Month: June 2023

A few years ago, Gen. Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff, came up with the concept of hybrid warfare.

The idea was that of a two-prong offensive, crushing the enemy’s army with military force and his spirit with a flood of disinformation. Russia’s success in the former endeavour is rather understated, but the latter effort is gathering momentum all over the world, specifically in France.

The country’s Foreign Ministry has issued a report saying that the Russians are stepping up a massive offensive on public opinion.

To that end, they have cloned the web pages of many government departments and national media outlets. VIGNUM, France’s electronic counterintelligence service, has so far identified 355 domain names registered by the Russians and used to flood the web with fake news.

According to Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, this isn’t just private initiative: “Taking part in the campaign,” she said, “are Russian state structures devoted to spreading false information.”

She also mentions that her own bailiwick has been targeted since May, with Russian criminals uploading information that looks as if it came from France’s Foreign Ministry.

“The involvement of Russian embassies and cultural centres actively participating in widening this campaign, mainly through their accounts on social networks,” says the statement issued by the Foreign Ministry, “is a new twist in Russian hybrid strategy aimed at subverting democracy.”

Other organisations, both European and American, have also reported this large-scale operation, codenamed Doppelgänger. It has now entered its second, more sophisticated phase complete with various surreptitious tricks designed to bypass countermeasures.

The fake articles are laid out and typeset in the formats that look identical to the official websites of popular media, such as Le Parisien, Le Figaro and Le Monde. Also receiving the same treatment are the German publications Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Bild and Die Welt.

The trick the Russians use widely is called typosquatting, also known as URL hijacking and sting site, which is slightly modifying well-known website addresses. For example, lefigaro.fr may become lefigaro.ltd, a change easy to miss when surfing the net.

VIGNUM has been tracking that campaign since the start of Russia’s war on the Ukraine. Predictably, the thrust of that hybrid banditry is to discredit Western support for the country courageously fighting Russo-Nazi invaders.

The principal themes identified by VIGNUM are exactly the same as you can find in the weekly outpourings of a certain Mail on Sunday columnist:

The only way to stop horrendous bloodshed and destruction of property is for the two sides to settle their differences at a negotiating table.

In reality, that means the Ukraine should accept the status quo, ceding the invaded territories to Russia. This would enable Putin’s Nazis to catch their breath, rearm and resume their offensive with renewed vigour.

Continued Western support for the Ukraine may lead to a Third World War.

Official Russian spokesmen express this threat in the direct, usually obscene language of their disadvantaged childhoods. The typosquatters couch it in the understated mock-Western terms of genuine concern that any Mail On Sunday reader knows well.

The sanctions against Russia are ineffective. They affect mainly Western citizens, while the Russians hardly even notice them.

If that’s the case, one wonders why the Russians are wailing and gnashing their teeth each time the sanctions are tightened. Could it be because two-thirds of their population are on the brink of starvation? Or because, to use Saltykov-Shchedrin’s quip, all you can get for a rouble these days is a punch in the snout?

All Western states are virulently Russophobic.

That awful vice stays dormant most of the time and only ever rears its head when Russia pounces on her neighbours and threatens to annihilate the world with nuclear holocaust.

The Ukraine’s army is savage and her government officials are predominantly Nazi.

The words ‘teapot’ and ‘kettle’ spring to mind. After Bucha and Mariupol, it takes most refreshing effrontery for the Russians to accuse the Ukrainian army of barbaric savagery.

As to Nazism, I haven’t heard a single statement by a Ukrainian official claiming the racial superiority of Ukrainians, which entitles them to force their unmatched spirituality on others. For Russian officials and propagandists, from Putin down, this combination of Nazism and imperialism is standard fare.

The French special services say this massive effort is perfectly structured and coordinated. Under no circumstances can it be treated as isolated pinpricks by private individuals.

With all undue respect for Gen. Gerasimov, none of this is his invention. He is simply repackaging the old Bolshevik strategy in play since the early days of the Soviet Union.

It was to put that strategy in operation that the Bolsheviks created a global disinformation and espionage network called Comintern. Its bright star, the German communist Willi Münzenberg, turned Comintern into a Popular Front propaganda and disinformation empire, complete with its own newspapers, magazines, broadcast networks and film studios.

Paris intellectuals from the Left Bank were seduced en masse, as were similar groups in other Western countries. Once the war started, Münzenberg had outlived his usefulness and was unceremoniously bumped off in a French forest. But the toxins he and his masters injected into the West stayed in its bloodstream for decades – and they still haven’t been expunged.

Now the techniques developed by Popular Front operatives are profitably applied to subverting Western public opinion and turning it towards betraying the Ukraine.

The advances in electronic communications of which the West is so proud act as offensive weapons in the Russians’ hands. Yet it’s not all about URL hijacking and pretending to be Western media. Genuine Western publications can also be manipulated to the same end – as any reader of The Mail on Sunday can confirm.

If a pun is the lowest form of humour, then a pun on a person’s name is the lowest form of a pun. My only excuse is that sometimes I just can’t help myself.

In this case, my lapse into the lowest of the low was prompted by Sarah Vine, a Mail columnist with learning difficulties.

Miss Vine wrote an article about a woman sent to prison for aborting her foetus a couple of weeks before birth. (She, that woman, not Miss Vine, lied about the term of her pregnancy to get an abortion pill.)

The subject of abortion invites muddled, illogical thinking like few others, but Miss Vine, poor Michael Gove’s ex, has found a new depth possible to plumb. To begin with, she tries to find a balance where none exists.

“Abortion is a deeply complex issue,” she writes. It isn’t. It’s only made complex by modern barbarians. In fact, the issue is beautifully black or white. Either the foetus is a human being en route to becoming a person or it’s merely a part of a woman’s body.

If it’s the latter, then the woman can do to it whatever she likes. If it’s the former, then it should be protected like any human life. There is really no middle ground between these two postulates.

Miss Vine is aware of this dichotomy, but she applies her formidable intellect to finding a compromise that can’t exist.

“On the one hand it’s right that a woman should be able to control her fertility…” Right how? Morally? Philosophically? But never mind: “On the other, there must be limits. A foetus is not just a bit of extra tissue; it is a growing human and there comes a point where that human’s right to life becomes as inalienable as the mother’s.”

Then comes a sentence that, for me, should have ended the discussion right there: “Exactly when that turning point occurs is a debate that will likely never be resolved.”

Precisely. The only indisputable “turning point” is that of conception. Any other point is open to debate, and surely any doubt must be resolved in favour of protecting human life. You know, the sort of thing that’s supposed to be sacred?

Hence Miss Vine’s subsequent support for the 12-week limit is a logical non sequitur: “… morally I’m as comfortable with 12 weeks as I’ll be with any other limit.” As comfortable as with any other limit? Surely Miss Vine means she is more comfortable with 12 weeks than with any other limit? Don’t keep us guessing, love.

She then gets to the core of the argument: “But it seems to me that at the heart of this issue is the disagreement between those who like to frame abortion as purely a healthcare issue; and those who believe it’s a moral choice between right and wrong. Neither are strictly correct.”

This sitting on the fence may adversely affect Miss Vine’s own fertility. She really ought to come down before it does. Either abortion is free of moral considerations or it isn’t. A woman can’t be a little bit pregnant, and human life can’t almost exist. “Either/or”, as Kierkegaard would put it.

This isn’t to say there can be marginal cases, such as a high likelihood that a woman won’t survive childbirth. But for Miss Vine any case seems to be marginal.

Witness the fact that she chose the imprisoned woman as proof of how ambiguous the issue can be. Once again, the woman “eventually obtained an abortion pill by lying to a nurse practitioner who provided the drug remotely under the ‘pills by post’ scheme instituted during Covid, which allows medication to be supplied after a remote consultation for pregnancies of up to ten weeks.”

In fact, the woman was 32 to 34 weeks pregnant, which is to say about to give birth. “A heinous crime – or the actions of a troubled, desperate woman?” asks Miss Vine and then answers her own question: “The answer, I fear, is probably a bit of both.”

According to her, what made that woman “troubled and desperate” was that she kept two men on the go and hence was unsure which one was the father. Oh well, such uncertainty can drive anyone round the bend.

Since Miss Vine likes to dip into the troubled waters of morality, I wonder if she discerns a valid moral difference between aborting a child a week before birth and a week after. The latter is unquestionably infanticide. But can the former be just an action of “a troubled, desperate woman”?

In pronouncing the derisory custodial sentence of two years and four months, Mr Justice Pepperall implicitly agreed that the case wasn’t clear-cut. After all, the poor woman was “plagued by nightmares and flashbacks to her dead child’s face.”

SS executioners were also sometimes pursued by similar nightmares. Some even went mad recalling the ravines full of blood. That, incidentally, was one of the reasons the Nazis went to gas, thereby sparing the delicate sensibilities of the murderers. Should they have been exculpated then? Or given reduced sentences?

No wonder His Honour came under savage criticism. I would have treated the case as manslaughter punishable by life in prison… Sorry, it’s not his inordinate leniency that exposed Judge Pepperall to hysterical criticsm. It’s the fact that he passed down a custodial sentence at all.

He came under fire from all the predictable quarters: the Royal College of Midwives, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, assorted feminist and pro-abortion campaigners and some of our venerable MPs.

How dare he criminalise abortions at any point, even minutes before birth, tweeted Labour MP Stella Creasy: “No other healthcare procedure has such a status. No other patient group would be treated this way.”

Here Miss Creasy is guilty of committing a rhetorical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question): using the desired conclusion of an argument as its premise. The whole issue is that some of us argue, persuasively, that abortion isn’t a “healthcare procedure”.

Why, even Miss Vine detects possible nuances there. Hers is a different fallacy: argumentum ad temperantiam – belief that a compromise between two positions is always correct. Still, at least she acknowledges that two positions exist. That’s more than most other modern barbarians do.

So perhaps I’ve been too hard on Miss Vine. If we met socially, I’m sure we could get on just fine. I only wonder how someone so manifestly incapable of either moral or intellectual judgement finds herself a wide audience.

I experience an acute fit of schadenfreude whenever I observe a clash of perverse modern pieties. My position is strictly that of an outside observer – I have no dog in any such fight. One thing for sure: whichever side wins, decent people will be the losers.

This melancholy observation applies to the on-going Commons debate on changes to the Equality Act 2010 that would stop trans ‘women’ going into female-only lavatories, dressing rooms, hospital wards and prisons.

How would you argue against the current situation, where no such restrictions apply? I bet your argument won’t be that different from mine.

Allowing men, whatever they call themselves, into such spaces goes against basic decency, propriety and morality, not to mention taste. Also, as recent events have shown, any such ‘woman’ may well use ‘her’ penis as an offensive weapon, which endangers real women in places where they are particularly vulnerable.

I would go further than this, although I don’t necessarily expect to take many of you with me. My argument will draw on Genesis, a book that specifies exactly what the sexes are, male and female, and how many of them exist, two.

Then I’d enrage the more liberal of my readers by arguing that transsexuals should have no rights specific to them. The ‘rights of Englishmen’ apply to them, as they do to all of His Majesty’s subjects. However, that concept, dating from 1608, didn’t include as its constituent the right of people to change sex and make the change recognised in law.

Moving from high to low, my argument would then state that if some deranged individuals want to identify as members of a different sex or, for all I care, a different species, then by all means they should do so. But no such aberration should have a legal status.

I’d then probably add a touch of pragmatism by suggesting that, should transsexuality not be legally recognised, many more people would want to keep the sex they were born with. For example, if little children weren’t aware that they could choose their sex from a long menu of available options, that possibility wouldn’t even occur to most of them.

There’s nothing especially original or profound about that argument. What I’ve just stated is a basic conservative position, a modifier I use interchangeably with ‘decent’ and ‘intelligent’.

But decent and intelligent people can’t win such a debate, nor can they even join it. Our liberal democracy allows freedom of speech, but only provided said speech stays within the liberal-democratic mainstream.

This is remarkably similar to the Soviet Union, where one Marxist could only have argued that another one was insufficiently Marxist. Someone like me, who regarded every shade of Marxism as illiterate, sinister gibberish, didn’t have a say in the matter.

In a similar vein, it’s unthinkable that any public figure, especially one who wishes to remain as such, could make an argument I’ve put forth. If one wants to take exception to any modern perversion, it can only be done in the terms of another modern perversion, in this case feminism.

The conflict isn’t between vice and virtue, but between two different if related vices. Trans rights clash with women’s rights and, only if the latter win, will it be possible to keep men with a screw loose out of women’s lavatories.

The liberal-democratic ethos of rights is as unchallengeable in Britain (or anywhere in the West) as the Marxist ethos was in the Soviet Union. This is an axiom that all our politicians accept.

That’s why both our PM Rishi Sunak and his Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch support the proposed amendment from the feminist position, not that of common decency. While recognising ‘trans rights’ as an inviolable concept, they both believe that ‘biological sex’ should take priority over ‘legal sex’ where there exists a distinct danger of women being raped in public loos.

Let’s remark parenthetically that the very existence of an equalities ministry is a sure sign of tyranny, albeit of a liberal-democratic kind. Equality may be the overarching deity in whose name modernity was inaugurated and at whose altar it’s supposed to worship. Yet it has nothing to do with any discernible reality.

Contrary to what the American Declaration of Independence says, all men are manifestly created unequal in every intellectual, moral and physical faculty worth mentioning. When allowed to come into play, such differences are bound to create hierarchical arrangements affecting social, political, economic, cultural, intellectual and every other sphere of life.

This is a natural process that can only be suppressed by unnatural means. The state has to be empowered to file away the natural peaks, using oppressive laws as a giant rasp. Hence, skipping a few obvious intermediate steps, the equalities ministry could be more appropriately called the Ministry for Despotism.

The glossocratic language of rights is how liberal-democratic despotism puts its foot down. And all rights immediately become politicised, which effectively turns any group of claimants into a political party competing for power.

That doesn’t reflect any actual reality: few women I’ve ever met perceive themselves as card-carrying, fully paid-up members of a ‘community’, much less a political party. The same goes for members of any race – politicisation is shoved down their throats by liberal-democratic elites seeking tyrannical powers.

Yet actual reality has been disfranchised, going the way of common decency, basic logic and aesthetic taste. Virtual reality reigns supreme, and it has an army of impassioned glossocrats to fight its battles.

So yes, do let’s keep men, former or present, out of women’s-only spaces. But if invoking feminism is the only way to ensure such an outcome, then the argument can have no real winners. It will, however, have real losers: all of us, along with what’s left of our civilisation.  

How very Boris that he should have bowed out as prime minister with a line from that particular Hollywood film.

He may well see himself as a Terminator-type character, someone who can take on all comers and disperse them with a mighty sweep of an over-muscled arm.

That was last year. Now that Johnson has been hounded out of his parliamentary seat, it’s he who has been terminated. Yet I’m sure the same phrase is bouncing around his cranial cavity.

Or perhaps he has reverted to a line more apposite to his Eton-Oxford education: “I am a man more sinned against than sinning”. I don’t think either line would be out of place. Johnson may be neither the Terminator nor King Lear but he is definitely a man more sinned against than sinning. And he’ll be back.

This isn’t to say his detractors don’t have a point. Johnson has indeed sinned both in his private and public life, a lot, often and in various ways. And yes, he has been known to tell the odd lie about such vital matters as consuming a piece of unauthorised cake.  

In this Johnson is presumed to be startlingly different from those who have been spewing venom at him at a vigorous pumping rate. Their own public lives have never been sullied by a single lie or indiscretion. Moreover, they have been spared the onus of any discernible achievement, with its potential for tempting a man into the sin of hubris.

They, Johnson’s detractors, differ from him in their sterling integrity and refusal to seek cheap popularity. They have none, which proves their commitment to high principle at the expense of any electoral gain.

Now that I’ve got sarcasm out of the way, a few mirthless points are in order.

Johnson has never been immune to the core frailties of the modern political class. But the way those jackals have pounced on him in a pack is totally out of proportion to his failings.

Like them, Johnson is open to amply justified criticism. He suffers from the systemic maladies of modern politics and adds to them a few touches of his own. Thus he did nothing to undo the constitutional damage done by his predecessors, nor anything to point the economy in the right direction.

But that’s not what is really held against him, whatever his detractors may be claiming. Johnson is hated not for what he failed to do but for what he did, his very tangible achievements.

I’ve now lived in England for 35 years, having moved here from the US two years before the palace coup against Margaret Thatcher. That’s nine prime ministers ago, including Mr Johnson and Mrs Thatcher, as she then was.

And, those two apart, I can’t think of a single one who can boast of any real achievement. Margaret Thatcher was, to me, more personally attractive than Johnson, and her achievements, though not unequivocal, were greater.

However, unlike his predecessors and successors, Johnson will go down in history not only for his failings but also for his accomplishments.

He campaigned on the promise of getting Brexit done, that is complying with the biggest vote in British history. And he broke ranks with modern politicians by actually doing what he had promised to do, restoring British sovereignty, after a fashion.

Keeping that particular promise was unpardonable. That was tantamount to leapfrogging practically the whole political class and landing smack in the middle of the people with their wishes.

Unlike the usual populist demagoguery all modern politicians try on with variable success, that was genuine populism, being at one with the demos. Treasonous behaviour, as far as Johnson’s colleagues were concerned. That alone would have been sufficient to single him out for buckets of vitriol.

Yet there was also that Ukraine business, with Johnson emerging as the first PM in my lifetime with a genuine claim to being a world leader. His outbursts of crusading zeal did much to rally the West to the defence of the Ukraine, ultimately Europe, from Russian fascism.

Johnson is the Western politician Putin hates the most, which at the moment is the highest accolade I can think of. Britain can’t match America’s physical ability to help the Ukraine, but Johnson injected much moral energy into the resistance effort, and in this he was unmatched by any other Western leader.

No doubt his motives were laced with a shot of self-interest; he is a politician after all. Yet one could detect a genuine passionate commitment to an unequivocally good cause – and I can’t think offhand of a single other post-Thatcher PM about whom one could say the same thing.

All this lies close to the surface. However, if we delve a little deeper, we’ll find another layer of resentment against Johnson. His parliamentary colleagues, including those who owe their seats to him, hate his popularity with hoi polloi.

That Labour should feel that way is perfectly understandable: Johnson beat them in one of the biggest landslides ever. Yet even most Tories share such sentiments, which at first glance seems paradoxical. But only at first glance.

For Johnson has always been ready to go over the heads of the political establishment and appeal directly to the people, among whom he was extraordinarily popular. That violated the implicit compact of modern politics: playing the democracy game is all well and good, provided all the cognoscenti never deviate from the knowledge that it’s just that, a game.

Burke insisted that members of Parliament should be the people’s representatives, not their delegates. Today’s lot solve that dichotomy by being neither – they don’t feel obliged to act either according to the people’s wishes or their interests. The people are merely the building blocks of individual political ambitions.

Appealing to them directly is breaking the rules of the game, and anyone who is good at it emanates the putrid aroma of treason to his corporation. He is branded a populist, a term that has become pejorative whereas in fact it encapsulates the very essence of democracy, to which our political class professes its loyalty.

Thus Johnson, though in many ways the flesh of the political class’s flesh, is seen as a maverick. The apparatchiks can’t forgive him his success achieved outside the inner workings of the apparat.

I despise unrestrained populism for any number of reasons, aesthetic, philosophical, historical – you name it. But then I’ve never pledged loyalty either to liberalism or to democracy or especially to liberal democracy. That’s why I’ve never been a particular fan of Mr Johnson.

Yet I recognise his achievements, including one I haven’t mentioned yet. Thanks to his popular appeal, Johnson is the only Tory who can be expected to keep Labour from power.

This is of paramount importance even though the difference between today’s Tories, including Johnson, and Labour is only marginal. Yet margins are important, especially when they separate failure from catastrophe.

The latter will ensue if Labour win the next general election, as every poll predicts they will. The mere anticipation of their victory is already causing economic damage, and they haven’t even won yet.

A survey of 504 business owners with annual revenue of more than £5 million has shown that 40 per cent of them are planning to sell or shut down their companies within the next year. The principal reason cited is Labour’s plan to double the rate of the capital gains tax as part of a general programme to crush private enterprise under the burden of extortionate taxation.

Rather than reversing the Tories’ ruinous economic policies, Starmer’s lot will add nice calamitous touches to them – as they will to all other perverse policies of the current government in every sphere of life.

Hence stopping Labour in their tracks is worth doing, and Johnson strikes me as the only Tory with a sporting chance of doing that. Yet even those Tory MPs who are slated to lose their seats in the next election pounce on him with lupine ferocity.

They do so not in spite of his achievements, but specifically because of them. Johnson is many awful things, but a faceless apparatchik isn’t one of them. For our army of faceless apparatchiks that sin outweighs even their self-interest.

For the time being. When the electoral bomb explodes, they’ll crawl back to Johnson because there is nobody else to crawl to. So he’ll be back, for better or for worse.

Now that equality before God has been ditched as a social dynamic, equality before the law was supposed to fill the gap.

That second type of equality lacks a noble metaphysical dimension, but at least it’s not completely devoid of some link to real justice. Yet few things are allowed to remain real nowadays. Virtual reality has to step in and claim its slice of the pie.

Most people fail to realise that it’s no longer just a slice. Virtual reality scoffs the whole pie and regurgitates it into tyranny – which we have to believe is freedom at its most crystallised. Mr Orwell, ring your office.

Witness the £104,000 speeding fine handed to Anders Wiklof for doing 51mph in a 30mph zone. The incident happened in Finland, a new Nato member and hence presumably a Western country out to promulgate and defend liberal values.

This champion of liberalism, which is after all a cognate of liberty, has a system of means-tested fines. The richer you are, the more you’ll pay for exactly the same transgression.

The rule of thumb there is that a speeding fine should be the size of the transgressor’s 14-day income. Since Mr Wiklof is one of the country’s richest men, justice was served. He has the temerity of earning £104,000 in a fortnight, which evidently goes against the grain of Finland’s take on liberal values.

Mr Wiklof should count his blessings. Back in 2010, another wealthy Scandinavian driver was fined 1.08 million Swiss francs (£957,000) in Switzerland. Since he was doing 125mph in a 20mph zone, even the staunchest libertarian would agree that some sort of punishment was in order.

Yet that same principled individual should bemoan the blow delivered to liberty by any means-tested fine for anything. For liberty means nothing unless it’s anchored by just laws equal for all. Without that anchor, liberty is cast adrift and begins to sail towards what may appear to be anarchy but is in fact tyranny.

The law should rely on actuarial tables to mete out punishment no more than it relies on them to establish guilt. True, if a rich man is fined, say, £500, a sum he normally spends in daily tips, he won’t feel the pinch as much as a similarly punished poor man.

But then the poor man unaccustomed to luxury may suffer from imprisonment much less than the plutocrat. Does this mean that if the latter accidentally ploughs through a crowd of children he should receive a lesser sentence than a poor man guilty of the same crime?

If justice isn’t equal for all, it’s not justice any longer. It becomes something else. But what?

Here we stumble on a constantly widening area where communism or socialism converges with liberal democracy. The area has many sections, and their number is increasing.

But since we are talking about justice specifically, the overarching principle was formulated by Martin Latsis, one of the founders of the CheKa, history’s most sinister organisation.

In 1918 Latsis explained the rationale behind the Red Terror: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. Do not look in materials you have gathered for evidence that a suspect acted or spoke against the Soviet authorities. The first question you should ask him is what class he belongs to, what is his origin, education, profession. These questions should determine his fate. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

It also seems to be the essence of liberal democracy. Granted, it hasn’t yet got around to “exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class”. But it too practises a class approach to justice, if for the time being without imposing sanguinary punishments. The same principle, although not yet pushed to the same extreme.

Both the Bolsheviks and the democratic liberals pursue a millenarian ideal of universal bliss on earth, where everyone is equal in every respect. Both groups have to admit, to themselves if no one else, that this ideal has so far not been achieved. Moreover, it shows few signs of coming soon.

That’s why both the communists and democratic liberals have built in their make-up what biologists call regression to the mean. Both attempt to push the lower reaches of society up to the middle, while dragging the upper reaches down into the same area. The latter task is easier.

The communists will happily shoot a man who makes several million a year, while the democratic liberals will profess commitment to his economic freedom. But they will be lying. Any outstanding quality of mind, creativity or enterprise challenges at least implicitly the core assumptions of modernity in general and liberal democracy in particular.

If a man displays his talent in a commercial arena, he is still just about tolerated even though he is deeply suspect. He can’t yet be given the Latsis treatment at the nearest wall, but every effort must be made to keep his economic rapacity in check.

Justice, that cornerstone and hallmark of decent society, falls by the wayside. It’s replaced by out and out tyranny, but one that’s different from the communist kind.

There tyranny is coercively imposed by the state, which most thinking people perceive as an enemy. They may go along for fear of persecution, but inwardly they will never acquiesce.

Liberal democratic tyranny relies more on seduction than on coercion. It drip-feeds its ideals into people’s minds, gradually turning each person into its informer and enforcer. If a decent man living in a communist country refrained from criticising the regime for fear of punishment, a liberal democrat has been paper-trained to close his eyes on any fundamental problems with his regime out of conviction.

Tocqueville diagnosed that condition with nothing short of prescience. He was writing about America circa 1831, but his diagnosis applies equally to today’s liberal democracy wherever it’s found: “I know no country in which there is less independence of mind and less genuine freedom of thought than in America.”

Mr Wiklof validates that diagnosis. Instead of raging and raving about the gross injustice he suffered, he said: “I really regret the matter and hope that the money is in any case used for healthcare through the treasury.”

It won’t be, Mr Wiklof. And even if it is, that’s not the point. His fine is another bullet fired in class war, where communism and liberal democracy are allied. Even if the latter may be coy about it.

Blowing up the Kakhovka dam and hydroelectric power station is a crime that may look senseless. But only to those who didn’t grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, aka Russia.

Those who, like me, had that unfortunate experience will recognise the pattern.

At the time Putin grew up in inner city Leningrad and I in the Moscow equivalent, those places were overrun with street gangs. No youngster could survive unless he ran either with the gangs or from them. Putin chose the first method, I the second. Yet neither one was foolproof by itself.

For example, while I ran from some gangs, I still had to find an accommodation with some others. Most of my accommodations were cultural: Russian thugs love stories. Since they usually don’t read them, they have a use for those who do.

Well-read youngsters like me could curry favour with the muggers, bandits and killers by telling them stories based on various romantic novels, mostly those by Alexandre Dumas and Sir Walter Scott. That cast us in the role of some kind of court jesters.

Sometimes I’d add erotic details the authors had carelessly omitted but my audience demanded (“So did Ivanhoe screw Lady Rowena?”). I’d helpfully provide the rather pornographic touches they craved, of the kind that would have got Messrs Dumas and Scott arrested had they put them into their narratives.

That saved me from violent abuse, but not entirely. An ‘intel’ (their term for the likes of me) still had to show heart by fighting occasionally, win, lose or draw. There he converged with actual thugs like Vlad Putin, who also had to earn their spurs by taking on members of other gangs or sometimes their own.

Since both he and I were of small stature, we had to rely on unconventional martial techniques, such as half a brick on the head or a pencil in the eye. Typically, a threat alone sufficed, provided it was credible. To that end, an enterprising lad would brandish the weapon and scream “I’m a psycho!”

That meant there was no limit to the kind of crazy things he could do to anyone he perceived as a threat. Usually the potential assailant would back off – who knew what that so-and-so would do. Better safe than sorry.

One can detect that sort of thing in Vlad’s order to blow up the Kakhovka power station, an action that at first glance looks at least as damaging to Russia as to the Ukraine.

(Since that area has been in Russian hands since the start of the war, and the Russians mined the station back in November, only some of our hacks may doubt it was the Russians who pushed the button. And no such action would have been carried out without a direct order from the Kremlin.)

The destruction of the dam may slow down or delay the incipient Ukrainian offensive, but it won’t stop it in its tracks. The Ukrainians can no longer ford the Dnieper close to its delta and attack in the Mariupol direction – the whole area south of the river has been turned into a swamp impassable for the Ukrainian armour.

Then again, it’s doubtful that the Ukrainian high command ever saw that direction as a promising strategic avenue. For one thing the Dnieper is very wide close to its mouth, between 4,000 and 7,000 metres. Getting an armoured brigade across would have been a perilous undertaking even had that dam remained intact. After all, the Russians had been busily fortifying the area, and the crossing troops would have been exposed to murderous artillery fire.

Now all those expensive fortifications have been swept away, but then they are no longer needed. A modern army can’t launch a frontal attack through a swamp.

A Ukrainian offensive will now be more sluggish even upstream of Kakhovka: the whole left bank of the Dnieper is lower than the right one and hence will suffer some flooding. Yet the Ukrainian General Staff will probably regard this as merely a nuisance, rather than as a deterrent. The offensive will have to be modified, but it won’t be cancelled.

On the other hand, the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe is huge – on both sides of the conflict. Vast areas of the Ukraine will lose much of their water supply, with dire effects on agricultural output.

Most immediately, up to 80 villages and towns will be flooded, affecting hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their houses and everything in them. How many will die is hard to tell – some 40,000 have already been evacuated.

When the retreating Soviets blew up the Dnieper dam and power station in 1941, the number of casualties is variously estimated between 20,000 and 100,000. And when in 1943 the RAF launched its celebrated Dam Busters Raid in the Ruhr Valley, some 600 Germans and 1,000 slave workers died.

The current action can have even more catastrophic consequences. For one thing, if the mainland Ukrainians lose some of their water supply, the population of the Crimea will lose almost all of it. Considering that securing that water supply was one of the reasons for the war the Russians cited, blowing up the Kakhovka dam looks counterproductive.

Even more potentially cataclysmic is the threat to the Zaporozhe nuclear power station, the biggest in Europe. The destroyed hydroelectric station provided the water needed to cool the reactors, which is essential for preventing a meltdown. The Zaporozhe station has its own reservoir, which will do for a while. How long a while is open to question.

Should a meltdown occur, the consequences can be worse than Chernobyl. Then the wind was blowing in the northwesterly direction, which is why Minsk was affected more than Kiev. God alone knows the wind direction should the Zaporozhe station suffer a meltdown. Poor mortals, such as Vlad, have to assume it may blow eastwards just as easily as westwards.

All things considered, the whole action seems irrational. Its military upshot hurts both sides about equally, and one can even argue that the Russians, who have lost billions of dollars’ worth of fortifications, will suffer more.

The Ukrainian side will suffer the greater humanitarian damage, but the Russians won’t escape it either. The country’s reputation will be hit even harder – every Western Putinversteher, with the possible exception of Peter Hitchens, will now realise that both Putin and his country are beyond the pale.

As an immediate result of that realisation, Nato may well remove all stops in the way of arms supplies to the Ukraine, along with its objections to Ukrainian forays into Russian territory. In short, the net effect of this crime is predictably negative for Russia.

So why did Vlad decide to commit it? Simple. He has reverted to that little Vova Putin who knew he had no chance against the big boys. So he waved a brick around, screaming “I’m a psycho!” Except that in this case the big boys, the Ukrainians, aren’t going to retreat.

Nor would I put it past Vlad to blow up the Zaporozhe nuclear power station either. That way he’d use nuclear weapons without using them, nominally speaking. And his claim to mental instability would carry even more weight.

Putin and his generals know they are losing the war. Their only hope is to scare the West into cutting off all assistance to the Ukraine. That’s unlikely to happen now, but should an American Putinversteher become president, and his British counterpart prime minister, things may change.

Will Putin use nuclear weapons as a last resort? Most commentators doubt that, but perhaps fewer now than a week ago. My hope is that Nato governments and generals have contingency plans for that eventuality – and that one of those plans involves taking out Vlad the Dam Buster.

When I was little, my parents often took me to the circus, where I especially liked the clowns. Most of them didn’t tax my immature mind with subtle jokes or even unsubtle puns.

They would just fall down all of a sudden, and each pratfall made the child in me laugh. Mind you, at that age the child in me was, well, me. I was a child from top to bottom and childish humour appealed to me.

Now I’m happy to report that my inner child hasn’t gone away in the decades that have since passed. He is still there, albeit remaining small while the rest of me has grown big (too big if you listen to Penelope). The rest of me can appreciate – sometimes, on a good day, even produce – sophisticated humour.

I can laugh out loud reading Aristophanes, for example. Or Rabelais. Or La Rochefoucauld. Or Dickens. Or Gogol. Or P.G. Wodehouse. Or Waugh. That’s the grown-up part of me, enjoying a good day out.

But then I also remember the ‘70s, when my inner child laughed his head off at the opening sequences of Saturday Night Live, those featuring Chevy Chase. I know this dates me, but hell, anyone can find out how old I am by looking up my Wikipedia page.

Real slapstick should catch you off-guard, with a pratfall coming at a moment when you least expect it. The beauty of those opening sequences was that everybody knew exactly what was going to happen: Chevy would crash down in spectacular fashion. And then, still on the floor, he’d shout exuberantly: “Live! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!”

The inner child of me had a field day – I laughed every time. It wasn’t the appreciative laughter of a grown-up. It was the unrestrained guffaw of a child, who plays Peter Pan by stubbornly refusing to grow up.

This brings me to public speakers, especially politicians. They have to ration their humour, even if they are capable of it. That doesn’t mean they have to shun it altogether, but they should watch their step.

When I was a budding copywriter, an old hand told me not to overindulge my funny side. “People don’t buy from clowns,” he told me. “They buy from serious men.”

Yes, the odd joke adds spice to a message, but it can’t be the message. Politicians know this too, as they are aware that coming across as serious men (or women, or other) is good, but coming across as gravely ponderous isn’t.

That’s why they like to slip the odd joke in. For example, I remember Ronald Reagan, then 73, debating Walter Mondale in 1984. The moderator asked the president if he thought age was a factor in that campaign.

A tricky question, but Reagan saw it coming. “I promise not to hold my opponent’s youth and inexperience against him,” he said, and the national audience laughed in record numbers. Reagan won the debate and the subsequent election hands down.

Good for him, he was capable of a good line, or at least of delivering one. Actually, I take that sneer back – Reagan could also improvise a joke, as anyone who watched him on Firing Line can confirm.

An earlier Republican president, Gerry Ford, didn’t possess that ability, but he still didn’t want to appear all dour and ponderous. So he’d do slapstick, vying with Chevy Chase for the laurels of the best pratfaller in America.

Ford would joyously tumble down the Air Force One stairs and every other set of steps he could find. And once he went Chevy one better by falling up the stairs, and you must agree that takes some doing. Americans laughed heartily. (They then voted for his opponent, but that’s a separate story.)

I did too. The inner child of me rejoiced in every tumble, while the grown-up would reach a sensible conclusion that, however meagre our talents are, we owe it to ourselves to make the best of them. If some people can’t come up with witticisms, they can still add gaiety to our lives by falling down, or even up, the stairs – whether they mean it or not.

In fact, I wouldn’t jump to a hasty conclusion of which it is. We may think a politician’s fall was accidental, but in fact it may have been carefully planned in advance. Rather than berating ourselves for gloating about old people’s frailty, we should laugh away – that might have been the desired effect.

In fact, we should compliment a falling politician for brightening up our day. This way we can always watch the telly, with the sound turned off, whenever he graces the screen with his presence. Chances are he’ll execute another hilarious tumble, tickling the inner child in us pink.

Give him top marks, if not necessarily your vote, for trying: the chap wants to put you in a good frame of mind. Then again, he may be preparing a fallback position for his career. Should he lose the next election, he could retrain as a slapstick comedian.

Why am I carrying on about pratfalls, slapstick and politicians? No idea. After all, sometimes I have something to write and at other times I have to write something. James Joyce would have called it stream of consciousness.

Before I go on, I must issue a disclaimer. I believe, and my friend Melanie Phillips proves, that women can be very good columnists indeed.

Yet I also believe, and Emma Duncan proves, that women are sometimes hired to be columnists not because they are qualified but because they are women. Otherwise it’s hard to explain how she found a broadsheet platform for airing Marxist twaddle with a touch of psychobabble platitudes.

Miss Duncan works for The Times, where her most recent contribution starts with a rather strained paradox: Don’t Kill the Death Tax, It’s Good for Most of Us. If she expected to catch our attention, she succeeded in my case.

I read on to find out whether she could make a case for that crepuscular proposition. She couldn’t. All Miss Duncan managed to do was prove yet again that such propositions beget crepuscular thinking.

Shining through the gossamer veneer of ratiocination is her underlying belief in the Marxist dogma that daily toil is the only acceptable way of making money. Money shouldn’t be allowed to make money – that’s capitalism, with its inexorable enslavement of the working classes.

Alas, since money hasn’t yet been abolished, as it will be when the millenarian bliss of communism arrives, it’s hard to avoid the lamentable situation of some people having more of it than others. Such individuals then pass the excess on to their children, who thereby lose the incentive to do honest labour at a factory conveyor belt.

The only way of correcting that gross iniquity is to reset the dial in each generation, by confiscating the estate of the dead plutocrat, thereby forcing his progeny to work for a living, ideally in manual jobs. Since it’s hard to drum up public support for such an extreme measure, any approximation will have to do, the closer the better.

If we can’t expropriate 100 per cent, let’s make do with 40 per cent, for the time being. Meanwhile, while we await the bright future of total nationalisation, let’s mock people like Nadhim Zahawi, MP, who “reckons it is ‘morally wrong’ to take someone’s assets on their death.”

This is how Miss Duncan encapsulates that argument in one paragraph: “There certainly is an element of unfairness, in the form of double taxation: if people are passing on money they have earned, it has already been taxed. But the rise in the value of estates is largely due not to years of hard work but to the rise in property prices.”

The observation is astute. However, the illogical conclusion isn’t: so let’s extort that ‘surplus value’. Though Miss Duncan managed not to use that Marxist term, she has lovingly preserved the warped thinking behind it.

According to her, some taxes are good for you. “The best ones – sin taxes, carbon taxes – discourage bad behaviour.” ‘Sin tax’ is an excise tax levied on certain goods deemed harmful, such as alcohol and tobacco.

You see, we may not know what’s good for us, but thank goodness the state does. Having a drink at the local, for example, is sinful. That’s why the state has raised tax on beer to a point where some London pubs already have to charge £10 or more for a pint as the wages of sin.

That obviously limits their clientele, and pubs are going out of business in droves. Miss Duncan doubtless thinks it’s good riddance: those dens of iniquity lead people into temptation. Now those who feel like a drink will do the virtuous thing: buy a two-litre jug of the cheapest cider and drink it on a park bench.

But she is right about the carbon tax: it discourages people from pursuing hedonistic, soul-destroying ends, like keeping warm in winter. And as to industrial profits, we all know they are the work of the devil.

Hence, taxing factories a little extra for their use of hydrocarbons is God’s work. Since factory owners then raise the price of their products, consumers have to pay more for them, thus having less left to spend on booze and fags. Virtue all around, all thanks to good taxes.

Getting back to death taxes, Miss Duncan supports them with the trusted Marxist argument from inequality: “And if inheritance tax is unfair, inheritance itself is even more so. When I die, my children will use the proceeds from my house to buy their own… The third of people who don’t own a house won’t be able to give their children this leg-up.”

So let’s punish the remaining two-thirds for having the temerity to buy a house, rather than living in social accommodation where everybody is equal. Fair is fair, eh comrades?

Banning the inheritance tax would transgress against the sacred dogma of equality in other ways too: “It would also exacerbate regional inequalities: about half of the benefits would go to people in London and the southeast.”

Verily I say unto you, 40 per cent is a joke. What’s wrong with nationalising the whole estate, lock, stock and house? But does Miss Duncan ever wonder what percentage of our GDP is produced in that contemptible region? She should.

Just think about it: according to Miss Duncan, inheritance tax saves people from all seven cardinal sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. This last one is supported by unimpeachable evidence: “An American study showed that receiving a large inheritance tends to decrease people’s earnings and increase the chance that they will drop out of the labour force.”

Crikey. I wonder how much that study cost. So the more money people inherit the less likely they are to enjoy the daily grind? I could have told them the same thing for free.

The other sins discouraged by death taxes are less obvious. Since they are unsupported by poll data, Miss Duncan relies on anecdotal evidence or what to her seems to be logical inference. For example, she mentions families torn asunder by squabbling about inheritance. She also offers her own variation on the theme of ‘money doesn’t make you happy’.

That’s true, although I’ve seen more unhappiness caused by poverty than by wealth. But that’s not even the point. The point is that Miss Duncan proceeds from the assumption that the state, and she as its prophet, should treat people as children incapable of deciding for themselves what’s good for them.

Hence the state must step in and spank them into virtue with taxation. Spare the tax and spoil hoi polloi, that’s the upshot.

Now I know that The Times, in the past the mouthpiece of conservatism, has become ‘liberal’. But do its editors realise they are lending their pages to unvarnished Marxism? Oh well, they probably wouldn’t care even if they did.  

A chap who came to inspect our gas pipes this morning noticed that my shelves are full of books on Russia.

That sight inspired him to share his innermost thoughts on the subject. His audience was Penelope – I was busy chasing fuzzy yellow balls at the time.

“I quite like Putin,” said the gas man. “Why?” asked my inquisitive wife. “He is a strong leader,” explained the chap, who must be a Mail on Sunday reader and a fan of a certain columnist.

“But he kills a lot of people,” offered Penelope, trying to keep the argument at a level accessible to gas repairmen. “So do the Americans,” replied the proletarian.

“Not the same way,” insisted Penelope. “They don’t kill their journalists, they don’t poison people in foreign countries…” The chap shrugged in an eloquent manner meaning “six of one, half a dozen of the other.” Moral equivalence had the last word, or rather shrug.

Some years ago I encountered a similar attitude in a supposedly more enlightened audience. I was delivering a lecture on Russia to the faculty of a London university. My listeners took exception to my description of the Soviet Union as evil. After all, quite apart from everything else, the communists murdered 60 million of their own citizens.

“Americans have killed a lot of innocent people too,” countered the academics. “How many?” I asked. “Thousands.” “Even assuming that’s true,” I said, “it’s still a far cry from sixty million.”

“There’s no difference,” sneered the scholars. “And if you think there is, you are a moral relativist.” It’s refreshing to know that our university professors are of one mind with manual workers on the subject of Russia.

Actually, my guess is that a broader canvassing sample of the two groups would probably reveal that, on average, the workmen hold more sound ideas. They may even be more knowledgeable or, if you want to be pedantic about it, less ignorant.

In the spirit of the moral absolutism my academic listeners believed I lack, let me reiterate the seminal difference between America and Russia, under either the communists or Putin’s kleptofascists.

America has done a lot of things wrong, and continues to do them. America is often rash, misguided, ill-advised, culturally primitive, not sufficiently connected with the historical continuum, too materialistic for my taste. But one thing she definitely isn’t is evil.

Russia is, and has been since at least 1917. America is a careless driver who may accidentally hit a pedestrian. Russia is an evildoer who will deliberately drive his car into a crowd and then reverse over the bodies to make sure they are all dead. I could offer an endless litany of such metaphors, but you get the picture.

The two drivers aren’t much of a muchness. They inhabit different moral universes, one created by fallible human beings, the other by monstrous ogres.

You may think I’m trying too hard to prove I’m not the moral relativist those academic nonentities accused me of being. But that’s not the case. It’s just that some issues don’t call for a nuanced judgement of various shades of grey. They are black or white or, in the case of Putin’s Russia, all pitch black.

The war Putin is waging on the Ukraine is different from most other wars in that there isn’t even a smidgen of moral ambivalence about it. The same can’t be said, for example, about either World War.

In the first one, both sides claimed moral ascendancy nothing short of sacral righteousness. “Guerre sainte!” screamed French newspapers. “Gott mit uns!” disagreed the Germans. And Britain, explained the Bishop of Hereford, was fighting for “the realisation of the Christianity of Christ.”

In fact, all the parties succumbed to the suicidal death wish and joined forces to kill Europe in every other than the purely geographic sense. It’s possible to argue which side was more culpable, but in any case the issue lacks the chromatic contrast between black and white.

In the Second World war, the moral lines were clearer, but only marginally so. The war was started by an alliance of the two most evil regimes in history, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, that both attacked Poland 17 days apart.

Britain and France immediately declared war on one evil power, Germany, but, illogically, not on the other, the Soviet Union. When two years later the two evil regimes quarrelled, the Western alliance sided with Stalin against Hitler. The subsequent defeat of Hitler was unequivocally moral, but the attendant victory of Stalin wasn’t.

Ask the Poles or the Czechs how happy they were during the ensuing decades of bolshevism, they’ll tell you. All things considered, that war wasn’t free of moral ambiguities: one evil regime was crushed, but the other thrived for another 46 years.

Moreover, when it died, it bequeathed to us all its evil progeny, Putin’s Russia. After consolidating its hold on domestic power, it started pouncing on its neighbours – eventually plunging Europe into by far the biggest war it has seen since 1945.

No ambivalence. No ambiguity. No argument: this war can and must be judged in black vs. white terms, as a clash between good and evil. If that’s not nuanced enough for you, fine. Here are a couple of shades, just a touch or two.

The Ukraine is good only on balance. It has good sides and bad ones, as do all countries inhabited by free men, and especially countries that communists were systematically corrupting for generations. The Ukraine is a work in progress, but she is definitely moving in the right direction, which is away from her miserable past under Putin’s predecessors and idols.

“Good on balance” is a morally relativist statement. So here’s a counterbalance of moral absolutism: Putin’s Russia is unequivocally, unambiguously and irredeemably evil. She is a fire-breathing Chimera, equally monstrous and equally mythological.

Her evil is unalloyed and unvarnished. Every end she pursues is evil, and so is every means she employs. No balance is anywhere in sight, no silver lining on the cloud and no light at the end of the tunnel (if you can forgive the lazy clichés). Everything else is myths spun out by either ignoramuses or people who are themselves evil.

It’s not just that Russia kills a lot of people, although God knows that’s bad enough. But that she has also created a moral climate in which killing a lot of people for evil reasons creates no public outrage. The evil regime has infected huge swathes of the population with its moral syphilis, with no antibiotics anywhere in sight. And now the whole world is quaking in its boots, wondering if that evil will unleash a nuclear apocalypse.

Strong words indeed, aren’t they? They are, advisedly and deservedly so. That’s to emphasise that no one in his right mind will use the same words to describe America. Love her or hate her or anything in between, she isn’t evil.

Anyone who detects moral equivalence between her and Russia should apply for a job with the Gas Board. They seem to hire such people, and I’m sure there must be vacancies. (I hear The Mail on Sunday is reducing its staff, so no luck there. And the job of the Putinversteher in residence is already taken.)   

One hears young people utter that phrase in reference to things that really ought to matter. Such as products of the human spirit, religion, culture, intellect – everything that makes us different from animals.

It’s not a function of their youth either. One can confidently predict that this abominable situation isn’t going to change as they mature. On the contrary, once they get mired in children, mortgages, retirement plans, insurance policies, adulteries, divorces, medical problems and so on, things are going to get worse, not better.

This observation has been prompted by a conversation with a good friend who was complaining about his nephew, a young doctor. That chap has married a Lebanese girl, his colleague.

She is a pious Muslim, which is why they first had to have a religious wedding in Lebanon. For that to take place, however, the young man had to convert, which he readily agreed to do.

He travelled to Lebanon, chanted the phrases he was supposed to chant, became a Muslim and went back to Europe to get married the proper, which is to say secular, way (his family and he don’t believe in all that God nonsense). When my friend queried him on his conversion, the young man laughed and uttered the phrase in the title above.

My friend’s immediate reaction was to point out to his nephew that there may be some practical ramifications. At some point he may be told to comply with Sharia law and, should he refuse, he’d become an apostate from Islam. That status isn’t always conducive to a long and healthy life, even in Europe.

But that’s a relatively minor matter. He and his wife are Western doctors, after all, and, barring the stuff of macabre dystopic fantasies, it’s unlikely they’ll ever fall under the jurisdiction of an Islamic court. The real problem isn’t the young man’s betrayal of Islam, but his betrayal of everything that constitutes Western culture.

According to my friend, the youngster knows next to nothing about the humanities, things like art, history, religion, philosophy. Such things simply don’t matter.

To his credit, the young doctor doesn’t pretend to be more knowledgeable than he is. He would if he saw the point, but he doesn’t. He’d earn no kudos for cultural pretensions because everyone he knows is just like him (except, obviously, my friend, but he lives far away).

The only judgement the youngster ever puts forth is that any judgement is, well, ‘judgemental’. And that’s the worst thing to be, next to racism and global warming denial. Such things apart, one’s mind is supposed to be open at all times to everything, with no critical judgement activated to filter concepts, tenets and ideas.

Yet it’s precisely by its judgement that a civilisation is defined, by its view of man and the role he plays in life’s drama. Cauterising one’s critical judgement can lead to the critical race theory being accepted as the be all and end all of consciousness – and conscience.

Observation suggests my friend’s nephew is no different from most of his coevals. This is supported by the evidence of those who deal with young people professionally.

As far back as 1987 Allan Bloom, professor at Chicago University, published his seminal book The Closing of the American Mind, in which he described this pandemic of deracination in detail. Bloom pointed out a paradox: the more open the mind, the tighter it’s closed in reality.

In the past, writes Bloom, professors of humanities defined their mission as disabusing students of their prejudices. These days, however, they have no prejudices whatsoever. They start out as tabulae rasae, but nothing worthy can be written on those slates. They remain pristine for life.

Yet prejudices are intuitive, a priori assumptions that anchor the mind, preparing it for a lifelong voyage. If that anchor doesn’t exist, the mind is cast adrift, whirling around aimlessly. Before long it’ll run aground.

Every Sunday a handful of Western holdouts recite the sacramental words “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty…”, which young firebrands used to hate. Now they no longer dignify those fossils with such strong emotions. They just smile condescendingly and get on with their purely material – which is to say mindless and soulless – existence.

Their minds are wide-open, but not to what Dostoyevsky called the “accursed questions”. People used to try to answer those, then they began to claim the questions were unanswerable. Now they don’t even know those questions exist. Such things simply don’t matter.

However, those open minds readily admit any nonsense bypassing the mind and appealing directly to gonadic response. The critical race theory, global warming, the joy of transsexualism – anything will do as long as it imposes no demand on thought. Just mouth the requisite stock phrases, prove you are ‘cool’ and watch the remaining cultural holdouts squirm. There are so few of them, they don’t matter.

Contrary to what T.S. Eliot wrote, the world will end with neither a whimper nor a bang. It’ll end with an indifferent shrug.

What we have in the world today is the natural sciences and the humanities going their separate and divergent ways. The natural sciences keep churning out technologies that can make human life easier – or extinct. Which it will be depends on man’s capacity to promote good and resist evil.

The ability to do so requires a lifelong training course for the mind, spirit and senses. The more people sign up for that course, the more likely will society be to choose good over evil and, ultimately, life over death.

Every time an educated (meaning ‘professionally trained’ these days) young man says “It doesn’t matter” in response to one of the few questions that really do matter, the death knell sounds. Metaphorically, for now.