal. The greatest French statesmen of that period, Richelieu, Mazarin and Colbert, come across as, respectively, a sinister tyrant, a thieving nonentity and a bean-counting flunky. But Dumas neither pretended nor was considered to be a writer of genius.

He wrote light entertainment of very high quality, and though many children read his musketeer stories with delight (I still do, in my dotage), few take them as historical orthodoxy. Shakespeare and Tolstoy, geniuses as they are, have a much greater influence – and a much better chance to falsify history.

P.S. Speaking of history, we must set the record straight: Joe Biden doesn’t hate Britain. In fact, an unverified account reports him as saying: “Some of my ancestors and best friends are colonialist murderers”.

To paraphrase Dr Johnson, Russian culture is great and original. The trouble is, where it’s original it isn’t great. And where it’s great it isn’t original.

Russian culture rose to greatness when it began to borrow heavily from the West towards the end of the 18^th century. That worked wonders: within a single century, the country’s artistic culture reached at least parity with any other, certainly any contemporaneous with it.

Alas, when it came to politics, philosophy and political philosophy, Russian culture remains puny and epigonic. To be sure, being derivative isn’t necessarily bad in itself. It all depends on what’s held up as a worthy model to emulate.

The thing is that Western political thought isn’t monolithic. For example, Burke’s exegesis of the French Revolution is diametrically opposite to Paine’s, de Maistre’s constitutional ideas to Jefferson’s, the Whig interpretation of history to the conservative one.

The trouble with anti-totalitarian Russians is that, perhaps understandably, they borrow only from the West’s liberal strain. That intellectual fallacy isn’t doing particularly well even in its native habitat, where it has been cultivated for centuries. In Russia, where no such tradition exists, that kind of thought leads to an intellectual fiasco – but, to us, a useful one.

Russia is like a convex mirror held up to the West to enlarge its failings into a grotesque caricature. That should enable us to see them clearly, although few of us are willing to focus our eyes for long enough.

Enter Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who looks like everybody’s favourite aunt and sounds the way a Russian Easter cake would sound if it could talk. Dr Eidelman has her own YouTube channel she uses to stream popular accounts of history.

Most of her effort to carry history to the masses is highly commendable. Her erudition can’t be faulted, and neither can her integrity, which is more than one can say for many modern historians.

However, when she flies too close to the sun of modernity, she does an Icarus by just rehashing views one can read in The Guardian, The New York Times or Le Monde. That makes her sound as intellectually bankrupt as those publications.

Her latest programme is about Franco, who, says Dr Eidelman, makes her feel “chilling horror”. In that she is no different from any leader writer at the papers I’ve mentioned. But I did tell you that, unlike them, Dr Eidelman possesses laudable integrity.

That’s why, having shared with us her innermost feelings, she proceeds to explain that the infernal Franco wasn’t as black as he is painted.

To wit: “he prevented Spain from being dragged into the Second World War.” All he did was “allow volunteers… to form the Blue Division that was sent to the Eastern Front”. That’s why “Hitler was enraged, saying he’d rather have his teeth pulled than ever talk to Franco again.”

“He wouldn’t let Hitler move troops through Spain in 1942, after the Allies had landed in North Africa.”

“He declared several amnesties for political prisoners” and paved Spain’s way to democracy “by appointing Prince Juan Carlos as his successor.”

Oh well, on balance I’d suggest that’s pretty good going, especially for a man described in the aforementioned papers as a fascist dictator. Dr Eidelman confirms that: “I know he was far from being the scariest of Europe’s 20^th century dictators… Franco can’t be put into the first rank of cannibals.”

So what’s the source of the “chilling horror” Dr Eidelman feels whenever Franco’s name is mentioned? She kindly explains: “I am scared by his complete coldness, total self-control, absence of sentiments. He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.”

Most of us would say “and a good job too”. Franco indeed managed to keep his head when all around him were losing theirs (yes, I know Kipling used that phrase first). That’s a job requirement for a leader, especially at crisis time. What’s the problem then?

Well, you see, Dr Eidelman is appalled at the cold-bloodedness Franco showed when ordering people to be executed. Would she prefer him throwing a hysterical fit every time he issued such an order?

Apparently not. After all, “He had neither Hitler’s hysterical fanaticism nor Mussolini’s temperament.” One gets the impression Dr Eidelman is horrified that any such orders had to be issued. Franco should have treated the communists’ attempt to deliver Spain to Stalin the way a Guardian-reading social worker treats a drug addict in his care.

Had he done so, Spain would have suffered the kind of terror Stalin’s other dominions suffered. The number of people executed in cold blood or otherwise would have exceeded Franco’s score by orders of magnitude.

Historical figures must be viewed not from the lofty height of humanitarian ideals but in the context of the alternatives available under the circumstances. The only alternative to Stalin in Spain circa 1936 was Franco, not a typological precursor of Dr Eidelman – praiseworthy as her humanitarian impulses may be.

She should take her cue from her colleague Adolphe Tiers (d. 1877), the great historian turned statesman, who suppressed another communist power grab, the Paris Commune. Thereafter the liberal press invariably referred to him as a Bloody Cur, with Tiers just shrugging: “Somebody had to be”.

Dr Eidelman hates communism as much as I do. I’m sure she detests Putin’s Nazism with equal passion. That part is easy, or at least should be for any decent person, which Dr Eidelman undoubtedly is. What’s hard is coming up with a realistic alternative – and ways of realising it.

Alas, many extreme situations can only be resolved by a Francisco Franco, not an Albert Schweitzer. And when a Franco-type figure (Pinochet comes to mind as a similar man in a similar situation) does resolve the situation, he should be hailed as a hero and saviour of his nation. Not panned for being unlike Dr Schweitzer in his methods.

I’ve seen hundreds of photographs of Franco, and never once did I spot a pair of wings on his back. He was no angel, and any normal person should deplore some of his methods. But a scholar can’t afford being just a normal person. The job calls for dispassionate – coldblooded! – analysis and a rational weighing of all relevant factors.

Dr Eidelman has learned from the West, but the wrong kind of the West. Yet in the process she, along with her whole country, teaches the West a lesson – in how not to think of complex events and complicated historical figures.

One hopes we don’t play truant at such classes. Every day of her life Russia teaches us what not to do, how not to approach public affairs. And the academic faculty includes decent people like Dr Eidelman alongside a full complement of monsters like Putin. Let’s learn from them.

Vive la différence, say the French. Originally the concept applied to sexes, but it’s fair to say it has now been pushed a bit too far.

However, differences among us are indeed worth celebrating, if only to remind us that each person, each nation, each society is unique.

Or perhaps such reminders are superfluous. We already know we aren’t the same as even our relations, friends and neighbours. And when it comes to strangers from elsewhere, we don’t need reminding how different they are, thank you very much.

But successful families, societies and cultures coalesce not on things that set them apart but on those they have in common. However distinctive each floor in a building may be, they must all rest on a single sturdy foundation. If that foundation is termite-eaten or subsiding, the structure will collapse sooner or later.

Our culture, indeed our whole Western civilisation, was erected on the foundation of Christianity. That’s a matter of fact, not faith. And staying in the cold realm of facts, one has to acknowledge that every attempt to replace that foundation with some other has failed.

Individuals, families, societies resemble more and more atoms spinning out of their molecule. Brotherhood of men, that notorious fratérnité in the French triad, has turned into an indigestible pie in the sky concocted in a secular cooker.

Men can be brothers only if they have the same father, and such kinship is the most enduring of all. That point was made and reiterated by millions of men over hundreds of years every day, when they said the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father…” – one for all.

Some of you still say those words every day; most, I suspect, don’t. But all of you must sense that a sense of brotherly unity is missing in the world. The misguided effort to squeeze various surrogate fathers into the space vacated by the real one has turned us into culturally homeless orphans.

Having built the edifice of history’s greatest civilisation, we’ve either walked away from it or, worse, tried to bring the structure down. We’ve succeeded in the former, failed in the latter.

For the edifice hasn’t been pulled down; it has only been obscured by a dense fog. Yet its outlines are still visible, reminding us all that it’s never too late to turn around and walk back.

Sooner or later we’ll do just that, even though it looks as if we’ve lost our way. Yet every other structure we see emerging out of the fog is a mirage. Only one edifice is real. Here in the West there can be no other – which has been proved empirically over the past few centuries in a series of experiments paid for in blood.

That one real edifice bears a superficial resemblance to the Tower of Babel in that its inhabitants converse in different tongues. But whatever their language, on this day they all say the same thing.

Christ is risen!

Le Christ est ressuscité!

Christus ist auferstanden!

Cristo ha resucitado!

Cristo è risorto!

Kristus on üles tõusnud!

Kristus er oppstanden!

Xристос воскрес!

Chrystus zmartwychwstał!

Kristus vstal z mrtvých!

Cristo ressuscitou!

Kristus ir augšāmcēlies!

Christus is verrezen!

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!

Krisztus feltámadt!

Kristus är uppstånden!

Kristus prisikėlė!

Kristus nousi kuolleista!

Hristos a înviat!

INDEED HE IS RISEN! HAPPY EASTER!

China’s ambassador to the EU, Mr Fu Cong (careful how you pronounce it) said something no one expected. Even my uniquely unfailing clairvoyance proved to be not so reliable (just this once!).

As you recall, Fu’s ventriloquist, Emperor Xi, visited Moscow the other day, where he co-signed some sort of agreement with Putin. The document had 14 paragraphs, most of which had to do with economic cooperation.

If you don’t speak Sino-Russian, in this context ‘economic cooperation’ means confirming China’s control of Russia’s Far East and Eastern Siberia. It also means that Russia accepts her role as China’s de facto vassal. And oh yes, I almost forgot: on that basis they also swore undying, limitless friendship.

The document reiterates both sides’ opposition to siting nuclear weapons in countries that don’t have their own. They also agree that using, or even threatening to use, nuclear weapons is unacceptable.

I wonder how Russia goes about that part. The only way to abide will be banning Russian politicians from making any public pronouncements on foreign policy. So far not a single one over the past couple of years has omitted the threat to reduce the West to radioactive ash or some such.

The two chaps also had a private chat that went unrecorded. No details have been released, but it doesn’t take my clairvoyance to know what they talked about.

Putin begged Xi to rearm Russia and start providing the military electronics for her to begin to rearm herself. He must have thanked Xi for his surreptitious help provided through third parties, but lamented its naturally limited scope. Massive direct help would be greatly appreciated.

Surmising Xi’s reply is harder, although many commentators did try. They were more or less evenly divided between favouring either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ answer, and only I, the clairvoyant, stated uncompromisingly that either was possible.

Unable to read anything on Xi’s inscrutable face, commentators agreed to wait and see what the two limitless friends would do next. Depending on what it was, they could then figure out Xi’s response retrospectively.

Alas, Putin’s next move didn’t clarify matters. He announced that Russia would deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, which went against both the letter and the spirit of his public agreement with Xi. Rather than answering the old question, this action raised new ones.

Either this development was discussed and agreed by the two chaps in private or it wasn’t. If it was, Xi must be happy. If it wasn’t, he must be incandescent. Which is it?

Enter the ambassador with a precariously pronounceable name, Fu Cong. Asked about that boundless friendship, he said that some people “deliberately misinterpret this because there’s no so-called ‘no limit’ friendship or relationship. ‘No limit’ is nothing but rhetoric.”

For all my clairvoyance, I can’t be sure I understand every implication. There are too many. First, speaking through his dummy (you don’t think Fu was stating his own opinion, do you?), the ventriloquist Xi tells the West to disregard the empty words he and Putin put into that agreement.

Friendship, what friendship? No limit? You bet every part of your body limits exist, in everything but rhetoric.

Two scenarios are possible here, and the first one is obvious. Xi refused to provide direct military help to Putin, and the latter retaliated by blatantly breaking their agreement not to proliferate nukes.

That enraged Xi, and Fu’s statement is a public rebuke of Putin. It’s also a plea to the West that it shouldn’t treat China as Russia’s ally in that bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Alliance with Russia may make China a target for massive sanctions, and her economy isn’t doing well as it is. So far Xi has been doing all he could not to fly too close to the sun of sanctions, and Fu’s disclaimer seems to confirm China’s intention to keep her nose, well, cleanish.

It may also mean that China is withdrawing her friendship and, more important, support from Putin. If that’s the case, he won’t last long.

His nearest and dearest may decide that the end is nigh, and their only chance of their own survival is to blame it all on Putin, deliver him to the Hague and make it easy for the West to pretend it believes that Russia has found God.

But that’s only one possibility. The other one is subterfuge, something of which both China and Russia are eminently capable. Using rhetoric to repudiate rhetoric, China is planning to step up her secret supplies to Russia, while trying to stay just this side of Western sanctions. There, the results would be unpredictable.

Giving up that silly tomfoolery about my clairvoyance, I must admit I don’t know which of the two scenarios is real. Neither does John Kirby, US National Security Council coordinator.

“Look,” he said. “For us it’s actions, not words… It’s certainly encouraging to hear that they are publicly making that pronouncement. But we’re going to obviously continue to monitor.”

Mr Kirby’s grammar is questionable, but his words are wise. Nothing emanating from manifestly evil powers must be taken at face value. Remember the Russian proverb Reagan once quoted, “trust but verify”? The first part is strictly optional; the second, vital.

Meanwhile, the Russians disavow Fu’s statement, suggesting he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. Just go by the official documents signed by Putin and Xi, says Putin’s spokesman Peskov: “The whole context of their mutual understanding is stated in the two documents… They clarify completely the whole gamut of questions currently on the mutual agenda.”

Yes, except that Putin broke that agreement both in deed (planning to deploy nuclear weapons in Belarus) and in word (continuing to make nuclear threats). And Xi tells the world that the agreement is just hot air to be ignored.

Which of the two scenarios is true to life? Let’s hope for the first and prepare for the second. That’s the best we can do, and never mind the Chinese whispers.

Everything about and around Trump is just that, gaudy. Though born to money, he comes across as a truck driver who has just won the lottery.

His language, dress, mannerisms, reliance on rabble rousing, tastes in everything including women suggest an ideological commitment to tawdry vulgarity. Now, and I hope Shakespeare won’t mind, some people are born vulgar, some achieve vulgarity, and some have vulgarity thrust upon them.

For all I know, Trump might have manufactured his personality to fit his assessment of his audience, the American people. If that was his ploy, it has worked, after a fashion. But it may also backfire.

Every dramatic event of Trump’s life, certainly his political life, brings out into the streets two mobs, those who either love him or hate him with equally hysterical passion. The mobs clash, scream, swear or even, in extremis, try to storm government buildings. It’s all passionate, loud – and vulgar.

Moving from the sublime to the, well, less sublime, that is from Shakespeare to Wilde, all vulgarity is a crime. Trump has done his level best to drag American politics into the gutter of mob tastes, and that’s infinitely worse than his alleged mishandling of hush payments to assorted women of easy virtue.

In modern democracies, politics takes on an inordinate importance. It becomes not only the face of a nation, but also its essence. When the masses become subjects, rather than objects, of governance, they shape politics and politicians – and hence their country – in their own image. But the reverse is also true: politicians retaliate by doing the same thing to the masses.

Thus politicians can have a powerful, sometimes formative, effect on the style and tone of a nation. And the brasher the politician, the greater and more enduring the effect. Style perseveres long after substance evaporates.

Each president as a person affects the presidency as an institution. What Trump fails to grasp is that the latter is much more significant than the former. Presidents come and go, as do their policies, good or bad. Subsequent presidents usually undo the good ones and exacerbate the bad ones, but the permanent institution lives on after the transient individuals withdraw into history books.

If that institution loses honour and dignity, the loss may well prove irreversible. And President Trump damages the presidency both in and out of office.

For example, he and his fans scream themselves hoarse that the Democrats stole the latest election. That may or may not be true, but those tasteless shrieks undermine the dignity of the institution one way or the other.

Compare Trump’s behaviour with Nixon’s, who can hardly be held up as an exemplar of presidential probity. However, when in 1960 his advisers showed him the data proving that the Democrats had stolen the election in the swing state of Illinois, Nixon refused to demand a recount. Doing so, he said, would diminish the presidency – and he was right. No such compunctions for Trump.

As to the face value of his indictment, let the lawyers figure it out. Trump’s acolytes claim the case against him is politically motivated, and no doubt they are right. But, however reprehensible such a motivation may be, it doesn’t in itself mean the case is groundless.

Personally, I can’t believe that Trump, a clever operator who had been around the block or two, made the amateurish mistake of passing hush money as legal fees. Surely he could have found a fool-proof way to compensate his lawyer for the payment the latter had made to that porn star.

Most commentators say that the resulting brouhaha will boost Trump’s chances of securing the Republican nomination, if not presidency. Again, I’m not an expert. Maybe it will or maybe it won’t.

But I do detect an opening for Biden to scupper Trump’s campaign once and for all. All he has to do is issue a presidential pardon for Trump, what Ford did for Nixon in 1974, and Nixon’s crime was infinitely worse than Trump’s.

That would be a noble, magnanimous gesture that could be sold to the public as upholding the dignity of the institution. Trump’s constant whining about his stolen presidency would then look petty and, by comparison, unpresidential.

However, he is doing a creditable job of that all on his own. I mentioned his taste in women earlier, and it’s identical to that of my hypothetical truck driver who has won the lottery. Basking in the glow of his unexpected millions, that chap would instantly use some of his new fortune to reel in models, Playboy bunnies, porn stars and hookers – the same demographic pasture in which Trump grazes.

One can say in Trump’s defence that he isn’t the first president whose sexual shenanigans have ever brought the presidency into disrepute. At least, according to the indictment, Trump misbehaved before, rather than during, his tenure.

JFK indulged his priapism while in the White House, with Secret Service agents running hookers and trashy actresses through his bedroom. Their colleagues in the next generation provided a similar service for Clinton. Bill also had a tawdry affair with a young intern, proving in the process that sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar.

Speaking of the dignity of the institution, I cringed when reading Monica Lewinsky’s recollections of having “phone sex” with the president. At least, by all accounts Trump eschews the mediation of electronic appliances, although I wouldn’t put anything past him.

To be fair, the media can either boost or soft-pedal whatever damage presidents do to the presidency. In the case of Kennedy and, to a lesser extent, Clinton they downplayed it, while for Trump they are turning their amplifiers on full blast.

That’s where politics barges in. The major TV networks and mainstream papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post tend to reflect the views of the Democratic Party, and not necessarily its right end. Hence they either ignored Kennedy’s and Clinton’s misbehaviour or treated them as friends who had done something naughty.

By contrast, they treat Nixon and Trump as mortal enemies, not friends gone slightly awry. When that’s the case, the media pounce like a pack of rabid dogs.

Nixon did something wrong, but one can’t help thinking that similar infractions wouldn’t have received as much attention if committed by one of the Kennedy brothers. How busy were investigative reporters with, for example, the case of Teddy, the Chappaquiddick swimming champ? And had Joe Biden paid off a talkative hooker with campaign funds, would the media be as worked up?

Whenever and however politicians are involved, so is politics. But that doesn’t excuse either Nixon or Trump, whose actions damaged the presidency. With Nixon the damage was substantive: he was a president accused of trying to cheat his way to a second term.

Trump’s misdeeds are minor by comparison, but only in essence. One could argue that he harms the institution even more stylistically, by compromising its dignity and honour. This regardless of what we may think of his policies, executed or proposed.

For the record, I quite like most of them. But that’s neither here nor there.

It’s official: Finland becomes Nato’s thirty-first member today. Sweden is to follow soon, although I dismiss as fanciful any suggestion that China too is contemplating a similar move.

This brings into focus yet again the nature of fascist (or Nazi) regimes I discussed the other day. One distinguishing feature of such regimes is that they pounce on other countries. They sometimes come up with reasons for their aggressiveness, sometimes with mere pretexts, but these are all superfluous one way or the other.

Fascist regimes are aggressive because that’s what they congenitally are. They pounce on others because of their own inner imperative, not because of any external threat or any other rational consideration. They attack other countries for the same reason dogs attack cats: that’s how their DNA is encoded.

Conversely, if a regime doesn’t do that, it’s not fascist. It may be authoritarian, like, say, Franco’s Spain, but it’s not fascist. You’ll notice that Franco never attacked anybody after the Civil War. Moreover, he steadfastly resisted Hitler’s entreaties to enter the Second World War.

Now we are on a determinist trip, here’s another observation. Fascist regimes may win some interim victories, but they always lose in the end. Whatever their pretext for aggression, they invariably get the opposite of what they claim they want.

The reason is simple: other countries gang up on them. A decent country can afford losing a war to another decent country, but not to a fascist one. Fascist values and practices are so abhorrent to civilised people that they’d rather die than accept defeat.

When attacked by an evil power, people see the war not as a mere military conflict but as an existential struggle for survival. To use an ancient example, Hannibal was beaten by Rome not because he was less of a military leader (he wasn’t) or because Carthage was inherently weaker (it wasn’t, not at the time), but because Carthaginians practised human sacrifice. That galvanised Roman resistance so much that the great general never stood a chance.

Finland illustrates these points perfectly.

Putin pounced on the Ukraine because, supposedly, he couldn’t accept Nato’s eastward expansion. The more repulsive of his acolytes, such as a certain Mail columnist who’ll go nameless (okay, Hitchens, if you insist) are still repeating that lie every chance they get.

See above for the real reason behind Russia’s aggression. But if we accept the claimed pretext on face value, what did Putin get? Another 800 miles of border with Nato. And facing a bloc that has become so much stronger by adding another nation with many historical grievances against Russia.

You’ll remember that a civil war between the Reds and the Whites broke out in Finland at the same time as in Russia, which is no wonder considering that Finland was part of the Russian Empire at the time. But the outcome of its civil strife was different there: the Whites won.

That converted the Russians’ usual disdain for smaller nations into visceral hatred. It was seething and building up until Stalin’s red fascist regime pounced on Finland in the winter of 1939. Unlike the Ukraine today, that small country stood alone against the fascist juggernaut – and she still managed to beat it to a standstill. Finland ceded some territory, but she kept her sovereignty.

(As an aside, she later entered the Second World War on Germany’s side, and it was Finnish troops that sealed Leningrad from the north during the infamous siege. But for Stalin’s little foray in 1939, Finland would have remained neutral and Leningrad wouldn’t have lost almost half of its population.)

Since then the Damocles sword of Russia has always hung over Finland’s head. Hoping not to whet fascist appetites, she has tried to steer a neutral course and not upset the Russians too much (hence the term ‘finlandisation’). But when Putin’s fascism acted according to its genetic makeup, neutrality was no longer an option.

This time around the Finns have no intention of standing alone in the face of a fascist monster. Nor are they prepared to wait and see which target Putin will choose next. Fearing it may be Finland, they’ve rushed under the umbrella provided by Article 5 of the Nato Charter.

The Russians responded with their usual threats of nuclear annihilation, supposedly likely in any case and inevitable should Nato deploy any forces in Finland. But the point is, it already has. Finland’s small but well-trained and well-equipped army has today become part of the Nato force.

Hitler claimed that Western powers, especially the dastardly Anglo-Saxons, were out to dismember Germany even more than she had already been dismembered at Versailles. His only solution was to attack the whole world, which predictably had a unifying effect on that rather large entity.

What happened? As a result, Germany was split in half and remained split for the next 46 years. Two generations.

It takes a blind man, or else a Putin poodle like…– well, no names this time – not to detect a parallel. A feral attempt to destroy the sovereignty of another nation has united the civilised world against Russia.

Rather than extinguishing another country’s sovereignty, she is now likely to lose her own, if she hasn’t already. China’s shadow is looming large not only over Taiwan but also over Russia. The two countries claim to be partners, but they both know Russia is the junior one, en route to becoming China’s protectorate, if not an out-and-out colony.

Sarcastic congratulations to Russia – and heartfelt ones both to Finland and the rest of the civilised world.

We’ve become stronger, a development directly attributable to the aforementioned law: whatever the pretext claimed by fascist regimes for their aggression, they end up getting its exact opposite.

Pan Macmillan, which once published a book of mine, has now re-released one of rather greater renown, Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind.

Moreover, it hasn’t even been bowdlerised, which practice is the current equivalent of Nazi book burning. This though Mitchell’s novel treats Southern planters as human beings, rather than caricature villains.

The temptation to bring the narrative in line with today’s sensibilities must have been strong. Nor would it have been difficult to do so.

Scarlett O’Hara could have been replaced with Simon Legree, appropriately renamed and borrowed for that purpose from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Limon Segree would spend his days torturing slaves and his nights in flagrante delicto with Rhett Butler.

That would give his character the requisite depth, by turning it into a battleground where virtue (homosexuality) clashed with vice (racism). Eventually, virtue would triumph. Limon would ‘transition’, surgery and all, and become a model modern woman. Rhett would follow suit, and the two would live in a lesbian union happily ever after, having first killed Ashley Wilkes for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

But I shouldn’t let my morbid imagination run away with me. We can argue till the cotton pickers come home whether anything along those lines could have happened. The important thing is that it didn’t.

The publishers clenched their teeth, held their nerve and committed the heroic act of publishing the book in the original. But such bravery, exceedingly rare these days, called for a full complement of warnings and disclaimers.

These were duly provided: “The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.

“We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.”

Now, the novel was written (not originally written, for those who eschew tautology) in 1936, some 84 years after Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Uncle Tom. The gap isn’t especially wide chronologically, but in every other respect the two epochs were aeons apart.

When Stowe put that last full stop down, the Emancipation Proclamation was still 11 years away and slavery was in full swing. However, it had become a distant memory by the time Mitchell created her one and only masterpiece.

Hence, it’s unclear which period it was that her novel was supposed to reflect linguistically. Mitchell expertly stylised her protagonists’ speech to make it sound the way people spoke in Stowe’s time – not in 1936, when Mitchell’s novel was “originally” written. Her contemporaries spoke pretty much as we do now, minus the woke bilge.

And they felt about slavery pretty much as we do now. However, they were neither “hurt” nor “damaged” by Mitchell’s depiction of Georgia during the Civil War. They still had enough taste to know the difference between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind.

The former wasn’t really a novel. It was novelised propaganda of abolitionism, which wasn’t out of place in the 1850s, when slavery was rife. Like any tract written largely for political purposes, it was artistically weak.

That genre called for the villains of the story to be demonised in a one-dimensional, caricatured way. That diminished the novel as a work of art, while giving it the impact of a down-with-slavery leaflet. The book was useful in that capacity, rallying anti-slavery forces to their worthy cause.

Unlike Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind is a real novel, and a damned good one. However, Mitchell consciously tried to counterbalance Stowe by depicting a more harmonious relationship between her slave owners and slaves.

Historically, that wasn’t out of place either. No doubt her O’Haras, Wilkeses and Butlers existed in the South – as did the Simon Legrees.

A reader of even average taste and discernment would have appreciated that back in the 1930s. Although raised on the ethos of Uncle Tom, he would have read Gone With the Wind for its literary merits, which were considerable. He would have perhaps even compared Mitchell to Stendhal or Tolstoy, what with their ability to create a panorama of an historical epoch and inhabit it with real people, not cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps as a result he would have stopped to think more deeply about the vicissitudes of human nature that could embrace good as well as evil, maybe even at the same time. Those who felt especially strongly about such matters might have felt that, rather than creating a balance, Mitchell tipped it too far towards the other end. Her planters just might have come out as too benevolent, and her slaves too content.

Those readers would have put that view to their friends, who would have either agreed or disagreed. But under no circumstances would any of them have been either “hurt” or “damaged”. And crucially, none of them would have felt obligated to feign the trauma he hadn’t experienced.

I am absolutely sure that no one reading Gone With the Wind today suffers a deep emotional wound either. But, as a crucial difference to the 1930s, today’s educated readers (the only kind who can get through a 1,000-page novel) have been ideologically conditioned to claim they feel “hurt” or “damaged” whenever their mandated woke sensibilities are slighted.

And today’s publishers feel they have to pander to such bogus sensibilities. Hence their offensive disclaimers – or worse. They often go as far as vandalising original texts, or banning them if they don’t lend themselves to vandalisation easily.

For example, Huckleberry Finn, as anti-racist a novel as one can find, has a character called Nigger Jim who appears throughout the narrative. Even today’s savages realise that renaming him Afro-American Jim or some such would be glaringly idiotic. So they ban Huckleberry Finn from school libraries, for starters.

That deprives children of the book about which Hemingway said: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

But who cares about literature or history or artistic and intellectual integrity? It’s ideology that sits at the top of the totem pole, and everyone is supposed to genuflect. Yet we should keep in mind that getting down on one’s knees may sometimes be easier than getting back up.

Any self-respecting Thesaurus of quotations contains 500 pages or more, and hence thousands of catchy phrases and epigrams.

By the looks of it, most of them come from either the Bible or Shakespeare, sources so venerable they are best left alone. Yet even the remaining adages run to thousands, proving that the world has never been short of men with the gift of the gab.

Most of the maxims ring true, as far as they go. But how far is that?

The question isn’t superfluous because aphorisms are often used in lieu of arguments. Defying gravity, an aphorism uses the weight of the author’s authority to fly up to the stratosphere of reason.

A chap says something like “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” and flashes a QED smile. Supposedly his case is made. Well, it isn’t. In most instances it would take but a few sentences to throw that case out of intellectual court.

I could cite many examples proving that, attractive as snappy wit may be, it can only function as an ornament of thought, not a substitute for it. For brevity’s sake, I’ll only cite one such because I use it quite often.

According to Thomas Mann, “all intellectual attitudes are latently political”. That’s a spiffy phrase that definitely contains a grain of truth. But it’s light years away from being the whole truth.

Political afflatus indeed shapes, or rather clouds, most modern attitudes. The qualifier ‘modern’ is justified because this is strictly a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. These days you discern politics behind pronouncements on sex, art, religion, family, cars, migration, style, architecture, education, medicine – well-nigh everything.

Mann’s aphorism is vindicated and stays that way until what I call the ‘next question’ is asked: Yes, but where do political views come from?

A materialist may say they are shaped by the outward circumstances of one’s life. Yet that’s like saying that two people with similar upbringing, education, spouses, jobs, bank accounts, houses and cars will see similar dreams in their sleep.

They may or may not. It all depends on their intuitive predisposition, which comes from a depth unplumbed by any Fraud and Junk (apt names my friend uses for Freud and Jung) – and certainly by no political scientist. That’s the problem with politics: it’s only skin-deep.

Intuition sits at the very bottom of one’s personality, and it can either swim to the surface where politics floats or dig below the bottom, trying to get to the core of reason. Both intuition and the reason it seeks are individual. They are aspects of one’s character, which makes them strictly private property.

Politics, on the other hand, is a mass phenomenon. Someone going in for it has to be prepared to pool his property with millions of others in some megalomaniac whip-round. All those people toss their political possessions into the same hat. But each has come by them in his own way.

I’d suggest that a person is born with his politics the way he is born with aggressiveness, loquacity or priapism. Over a lifetime, he may learn to contain those qualities, but they’ll never disappear. He is a junkie who remains an addict no matter how many years he has been clean.

One’s politics can be surmised from any number of tell-tale signs, none of which seems to have anything to do with politics. For example, tell someone that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion” and ask him if the statement is true or false.

A chap inclined leftwards will say ‘yes’ nine times out of ten. And a conservative will be as likely to say ‘no’, explaining that the statement needs to be qualified to become true. “Everyone is entitled to his feelings and thoughts,” yes, hard to argue with that.

But an opinion is feelings and thoughts enunciated, and the right to do so can’t be a matter of automatic entitlement. It’s contingent on too many circumstances: time, place, audience, the speaker’s qualification and so on.

Show me those two hypothetical protagonists, and I’ll show you how each will vote in the next general election, even though the original question ostensibly had nothing to do with politics.

The first man is given to reckless haste in forming imprudent judgement, which is certainly not a conservative trait. Neither is his readiness to accept easy answers to difficult questions. He is also a congenital egalitarian, for whom equality takes precedence over hierarchy and discernment – and even if it doesn’t, he’ll never admit that in public. In short, he is bound to vote for a socialist party, likely to be Labour in Britain or Democratic in the US.

The second responder thinks before he talks, proverbially looks before he leaps. His strong quality is prudence, which Edmund Burke identified as the uppermost conservative virtue.

He is suspicious of egalitarianism, which he sees as a construct far removed from any reality. Over his lifetime he has observed a hierarchy underpinning every walk of life, and he won’t sacrifice the evidence before his eyes to any contrived notion. Such a man is almost guaranteed to vote Tory in Britain or Republican in the US, although he may well be in for a let-down in both cases.

So, Herr Mann, every intellectual attitude may well be tinged by politics. But politics itself is a matter of intuitive predisposition that has more to do with temperament, character, culture and intelligence than with any conscious bias.

Politics is a way of rallying masses to a cause, whatever it might be. It relates to reality the way car advertising relates to car making. Which is to say practically not at all.