Month: November 2023

“Jeremy Hunt is urged to let workers keep more of their cash through tax cuts,” goes today’s headline in The Mail.

In this context that one word, ‘let’, has the same effect on me as the word ‘culture’ allegedly had on Dr Goebbels. For you can let anyone keep anything only if it legitimately belongs to you.

Hence that wording of this worthy plea amounts to acknowledging that the money we earn belongs to the state, which can then decide how much it should allow us to keep for our own petty needs. In other words, that headline in our supposedly conservative paper meekly accepts tyranny.

In response to that abject entreaty by some Tory MPs, the Chancellor with the oft-mispronounced name set out to prove one of two things: either he is ignorant of elementary economics or he believes that everyone else is. “As we start to win the battle against inflation, we can focus on the next stage which is growth,” he said.

As if those two things could be separated. Both runaway inflation and extortionate, growth-stifling taxes have the same root: excess government spending. And excess government spending is caused by the state’s commitment to socialism in its various guises.

The only way to cut inflation and ensure steady growth is to abandon or at least curtail socialist practices. A good start would be a massive educational campaign – something all governments know how to do – explaining to people that socialism is as morally defunct as it is economically ruinous.

As a former adman, I can assure you that a massive campaign in all key media wouldn’t take more than a month to soften the ground for a parallel cut in taxes and public spending. Then the government would be able to go into the next election with a growth of some three per cent and an inflation of less than that.

Also, since lower taxes would increase productivity and turn many tax consumers into tax producers, the taxation base would widen. Hence it’s entirely possible that lower tax rates could produce higher tax revenue, although this is by no means guaranteed – whichever way the Laffer Curve bends.

Moreover, a corporate tax rate of, say, 10 per cent, as opposed to the current 25, will stimulate business activity by encouraging both start-ups and import of capital. All this is the ABC of economics, and I lay no claim to blazing new trails.

Yet you know and I know and everyone knows that none of this will happen on any other than a purely cosmetic scale designed to produce a PR effect but none other. For Clinton’s guru James Carville was wrong when he uttered his famous adage in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

It’s not. Certainly not now and not even 30 years ago. “It’s the ideology, stupid” would be more accurate, or “It’s the stupid ideology”, if you’d rather.

The two antipodes, Marx and Hayek, both got it wrong. Modern, which is to say post-Enlightenment, societies are run along ideological, not economic lines. Whenever there is a conflict, ideology wins every time.

Take any country and any field of human endeavour, and you’ll find irrefutable proof. Modern governments are prepared to sacrifice economic prosperity for the sake of ideological virtue signalling. And not just sacrifice some prosperity – they will willingly set up conditions for an economic collapse.

Just look at the insane, potentially catastrophic drive towards a net zero economy. Net zero usually refers to carbon emissions, but it may just as well mean zero growth, zero prosperity, zero happiness (in the modern, pecuniary sense of the word).

I can’t estimate the cost of this folly, other than suggesting it will run into more zeros than one can find in the Mother of All Parliaments. Moreover, there is every chance that the experiment (for that’s what it is) will fail and more trillions will have to be spent to go back to normal.

And why are we doing that? There isn’t a single economist in the world who will argue that this massive self-harm is being done for sound economic reasons. Everyone knows the reason for it is purely ideological, based as it is on the pernicious, anti-scientific notion of global anthropogenic warming.

Anti-capitalist ideologues using a hysterical, mentally deficient child as their figurehead, waved a magic wand, and an unfounded hypothesis was turned into an unsound theory, then into an indisputable fact, and then into an ideological orthodoxy one can only resist at one’s peril.

Few people believe we can ever pull off the net zero trick. No one believes we’ll be better off economically even if we can. Everyone knows that the economic, and hence human, cost of this ideological experiment is staggering.

The same goes for taxes. Everyone knows that our current tax rates are ruinous both economically and, more important, morally. The government has systematically created a vast urban underclass sponging off the Exchequer and turning normal social ills into deadly diseases.

Writing about the decline of Rome, R.G. Collingwood wrote what was both penetrating analysis and unerring prophecy:

“The critical moment was reached when Rome created an urban proletariat whose only function was to eat free bread and watch free shows. This meant the segregation of an entire class which had no work to do whatever; no positive function in society, whether economic or military or administrative or intellectual or religious; only the business of being supported and amused. When that had been done, it was only a question of time until Plato’s nightmare of a consumer society came true: the drones set up their own king, and the story of the hive came to an end.”

Has the Chancellor read Collingwood? Probably not: he doesn’t have the face of a scholar.

Yet it only takes a modicum of common sense to arrive at the same conclusion, and that I’m sure he does possess. He is also aware of what exorbitant taxation does to the economy, and he even knows how quickly both the economic and moral health of the nation would improve should the welfare state be dismantled.

Yet here I have to cite the immortal word of Jean-Claude Juncker, whom I mocked mercilessly when he was head of the EU Commission, yet whom I now remember with gratitude for this adage: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.”

He put his finger right on the most festering sore of modern democracies. Yet if it’s true that there is an opportunity in every crisis, then our Tory government has one of the greatest opportunities in its history.

The party is in crisis, heading for a generation-length stay on the back benches. Hence the government has nothing to lose – given the normal flow of events, it has lost already. So why not take a Hail Mary swing and introduce sweeping tax cuts, accompanied by a pari passu reduction in social spending? Why not replace our defunct NHS with a semi-private system that works much better on the Continent?

Alas, our government lacks one indispensable member, whom I can call for the sake of argument C.O. Jones (you know Spanish, don’t you?). So it’ll just sit on its thumbs, watching on complacently as the party slides towards defeat – and the country towards penury.

But please, can we stop talking about the government ‘letting’ us keep the money we earn? The money is ours, and we shouldn’t let the government extort it.

P.S. Does the reinstatement of Dave Cameron mean the government is planning to re-enter the EU? Is that the desperate ploy it’s counting on? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Cameron? Seriously? One of the most incompetent prime ministers in British history is now going to be one of the most incompetent foreign secretaries in British history.

That’s not scraping the bottom of the barrel. It’s chopping the barrel for firewood, only then to find out it doesn’t even burn.

That Rishi Sunak sacked Suella Braverman was predictable. After all, she was the only Conservative minister making conservative noises, which means she had no place in this Conservative cabinet.

But couldn’t Sunak find another nonentity to appoint to one of the four great offices of state? The Tory front bench is full of them, take your pick. Or any Labour MP would have done as well.

After all, Dave Cameron, as he then was, proudly called himself “heir to Blair”, and that was the only thing he got right during his stint at Number 10. There was a man who devoted his whole life to political mechanics, and couldn’t even master that discipline.

Dave, as he then was, was committed to tying Britain to the EU’s apron strings in perpetuity and he was sure the British shared that un-British vision. Dave’s finger, after all, was on the pulse of his nation and he could tell you what every beat meant. That’s why, certain of victory, he agreed to a referendum.

That was a miscalculation so gross that it can only be put down to his epically vacuous incompetence. For, even though Dave, as he then was, threw the whole weight of government propaganda behind the Remain vote, the British voted to leave – in the greatest numbers they had ever voted for anything.

Dave, as he then was, had to resign and concentrate on writing his memoirs. A friend of mine, paid to review the tome, called it the dullest book he had ever read. But how could it be otherwise? Dull writers write dull books – to this law there are no known exceptions.

In his exit interview Dave was asked to sum up his tenure. What was his greatest achievement? Dave, as he then was, didn’t hesitate: his greatest achievement had been pushing the homomarriage law through Parliament. A bit thin for six years as PM, wouldn’t you say? Not to mention morally decrepit, historically ignorant and subversively anti-conservative.

Since Dave is no longer an MP, Rishi Sunak had to make him a baron, so he could move into the House of Lords and thence into the cabinet. Now he can proceed to do to UK foreign policy what he did to UK policy in general all those years ago.

Here is the man deemed well-equipped to take charge of foreign affairs at a time when the world is on the brink of devastation.

The West is showing every sign of being ready to sell the Ukraine down the river, thereby empowering a nuclear-armed fascist regime. The Muslim world is about to explode, with fiery fragments threatening to ignite conflicts all over the world. China’s economy has finally realised it’s run by communists and gone into a slump. It’s possible that the communists will see an attack on Taiwan as the best way to vent the resentment building up in a society spoiled by a few years of relative prosperity.

And now in comes Dave, slightly older, slightly greyer, but not even slightly wiser. He’ll sort out Putin and Xi. He’ll stamp on the Muslims baying for blood. Just the right man for it.

The greatest catastrophes in history didn’t happen because of inept politicians. Nor did they happen because of serious crises. They happened because inept politicians were in charge at the time of serious crises.

Appointing Dave, Lord Cameron, to the Foreign Office at this time can surely qualify as a crime against humanity or, barring that, as a crime against sanity. It has one advantage though: the next Foreign Secretary will be David Lammy, currently holding that position in the shadow cabinet.

From one Dave to another – what could be an easier transition? People who are no good at remembering surnames will be able to continue to refer to the Foreign Secretary as Dave. The forename won’t change and neither will the policy. Our heir to Blair is your quintessential CINO, Conservative In Name Only.

The only chance the Tories have to stay in power is to start acting as Tories, not as a pathetic impersonation of Labour. There is still time before the next general election in January 2025 to give the electorate a valid choice between sane and socialist policies, even if it’s already too late for conservative measures like cutting taxes to have an appreciable effect before the country goes to the polls.

But at least Sunak’s government would be able to tell the voters: “Look, we’ve made mistakes. But our new policies show we know how to correct them. If you vote for Labour, you’ll be voting for all the same mistakes, made ten times worse. Give us a second chance, will you?”

The electorate might agree or disagree, more likely the latter. But there would be an outside chance. The appointment of Dave Cameron signals to the world that no such attempt will be made. Sunak is resigned to guaranteeing a smooth transition from one Labour government (in spirit) to another (both in spirit and in name).

He should do the honourable thing, call a snap election and ensconce Keir Starmer at 10 Downing Street without delay. That outcome is now guaranteed, so why prolong the death throes?

Dave, now Lord Cameron, will then have time to write a second volume of his memoirs, guaranteed to be even duller than the first. People don’t suddenly develop a personality in their advanced years.

That’s the number of people who marched through London yesterday.

They shouted “Death to all Muslims”, “Drive Gaza into the sea” and “Palestine for Jews”. They also carried placards showing the Star of David superimposed on the whole Middle East, Mohammed as the Devil, Islamic crescents intertwined with swastikas and wild beasts painted the colours of the Palestinian flag devouring the world.

The police did nothing to stop the Zionist rally. Moreover, some officers were seen cheering on and pumping fists with the demonstrators. When a few hundred irate Muslims tried to disrupt the march, it was only then that the police sprang into action, arresting a few thugs.

The next day, the BBC and Channel 4 ignored the xenophobic march of 300,000, focusing instead on the arrests made. One could get the impression that our TV channels were grateful to the thugs for providing a welcome diversion and giving them a free hand to pass the Zionist march for an innocent frolic. Then again, our liberal media are known for their Zionist leanings…

Got you going there for a second, didn’t I? Actually, the picture above is a bit of a spoiler. For the situation was exactly the opposite. Muslims reinforced by assorted lefties staged what Stephen Pollard correctly described as the biggest anti-Semitic rally in British history.

A thunderous chorus of “From the river to the sea” and “Death to all Jews” shook the stones of Westminster. The stage set featured placards saying “Gaza a real Holocaust” and showing a snake in the colours of Israel strangling the world. Smoke bombs thrown at Jews as they emerged from the synagogue provided the background music.

Everything else I described in my imaginary scenario did happen – exactly the other way around.

Some 300,000 pro-Hamas demonstrators wreaked havoc on London. The police did nothing to stop the anti-Semitic outrage, and some officers were indeed openly sympathetic. And our TV channels indeed concentrated on the couple of hundred thugs, Tommy Robinson types, rather than on the hundreds of thousands spewing hatred not only for Israel but for Jews in general.

A Telegraph reporter asked two young demonstrators what they thought of the massacre of Israeli civilians perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October. One of the interviewees honestly said she hadn’t heard about that event and promised to read up on it. The other said it had never happened.

The 1936 Battle of Cable Street only featured 3,000 fascists at most. Now it has been bettered, if this is the right word, by two orders of magnitude. And it doesn’t matter that some came along for the ride simply out of ignorance. If they didn’t know, it was because they didn’t want to know.

Yet there is a major difference between 1936 and 2023. Back then we didn’t have loosely worded laws against hate speech. Now we do. In 2023, one can get arrested for shouting “All you bastards are the same” at a group of whatever putative bastards cause one’s racial ire.

Regular readers know what I think about that law and especially its broad interpretation. But it does exist – though evidently not to protect Jews from the worst outbursts of anti-Semitic hatred in British history.

Now imagine the media coverage had things happened just as I described above. I can’t: my imagination isn’t vivid enough. Suffice it to say that I doubt the coverage would be generally sympathetic to that bit of innocent fun, a nice family occasion to promote peace.

Yet there was BBC reporter Frances Reid telling viewers that, “there have just been people peacefully protesting… it has been more of a family feel throughout the day”. Quite. Just a family outing calling for the murder of millions of people.

It never occurred to her to put herself in the shoes of British Jews, scared of going anywhere near the city centre and feeling unsafe even in their own neighbourhoods. They are British subjects, Frances, supposedly under the protection of the Crown.

It’s France that’s generally believed to be the most anti-Semitic country in Europe (Western Europe, that is – the Eastern part is sans pareil). Britain is supposed to be the paragon of tolerance and multi-culti virtue, her social scene reflecting the moderate British character always seeking accommodation rather than confrontation.

Sure enough, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Paris as well. But they were protesting against anti-Semitism, not in favour of it. And when in the past weeks the ‘from the river to the sea’ crowd tried to cause mayhem, the French police responded with water cannon and tear gas.

This though the Muslim population of France is twice as large as in Britain, and the Muslims there carry a much heavier political weight. Now that’s what I call a real tale of two cities. Mind you, I don’t think Parisians are any less anti-Semitic than Londoners. They just may be a bit more civilised.

Please take another look at the photo above and ponder the depth of depravity it took to produce that placard. Give a thought to the 60 million people murdered by the Soviets. About the same number murdered in China. The millions of Muslims killed or displaced by other Muslims in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan and Afghanistan. Then think of Israel, the sole oasis of Western civility in the Middle East.

Done? Now please tell me what the hell is happening to the world. Because what is happening is indeed hell.

Have you ever had sex with a person considerably less intelligent than you? If the answer is yes, proceed to the next question.

Are you an atheist? If the answer is yes again, then I don’t see how you can argue against Peter Singer’s logic.

Singer, Princeton professor of bioethics (whatever that is), has just issued a report called Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible, which created a bit of a stir. I can’t understand why, considering that he has been beating that particular drum for a quarter of a century at least.

In the old days his advocacy of hanky-panky with animals came as a natural conclusion to his GAP (the Great Ape Project), a movement for granting some primates equal human rights. Again, I can’t see how an atheist can logically object to such generosity.

After all, chimpanzees and humans share over 99 per cent of their genetic material. That means chimps are biologically human, or as near as damn. Granted, they are not as bright as most humans: we’ve seen many studies of chimps written by primatologists, but not a single study of primotologists written by chimps.

But then we all also know people who aren’t as clever as we are or even as Prof. Singer is. That doesn’t make them any less human, does it? There isn’t a single constitution in the world saying those poor dears shouldn’t enjoy equal rights – including the right to consent to sex.

You might think that at the very least the fashionable issue of consent may arise to prove a stumbling block there. After all, before planting a kiss on a girl’s lips, men are these days almost expected to get a signed and properly notarised consent form. That may ruin the spontaneity of the occasion, but on the plus side no one ends up in pokey.

Since animals tend not to be fluent in human, one doesn’t see how they can express their consent to sex, but Prof. Singer doesn’t see that as a problem. Animals, he explains, can consent by giving non-verbal “indications”.

I’d rather not go deep into the details, but I do wonder how that logic would play out at your run-of-the-mill rape trial. “She gave me non-verbal indications, M’lord” doesn’t strike me as a line of defence promising a realistic chance of acquittal.

Prof. Singer may be accused of many sins, but inconsistency isn’t one of them. He has been attracting my attention for 20 years at least. For example, this is what I wrote way back then:

“Consider the track record of Peter Singer, the ‘mind’ behind GAP. In 2001 he allowed that humans and animals can have ‘mutually satisfying’ sexual relations because ‘we are animals, indeed more specifically, we are great apes.’ Therefore such sex ‘ceases to be an offence to our status and dignity as human beings.’ Good news for some shepherds, bad news for poor Mrs Singer.

“Singer also maintains that the right to life is grounded in the ability to plan one’s future. Since the unborn, infants and mentally disabled lack this ability, he justifies abortion, selective infanticide and euthanasia. However, even though apes are not known for prudent foresight, Singer does not advocate their cull. So his is a kind of affirmative action: he wants apes to have rights that are not just equal but superior to ours.”

As I said, everything Prof. Singer preaches is logical within his own atheist frame of reference. If the difference between man and ape is only that of degree and not of kind, why not grant primates full human rights?

And why not have sex with them or other animals? I mean, many men have had sex with Angela Rayner, yet no one says they are perverts just because she is intellectually challenged.

But seriously now, can you see the intellectual conundrum? A materialist view of life disarms arguments against what any half-decent person intuitively knows is a disgusting perversion.

A successful, irrefutable argument against zoophilia can only be launched from the premise of Genesis: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he him.”

(The last phrase also provides a launchpad for an argument against some other perversions, but watch your step: arguing along those lines may already be against the law proscribing hate speech.)

Much of our morality has spun out of that one verse. The sanctity of human life, for example, rings hollow if human life isn’t sanctified.

That verse reduces all biological similarities between man and beast to the level of petty atavisms. It also defangs every attempt to explain man in purely materialist, Darwinist terms. The reason no missing link between man and ape has been found is that none exists. Because the ape isn’t made in the image of God, it’s typologically closer to a plant than to a human.

It was St Augustine who first described the Devil as the ape of God. For all its genetic makeup, a chimpanzee isn’t a human being but a ghastly caricature of one. It’s a reminder of what will happen to man if he loses his link with God and hence his humanity. The ape isn’t our past. But it may well be our future.

Looking on from the side lines, I enjoy watching ‘thinkers’ like Singer develop asinine theories to their logical conclusion, all the way to the gutter. What also gives me that nice sense of schadenfreude is the sight of ‘progress’ reverting to the darkest forms of animal worship.

Prof. Singer has the power of his convictions: as a vegan, he believes it’s wrong to eat animals; and as a humanist, he believes it’s right to copulate with them. I’m sure he also advocates interspecies marriage; perhaps he’ll even practise it. Should it come to that, in our progressive times the goat he’ll marry won’t even have to be female.

P.S. On the subject of consistency, Peter Hitchens is still at it, repeating every line of Kremlin propaganda word for word and then moaning about being “called all the stupid names (‘Kremlin Shill’, ‘Putin Apologist’ etc).”

He then goes on to prove those names aren’t so much stupid as dead accurate: “The conflict in Ukraine was always unnecessary. It has done nothing but harm to Ukraine and Ukrainians. Ukraine has been used as a battering ram in someone else’s quarrel. The whole thing was cooked up in the same Washington DC kitchen where the even crazier invasion of Iraq was prepared.”

Get it? It was those ghastly Americans who invaded the Ukraine, or rather made her attack Russia (which is what being a battering ram implies). Putin, the leader of what Hitchens regards as “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe” isn’t to blame.

Those names aren’t so stupid after all, are they?

Manny Macron has graciously recognised Israel’s right to defend herself – provided that no babies get killed in Gaza.

In fact, though he didn’t quite put it in so many words, Manny is unhappy with anyone being killed in Gaza, except perhaps Israeli soldiers. That’s why he called for an immediate ceasefire or, barring that, at least an end to Israeli bombing raids, for which, he says, there is “no justification”.

Now, a ceasefire in the middle of an unfolding military operation before its strategic objectives have been achieved is otherwise known as defeat. Hence in effect Manny calls for Israel’s defeat, which seems to be logically incompatible with her right to protect herself that Manny accepts so magnanimously.

The romantic in me likes to think that Manny is driven by noble emotions, if lamentably those not backed up with any sound thinking. Yet the cynic realises that the romantic is only half-right: Manny is indeed incapable of sound thought. However, the rest of it comes from demographic, rather than noble, considerations.

Manny’s country is blessed with a population 10 per cent of which are Muslims. And not just any old Muslims but those who love to riot, burn cars, loot shops, clash with policemen, cut people’s heads off, shoot up newspaper offices and in general make a nuisance of themselves. Moreover, they vote, usually as a bloc.

Thus no French politician who wishes to remain a politician can do without a sop to the Muslims, who are pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli and – if I’m being totally honest – anti-Semitic almost to a man (also woman, child and babe in arms). Hence, but for this realpolitik proviso, one would have to regard Manny’s statement as frankly imbecilic.

Indeed, if Manny seriously means what he says, one would have to diagnose serious mental deficiency or else a lamentable pedagogic failure on the part of his foster mother Brigitte. She really ought to instruct her charge on the basics of logic.

First, Israel’s right to defend herself has to include the right to respond militarily to one of the worst attacks in her history, with more Jews killed in a single day than at any time since the Second World War. Agreed, Manny?

Good. Then, since Israel possesses an effective air force, using it in support of a ground offensive makes sense. Doesn’t it?

Excellent. Now, the way an air force is used in conditions of air supremacy mainly involves bombing raids designed to degrade the enemy’s military capabilities and paralyse its command structure. True?

Splendid. However, it so happens that Hamas practises terror not only against Israelis but also against its own civilians. It’s happy to pay with their lives for any PR payoff to be derived.

To that end, Hamas command centres, ammunition stores and rocket sites are deliberately located in, underneath or next to hospitals, schools and residential buildings. That guarantees a large number of civilians, including babies so dear to Manny’s heart, will get killed.

This is an outcome that Hamas welcomes and Israel tries to avoid – by issuing advance warnings, telling people to evacuate and trying to aim away from civilian structures wherever possible. However, given the fact that Hamas actively wants to maximise its own civilian casualties, they are unavoidable. Sounds logical so far?

Superb. Yet Manny seems to think that no justification for bombing exists. He is wrong about that. For the only alternative to bombing is house-to-house fighting on the ground.

Manny would be well-advised to read up on the history of the 1942-1943 Battle of Stalingrad. He’ll find out that this type of urban warfare produces the highest number of casualties.

In numerical terms, instead of losing dozens of its soldiers, the IDF would be losing hundreds if not thousands. Yet no one with a modicum of moral sense would expect Israel to protect Gaza lives with those of her own soldiers. Is Manny endowed with that faculty, or has Brigitte failed in that area too? No? Well, in that case we’ve made an unbreakable logical chain.

First, Israel has a right to protect herself. Second, exercising that right involves military action designed to punish Hamas atrocities and deter any repeat performances. Third, no deterrence is possible as long as Hamas continues to exist. Fourth, hence it must be destroyed. Fifth, since, unlike Hamas, Israel hates losing her own people, the military objective has to be achieved with a minimum of Israeli casualties. Sixth, that can only be done by deploying overwhelming air power and as little urban fighting as possible.

Since this logic can’t escape even someone of Manny’s understated intellect, one has to believe he has been misinformed on the military technology currently available. His military advisers must have told him bombs exist that can hit a rocket site located underneath a residential building without damaging the building itself.

Well, Manny, they lied to you. Such precision bombing hasn’t yet been invented, and I doubt that even the Israelis will ever be able to fill this lacuna in military technology.

In the absence of such improbably smart projectiles, how does Manny propose to save Gaza babies without obliterating the logical chain above?

He doesn’t. Instead he mouths the usual bien pensant waffle about ceasefires and ends to bombing: “It’s extremely important for all of us because of our principles, because we are democracies. It’s important for the mid-to-long run as well as for the security of Israel itself, to recognise that all lives matter.”

I propose Brigitte offer this test to Manny: “Name one country in history that has ever fought for its survival on the premise that the lives of its enemies matter as much as its own people’s.” If he can’t, some corporal punishment will be in order (unless, of course, Manny may like it).

This morning, out of the blue, I thought of the 1953 play I last saw back in 2007, The Arsonists by Max Frisch. (You may know it by its earlier, better, English title The Firebugs.)

I wouldn’t be prepared to argue whether or not it’s the best play of the 20^th century – we all have our favourites. Yet there is no argument it’s the most prophetic.

I’m not going to tell you what it prophesies. Doing so would be insulting your intelligence, and it’s the last thing I’d ever be prepared to do. So, in case you haven’t seen or read the play, let me just tell you what it’s about.

A town is plagued by a spate of arsons. Firebugs, disguised as hawkers, talk, cajole, threaten or otherwise insinuate themselves into people’s homes. All they want is to spend a night or two in the attic, and the townsmen are either too kind or too intimidated to turn them away. Having ensconced themselves, the arsonists proceed to do what arsonists do: setting the houses on fire.

The local worthies, such as the principal character named Biedermann, read accounts of such blazes with smug complacency. That sort of thing may happen to other people, but certainly not to them. They are solid bourgeois burghers, the salt of the earth. No one would dare play fast and loose with them. And if anyone tried, they’d see right through the evildoers’ perfidy.

The name Biedermann derives from der biedere Mann, literally (and ironically) ‘worthy man’ or ‘Everyman’. The protagonist thus embodies the philistine conceit Frisch treats with scathing if subtle derision.

Sure enough, no sooner had Biedermann finished reading yet another newspaper report of an arson than a hawker turns up at his doorstep. Using persuasion faintly tinged with intimidation, he talks his way into Biedermann’s attic, where he promises to spend just one night. Biedermann acquiesces, telling himself his cowardice is actually kindness, and his spinelessness is in fact empathy for his fellow man.

One night becomes several, and before long another hawker appears to share his friend’s new lodgings. The self-invited guests begin to pile the attic high with oil drums full of petrol, which should really tip Biedermann off. So it does, fleetingly, before his congenital smugness takes over. The firebugs don’t even have to deceive him. He does a good job of it himself.

Hence Biedermann does nothing to stop the arsonists. In fact, to prove to himself that no one would dare play a dirty trick on him, the apex of creation, he even gives the criminals matches and helps them to measure the detonating cord to make sure it’s just the right length.

An infernal finale follows, with the two hawkers turning out to be Beelzebub and the Devil unleashing the fires of hell on Biedermann’s cosy world. The philistine Everyman, the Swiss playwright appears to be saying, doesn’t deserve to survive because he’ll do nothing to fight for his survival.

There Frisch echoes Goethe who, in his Faust, conveyed a similar idea: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving who every day must conquer them anew.” But unlike Goethe, Frisch lived through two world wars. That’s why, unlike Faust who finally goes to heaven, his Biedermann ends up in hell. The 20^th century left no room for even Goethe’s semi-happy ending.

Lovers of tags usually mention Frisch side by side with Becket, Ionesco, Pinter and other key figures of the so-called ‘theatre of the absurd’. But life has a tendency to reshuffle the pack, with reality itself becoming so absurd that only absurdity can approach reality.

I’d call Max Frisch a prophetic realist – after I’ve finished calling him a great playwright.

And now let’s talk about the delights of Muslim immigration…

P.S. A retired American lawyer living in Panama yesterday drove down the road only to find his way blocked by anti-oil fanatics. He tried to remove the tyres and rocks they had used as barriers, but his 77-year-old body wasn’t up to the task. As the zealots moved in on him, the lawyer pulled out a gun, a Glock Compact by the looks of it, and shot two of them dead.

He is now held on remand, awaiting a long stint in prison. Call me a heartless brute, but instead of a custodian sentence I’d give him a British passport and a lifelong supply of 9mm ammunition. Perhaps I ought to write a play about it.

If you get the literary allusion in the title, congratulations. You are a man of learning and discernment.

Therefore you don’t need me to tell you why Hamas launched that infernal raid on 7 October and why it was conducted with such savage cruelty. But some people, notably many commentators on the war, seem to need help to sort things out.

Discounting professional anti-Semites and Israel-haters, many well-meaning commentators are incapable of following the logic of the event. They regret the inhuman cruelty of Hamas’s action while displaying compassionate understanding of its motives.

I’d call such a pundit a Hamasversteher, by analogy with Putinversteher, someone who feels Vlad’s pain while bemoaning the pain he inflicts on millions of Ukrainians. Yes, says such a commentator, those Hamas lads went way over the top with their throat-slitting machetes and dismembering hoes.

But if I, the commentator, had to live my whole life under an occupation authority in miserable conditions and without any prospects of advancement, why, I’d feel the same way. I too would want to whip my machete out… no, not quite that. I am a civilised man, after all. But I understand how those youngsters feel. (This is a verbally loose but substantively accurate rendition of Max Hastings’s article).

The overall tone of commentary in our liberal (which is to say illiberal) press is that Hamas’s cause is just and it remains so in spite of the regrettable excesses committed on 7 October. Those excesses may explain but in no way justify Israel’s response that has already produced greater casualties in Gaza than those impetuous youngsters inflicted on Israeli babies.

Digging through such a pile of mental manure is an ungrateful task, but someone has to do it. So let’s construct a logical chain that will strangulate such crepuscular musings.

For our starting point, let’s use Golda Meir’s saying: “We want to live. Our enemies want us dead. Not much room for compromise there.”

Ever since the founding of Israel in 1948, the entire Arab world has been baying for the blood of every Israeli. Arab states have ganged up to launch three major wars on Israel with the explicit purpose of “driving her into the sea”. It was understood that such a marine excursion would leave no Israelis alive.

Israel won those three wars, the first one, paradoxically, with the Soviet Union’s help, the next two, predictably, with America’s. All that unfolded to the accompaniment of the liberal (which is to say illiberal) world railing again Israel’s “unlawful occupation” of the small patch of land that rightfully belongs to Muslims.

Appeals to history fell on deaf, and biased, ears. Yes, Jews had been living in Palestine for at least 2,000 years before Mohammed robbed his first caravan. And at no point in history had the population of Jerusalem been less than half-Jewish.

That’s not the point. The point is that some Arabs were displaced when Jewish settlers finally got their state in 1948, a guarantee that another Holocaust wouldn’t happen or, if it did, at least the Jews would go down fighting.

Hence the Golda Meir juxtaposition: we want to live, they want us dead. The experience of those three wars has taught the Arabs that a military defeat of Israel isn’t on the cards, especially since the country has a nuclear bomb up her sleeve, to be used as the last resort.

Also, Israel enjoys the support of the civilised world that correctly sees her as its outpost in its 1,400-year struggle against Islamic aggression. Back to logic then: what can the Arabs do to achieve their laudable aim of turning all of Israel into a bloodbath similar to that of 7 October?

Correct. They have to turn the civilised world against Israel, forcing it to withdraw its support and leave the tiny country one on one with the vast Muslim world. And what’s the best way of accomplishing that? Correct again: by portraying Israel as the heartless aggressor and the Arabs as her helpless victims.

To that end, each terrorist attack on Israel, with rockets, AKs or machetes, must be hailed as the crying out of wounded souls. At the same time, each Israeli response to such attacks must be decried as flagrant, unprovoked aggression with genocidal intent.

This little stratagem has worked a treat. As a result, Israel is the only one of the world’s 196 states whose legitimacy is denied by most UN members. That august organisation, born at roughly the same time as Israel, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other country. A visitor from another planet would be justified in believing that Israel is the main, not to say only, source of evil in the world.

Knowing all that, Israel has learned to fight with one hand behind her back. The Israelis know that their support even in civilised countries is by no means guaranteed. Large swathes of Western liberal (which is to say illiberal) opinion are against them, and the balance can be tipped the other way at any moment.

That’s why they have been responding to hails of rockets fired at their villages and towns with restraint no other country would show. Just imagine thousands of rockets being fired at Texas and California from Mexico day in, day out. I sincerely doubt Mexico City would look considerably better than Dresden, circa 1945.

Israel can’t afford the luxury of just retribution for monstrous attacks on her civilians. The world is keeping a watchful eye on her military responses, hoping for a pretext to gang up on Israel and leave her at the mercy of her savage enemies.

The latter, however, know exactly what to do. If Israel won’t oblige to unleash hell on her attackers, she must be forced to. Should such an undertaking succeed, the liberal (which is to say illiberal) champions of the Third World will join forces with rank anti-Semites and have another go at leaving Israel friendless and defenceless. Keep doing that long enough and at some point you’ll succeed.

The links of the logical chain have clasped together. We now understand why Hamas had to launch that raid and why it had to be conducted with such savage brutality. Israel had to be deprived of any option of showing restraint. A massive military response became the only option on the table.

Even Israel’s attempts to limit non-combatant losses had to be nipped in the bud. Hamas and all other Arab enemies of Israel have a vested interest in maximising their own civilian casualties. To that end, they place their command centres and missile sites in bunkers built under hospitals and schools, leaving the Israelis no option but to hit them. And when that doesn’t work, the Arabs simply lie about a hospital being bombed, as they did on the first day of Israel’s response.

Meanwhile, liberal (which is to say illiberal) opinion used all the best methods of rabble-rousing to marshal its forces around the civilised world — before the Israelis launched their counter-attack. Millions have been driven out into the streets demanding a “Palestine free, from the river to the sea.” Allow me to translate: that means annihilating Israel and murdering every Israeli.

If that isn’t incitement to terrorism, I don’t know what is. And yet our authorities are helpless to stop that Walpurgisnacht. They’ve meekly begged the scum to postpone their march until after 11 November, to make it possible for us to remember our fallen soldiers in peace. The scum refused, and the attack on the Cenotaph is on.

There are rumours that football lovers, Tommy Robinson types and assorted faschisoid extremists will come out to turn London streets into battlegrounds. The situation may resemble the 1930s, when fascists and communists fought their bloody battles in the East End.

Public order is in peril, and the fault lies with our government’s vacillating policies, both foreign and domestic. HMG should state unequivocally that supporting Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel (“from the river to the sea”) is tantamount to inciting terrorism. The Terrorism Act 2000, Section 2, provides for rewarding that activity with imprisonment of up to 15 years.

The next step would be putting enough police, possible even troops, on the streets to enforce that law and preserve public order. It’s time we realised that what is under way isn’t a conflict between Israel and her enemies, but what Samuel P. Huntington correctly identified as the clash of civilisations.

Having said that, I’m almost certain today’s governments, including ours, are incapable of understanding such simple logic and acting accordingly. Mindless toing and froing is their lot.

P.S. The other day several people filmed the act of vandalism at the National Gallery, but not a single one tried to stop it. Have the English become a nation of voyeurs?

Living in a stifling atmosphere saturated with tawdry vulgarity, one has to come up for a gulp of fresh air now and then. That’s why the National Gallery is our usual haunt, what with its air full of cultural oxygen.

We’ve been going to the National once a month or so for 35 years and, though we know every inch of every painting there, the gallery never fails to provide the resuscitation we seek. That’s why, when Penelope suggested we go there yesterday, I nodded enthusiastically.

But then I looked out of the window, which exertion led to an inner conflict, not to say turmoil. The day was sunny, and it would be misleading to suggest that London is blessed with many such days in November. Nice weather usually spells t-e-n-n-i-s for me, hence the conflict between my spiritual and physical needs.

The latter prevailed, and I drove to my club, having come up with a lame excuse for doing so. We have tickets for two on-going exhibitions, of Rubens and Holbein, I said. Going over to the National Gallery a few days before attending those would constitute not so much a dose of aesthetic pleasure as an overdose. I’m not sure Penelope agreed, but she knows better than to get between me and tennis.

That saved me from having my collar felt.

You see, we seldom look at every painting each time we go to the National. Yet we never bypass some, especially those of the early Renaissance, along with the Dutch and Spanish art of the 17^th century. Vermeer and Rembrandt, Zurbarán and Velázquez are as essential to our spiritual diet as malt whisky is essential to mine and coffee to Penelope’s.

Hence it’s a distinct statistical probability that I would have been admiring Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus even as two Just Stop Oil thugs were vandalising it. Since I’m a firm believer in ‘just stopping’ not oil but such thugs, I would have reacted violently.

Experience has taught me that persuasion doesn’t work with crazed fanatics; only violence does. Hence I would have come out swinging, and there would have been blood on the floor – most probably mine, because at my age I’m less equipped for fisticuffs than in my younger days. But they wouldn’t have escaped punishment either and, more important, the painting would have been saved.

As it was, those two criminals only used their hammers to smash the protective glass of the painting, not the pigment crusted 400 years ago. But I would have had no way of knowing that in advance, and that canvas is of much greater value to me than the noses, indeed the lives, of some obsessed scum.

You might say that isn’t the way a civilised person must act and, if he does, it raises legitimate doubts about his being civilised. I can’t argue with that comment – you’d be right. But pray tell me what other recourse I would have had.

Call the police? Yes, that would have been civilised. It would also have been useless because it takes less time to destroy a priceless painting than for cops to arrive. And letting that scum vandalise Velázquez and then walk away unmolested would have been impossible for me.

In the end, they didn’t walk away, choosing instead to stick around and mouth the usual moronic twaddle. The cops did arrive and arrested the vandals, who are now going to have their knuckles rapped. They were charged with causing criminal damage, the penalty for which is contingent on the extent of damage inflicted.

Since they only broke some glass, my guess is they’ll get away with a warning and perhaps a small fine. Had I smashed their faces, I wouldn’t have got off quite so easily.

When the vandals face the magistrate, no doubt their lawyer will offer in extenuation their deep commitment to the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’. Since the cause is in fact ignoble, I rather think such commitment should be an aggravating circumstance instead, but that’s not how our jurisprudence works.

By contrast, striking a physical blow in defence of our civilisation would be seen as a violent crime, and never mind the cause. That’s why, when Just Stop Oil mobs wreak havoc on London traffic by blocking vital thoroughfares, not one of them has so far suffered any physical retribution.

Some drivers get out of their cars and try to drag the fanatics away to clear the carriageway, but that’s as far as it gets. The police are typically in attendance but, just as typically, they do nothing. People have a right to demonstrate for the causes they see as just, they’d say – or rather would be instructed to say.

Society, on the other hand, isn’t allowed to protect itself even in situations where authorities offer no protection. Thus the two vandals will be free to join hundreds of thousands of others to disrupt the Armistice Day commemorations. They’ll be screaming “Palestine free, from the river to the sea”, even though many of them won’t be able to identify the river involved or find it on the map.

If such recent sabbaths are anything to go by, Muslims will make up only about 20 per cent of the mob. The others will mostly be members of lumpen intelligentsia, alumni of our schools and universities where they learned to hate our civilisation and love its enemies.

Dress rehearsals for 11 November have been held throughout last week, with the Met pretending it has been doing something about it. According to its spokesman, “Around 100 arrests were made by officers along Whitehall during another day of disruption by Just Stop Oil. These arrests were made for breaching section seven of the Public Order Act at various points between Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square, including near to the Cenotaph. No protester glued themselves to the road. There were no offences linked to the Cenotaph”.

Quite. But I assure you there will be, and the two vandals will be out in time to join in the fun. And even those 100 already arrested will be released in good time.

Now I invite you to exercise your imagination and picture hundreds of thousands of conservatives joining Jews to flood central London. They’d be carrying placards and chanting mantras calling for killing all Gaza Muslims and for Israel to reclaim all of her ancient land, including Judaea and Samaria – perhaps even Egypt and Iraq where the Israelites were once enslaved.

Do you think just a paltry 100 people would be arrested? If that’s a difficult question, here’s an easier one: if a scared septuagenarian seriously wounded a burglar, which one would go to prison?

Both Just Stop Oil and Free Palestine fanatics come from the same classroom as most of our civil servants. The latter may or these days may not speak with better accents, but they certainly don’t espouse better ideas. Hence they sense kinship with the fanatics and won’t punish them too severely by defending the putative good causes with too much youthful impetuosity.

But who will defend the really good cause of our civilisation? Some isolated and impotent individuals not even worth talking about. They won’t make a dent in the awful juggernaut and won’t even slow it down. So all we can do is rejoice that those vandals took hammers to Velázquez, not acid. And that so far no Jews have been murdered in North London, even though hundreds have been abused.

Thank God (and our government) for small favours.

Once the two on-going wars have been covered, other subjects begin to claim pride of media space. One of them, Artificial Intelligence, is taking up more and more newspaper inches, most reading like a dystopic sci-fi fantasy.

Details vary quite a bit, but the overall thrust less so. Many commentators see AI as a threat to people’s jobs or even to the very survival of mankind. Robots will turn into Frankenstein’s monsters, they say, but with a much greater destructive power. Artificial intelligence will then trump the natural kind to annihilate humans and set up an electronic totalitarian realm from hell.

Unfortunately, my knowledge of computers barely stretches to using them in lieu of typewriters and looking up bits of information on Google. Hence I can’t judge the technological feasibility of such doomsday scenarios.

On general principles, however, I can’t imagine a creature ever being superior to its creator, although I’m sure some atheists may feel differently. Come to think of it, computer geeks and chess players have joined forces to create software packages that can wipe the board with any human wood-pusher, but that’s a rather narrow area.

That example isn’t substantially different from, say, cars made by man and yet capable of going much faster than a human can. Unless, of course, we are talking about traffic in London or Paris, strangulated as it is by bicycle lanes, derisive speed limits and socialist mayors.

However, I am prepared to accept that those computer experts who warn against the awesome power of AI have a point, and we are in dire danger. Even so, I’d suggest it’s not AI we should fear but ourselves.

AI is nothing but a tool or, if you will, a weapon and, as Soviet drill sergeants used to tell me, the most important part of a weapon is the head of its owner. Tools can be used for various purposes, good or bad. Which it will be depends on whether their wielders are good or bad.

A knife can be sharpened to make a kebab or to cut a baby’s throat. A shotgun can put a brace of pheasants into your oven or you six feet under. A split atom can light up a city or blow it up.

Likewise, I’m sure, AI can be put to good or evil use. The same goes for high-tech in general. Thanks to computers, I no longer have to tote a suitcase full of reference literature every time I go on holiday. Also thanks to computers, when some idiot drove into me a few years ago, the crash was caught on two CCTV cameras. He was banned for a year; I got the insurance money.

However, put a different software package into those same computers, and they tell strangers all sorts of things about me I’d rather keep private: what I eat, cook, read or watch, which holiday destinations and types of music I prefer and so on.

My car’s GPS can guide me to my destination, especially if I know the way anyhow, but it can also inform the police how fast I’m driving. (And if it can’t yet, rest assured it will be able to before long.) My mobile obviates the need to search for a public phone every time I need to tell Penelope I’ll be late, but it can also tell authorities where I am when I go about my lawful business.

 A free country can use AI to protect civil liberties, a tyrannical one will use it to quash them. That’s where I begin to worry – not about AI as such but about its possible nefarious uses.

The history of potentially dangerous technologies shows that we won’t be deterred by their dangers: if something can be made, it will be made. Corollary to that is another historical observation: if technology can be put to wicked use, it will be.

Arguments about the morality of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still raging almost 80 years later. Personally, I’m on the side of those who believe that the bombing was justified because it saved hundreds of thousands of American lives that would otherwise have been lost in Japanese island hopping. Yet I can see the validity of the opposite argument as well.

Whether or not we agree not to chalk those incidents up in the rubric of wickedness, we can argue that the presence of nuclear weapons has so far managed to deter evil states from starting another world war.

Yet ‘so far’ are the operative words. I’m convinced that sooner or later those nuclear mushrooms will be planted by indisputably evil powers. Neither history nor any reliable reading of human nature offers many arguments against that possibility.

The same goes for AI. It may make us all freer and richer, or else, if it can, it may make us redundant and extinct. Let the boffins argue among themselves about the technical aspects of the problem. The rest of us ought to ponder human nature and, if such is our wont, divine providence.

The latter gives reason to hope, the former to tremble. I for one am afraid, but not unduly so. When all is said and done, God will provide.

Any war is a test – of courage, morale, ethics, determination, economic strength, military nous. And, what is especially interesting to me, of intellect.

This test is at its most severe for the belligerents themselves. But outside observers have to take it as well, and the two on-going wars are no exception.

Both are rare, possibly unique, in modern history in that neither leaves any room for moral or intellectual ambiguity. The Ukraine and Israel are fighting for their life, having been attacked by evil aggressors seeking to destroy their countries and, in the latter case, murder everyone living there.

Both countries are our allies, Israel of longer standing, but the Ukraine just as clearly. Both find themselves on the receiving end of inhuman cruelty at the hands of self-proclaimed enemies of the West seeking to wipe out our civilisation. Both are bulwarks, the outposts of the West trying to keep barbarians at bay.

One would think that anyone with a modicum of intelligence and moral sense would know which side to support in both conflicts. Yet hardly a day goes by without some pundit delivering the stock mantra, along the lines of “it’s not all black-and-white”, “both sides are at fault”, “it’s not as straightforward as it seems” and so forth.

The motivations for such pseudo-balanced views vary. Some people sympathise with the aggressors, but don’t dare own up to that unequivocally. Others dislike the West and hence cheer for its enemies, whoever they might be. Still others aren’t sufficiently informed to assess the situation properly. But all of them without exception are intellectually underdeveloped.

The problem, I’m afraid, is not only individual but also systemic. For modernity has thrown out the baby of rigorous ratiocination with the bathwater of Christian habits of thought.

I specifically mean Christian thought rather than faith, even though it’s the latter that produced the former. When Christianity was the dominant, or at least essential, part of the Western ethos, it imposed certain patterns of thought that even unbelievers followed, consciously or otherwise. Not all thinkers were devout Christians, but most thought as if they were.

People breathed ambient air saturated with belief that one’s life and therefore thought were directed towards communion with absolute truth. That’s why Western thought was teleological even in its approach to secular problems. Whether or not absolute truth was fully accessible to human reason, people knew it existed and directed their thinking towards getting as near to it as their resources allowed.

Practically all Enlightenment thinkers, French, German or Scottish, illustrate that point. Few of them were pious Christians, and some were out-and-out atheists. Yet the intellectual rigour beaten into them by their teachers, most of whom were clerics, enabled them to think the tasks they set themselves through to the end.

Although I happen to think most of them were misguided most of the time, one can observe first-rate minds at work. Though they had blown up the foundations of the Christian intellectual structure, the structure itself was still upright, providing the framework of disciplne within which the mind could do its work.

Their heirs weren’t so lucky, although it took a while for that structure to totter and then collapse. But collapse it did.

Western thought has lost what I call the art of making the next step. It muddles through to some stopover on the way to the truth, and then a steel gate comes clunking down: thus far but no farther. Some people reach that stage sooner, some later, but few ever get to the final destination. Most don’t even know it exists and suspect it may not.

Thus they become susceptible to persuasion that bypasses reason altogether. If you look at advertising in commerce and propaganda in politics, you’ll see that neither owes its success to reason. Both appeal to the primitive pagan in man, an intellectually half-naked creature unable to tell shiny baubles from sparkling diamonds.

That’s what turned liberalism into the dominant element in the intellectual atmosphere of the West. It’s commonly believed that this word has changed its meaning, and there exist actually two liberalisms: classical and modern. Yet the essence of liberalism remains the same – it’s the ambient ethos that has changed.

Someone like Gladstone or Acton seems typologically opposite to today’s liberal saying that “both sides are at fault” and then screaming himself hoarse on a Free Palestine march. Yet both act according to type.

Liberalism starts from negation, dissatisfaction with things as they are. That was the starting point for both yesterday’s Whiggish liberals and today’s socialist ones. But the former still lived in an intellectual universe formed, if no longer dominated, by Christianity.

Thus they were still adept at the art of taking the next step. Having identified their bugbears, they would then activate their teleological thought to negate the negation, in that dread Hegelian terminology. You may agree or disagree with the solutions they reached, but you can’t say they stopped at negation and left it at that.

By contrast, today’s liberals live in a world of intellectual entropy. Having lost the Christian mental discipline, they have replaced it with no other. The thunderous egalitarian noises of the Enlightenment have busted their eardrums, and they can no longer hear voices of reason.

Ignorant opinion and kneejerk sentiments now enjoy equal, in fact preferential, rights with informed judgement, and today’s meandering intellectual roads bypass reason at every turn. Political propaganda and its commercial sibling, advertising, cauterise the last surviving receptors of reason in people’s minds, and they fall easy prey to bandits lying in wait by the roadside.

Gladstonian liberals knew what they wished to destroy, but they also had a clear idea of what they wanted to build in its place. Their minuses were even in number and hence turned into pluses – in their own minds at least. Such was the ambient intellectual air, and they had to inhale it or suffocate.

Yet the collapse of Christianity has sucked positive molecules out of the cultural and social atmosphere. Free destructive atoms no longer bond with intellectual rigour but run wild.

Coming to the fore are the kind of people William Safire used to call alliteratively “the nattering nabobs of negativity”. They send atoms of resentment out, and these bond together into molecules of antipathy to the West.

That explains why our writing and academic intelligentsia are predominantly left-wing. They aren’t necessarily wicked or stupid people – and yet they espouse wicked and stupid causes because their minds are in a state of chaotic clutter. They keep receiving and forwarding anti-Western messages so often and so eagerly that eventually they end up believing that’s where the truth lies.

Their negation is resolved into the assertion of nothing but falsehoods. And their minds no longer have the tools to sort the mess out.

That’s why next Saturday we’ll see many academics and ‘celebrities’ marching through London, their arms intertwined with Muslims and other rank anti-Semites. They’ll be screaming liberation slogans because their minds are enslaved in the modern ethos.

Many of the same people also root for Russia in the other war, but right-wingers outnumber such cheerleaders. These suffer from the same intellectual failings, but their emotional makeup is different.

Most of our political right is defined by the negation of liberalism. Hence both liberals and anti-liberals embark on their intellectual journey from the same starting point: liberalism. Since the anti-liberals too lack the intellectual rigour to resolve their negation into assertion, they too end up disliking the West.

They too are susceptible to semiotic signals bypassing reason, and Russia kindly obliges. Putin’s propagandists make all the right noises, identifying all the same liberal foibles that so excite our right-wingers. Hence they don’t – aren’t trained to – question the credentials of those who emit the signals they like so much.

People aware of our pathetic care for the elderly still wouldn’t credit Dr Shipman’s pronouncements on the subject, even if he said all the right things. Yet our right-wingers (note that I avoid calling them conservatives) happily heed sermons on traditional Christian values preached by mass murderers, torturers, looters and rapists.

Like the liberals they dislike so much, they start at negation and that’s where they end up as well. My contention is that, whatever other problems they may have, intellectual weakness is prime among them, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid.

It’s just that they live in an intellectual climate that has only one season, the silly one. It’s called modernity.