Month: October 2023

Over 50 percent of Americans planning to vote in the Republican primaries say they’ll vote for Trump even if he is in prison at the time.

The stern resolve tinged with hysteria one can read on their faces suggests they’d feel the same way if their hero were caught on a CCTV camera mugging a pensioner. Quite simply, as far as his fans are concerned, Trump can do no wrong.

This isn’t even about their voting intentions. Confronted with the evil of two lessers, voters still have to choose one who is less of a lesser. Thus, given the choice between Biden and Trump, even I would vote for the latter, much as I consider him revolting on many levels, both personal and political.

Yet my decision would have no emotional component whatsoever. It would be strictly transactional, wholly based on a coldblooded weighing of the relative pros and cons. Having compared the two candidates, I’d pinch my nostrils, decide to take the rough with the smooth and vote for Trump.

No doubt some of Trump’s intended voters go through the same exercise. But – and I hope my American friends will correct me if I’m wrong – my impression is that the core of Trump’s supporters see only the smooth and none of the rough.

Since no one since Jesus Christ has been sinless, such devotion suggests that their minds are disengaged. Taking over instead is something else, something I can’t easily define. Emotions, yes, but also something infra-emotional, some passions bubbling in the viscera and bone marrow.

This scares me, as does anything that dehumanises man. People aren’t supposed to be jukeboxes whose buttons can be pushed to get the desired tune. Even biological taxonomy classifies us as sapient, pinpointing sapience as our defining characteristic. This means that anyone putting his mind on hold thereby suspends his humanity.

Far be it from me to equate Trump with dictators like Hitler, Stalin or Putin. Unlike them, he has lived and functioned his whole life in a civilised country, and much of that experience has rubbed off. What upsets me is the similarity between the public response to those monsters and to Trump.

One sure sign of mindless political hysteria is the readiness to reduce the entire complexity of politics to catchy slogans.

While some may be more benign than others, typologically I see little difference between Deutschland über alles and MAGA. The latter desideratum is infinitely more attractive than the former politically and civilisationally. But the emotional and psychological makeup of those responding to such rallying cries is eerily similar.

I must own up to a personal idiosyncrasy. Having spent much of my working life in advertising, I’ve seen how easily slogans can be used to manipulate even otherwise sensible people. Hence my choice was to despise either slogans or mankind, and the first was more acceptable than the second.

And yet I’ve seen the same Pavlovian response to Trump appearing in the MAGA cross-section of America’s population, from truck drivers to the editor of a highbrow conservative magazine. The lover and student of humanity in me has his curiosity piqued.

Detestation of Biden, richly merited as it is, doesn’t quite explain this. Yes, most Americans feel they are worse off now than they were three years ago. Then they look at their senile president and see why.

Biden can’t even outscore Trump on moral rectitude, never mind dynamism, general intelligence and psychic health. Even a good chunk of the Democrats see him alternately as a disaster or else an unfunny joke.

This means that if, as seems likely, Biden is their candidate, the turnout of potential Democratic voters will be low, giving any competent Republican candidate an open goal to aim at.

DeSantis, Ramaswamy and Haley are usually mentioned in that context and, whatever the polls may be saying, I’m sure any of them would win against Biden by a landslide. That makes Trump Biden’s best hope.

For one detects the same febrile stridency among those who hate Trump as among those who worship him. That may galvanise Democratic turnout for any candidate of their party, even Biden. Their support would turn from at best tepid to red-hot.

That’s exactly what happened at the last election, when even those who correctly saw Biden as a corrupt and incompetent nonentity came out in force to vote against Trump. Hence it’s possible, even likely, that Newton’s Third Law will come into play this time too: every action causes an equal and opposite reaction.

The more piercing the screams and the more bulging the eyes of the MAGA throng, the greater will be support for Biden or any other Democratic nincompoop (one can’t detect any other type among the potential candidates).

Trump’s supporters could do worse than recall Thomas Jefferson’s strategy during the debates on the Constitution. The key issue was the balance between centralism and localism, the power of the federal government versus state rights.

Federalism, as conceived by Messrs Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Jay, Hamilton et al., spelled slow death for state rights – especially the right to secede. That was exactly the desired end Jefferson saw in his mind’s eye, but for the time being he had to settle for a palliative.

“Half a loaf is better than none,” was how he put it. As a result, a constitution inspired by modern centralism had to include various nods towards traditional localism. The wounding issue continued to fester, eventually bursting out into the horrific Civil War. But at the time, Jefferson never took his eyes off the political ball.

If Trump worshippers shun half a loaf, they may end up picking up crumbs off the Democrats’ table. They love Trump so much, they may end up with Biden.

One would think that, having densely populated Planet Earth with children born on either side of the blanket, Boris Johnson doesn’t need to prove his masculinity to anyone.

However, some news items make one wonder if he has finally realised he is a woman trapped in a man’s body. That may not be the case, but he is certainly displaying some traits normally associated with the fair sex.

I realise how contentious this statement is. We’ve been told for several decades that no such distinctive traits exist. Men and women are supposed to be not just equal but identical in everything other than their primary sexual characteristics. Moreover, lately even such differentiators have been pronounced null and void.

Nevertheless I’m not prepared to defend the validity of this syllogism. Thesis: Women can have penises. Antithesis: Boris has proved he has one too. Synthesis: Boris is a woman.

No, this doesn’t quite add up logically. However, if one went strictly by empirical evidence, the case would become stronger.

First, I must establish my premises. One such is that women tend to respond to life more emotionally.

This isn’t a quality judgement but merely a lifelong observation. In many situations where a man would first swear but then act rationally, women would burst into tears and not act at all. They cry more often and more readily than men do, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Another premise is that I don’t think women are less intelligent than men. In fact, taking my own family of two as an admittedly narrow sample, I’m more inclined to think they are more so.

Yet they are differently intelligent. If men tend to arrive at a solution by sequential logical steps, women often skip them and jump to the right conclusion intuitively. However, when a woman disregards this gift God gave her sex and tries to build a logical structure, she is more likely than a man to lose her way.

Then, and I do know I’m such a macho troglodyte that I don’t deserve to live, women tend to play a subservient role in a marriage, although someone forgot to teach this lesson to Penelope. Yet on the evidence of the hundreds if not thousands of couples I’ve known, it’s the men who tend to lead and the women who tend to follow.

Lord Tennyson found a poetic expression of these prosaic observations: “Man with the head and woman with the heart:/ Man to command and woman to obey;/ All else confusion.” In the same vein, St Paul taught that a woman should keep silent in church and, if she fails to grasp the finer points, she ought to ask her man for an explanation. Both the secular and ecclesiastical dicta imply the same hierarchy.

Having thus set my stall, let’s get back to Boris Johnson, starting with his article on HAMAS terrorism in Gaza. His first sentence is blatantly lachrymose: “When I saw the murder of those 260 revellers at the Nova music ­festival, I wept – as any father would – because those kids could have been yours or mine.”

Forgive me, but this is a woman’s reaction (always provided Mr Johnson isn’t just saying that to curry favour with his feminised audience). Call me a heartless brute incapable of empathy, but “could have been” is different from “were”.

I realise that, given Mr Johnson’s past, those children (not ‘kids’ – where Mr Johnson comes from, which isn’t the US, you can only produce a kid by mating with a goat) are indeed more likely to be his than mine. But barring that possibility, a man would more naturally respond to such savagery towards someone else’s children with rage, followed by a realistic plan of avenging and deterrent action.

To his credit, Mr Johnson then wiped his tears and proposed a solution: to give the Palestinians their own independent state, happily coexisting with Israel. I shan’t give a precise quotation because that’s the thrust of the whole article.

Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza could be interpreted as a tacit agreement and a move in that direction. Autonomy is a step towards self-government, which is a step towards statehood. So did the ‘Palestinians’ accept this overture with gratitude and a commitment to peace?

“On the contrary,” writes Mr Johnson, “the Gaza Strip became a launching pad for rocket attacks on Israel; an ­appalling advertisement for what two states could mean.”

I’m confused. He says that terrorist attacks on Israel, including the on-going monstrosity, are a taste of things to come from an independent Palestinian state.

I agree – hell, anybody with any brain and eyes to see will agree. Such a state would certainly be run by HAMAS and Hezbollah terrorists (if you remember, HAMAS was democratically elected in Gaza). It would be a terrorist state, and as such it would be better equipped than a stateless terrorist gang to act in the fashion “appallingly advertised”.

So why does Mr Johnson champion the two-state solution, which he himself suggests would make things worse? This is what the Russians – much to my indignation! – call ‘woman’s logic’.

That’s two proofs that Mr Johnson is trying to get in touch with his feminine side, if not actually transitioning. What about the third one, the role he plays in his family?

WhatsApp correspondence at the time of Covid has just come to light, in which Simon Chase, head of the civil service, complained to Lee Cain, Johnson’s head of communications, that Boris’s wife Carrie was “the real person in charge”, which made the government “a terrible, tragic joke”. “I am not sure I can cope,” he added.

Cain replied: “Wtf are we talking about.” Case explained: “Whatever Carrie cares about, I guess… I was always told that [Dominic Cummings, Johnson’s closest adviser] was the secret PM… Oh, f*** no, don’t worry about Dom, the real person in charge is Carrie.”

Even those not privy to the inner workings of 10 Downing Street, had similar suspicions.

Carrie, who married Johnson in 2021, having already produced a child by him, is less than half her hubby’s age. That has to be the principal attraction because I can’t detect any obvious others. She is certainly a strong-willed young woman, who makes most eco-zealots sound mild by comparison.

Ever since Mr Johnson got down to the business of impregnating Carrie, his own views on ‘our planet’ took a noticeable turn in that direction. By itself, there is nothing unusual or pernicious about that. Women often defy St Paul by changing their husbands’ opinions.

The trouble was that Johnson wasn’t any old husband. He was Her Majesty’s Prime Minister, and he had the power to convert his – or rather Carrie’s – opinions into policy.

Thus it was under his stewardship that the government set the ruinous and, worse still, unrealistic 2030 deadline for stopping the sale of new IC vehicles. Wind farms also boomed during his premiership, something he hadn’t passionately advocated BC (Before Carrie).

This is a serious matter. We are supposed to be a democracy, meaning we can only be governed by elected officials and those they appoint. Even the monarch has no executive power to affect policy. Carrie apparently did, and she was neither elected, nor appointed, nor in the line of succession.

The issue has constitutional ramifications, but rather than mulling over those, I wonder who wears the trousers in that family. Who has the Johnson?

There you have it: a man who cries easily, suffers from a deficit of logic and is told by his wife what to think, say and do in matters of the state. Show me a man like that and I’ll show you a woman in the making.

Oh well, nothing wrong with that, now Mr Johnson is a private subject of His Majesty.

Against the background of Russian and Muslim terrorists murdering Ukrainians and Israelis, it seems churlish to talk about a leaking pipeline. So it would be if the incident weren’t related to the on-going slaughter.

The pipeline in question connects Finland and Estonia. About 50 miles of it run under the Baltic Sea, entirely in Nato waters, and it was there that the leak occurred during the night of 7-8 October.

That’s when the first alarm bell ought to sound: It was on 7 October that HAMAS struck. Was that a coincidence?

The Finnish authorities immediately announced they had reason to suspect that the leak in Balticconnector may have been caused by “external actions”. Another word for such actions is sabotage, something – and you can’t refute this ironclad logic – caused by saboteurs.

However, this situation was different from the Nord Stream incident last year. There seismologists detected two distinct blasts, but this time around they didn’t measure any such activity – at first.

However, the next day Norwegian seismologists reported an explosion they had detected near Balticconnector that very night. Its magnitude of 1 was lower than the Nord Stream explosion, but high enough to punch a hole in a pipe.

This brings sabotage and possible saboteurs back into focus, and, just as with Nord Stream, everybody knows who the culprits are. Yet “everyone knows” isn’t seen as forensic proof in Western jurisprudence. We need prima facie evidence to point an accusing finger at anyone.

Now what would constitute such evidence in this case? Photographs or video footage of frogmen diving off a Russian ship? Tearful confessions of the remorseful officials involved? Putin banging his fist down and hissing “I’ve taught the bloody Finns a lesson”?

We have no such proof, and I can confidently predict we’ll never have it. Yet strategic decisions on enemy action shouldn’t require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s a standard for criminal courts to use, not for government ministers and their generals.

Such people are neither detectives nor prosecutors. Their stock in trade isn’t exposing a crime to a jury’s satisfaction but punishing it to protect their citizens from a repeat performance. To put such measures on line it’s sufficient to establish guilt on the balance of probabilities.

And when the probabilities in this case are weighed in the balance, just one suspect emerges. Only Russia had the motive and opportunity to sabotage Nato infrastructure in the Baltic.

Several Russian ships were in the immediate vicinity when the explosion occurred. One of them, a freighter, was moored there. Diving overboard and attaching explosive charges to the pipe would have been a simple matter, especially considering the on-the-job experience Russians acquired at Nord Stream.

The motive part is equally straightforward, and it’s made up of several subsets. One is to punish Finland for her hasty decision to join Nato last year. The country, along with Sweden, applied for membership in May, 2022, just three months after Russia’s full-scale attack on the Ukraine.

A stream of spittle-covered threats instantly emanated from the Kremlin. The general thrust was to tell those new members that the Nato aegis would make them less, not more, secure. Yet, as the old proverb goes, “it’s better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times’. That makes sabotaging the pipeline a visual aid to an important lesson.

The terrorist attack on Nord Stream in September last year was part of Russia’s concerted effort to make Europe freeze through the winter. For, like a drug pusher, Russia had made Europe, especially Germany, addicted to her cheap gas.

When the first sanctions began to bite, Russia had to make Europe suffer the pain of having to go cold turkey. Acting in the same spirit, the terrorist Russian state intensified its attacks on the Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, trying to leave 40 million people without heat during a typically inclement winter.

The potential effect of the current blast is less damaging because Finland is less dependent on gas in her energy mix. Still, the Russians may feel this is a warning shot across the country’s bows.

This time around, they seem to be saying, you’ll only have to pay a little more for your energy, but next time… Well, you know the rest if you’ve ever seen a gangster film.

Another, strategically more telling, motive is to test Nato’s resolve. After all, under attack there was the critical infrastructure of two Nato countries, supposed to feel secure under the protection of Article 5.

If that was indeed a test, I’m afraid Nato failed it. Last year, when Nord Stream was blown up, Russia was instantly identified as the likely culprit, and Western papers screamed that off their front pages in huge type.

This time around the word ‘Russia’ wasn’t even mentioned, and the stories were buried where few readers were likely to see them. And all the official statements were circumspect.

Thus EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen promised she would “strongly condemn any act of deliberate destruction of critical infrastructure. Our pipelines and underwater cables connect citizens and companies across Europe and to the rest of the world. They are lifelines of financial markets and global trade.”

A commendable sentiment, that. However, for my taste, it lacks specificity. Any suspects, ma’am? In fact, any suspicions?

As I said earlier, the list of potential suspects includes only one entry. After all, Nato countries blowing up their own pipelines is as unlikely as Prigozhin pulling out a grenade’s safety pin aboard his plane.

The Baltic is now a water feature in Nato’s backyard, with only one non-member having access. This may all be circumstantial, but people have been sent to the gallows on less evidence.

Vague statements of concern simply won’t do – the time for generalities has passed. Terrorists, coming from large countries or smallish enclaves, are attacking the West on a broad front, giving a whole new meaning to what the Russians call hybrid warfare.

As a minimum, the West should respond by pulling all the stops out in the flow of aid to the victim countries, while punishing the terrorists no matter who they are and where they strike.

In this case, the sanctions on Russia should be replaced with a total embargo on Russian goods. Terrorist states and smaller entities should get a taste of their own medicine: let them eat drones and Kalashnikovs.

Israel is showing the way by cutting off the supply of electricity and food to Gaza, and a similar strategy, mutatis mutandis, can work against Russia. She may be more self-sufficient than HAMAS, but not infinitely so.

At the same time, third parties should be told in no uncertain terms that they should choose whose trade partner they’d rather be, Russia’s or the West’s. One precludes the other, and no exceptions will be tolerated.

But to begin with let’s acknowledge publicly and in large type that the leak in Balticconnector is no mystery. We know who caused it, how and why.

If you think The British Medical Journal is a scholarly publication, not a political one, you haven’t read it for years, possibly ever.

In fact, no publication today, however scholarly, can stick to its subject without venturing into faddish politics. That’s the fee it has to pay to enter a modern mind. Having thus gained entry, it can then proceed to overstuff that mind with ideological drivel that has nothing to do with its subject or any scholarly pursuits.

Thus the current issue of the BMJ regales its readers with an article by Dr Rhys Jones, associate professor of public health at University of Auckland. Dr Jones, who also goes by his Māori name Ngāti Kahungunu (don’t ask me how to pronounce it), is described as “a passionate advocate for health equity, Indigenous rights, and climate justice”.

That introduction should tell any sensible reader that he is about to be buried in an avalanche of bilge, and Dr Jones doesn’t disappoint. Essentially, he argues that the causes of health equity, Indigenous rights and climate justice can only be served by New Zealand (and the world) reverting to pre-industrial, and ideally pre-historic, ways of life.

White man with his forked tongue came to corrupt the country and its people into improving their health and increasing their life expectancy. Or, as Dr Jones puts it: “Settler colonialism, with its underpinning assumptions of superiority and resulting imposition of social, cultural, political, and economic systems, has transformed environments in ways that exacerbate the impacts of floods and storms.”

Sorry, he seems to be saying something else here. Never mind better health and longer life. Poor, nasty, brutish and short is just fine, provided there are no floods and storms. However, since we’ve always had floods and storms, we seem to have arrived at an impasse.

Yet Dr Jones doesn’t see it that way. His worldview is circumscribed by the fact that “a recent ministerial inquiry reported that ‘an environmental disaster is unfolding in plain sight’.”

Such is the diagnosis, now for the treatment. But not so fast: “As health professionals, [we know that] in order truly to understand and tackle the health impacts of the climate crisis, we need to take a proper history – one that goes beyond the presenting complaint and seeks to reveal the antecedents or root causes.”

And as vogue ideologues, we can choose only those segments of history that vindicate our ideology. We’ve had rather warm weather lately, along with some storms and floods – that’s the aetiology. Never mind that the Earth has been warmer than it is now for 80 per cent of its existence, and numerous climatic disasters have been recorded since anything at all has been recorded. As medical professionals, we don’t care about such incidentals.

All we care about is the two bogeymen: colonialism and capitalism. Once they were implanted into the healthy body of the Indigenous population, it has been going downhill ever since. That the problem is physical is self-evident. But it’s also metaphysical:

“The predicament we find ourselves in is not some accident of history in which humankind inadvertently chose the wrong energy sources or food production systems. It is a direct result of globally powerful societies abandoning the fundamental principles that had guided and protected humankind since time immemorial.”

When Dr Jones tried to define those fundamental principles, a toggle switch must have been flicked in his mind, and he began to mutter like a delirious dervish on drugs: “According to Indigenous natural or first law, human development is guided and informed by relational values and mutual responsibilities. Decision making is conducted with a critical awareness of our place in the greater scheme of things and considering the impacts on all our (human and more-than-human) relatives.”

I must have some of what he is on to understand this. A convoluted mind meets involute style to produce utter gibberish. Can we have some clarity please? Dr Jones is happy to oblige:

“Once the Earth is viewed as a commodity to be exploited for human development, rather than an ancestor to be held in good relation, it becomes possible to extract, consume, and pollute in ways that disrupt natural planetary cycles.”

The bliss of a pristine Earth unsullied by human development takes us back to the primordial times of cave dwelling, stone hammers and simian chaps tossing their hirsute females on the grass in the spirit of unbridled joy. Is that the ideal Dr Jones has identified?

Well, yes and no. All that stuff was merely a way of setting his stall. He thereby established a rapport with his presumed audience by uttering the Mowgli password: “We be of one blood, ye and I”. That done, now comes the meat of the article, the reason it was written:

“A detailed history therefore allows us to identify colonialism as a fundamental driver of the climate crisis (and myriad other ecological crises). Its associated capitalist systems are also responsible for modern health crises, including powerful commercial interests promoting products that are harmful to population health and acting to block or delay critical public health action. Colonialism and capitalism can also be seen to drive the unacceptable health inequities between and within countries.”

It’s colonialism and capitalism what done it. They imposed their deadly products, such as analgesics and antibiotics, on the virginal Indigenous people (always capitalised). And now we all have to live with the consequences, illogically expecting the culprits to correct the problem they created:

“Yet, too often, our proposed climate solutions are also situated in these systems. For example, electrifying the vehicle fleet may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it does nothing to solve the many other problems associated with a car dependent transport system, and inexorably leads to a range of other social and ecological harms.”

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. So electric cars aren’t the solution, and haven’t I been telling you the very same thing all this time?

Let’s go back to fossil fuels and forget all this nonsense… No, wait. Dr Jones has a different idea:

“The goal should not be a slightly greener version of multinational corporate exploitation, it should be to dismantle exploitative systems and rebuild relationships. That is the only way truly to solve the climate crisis – because it is a crisis of relationality, not of atmospheric chemistry.”

Lovely word, relationality. Just to think that I’ve lived to an advanced age without ever learning it until now.

Sorry, I digress. Down with corporate exploitation and capitalism, I get it. But what should come in their stead?

Why, primordial economics of course: “What this means is that Indigenous ways of knowing and being must be central to climate responses. Critical actions include re-establishing the authority of Indigenous natural law, recognising the rights of nature, providing for Indigenous self-determination, and honouring Indigenous rights agreements.”

My education is accelerating with every word. For example, I never knew nature had rights, although I’ve heard the term ‘natural rights’. Learn something every day. But how can we go back to Indigenous rights agreements, whatever they are? Easy.

“For non-Indigenous people, it is a call to remember their own ancestral ‘original instructions’ and revitalise their own ancient ways of knowing, being, and relating to Mother Earth and all her inhabitants before patriarchal colonial capitalism took hold.”

How do those ‘original instructions’ relate to, say, transportation? We have already established that IC engines are the work of the colonialist capitalist devil, and electric transport is only marginally better for being similarly tainted. We’ve also learned that the answer lies in the practices of Indigenous people predating the arrival of white settlers.

Hence goods must be moved by oxen, canoe or human muscle. Whatever we lose in efficacy we’ll gain in moral rectitude and a happier Mother Earth.

Now, I’m not a health professional, which is why I suggest we should summon a few of them, the men in white coats. They may deliver the treatment Dr Jones so clearly needs. As to the BMJ, it’ll have to go untreated. It shows every symptom of a civilisational disease afflicting our times, and I can’t think of any possible remedy.

Yesterday I proposed a test to identify evil in our midst. One half of it dealt with Gaza.

The test is simple and binary: any Westerner who supports HAMAS savagery and believes Israel has only herself to blame is evil. Moreover, it doesn’t matter whether the support is overt (see the photo) or camouflaged.

The latter category includes pretensions of even-handedness, assurances that things aren’t as straightforward as they seem, reminders that “it takes two to tango”, fulsome abhorrence of violence in general, calls for immediate peace at any price. (Today I’m disengaging Gaza and the Ukraine, but all the same observations hold true for responses to both HAMAS’s and Russia’s savagery.)

However, I omitted to mention that what went for individuals also went for organisations. That omission calls for immediate correction, starting with left-wing student groups all over Britain.

Wide swathes of our fledgling intellectual elite are “inspired” by videos of decapitated babies and some such. According to Warwick University’s Palestine group, the attackers are “martyrs” resisting a “vile occupation” by an “apartheid state”.

Justice for Palestine, a University College London group, hailed the decapitators for “freeing the world”.

A similar group at the London School of Economics both anticipates and deplores Israel’s response by stating that it is “heartbroken and enraged as another wave of brutal and indiscriminate violence prepares to unleash itself against the Palestinian people of Gaza.”

The University of East Anglia’s student union is duly appalled – by Israel’s “crimes”: “Those who exercise their internationally recognised right to resist such crimes are being met with force by the Israeli occupation forces.”

I’ve heard of youthful impetuosity, but this goes beyond everything I’ve ever heard. However, it’s always good to learn something new: it turns out that the right to slit babies’ throats, fire indiscriminately at crowds of defenceless people, rape children male and female, enjoys international recognition.

A new fact doesn’t amount to knowledge unless it is confirmed. Such confirmation promptly arrived, this time not from adolescents but from grown-ups, specifically those who run the UN and the EU.

In my comments on those organisations, I’ve always exercised self-restraint by resisting the temptation to call them evil. “Wicked” is as far as I’ve gone. However, to quote Barry Goldwater, “Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Both organisations have failed my test by first making a barely perceptible nod towards Israel’s right to fight back, but then expressing their full-blooded opprobrium of any serious attempt to exercise that right.

Thus the UN’s top diplomat Josep Borrell is deeply concerned with Israel’s response to the greatest savagery Jews have faced since the Holocaust:

“Israel has the right to defend (itself) but it has to be done accordingly with international law, humanitarian law, and some decisions are contrary to international law,” he said. “Some of the actions – (such) as cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people is against international law.”

In other words, while Israelis are being slaughtered with nauseating sadism, Israel is supposed to keep up its supplies of water, electricity and food to HAMAS-run Gaza. International law says so. Does it also say Israel should equip HAMAS with arms by any chance?

Mr Borrell would do me a great favour if he were to name one modern war in which victims of brutal aggressions continued to supply their assailants throughout. “Israel has the right to defend itself, provided she doesn’t succeed.” There, Mr Borrell, isn’t this closer to what you really mean?

Speaking of evil organisations, Black Lives Matter gets top marks for honesty. Unlike the UN and EU that have to maintain a veneer of respectability, BLM doesn’t pull punches.

Its Chicago chapter posted a graphic of a HAMAS murderer paragliding into Israel. The caption said: “I stand with Palestine”. I’m amazed they didn’t illustrate what that parachutist did next. The impulse to do so must have been strong: black activists of any kind, especially BLM, are easily the most anti-Semitic group in America.

In my day, ‘black leaders’ like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Andrew Young et al. routinely made pro-terrorist and anti-Semitic statements. Jackson, for example, tended to refer to New York as “Hymietown”.

Such sentiments struck a chord with even educated blacks. One of them, my NASA co-worker, explained that the blacks hated Jews because they lent them money and then demanded repayment.

As someone who has often found himself on the receiving end of financial services, I sympathise. After all, you borrow someone else’s money but pay back your own. However, I didn’t hate NatWest when I repaid my mortgage. Many American blacks, on the other hand, do hate Jews, and what my colleague cited was a pretext, not the reason.

BLM keeps that fine tradition alive by depicting the current situation as strictly a racial clash. Actually, Arabs and Jews belong to the same Semitic race, but, as Pascal observed, “The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of” (Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne con​naît point).

In that spirit BLM posted another visual, showing two groups of celebrities. The caption asked the rhetorical question: “Notice anything about those who support Israel and those who support Palestine?”

What the audience is expected to notice is that the first group are all white people, most of them, such as David Schwimmer and Sarah Poulson, Jewish, whereas the second group is made up of blacks, such as Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Nelson Mandela.

Not belonging to the assumed target audience, I also noticed that all three models weren’t just any old blacks but those involved in the odd bit of terrorism. Obviously, according to BLM, propensity for violence is essential to blackness.

Evil comes out of the woodwork gloating all over the world. But at least it does come out, for all to see its contorted face. Meanwhile, we must brace ourselves for what’s coming in our predominantly ‘liberal’ (meaning illiberal) media.

Once the initial shock of decapitated Israeli babies dies out, the newspapers and airwaves will be flooded with pictures of destroyed tower blocks in Gaza and dead Palestinians. These will be accompanied by long stories couched in bien pensant terms but leaving no one in doubt as to which side the media support.

As you toss a slipper at the TV screen or a newspaper into the bin, I hope you’ll remember the test I proposed. For evil doesn’t have to scowl savagely. It may also introduce itself with a beneficent smile. Yet the scowling and smiling varieties are equally evil because they share a common DNA.

I hope Israel stamps out that particular specimen of evil once and for all. Someone has to.

P.S. I wish we had more black people like Floyd Mayweather — no, scratch ‘black’. I wish we had more good people like Floyd Mayweather. The boxing champ sent to Israel his private jet loaded with aid. “I stand with Israel,” he said. So do I — and I also stand with Floyd Mayweather.

Sidney Reilly, nicknamed ‘Ace of Spies’ in the excellent 1983 TV series, knew something about warfare that many commentators still don’t know a century later. That gave him the kind of insight that bordered on prescience.

Wars, he knew, can’t be reduced to the simple dichotomy of winning and losing. Some wars can be lost quite painlessly, others must be fought to the last man.

Thus a few months after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Reilly pleaded from Moscow that his superiors in London should shift the emphasis of their policy from the war to that revolution:

“This hideous cancer [is] striking at the very root of civilisation. Gracious heavens, will the people in England never understand? The Germans are human beings; we can afford to be even beaten by them. Here in Moscow there is growing to maturity the arch enemy of the human race… At any price this foul obscenity which has been born in Russia must be crushed out of existence… Mankind must unite in a holy alliance against this midnight terror.”

His entreaties were left unheeded. After all, Reilly was a foreigner, an ex-Russian with an obvious axe to grind. He was also a Jew, born Rosenblum, of which Bruce Lockhart, at the time the senior British official in Russia, never stops reminding us in his memoirs. In other words, Reilly could never be trusted.

Yet he understood something his superiors didn’t. Losing some wars may hurt the country’s pride and possibly her treasury. Losing some others may wipe the country off the map. And losing still others may obliterate a whole civilisation.

Just compare the two world wars. Had the Alliance lost the first one to the Central Powers, Britain would have been humiliated but she would have lived to fight another day. Moreover, had Germany emerged victorious in 1916, conceivably neither the Bolshevik Revolution nor the Second World War would have happened (the former almost certainly).

However, the option of losing wasn’t on the table in the Second World War. Had Hitler occupied Britain in, say, 1940, the country and her unique civilisation would have ceased to exist. Unlike the first one, that one wasn’t a war for geopolitical gains. It was one for civilisational survival.

Moving a bit further back, Rome couldn’t afford to lose the Punic Wars to Carthage. When Hannibal, one of history’s greatest generals, crossed the Alps in 218 BC and invaded mainland Italy, his troops were superior to the Roman legions in numbers, equipment and leadership.

Yet the Romans fought desperately for 14 years because they knew they weren’t just defending their country. They fought for the survival of their proto-Western civilisation threatened by another civilisation they perceived as not just barbaric but evil.

The Carthaginians practised human sacrifice and even the odd bit of cannibalism. That meant Roman soldiers didn’t need to have their morale boosted by indoctrination. They knew in their viscera that losing to Carthage meant losing more than just a war. So the only alternative to victory was death, and they were prepared to face it with unflagging courage.

The two armed conflicts going on at the moment fall into the same category. The West has allowed the “arch enemy” to grow to maturity, and now it is indeed threatening the survival of the human race – and not just metaphysically speaking.

However, yet again Reilly’s acute sense of civilisational danger is missing in the West, as it went missing in 1917 and in the late 1930s. We refuse to recognise that the Ukraine is the easternmost frontier of Western civilisation, which is exactly how the Kremlin sees it.

In one speech after another, Putin and his minions couch their military desiderata in civilisational terms. As far as they are concerned, the Ukraine is only a rampart of Western civilisation, and it’s not merely Russia as a country but the Russian civilisation that needs to bring it down.

This motif is by no means new in Russian history, going back as it does to the 15^th century, when Russia qua Russia didn’t even exist. Russia was supposed to be an analogue of a redeeming god saving mankind’s souls in eternity. Since mankind has always been reluctant to be saved by Russia, it had to be conquered and re-educated.

What until 1917 had been a messianic mission articulated mainly in churches and literary salons, became state policy thereafter. Bolshevik leaders openly identified their mission as world revolution, which was the same old messianic idea in verbal disguise.

The West didn’t realise it then and it refused to listen to those who did. In a way that’s understandable.

Essentially decent people (also cultures and civilisations) find it hard to get their heads around boundless evil. No matter how many atrocities barbarians commit or how openly they proclaim their intentions, there is always hope they won’t overstep a certain line in the sand. Yet that line has long since been washed away by the tide of evil. Evil is absolute, and it knows no upper limits.

That, I think, is the main reason for the West’s habitual vacillation – not stupidity, ignorance or cowardice (although these may also be variably present). Just like Penelope refuses to understand my most obscene jokes, so does the West feign deafness when civilisational threats thunder out of the Kremlin. Surely they can’t mean this? Surely they can’t do that? Yes, they can – and they do.

The same goes for the Gaza clash, if on a much smaller scale. From 1948 onwards the Israelis have known that they can lose a war against their Muslim neighbours only once: for the first and last time.

A defeat would be different from the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity and even from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and subsequent diaspora. The Israelites could survive those, keep the civilisational flame alive even in bondage and hope for return to the land promised to them by God.

Today’s Israelis know they can’t survive a defeat. Every one of them would be murdered, and their soil would be sown with coarse salt to make sure nothing would ever grow there again.

Both they and the Muslims see every military clash in civilisational terms. Yet the Judaic civilisation, for all its uniqueness, is also a subset and an outpost of a broader entity, Western civilisation. That’s why, like the Ukrainians, the Israelis are fighting not only their war, but also ours.

Neither they nor the Ukrainians nor indeed we can afford to lose. The Israelis and the Ukrainians realise this, but do we? And Sidney Reilly is no longer around to explain what’s what – and to wring his hands in despair knowing we won’t listen.

Few absolutes survive in our relativist world. Evil especially has become a suspect term hardly ever used – unless a conversation between two academics veers towards Margaret Thatcher.

Yet evil does exist, even if it’s not always easy to discern. Without spelunking into the depths of philosophy and theology to explore the essence of evil, I suggest we simply learn how to identify it.

Many visible dichotomies of good and evil exist in the world, but two strike me as the most salient at present.

Using today’s world as the testing ground, one can draw two demarcation lines (which at base are actually one and the same) beyond which evil lies. So let’s keep it simple: Anyone who takes HAMAS’s side against Israel or Russia’s against the Ukraine is evil.

The second group has often invaded this space, for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, it’s the first one that’s hogging the news at the moment.

The on-going massacre of Israeli civilians by HAMAS murderers vindicates the international classification of that group as terrorist. Indeed, it’s a misnomer to describe this event as a war. Slaughtering civilians isn’t warfare. It’s terrorism.

The coldblooded actuarial term ‘collateral damage’ doesn’t apply here – as it doesn’t apply to Russia’s actions in the Ukraine. When civilians are the intended target for slaughter, the damage isn’t collateral but deliberate. It’s not a by-product but the product. Such is the nature of terrorism, as accurately pinpointed by that great expert, Lenin: “The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise.”

Those who enthusiastically support such monstrosities are the monsters’ accomplices, morally if not legally. Yet evil isn’t a legal category but a moral one, and it easily accommodates such creatures.

Our perfectly integrated, impeccably multicultural Muslim community has come out in huge numbers to dance triumphantly in the streets. That reminds me of the late Lord Tebbit who proposed the ‘cricket test’ of loyalty to Britain, based on which team multi-culti people cheer when England plays Pakistan or India.

I’d suggest that the massacre test could examine an even broader loyalty to our whole civilisation. And the evil morons driving along Edgware Road with horns blaring fail that test with flying colours, those of the Palestinian flags flapping out of their car windows.

Those barbarians celebrated the brutal murder of (so far) 700 civilised people, of whom only 44 were soldiers. The rest were regular persons walking the streets or holding outdoor parties. Women. Children. Men old and young.

I don’t know whether HAMAS deliberately planned the atrocity to coincide with the opening of the Labour conference, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that were the case. Evildoers know where to find kindred spirits.

Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn, who tried, not wholly in vain, to recreate the Labour Party in his own virulently anti-Semitic image, pointedly refused to blame the ‘Palestinians’ for the atrocity. That’s hardly surprising since he has always described Muslim terrorists as his friends, as indeed they are.

When Corbyn was Labour leader, the party conferences were equally adorned with red and Palestinian flags. This time around the Palestinian flags are fewer, but they are still there. Global solidarity of evil needs constant confirmation.

On the other side of the Atlantic, 31 Harvard-related organisations have blamed the massacre on the Israeli occupation of ‘Palestine’ – just as Putin’s shills blame the Ukraine for the mass murder, torture, looting, kidnapping and raping of her civilians perpetrated by the Russian terrorist state.

Putin’s people may not be dancing in the streets today, but they are hearing triumphant music in what passes for their souls. They welcome anything that diverts the world’s attention from their own terrorism, especially since the Ukraine may now find herself competing with Israel for Western aid.

It’s that solidarity of evil creatures again: their name is legion, not ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘red’, ‘green’ or any other political nomenclature. If any physical links between them need some detective work to establish, the metaphysical links are there for all to see.

The Russian trace in the attack is unmistakable. The immediate inspiration for the HAMAS action came from Iran, Russia’s ally and, in this case, proxy. But it’s worth remembering that the previous, first generation of HAMAS chieftains were trained at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University.

That was the world’s only institution of higher learning that educated its alumni in terrorism to PhD standards. As befits educated people, the first generation have relayed that invaluable learning to their sons and nephews, who have now put it to good use.

Meanwhile, yesterday a girl who took flowers to Israel’s embassy in Moscow was arrested. The charge? “Besmirching Russia’s armed forces”. The logic may escape you, unless you keep the solidarity of evil in mind.

In parallel, Russian hackers under the FSB aegis have launched an attack on Israel’s government sites. Another such group, called Killnet, explained that it’s Israel’s government that’s to blame for the conflict – and not only because of its occupation of ‘Palestine’ but also because it had betrayed Russia by supporting the Ukraine.

The UN Security Council has failed to pass a resolution condemning HAMAS. I’ll give you three guesses as to which permanent member blocked it, but I doubt you need that many.

As to the Western supporters of either manifestation of evil, it matters not a jot that some of them self-identify as ‘right-wing’ or, God forbid, conservatives, while others are the rankest of lefties. Thus Putin admirers are mostly found in the former group and those who cheer HAMAS in the latter, although there exists a large overlap.

All evil has the same origin, even if it may then flow into different conduits. This understanding could simplify the analysis of each particular strain, but it shouldn’t supplant it.

Rooting for Muslim terrorism, for example, is the destination on many roads radiating from evil. One of them is common-or-garden anti-Semitism masquerading as criticism of Israel’s policies.

Likewise, admirers of Putin camouflage their visceral craving for a muscular state mouthing quasi-conservative slogans as criticism of the Ukrainian government. They aren’t deterred by the implicit imbecilic logic: because the Ukraine is imperfect, Putin’s bandit raid is justified.

That the Ukraine is imperfect is true – in this world we aren’t blessed with perfection. Yet she isn’t evil, and Putin’s Russia is.

In the same vein, people with intellectual pretensions happily decorticate the Israeli government, pointing out its failings. They then lash out at those who they claim equate anti-Israeli with anti-Semitic sentiments.

On the face of it they are right: a critic of Israel doesn’t have to hate Jews any more than a critic of HMG has to hate Britain. On the other hand, one has to ask why they are so persistent, borderline obsessive, in identifying Israeli imperfections. Why such intense scrutiny of the only civilised country in the region? Could it by any chance be their urgent need to find something wrong with the Jews?

Meanwhile police forces all over Britain are putting more men on the streets in Jewish neighbourhoods, anticipating violent attacks. Yet British Jews aren’t Israelis. They may sympathise with Israel, as do all decent Westerners, but they are in no way responsible for its policies. Why are they then being targeted?

In parallel, traditional Russian anti-Semitism, kept under wraps for a couple of decades, is now claiming broadcast time and newspaper space. One has to wonder if Putin authorised that volte-face in the runup to the HAMAS action.

When the Poles rose against Russian rule in the 1830s, their slogan – also aimed at the Russians themselves – was “For our freedom and yours” (Za naszą i waszą wolność). Both Israelis and Ukrainians, dying as they fight evil, could say the same thing. For they aren’t just fighting for their own survival. They are also fighting for ours.

This uncannily accurate cartoon doesn’t paint the whole picture. But it’s an important fragment.

For Messrs Smith, Ricardo, von Mises and Hayek failed to mention one immutable law of economics: If the state sector dominates or even edges towards domination, even the private sector will be tropistically attracted to it.

As the state controlled by bureaucrats grows more corporatist, so do actual corporations controlled by shareholders. At both manufacturing and service companies, those who actually make the products or provide the services are increasingly marginalised by bureaucrats.

Our state-owned NHS provides a ubiquitous blueprint, what with the frontline medical staffs routinely outnumbered by administrative parasites holding positions similar to those lampooned in the cartoon above.

They spend their time issuing counterproductive regulations, writing reams of unnecessary memos and forcing overworked doctors to sweat over endless reports and superfluous administrative tasks. As a result, many excellent doctors, unable to fight permanent nausea, take early retirement, opening doors for immigrants whose medical credentials may not be up to our standards.

That blueprint is dutifully followed in the so-called private sector. The centre of corporate gravity there also shifts towards self-perpetuating managers in sinecure posts who as often as not hamper the actual work. The situation was first diagnosed, with foresight of genius, by James Burnham in his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham spotted the first signs with the eyesight of a sleuth and predicted the future with the accuracy of a prophet. Written four generations ago, his work still reads as up-to-date reportage.

An attempt to analyse this situation brings together three different disciplines, each posing its own questions. The sociologist asks ‘what?’, the political economist asks ‘how?’, and the philosopher asks ‘why?’

The first question is the easiest, and the cartoon above comes close to answering it adequately. The next question is slightly thornier because it’s closely related to another inquiry: “Can today’s bosses be really so stupid as not to see that a profusion of useless sinecures reduces productivity and profitability, in more ways than one?”

The answer is, no, they can’t be, not as a rule. However, a car whose brakes fail acquires a mind of its own, making questions about its driver’s skill irrelevant. Why our socioeconomic machine seems to have reduced its drivers to impotence is a question neither a sociologist nor an economist can answer.

A philosopher may try, but even he will soon realise that no satisfactory answer lies anywhere close to the surface. Nor is there just one answer but many, and it’s hard, although not impossible, to trace them back to their common origin.

Having taken that task on in several books, I realise that a short article isn’t a fitting medium for it. So let’s just tug on one string in the hope that it will turn into Ariadne’s thread.

Every year, about 800,000 youngsters graduate from British universities. Now, at the time of John Henry Newman a university was an institution accommodating young people with an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

They sought to make our world intelligible, a task, they knew, that involved concerted inquiry into the inner depths of many disciplines, such as theology, philosophy, logic, rhetoric, music, astronomy, law, mathematics. Then as now, the number of such savants in the making was low. For example, all British universities combined awarded only 800 degrees in 1850.

At that time Britain’s population was about one third of what it is now. Hence, if the same proportion pertained today, we’d be producing 2,400 graduates a year. Since the actual number is gravitating towards a million, one has to reach some awkward conclusions.

Clearly, admission standards at our universities are no longer designed to filter in only youngsters seeking pure knowledge above all. Equally clear is that an overwhelming majority of aspiring students wish to go to university for some other reasons, typically the hope of a more lucrative career.

In the past, we had technical colleges serving such people, but they have almost all been converted into universities. However, considering the expectations of their students, these schools in fact remain technical colleges, jumped up to university status.

Moreover, since they largely or wholly depend on the students’ fees for their funding, they have to treat students not as charges to be raised to some higher understanding, but as customers to be served.

Since most students crave not knowledge but simply a degree, it’s natural that universities have to make it easier for them to get one – just like supermarkets try to make it easier for customers to part with their hard-earned.

Hence the profusion of non-academic degrees reflecting their holders’ social conscience and TV viewing habits, rather than their learning. Women’s studies, black studies, gender studies, ‘Philosophy and Star Trek’, ‘How to train in the Jedi way’, ‘Harry Potter studies’ and so on figure in most curricula these days.

Now proud possessors of BA degrees, such graduates soon find out that even their original limited purpose for seeking higher education remains unfulfilled. Their degrees are as useless for all practical purposes as they are for all intellectual ones.

So why do they still want to go to university if they have no high intellectual aspirations, nor any realistic hope of converting their degrees into cash (“What do you say to a philosophy graduate?” “I’ll have fries with that.”)? Because the whole ethos of modern society has indoctrinated them to believe they are all equal – no hierarchy of intellect, taste or learning exists, or should be allowed to.

If that’s the case, then a lad who can’t read without moving his lips feels he is fully equal to another youngster who has already perused, if not always understood, The Critique of Pure Reason. And equal not just before God (none of that obsolete rubbish) but in every respect.

Specifically in relation to higher education, they have been encouraged to think that way by intellectual and moral pygmies like John Major and especially Tony Blair, both of whom vowed to make sure half of all Britons have university degrees.

This is one of the few areas in which politicians actually do what they promise. However, this raises the inevitable question: If some eight million graduates, most with useless degrees, are disgorged on the economy every 10 years, what are they going to do? They can’t all wait at tables or deliver pizzas – we have immigrants for that.

The modern ethos lends a helping hand, the same ethos that has brainwashed youngsters who could otherwise become good plumbers or electricians that they are equal to that four-eyed egghead they bullied at school.

That same ethos applies the principle of supply-side economics to a festering social and cultural sore: supply generates demand. But the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who first formulated that law, never suspected it might find such a multifarious future.

Fine, people holding advanced degrees in Harry Potter can’t design bridges or treat patients. But they can drive engineers and doctors potty by lecturing them on diversity, gender equality or faddish appetites disguised as human rights.

That’s the supply, and the ethos kindly provides the demand by indoctrinating prospective bosses in the vital need for such services. And if they are slow to learn, the state steps in with threats of fines and legal prosecution.

That closes the circle, and it’s bound to be vicious. Or else funny, as in that cartoon.

As you may recall, back in August a private plane carrying Wagner Group leaders Prigozhin and Utkin blew up in mid-air.

Both gentlemen were winners of Hero of Russia medals, a distinction equivalent to the Victoria Cross in Britain, but their valour proved helpless against the blast.

Since Prigozhin and Utkin had led an armed mutiny against Putin a couple of weeks earlier, ugly rumours started to spread immediately. The explosion, they were saying, was Putin’s revenge and a little reminder pour encourager les autres.

That was accusing Hitchens’s beloved leader of murder, but I am happy to report the rumours have been conclusively dispelled by Vlad himself. In yesterday’s speech, he explained, inter alia, that all the passengers on board got whacked on vodka and cocaine, and one of them pulled the safety pin out of a hand grenade. Kaboom!

If you doubt this version, you aren’t familiar with the facts of the matter. But Vlad was happy to educate you: “A search of Prigozhin’s office in Petersburg,” he said, “found five kilos of cocaine.”

What better proof do you need, you doubting Thomas you? The logical chain is unbreakable: Prigozhin had five kilos of cocaine, obviously for personal use.

Therefore, he must have had some for on-board entertainment too. Therefore, he and his friends were snorting it. Therefore, they were also drinking vodka – after all, they were known to have indulged in that beverage. Therefore, one of them simply had to see what would happen if he pulled that safety pin out.

In a phenomenon so far uninvestigated by science, the drugs must have also boosted the hand grenade’s yield. After all, the first thing the explosion did was blow the plane’s wing right off. That might have been the initial, albeit accidental, test of Russia’s new secret infantry weapon.

At this moment any averagely educated Russian, and even some supremely educated Westerners, will think of Gogol’s great play Inspector General. There, a corporal’s widow complains to the eponymous inspector that the mayor of her town had her flogged. The latter does a Putin and rejects the calumny: “She lied to you that I had had her flogged; she is lying, as God is my witness she is. She flogged herself.”

So far we haven’t heard that the 51 denizens of Groza in the Kharkov region blew themselves  up in the café where they gathered for the wake of a killed Ukrainian soldier the other day. Vlad must be saving this plausible explanation for later – after all, people drink at wakes. Obviously a few of them overindulged and decided to test the same kind of grenades that had vaporised Prigozhin’s plane. It stands to reason, doesn’t it?

The grenade story wasn’t the only revelation Putin vouchsafed to his audience. He also elucidated the true nature of the on-going war, which he had hitherto kept to himself to throw the enemy off scent.

When the Russian invasion started, the stated objective was to ‘de-nazify’ and ‘demilitarise’ the Ukraine, thereby saving her Russophone population from the genocide perpetrated by those Ukie Judaeo-Banderite Nazis. Since that noble goal couldn’t have been achieved without occupying the country and incorporating her into Russia, this was the actual intention, and everyone knew that.

But in any case, the target was specifically the Ukraine, that Nazi Germany in disguise. However, now Vlad has revealed that stopping the genocide of every Ukrainian Russian speaker (such as many members of the country’s government, including Zelensky) was only an intermediate objective.

The scale of the challenge Russia is facing is infinitely wider, so wide in fact that it can never be solved by blowing up a few civilians here and there, even though they tend to do it themselves. The conflict isn’t local but global, with Russia forced to defend her very civilisation with its culture, traditions and territorial integrity.

Most countries in the world have joined forces to stamp out Russia’s peerless spirituality, but those Western Nazis are in for an unpleasant surprise. Vlad was happy to announce that the Sarmat 2 ICBM, affectionally known as ‘Satan’, is ready to go.

The Satan carries ten 750-kiloton MIRV warheads, each capable of defending a good chunk of Russian civilisation against any enemy within an 11,000-mile range. It goes without saying that, when London, Paris and New York sprout those thermonuclear mushrooms, it will be their own doing – that collective corporal’s widow is already soaking the rods to flog herself.

I’ll leave you to arrive at your own evaluation of a population largely accepting such drivel at face value. I am more concerned with Putin’s agents, witting or unwitting, recruits or volunteers, who spread Kremlin propaganda to weaken the Ukraine’s support in the West.

Their tireless efforts are bearing fruit: it is indeed palpably weakening. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary have already either stopped aid or reduced it to a trickle. France and Germany aren’t far behind, if opinion polls are anything to go by. And the emergency budget passed by US Congress provides no support for the Ukraine whatsoever.

Putin’s Western shills use time-proven techniques I have to appreciate as a former adman. They know that any nonsense repeated endlessly will have a desired effect sooner or later.

Most people don’t read newspaper articles word for word, and very few ever try to analyse them rationally. Like consumers who eventually get to believe that some brand of toothpaste will make them sexually irresistible, they respond to a few buzz words being hammered into their minds by expert propagandists.

The buzz words of Putin’s anti-Ukraine shills are ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’. Peter Hitchens, for example, hardly ever mentions Ukraine without those two attachments. This, for example, is from his article last Sunday:

“Bad things about Ukraine – its corruption, its oligarchs, its thuggish factions of Nazi sympathisers, its increasingly feeble democracy and flickering freedom of speech – are simply ignored or suppressed.”

Ergo, runs his implicit – often explicit – conclusion, we have no business helping the Ukraine as she is being bled white by Russian invaders, inspired by their regime which is “hardly not the most conservative and Christian in Europe.”

It doesn’t matter that only between one and three per cent of Ukrainians ever vote for Nazi-like parties, as opposed to 20-25 per cent in Russia – or some 75 percent if we legitimately class Putin’s party as Nazi.

It doesn’t matter that the Ukraine’s democracy isn’t at all feeble – it regularly has open and honest elections, something Russia hasn’t had in at least 30 years.

It doesn’t matter that, unlike the Ukrainian government, Putin’s gang has stamped out free speech altogether.

It doesn’t matter that corruption in Russia puts her way above the Ukraine in every international ranking, and into the territory she shares with particularly nasty African regimes.

Especially, it doesn’t matter that, unlike Russia, the Ukraine has no imperial ambitions forcing her to pounce on her neighbours like a rabid dog. For a propagandist none of this matters. He aims to elicit a Pavlovian response from his audience, not Aristotelean ratiocination.

Disgorge every possible permutation of the words ‘Ukraine’, ‘Nazi’ and ‘corruption’ in every available medium every chance you get, and hey presto – people will start wondering why we should take any part in defending such an awful regime. QED.

“A quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing”, and what we do know about that country, courtesy of Putin’s Lord Haw-Haws, is that it’s “corrupt” and “Nazi”. That makes an outcome similar to that precipitated by the quotation above exceedingly likely. And for all the similar reasons.

Pope Francis called his latest encyclical Laudate Deum, Praise God. However, a closer examination reveals that he praises not so much God as the wild-eyed fanatics of such groups as Just Stop Oil and the Extinction Rebellion.

They are, lamented His Holiness as if out of the burning bush, undeservedly castigated: “But in reality they are filling a space left empty by society as a whole, which ought to exercise a healthy ‘pressure’ since every family ought to realise that the future of their children is at stake.”

One gets the impression that, if Jesus Christ came again today, he’d join the gangs blocking traffic on the M25 and disrupting sporting events or theatrical performances. At least that’s what His Vicar on Earth wants us to believe and he should know.

The encyclical was released on the feast day of St Francis of Assisi, whose name the Pope took to signal his intention to emulate the saint, identifying Francis’s worship of nature as the aspect worthy of imitation. To my regret, he chose not to go the whole hog, by dropping his vestments on the floor, walking out of his palace naked and becoming a mendicant monk who begs for food.

Since those eco-zealots do God’s work, it follows ineluctably that anyone who as much as doubts the anthropogenic nature of climate change is an enemy of Christ. After all, according to His Holiness, “’It is no longer possible to doubt the human – ‘anthropic’ – origin of climate change.”

I agree it’s no longer possible for leftie demagogues to doubt their own mythology. The rest of us know CO₂ is a trace gas, contributing only one in 85,000 molecules to the atmosphere. And only three per cent of our CO₂ is anthropogenic, making it a small trace of an infinitesimally tiny one.

No evidence suggests that we are going through an unprecedented global warming. In fact, ‘our planet’ has been warmer than it is now for about 80 per cent of its lifespan. Serious scientists – as opposed to assorted shills of man-made apocalypse – identify numerous factors affecting climate, with CO₂ playing a walk-on role, if indeed any at all.

That is to say it’s possible not only to doubt the greenhouse gas theory of climate change but to reject it outright for the politicised nonsense it is. But the fanatical proponents of that swindle don’t really care about the minutiae of science.

Though they talk green, they think red, or rather maroon (red with a touch of brown). Yet they correctly sense that simply coming out and saying they yearn to demolish the West and everything it stands for would compromise their credibility. Hence they pluck some quasi-scientific facts out of the least attractive orifices in their bodies and cite them as God’s own truth.

That requires a certain dexterity of mind, and His Holiness could give any mental contortionist a good run for his money. Thus he cites the fact that CO₂ emissions have increased greatly since the Industrial Revolution, and so have global temperatures.

Crikey, who could have thought. The Industrial Revolution was fuelled by hydrocarbons, first coal, then oil, then gas. So of course mankind started to produce more CO₂.

However, in view of the facts I cited above, attributing global warming to that fact is a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Moreover, there have been extended cooling periods since the Industrial Revolution. That’s why, for example, as recently as in the 1970s the same scaremongering scientists who now bleat about us frying to death were warning about the impending arrival of an Ice Age.

Perhaps sensing he is on shaky scientific ground, the pontiff inadvertently let the political cat out of the bag. In common with other lefties, he is driven not by love of ‘our planet’ but by hatred of the West.

“We can state,” he stated, “that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.”

Said irresponsibility is turning Earth into “an immense pile of filth”, and the principal culprit is that devil incarnate, the United States. And if you doubt that, here is the clincher: per-capita emissions in the US are twice as high as in China.

Quite. However, if ‘our planet’ is indeed being fried by emissions, then it’s not the relative, per capita amounts that are doing the dirty deed but the absolute values. And in those absolute values China emits twice as much CO₂ as does the US.

Moreover, of the 10 greatest emitters in the world, only two, America and Germany are Western. All the others are Asian plus Russia that herself doesn’t know whether she’s East, West, halfway in between or sui generis.

This statement by His Holiness can only be properly understood if juxtaposed with his 2015 encyclical on the same subject. Then he explained in no uncertain terms that ‘our planet’ could only be saved by a cultural revolution overturning a “structurally perverse” economic system where the rich exploit the poor.

Mr Marx, say hello to Miss Thunberg. That psychopathic dropout also loves to sputter spittle about capitalists who destroy ‘our planet’ for the sake of profits. One should like to hope that the primus inter pares leader of world Christianity would have a higher intellectual capacity and sturdier moral fibre, but that hope is in for a let-down.

The Pope’s grasp of Christian doctrine is sometimes shaky, but his grip on the Left-wing catechism is vicelike. Instead of pontificating on political fads he’d be well-advised to study the works of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Who knows, he might learn what really matters in life.