Month: February 2024

Once, intelligence officers are taught, is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action.

In other words, if an enemy does three or more seemingly unconnected things at the same time, ‘seemingly’ is the key word. There is always a pattern there, and it’s just a matter of being able to discern it.

The four events of the past few days that add up to enemy action are the murder of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s capture of Avdiivka after many months of desperate fighting, the announcement that Russian nuclear weapons will be put on satellites, and Medvedev’s hysterical threat to take out Western capitals.

To grasp the connection among them, one has to understand Putin’s mentality, formed as it was in the rough-and-tumble of Russian inner cities. Having a similar background helps, and that’s something I can boast, or rather bemoan.

When we were growing up, both his native Leningrad and my native Moscow were overrun with youth gangs. Putin ran with them, I ran from them, but we both had to acquire certain survival skills.

He and I were both smaller than most bullies around, making it impossible to fight them off. Following the tired maxim of joining them if you can’t beat them was one way out, and that was the path little Vova Putin followed. My upbringing took that option off the list, but our problems were similar.

Being a gang member didn’t protect a lad from violence meted out by rival gangs or indeed his mates. “Beat your own so others will fear you” is an old Russian proverb that has inspired the nation throughout its history. Hence both insiders like Vova and outsiders like me had to find an accommodation.

We tried to seek salvation in martial arts, for him judo, for me boxing. But that ran head on into another Russian proverb, this one of more recent vintage: “There’s no technique against a crowbar except another crowbar.” All that training only meant one got even a worse thrashing in the end. Neither judo nor boxing offered enough protection against stronger foes, especially several at a time.

The only thing left to do was pretend to be a psycho, what the Russians call a ‘no limiter’. “Don’t touch me, I’m a psycho!” was the battle cry of smaller, weedier boys. Meaning that, in response to some normal bullying, an attacker could get a pencil stuck in his eye or a brick broken over his head.

Once a ‘psycho’ had acted on his newly acquired reputation a couple of times, he was usually left alone. There was plenty of easier prey around, so why risk a serious injury picking on a ‘no limiter’?

Sorry about this exercise in nostalgia, but that’s what helps me understand Putin. I know where he is coming from.

His rival gang today is made up of bigger and stronger boys, otherwise known as NATO. There’s no way Russia can take them on in a fair fight, especially if they pool their resources. Yet take them on Putin must: his position as gang leader hinges on that. Show weakness, and one of his closest lieutenants will stick a shiv into his back. And the possibility of a popular uprising always looms large.

So little Vova, now the big cheese in the Kremlin, has to resort to the stratagem that used to get him out of trouble in his youth. He has to scream “I’m a psycho!” and come across as a real no limiter.

If we take that mentality out of the back alleys of Leningrad (as it then was) and transpose it into the somewhat wider field of geopolitics, it means Putin wants to scare off the West and also those of his own people who are beginning to get second thoughts.

Many commentators, those who grew up in different circumstances from his or mine, didn’t believe Putin would kill Navalny. That would turn world opinion against him, they explained. Such a vile act would disgust and galvanise the opposition both in Russia and abroad. People in his own country would come out in their millions to throw him out of the Kremlin.

Yet those analysts got their numbers wrong, if not their moral rating of that murder. A few thousand people in the West protested against that crime, an action that doubtless made them feel good about themselves, but predictably failed to achieve any other effect. In any case they weren’t the target audience for that particular bravura performance.

By doing something so many people considered implausible, Putin sent the “I’m a no limiter psycho” message to the Russians. If he killed a man of Navalny’s international renown, he can kill thousands more without batting an eyelid, millions if he has to.

This explains why internal protests against Kremlin fascism involved hundreds of thousands 15 years ago, tens of thousands a few years later and merely hundreds now. People have bought the psycho act and they are justifiably scared.

Now, Avdiivka was the last Ukrainian stronghold in the Donetsk area, after the metropolis was captured by Putin’s troops years ago. Quite apart from its strategic value (which experts say is minimal), Avdiivka thus had a huge symbolic significance for both sides.

The other day the Ukrainian high command decided to withdraw its battle group from Avdiivka, because otherwise it risked encirclement and destruction. The Russians finally grabbed what’s left of the town after years of fighting, every inch of the way paved with corpses piled up many layers high.

Their success was inevitable because in that artillery-dominated war the Russians outnumbered Avdiivka defenders 10 to one in artillery rounds fired. The Ukrainians ran out of ammunition, in other words.

That showed Putin that his psycho act worked not just domestically but also internationally. The Ukraine had to relinquish her nuclear weapons according to the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, with the US, Britain and Russia offering her security guarantees in exchange.

How Russia honoured those guarantees is well known, but NATO’s help to the Ukraine’s struggle for survival has been sluggish from the beginning. The West has fallen for the psycho act, with Putin and his propagandists constantly waving the nuclear shiv in the air.

If we lose, you’ll lose, they screamed. Do you think we’ll go without trouble? Think again, you NATO wimps. If those Ukie Nazis look like they are going to defeat us with your help, we’ll push the nuclear button and take the whole shebang down with us. I’m a no limiter, screamed the collective Putin. I’m a psycho!

And what do you know: the trick worked. Western supplies were going up one month, down the next, but the overall vector was unmistakable: they were dwindling away.

But not fast enough, as far as Putin is concerned. So he did what his gang members used to do in his youth: if the mark wasn’t scared enough, he had to be scared more.

To that end, Putin declared that he’d put nuclear weapons into space to destroy American satellites. Whether that threat is feasible is up to the experts to decide. Those I’ve read so far say it’s a bluff because a nuclear blast causes much of the damage by a shock wave, the combination of the pressure jump (called the overpressure) and the dynamic pressure. That can’t exist in space. I can’t judge the physics of it, but I understand the intention behind the threat very well.

For the other threat, Putin selected his loyal stooge Medvedev, formerly Russia’s sham president and now deputy chairman of the Security Council. In the past 30 years, Medvedev hasn’t uttered a single word unprompted by Putin. The latter uses him to scream “I’m a psycho!” the loudest, especially since Medvedev has acquired a carefully cultivated reputation for drunkenness.

This time around, Putin, speaking through Medvedev, screamed “I’m a psycho!” in this way:

“Attempts to return Russia to the borders of 1991 will lead to only one thing, [Armaggedon]. Towards a global war with Western countries using the entire strategic arsenal of our state. In Kyiv, Berlin, London, Washington.”

If I were a Parisian, I’d resent that omission of my city. “And what am I, foie haché?” I’d say, with put-on anger and genuine relief. But this isn’t a joking matter.

It’s a direct threat to retaliate in an insane fashion against continued supplies of armaments to the Ukraine. In response, European nations still appear to be standing fast. The Danes have pledged to transfer all their artillery to the Ukraine, while the Czechs have miraculously found a million loose artillery shells sitting forgotten in their warehouses.

Yet by far the biggest supplier, the US, is clearly responding the way Putin’s bespectacled victims did in the Leningrad of his youth. They submit to the threats, their cowardice covered up with pseudo-rational excuses (“Not our war”, “We have our own problems we must solve first”, “Why should our taxpayers shell out for that war?”)

That’s not how you deal with blackmailing thugs, chaps. And you certainly shouldn’t expect their demands to stop once the first ones have been satisfied. They’ll be ratcheted up instead – take it from someone who grew up dealing with the likes of Putin.

P.S. After Navalny was poisoned by the FSB three years ago, he rang up one of the murderers and, pretending to be a government official, got him to describe the crime in detail. This is the video of that call, with English subtitles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ibqiet6Bg38&si=bkxGC8J5nTaePCNz

The title comes from the 1929 novel by Richard Aldington, whose main protagonist is killed in the First World War.

While both sides in that war claimed they defended good against evil, neither had a valid claim to such moral ascendancy. The lines weren’t so clearly drawn, as if to remind us that our post-Christian world allows for no absolute standards of goodness.

It’s more generous when it comes to absolute standards of evil. There is always room for those, and in Russia that space has been pre-booked for centuries in advance. Public, if not yet private, virtue has been expunged there, the very possibility of it consigned to oblivion.

Yet some people still harbour hopes, although few are prepared to die for them. Alexei Navalny was, and he will go down in history as a hero, a man who had the courage of his convictions. His murder by Putin has forever put his courage before his convictions, and this is the only order in which they can be discussed in the aftermath of the tragic news.

In 2020, Putin’s hitmen poisoned Navalny with Novichok, the nerve agent they had already used to murder other dissidents at home and abroad. Unlike others, Navalny didn’t die, and the public outcry around the world was such that Putin agreed for Navalny to be flown to Germany for treatment.

A fortnight later Navalny emerged out of his coma and felt strong enough to go back to Russia. His friends desperately tried to talk him out of that suicidal intention, but to no avail. Navalny knew he’d be arrested on return and imprisoned for a long spell. But he felt that his whole life had left him no choice. He had to either repudiate it or take Putin head on.

A series of sham trials followed, with more and more years tagged on to Navalny’s original sentence. He refused to indulge in jailhouse arithmetic, knowing that he was in prison for life, either his own or Putin’s, whichever lasted longer. Unfortunately, Navalny’s hearse beat Putin’s in that race to death.

“The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church,” wrote Tertullian, and the same goes for any revolution. I hope Navalny’s martyrdom will fertilise the soil in which what he called “a beautiful future Russia” may grow, but this hope has little realistic basis.

I’m not going to go over every detail of Navalny’s epic struggle against those he described as “a party of crooks and thieves”. The papers are full of such accounts, and I have nothing to add to them. Instead I’ll try to understand Navalny’s reasons for delivering himself voluntarily into the blood-stained hands of Putin’s torturers and murderers.

Why didn’t he just stay in the West, joining hundreds of Russian dissidents, journalists, bloggers, political scientists who had fled for their lives to the sanctuary of Europe or America? The question contains the answer: Navalny was neither a dissident, nor a journalist, nor a blogger, nor a political scientist.

He was an active politician who felt he had a fighting chance to supplant Putin and drive his “crooks and thieves” out of the Kremlin. In that regard, I can only repeat what I wrote on 22 January, 2022, when Navalny received yet another tagged-on sentence:

“Navalny certainly has a talent for what some may describe as inspiring the masses and others as rabble-rousing. He has become the focal point of dissent, and the only political figure seen as a plausible challenger to Putin.

“He is trying to unify various factions in what may become a sustained protest movement, to which end Navalny is uttering plenty of liberal phrases. But his heart lies elsewhere.

“Navalny’s problem is with Putin’s epic corruption, not his declared political sentiments: Russian nationalism, empire building, suspicion (if not hatred) of the West and so forth.

“Hence one hopes that Navalny will only act as a battering ram breaching the wall surrounding the kleptofascist regime, not as its one-for-one replacement. But such hopes are probably forlorn.

“Navalny may not get the chance to challenge Putin in earnest. Vlad has shown that he doesn’t mind turning Navalny into a martyr, and he may still feel Navalny is more dangerous alive than dead. After all, another plausible challenger, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead 100 yards from the Kremlin six years ago, and no mass opposition has rallied around his body.

“Hence I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Navalny suffering a sudden heart attack in prison…”

In another article written at about that time, I wondered how the West would respond should that possibility become reality:

“Biden tried to answer that implicit question by threatening ‘devastating consequences’ should Navalny die in prison. By the looks of it, the devastating consequences will take the shape of another stern expression of deep concern.

“Anyway, why weren’t there any consequences, devastating or otherwise, when the previous opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, was shot dead a few feet from the Kremlin wall? Or when another opposition leader, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered? Or after dozens of other dissidents (Starovytova, Shchekochihin, Sheremet, Litvinenko et al.)  were ‘whacked’ in Russia and elsewhere?

“Where were the consequences of a London restaurant being poisoned with polonium and half of Salisbury with Novichok? What about that Chechen émigré shot in Germany? Boris Berezovsky garrotted in England? Alexander Perepelichny poisoned in Surrey?”

This isn’t a boast of my prescience: anyone with a modicum of understanding and knowledge could have predicted such gruesome events and the West’s cowardly response to them. But the question is still nagging: what was the source of the suicidal courage with which Navalny marched towards his tragic death? After all, such an outcome was even likelier than the death of Aldington’s hero.

I’m sure the role model Navalny saw with his mind’s eye was Václav Havel, who emerged from communist captivity to become the first president of the Czech Republic. Another example of a political Phoenix rising from the ashes of prison was Nelson Mandela, but I doubt Alexei found him as inspiring.

Whatever gifts Havel possessed as playwright and intellectual, Navalny was a more talented politician. Had he been born anywhere in the West, he could have reached the political summit. He certainly had every prerequisite: charisma, oratorial brilliance, campaigning stamina, leadership qualities – even a law degree.

Yet Navalny wasn’t born in the West. He was born in Russia, the place where politics has died, or perhaps has never lived. Power there changes hands by revolution, coup or fiat, never by anything a Westerner would recognise as politics.

And revolutionaries need a different set of skills, of which Navalny had some but not others. He had suicidal courage but not homicidal cruelty, which is de rigueur for a Russian revolutionary. Navalny was ready to accept his own martyrdom, but not to send others to theirs.

He watched most of his comrades in the Anti-Corruption Foundation flee to the West, and he was neither prudent enough to follow nor cruel enough to stop them. Navalny could have formed an effective political party but not a subversive cabal. And he didn’t realise that only the latter could possibly succeed in unseating “the crooks and thieves”.

Most successful revolutionaries in history led the masses by offering a drastically different vision of government expressible in simple slogans. Yet Navalny was consistent only in his opposition to the Kremlin, not in the premises from which he mounted such opposition.

In his younger days he was a nationalist whose pronouncements weren’t dramatically different from Putin’s. Navalny welcomed Russia’s attack on Georgia and subsequent annexation of the Crimea. In private, he also expressed pride in his Nordic looks and wasn’t averse to racial invective, such as describing Georgians as “rats”.

Displaying a certain amount of elasticity, so typical of Western politicians, Navalny sensed that a Putin Mark II, even if free of corruption, wouldn’t be able to rally the opposition. He then adopted the phraseology of the predominantly liberal dissidents, who, unable to come up with equally powerful leaders, accepted him as their own.

Yet even pooling their resources, they were unable to offer much beyond the usual phrases about freedom, democracy and real elections. Since the Russians have never tried such delicacies, they have no taste for them. Hence Putin’s stormtroopers have had no problem isolating such dissidents and either squeezing them out of the country or putting them in prison.

Navalny, the only real politician among them, had to die, just to be on the safe side. For Putin, already covered head to toe with the blood of hundreds of thousands, spilling another drop is no hardship, especially if that eliminates a potential nuisance.

The rest of us, whether or not we shared Navalny’s convictions, such as they were, should bow our heads to his courage. He lived and died as a hero, his whole life proving he was a man, not what Dostoyevsky called “a trembling creature”. May God look after his soul with the loving care his martyrdom deserves.

Both purveyors and consumers of culture, narrowly understood as high art, often assign demiurgic powers to it. Culture, they say, is the world’s only hope.

In support, they quote Dostoyevsky, whose Prince Myshkin insists that “beauty will save the world”. Our champions of high culture then translate that promise into a simple, and false, syllogism: beauty will save the world – culture is beautiful – therefore, culture will save the world.

That’s not what Dostoyevsky or any intelligent man could have possibly meant. Myshkin’s statement was either subtle philosophy or arrant nonsense, and it becomes the second when simplistically understood.

Beauty, along with truth and goodness, is part of the ‘transcendental’ triad that many thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas, regarded as the inseparable ontological properties of being.

They all agreed that a deficit in one part would also lead to a diminution in the other two. Hence, replace ‘beauty’ with ‘ugliness’, and mankind also loses truth and virtue, bringing about a global blood-sodden chaos. In that sense, beauty may indeed save the world, just as its lack may spell the world’s destruction.

However, narrowing the meaning of beauty to culture (and the meaning of culture to art) is wrong on any number of levels you care to name: aesthetic, philosophical, social, anthropological, political and so on.

Nevertheless the saving power of culture constantly crops up in all sorts of questions asked by people anxious to detect a link where none exists. How is it possible, they wonder, that two of Europe’s most cultured nations, Russia and Germany, produced the two most evil regimes in history?

Look at what they’ve given the world, they say: [a roll call of great names follows]. How could the same nation that produced Bach and Goethe also produce Hitler and Himmler? Replace the first two names with Tchaikovsky and Pushkin, the last two with Lenin and Stalin, and you’ll hear the same why-oh-why question posed over and over again.

Invariably, people who ask such questions themselves fall into one or both of the same groups I mentioned earlier, purveyors or consumers of art. Far from every member of these groups can genuinely feel the saving grace of art, yet those who can find it hard to understand why others don’t feel the same way.

Similarly, believers who are in communion with God and live their lives accordingly fail to see why others bypass this obvious route to private and public goodness. This is less of a fallacy because such believers can at least cite historical evidence of religion having that effect at times. Their opponents, however, cite evidence to the contrary, and a lively debate ensues.

But at least there’s something to argue about. When it comes to culture, no one can show any instances of Beethoven or Tchaikovsky preventing people from murdering one another in all sorts of imaginative ways and apocalyptic numbers.

So whenever our literati bemoan that those two gentlemen and their colleagues failed to mitigate their nations’ beastliness, I always reply: “Why, would you have expected them to?”

The kind of art that can raise a man a rung or two closer to God is produced for few by fewer. Lump those two groups together, and you’ll still only get an infinitesimally tiny fraction of one per cent of the population.

Even when looking at a pre-selected group, say audiences at classical concerts, I often wonder how many of them really feel elevated and purified by the music. Judging by the enthusiasm with which they applaud charlatans reducing musical performance to a circus act, not very many. Let’s say 10 per cent if we are feeling generous.

If asked, they’ll all say they enjoy music. Of course they do. But that’s not what music is for. You may enjoy a good meal followed by flatulent excretions and a post-prandial snooze. You may enjoy driving fast or dancing slowly. Why, some people even claim they enjoy pop pandemonia, and one has to take them at their word.

But Bach and Beethoven aren’t there to be enjoyed. Their music cracks ajar the door beyond which lies salvation in Dostoyevsky’s sense of the word. However many subjects a Bach fugue has, three are always present if not always perceived: beauty, truth, virtue. Three in one, and one as three. So by all means do let’s talk about this when delving into philosophical or theological depths. But please leave art out of any sociological context.

Yes, some sublime poetry was written during the early years of Bolshevism, and some serious philosophy during the Third Reich. And yes, great German conductors still led great orchestras in masterly renditions of Beethoven symphonies throughout the Nazi years, even as Allied bombs rained on Berlin.

But that’s like saying that the sun sometimes shone when the Bolsheviks were machinegunning peasants or the Nazis were gassing Jews. One had nothing to do with the other. And no, art neither prevents evil from happening nor redeems it after it has been perpetrated.

What could reduce the amount of evil in the world is a social arrangement allowing the same spirit that flows into art to break banks and engulf society as a whole. For that to happen, all or at least most members of society must be raised in a way that leads them to beauty, truth and virtue – even if they remain deaf to Mozart and Schubert.

Not everyone can be taught to appreciate Bach’s counterpoint or Homer’s hexameters, but everyone can be taught to respect others, obey just laws, protest against unjust ones, and be able to tell the difference. Everyone can be taught not to be selfish and always remember that the Earth revolves around the Sun, not one’s own person.

I’m not saying that everyone can heed such lessons, but perhaps enough people will to make the world a slightly more civilised place. It’s not down to any temporal institution to erase original sin, thereby saving the world. That prerogative is reserved for a higher authority. But human institutions should still be able to do a better job than they are doing now.

The distinction between culture and civilisation isn’t deeply entrenched in Anglophone thought, coming as it does mostly from 18^th century German philosophy. Although that isn’t my favourite period, the distinction is valid and useful.

While Western culture thrives on esoteric exclusivity, a civilisation can’t last unless it includes all, or at least most, members of society. Some may drive it, some may sleep in the back seat, but they all must be inside. Culture is merely a part of civilisation, and not the most important part at that.

In fact, one could even say that, unlike civilisation, culture is divisive. Cultural elitism (not unlike that which you can sometimes detect in this space) builds a social moat between people, with no drawbridge provided. But civilisation can fill that moat with, well, beauty, truth and goodness – leaving culture for the delectation of the very few.    

These days one can’t go for a walk without overhearing one passer-by or another say nasty things about someone.

Most of the insults allude to the target’s Oedipal tendency to corrupt his mother’s morals or else to his propensity for self-gratification. Lest you may consider me a prude, I have nothing against that sort of thing in principle.

Why, on occasion (well, regularly, if I’m being totally honest) I’ve been known to use such words myself, much to Penelope’s chagrin. I defend myself with the technique refined by thieves and murderers: using my tough childhood as an excuse.

I was born on the wrong side of the tracks, I say. And when my wife points out that I grew up a stone’s throw away from the Kremlin, I explain, truthfully, that all of Russia is the wrong side of the tracks. The country is the world’s ultimate bad neighbourhood.

When that excuse is rejected, I invoke ecclesiastical authority, specifically emanating from the first priest of my life. He was appalled when I once took the Lord’s name in vain, adding the middle initial ‘H’ to his name. The servant of God explained to me that was repellent. If you have to swear, he said, use sexual allusions instead. To his credit, the clerical gentleman practised what he preached.

We first met some 30 years ago, at a dinner honouring G.K. Chesterton. The priest wore the insignia of his vocation, and I was suitably cowed sitting next to him. But then he tried the food and commented that “the grub is fucking awful”. The contrast with the clerical collar created such a delicious cognitive dissonance that we became friends for life there and then.

However, it can’t be gainsaid that swearing is the easy way out. All clichés are just that. They are the verbal equivalent of frozen pizzas and other ready-made foods. Anyone who prefers to do his own lexical cooking should be able to avoid lazy shortcuts.

Now, I can’t claim intimate familiarity with every national culture in His Creation. But I am familiar with a few, and it’s France and England (with her colonial offshoots) that excel in the art of the witty putdown.

Even our politicians used to be able to give the celebrated wits of the day a good run for their money (and there I was, forswearing clichés). Today’s lot are occasionally capable of humour, but hardly ever wit. And they may not even be aware of the difference.

But two Tories of the past, Disraeli and Churchill, knew how to handle themselves in verbal jousts.

Thus another member of parliament told Disraeli: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of a venereal disease”. “That all depends, Sir,” replied Disraeli, “on whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.”

Churchill often chose Labour politicians as bull’s eyes for his wit. Speaking of Stafford Cripps, the leftmost MP at the time, Churchill said: “He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.” (I wish I had used that when writing about Donald Trump. Perhaps I will one day.)

Churchill’s direct competitor, Clement Attlee, often found himself in the great man’s crosshairs. Two examples will suffice: “An empty taxi drew up, and Mr Attlee got out.” And “Mr Attlee is a very modest man, but then again, he has much to be modest about.”

The previous generation of our royal family were no slouches either. For example, Princess Margaret once attended a New York party, where she was asked: “Your Royal Highness, and may I ask, how is the Queen?” “Are you asking about my mother, my sister or my husband?”, replied the princess off the cuff, drawing my retrospective applause.

But it’s Her Majesty Elizabeth II, our late Queen, who often belied her stern image with the odd cutting word. Her stock in trade wasn’t so much a memorable phrase as a subtle understatement. Much of it revolved around the intensifier ‘too’.

Thus she once described Tony Blair as “too presidential”. And after she first met Princess Michael of Kent (née Baroness Marie-Christine Anna Agnes Hedwig Ida von Reibnitz), Her Majesty quipped: “She is a bit too grand for us”.

It was Harry and Meghan who found themselves on the receiving end of some of the last putdowns in the Queen’s life. It’s no secret that Her Majesty wasn’t ecstatic about that match, and she made her feelings known without resorting to any obvious epithets.

Commenting on the wedding ceremony, the Queen said that Meghan’s dress was “too white”. Indeed, the white dress is supposed to symbolise the bride’s virginity or at least first marriage, neither of which Meghan could boast.

On another occasion, appalled at seeing her grandson henpecked by a Hollywood starlet, the Queen said “he is too in love.” That’s so much more poignant than any common phrase alluding to a certain part of a woman’s anatomy used as a whip.

That art of understatement, used in putdowns or otherwise, has been largely lost in England, along with most other admirable traits of the national character. We can safely chalk it up in the loss column, next to dignified stoicism, quiet courage, noble restraint, irrepressible cheerfulness, patriotism assumed, rather than shouted off the rooftops.

Far from being the exclusive property of the high and mighty, such characteristics used to cut across the social hierarchy. Yesterday, for example, I chatted with a wonderful woman who works at our local supermarket.

We always exchange pleasantries, and she is never short of a smile and a joke. When I told her a few years ago that my wife was ill, she gave me a bunch of flowers for her, and refused to accept payment. Since then she has always asked after Penelope, and I’ve dutifully kept her updated.

She’ll be retiring in April, she said yesterday, so now she’ll have time to do things she has always wanted to do. What, going on a cruise? I asked. No, working at the homeless shelter next door, replied my supermarket friend. She then joked about her career, with not a touch of bitterness or rancour anywhere.

When I look at her young co-workers, sporting tattoos, sullen expressions and telling the world with every gesture that they are hard done by, I can’t think of anything funny or witty to say. But then I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.

“Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it”. That’s how Dr Johnson stopped a tedious debate on what he correctly considered a self-evident truth.

That quip doesn’t meet the requirements of rigorous rhetoric, and yet it’s legitimate. For when it comes to anything more complex than two and two makes four, much of our knowledge is intuitive.

And what can be more intuitive than love? Any rationalisation of it would merely be post-rationalisation of something already known intuitively. So why bother?

This also applies to politics. And my intuition says that Republicans in Congress are setting up a massive betrayal of the Ukraine.

Moreover, having spoken in this fashion, my intuition refuses to shut up. It then insists that, whatever arguments those gentlemen put forth, their plan is at least partly based on their latent affection for Putin and their whole-hearted desire to hitch their political wagons to Trump.

The first emotion is visceral; the second, pragmatic. Though not all Republicans love Trump, they have obviously decided to align the party behind him, now he has the nomination in the bag.

That’s why they are doing all they can to block aid to the Ukraine. I’ll get to the possible nature of the scenario they may be setting up in a second. But first I’d like to talk about the intuitive disposition behind it.

When I first laid my eyes on Putin, I instantly knew all there is to know about him. That evil yet cunning nonentity united in his person the two formative components of Russian post-1991 government: KGB and organised crime. That’s all; everything else is just hot air.

Hence nothing Putin has since said or done came as a surprise to me. When evil nonentities reach power, they only ever use it to evil and idiotic ends. Whenever I looked at Putin, I saw the living proof of this historical observation.

But that’s not how many other Westerners, especially those on the political right, saw him. Fair enough, they lacked my native knowledge of Russia. And when it comes to that doctrinally enigmatic land, there is no substitute for native knowledge, ideally backed up with the rational kind.

None of this is unique to me. People of similar interests and background, which is to say other academically inclined ex-Russians, see and think the same things, with only a minor diversion here or there.

However, most American, French or British conservatives see something else. Even if they agree with the general thrust of my understanding of Putin’s Russia, there’s always an unspoken “yes, but” at the tail end.

They have their own longings for public virtue, and these are left unsatisfied by their own governments. Their minds can produce cogent arguments on what it is they are missing in the contemporary West, but their hearts still feel dejected and empty.

They desperately need some electrodes, if only rhetorical ones, that can touch the far recesses of their minds to produce an instant emotional spark. And Putin, his own instincts honed in the KGB, knows how to serve up such electrodes.

Most of those people say they don’t like Putin, and they mean it. But liking is different from loving. We like people for something; we love them in spite of everything.

Each carefully designed conservative pronouncement by Putin is a touch he adds to the picture of a political ideal right-thinking Westerners have in their minds. They respond with love that takes permanent residence in their souls. Every time Putin does something beastly, the cerebral room they allocate for that feeling gets smaller. But residual love is hardly ever evicted altogether.

Even when it is, it leaves a warm memory behind. That’s why even those congressional Republicans who deplore Putin’s atrocities are receptive to specious arguments about America having no dog in that fight and American taxpayers being ripped off for no good reason. Okay, Putin is ghastly, they admit – and then comes that lapidary ending: yes, but… .

I’m not going to speculate on the links between Trump and Putin – many others have written books on that subject, catering to my intuitive understanding without providing the factual tools to chisel it in stone. Nor am I going to deliver another litany of loving things Trump has said about Putin over the years – I’ve done it often enough, and so have many others.

Yet that love is discernible. Putin is Trump’s kinda guy, even if Trump himself wouldn’t do most things Putin has done. And I’m sure many congressional Republicans feel the same way.

That’s why they don’t have overwhelming moral reasons not to deny aid to the Ukraine, or to use the threat of such denial for their own purposes. Chief among these is sincere, wholehearted commitment to political self-perpetuation. And if delivering the Ukraine to Putin serves that end, then so be it. Nothing personal, Ukraine. Just business.    

Yesterday the US Senate passed a $95 billion aid package for the Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The bill now travels to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where it may well die.

The bill needs a simple majority, 218 votes, to pass, and every indication is the votes are there. All 212 Democrats are likely to support it, and more than six Republicans are inclined to do so. Yet Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House, has already said he wouldn’t put the bill to a vote no matter what.

He can invoke the Hastert Rule saying that, even if the overall congressional support is there, the Speaker doesn’t have to schedule any vote that doesn’t have majority support within his own party. So nobody can budge Johnson, and he is one of those with love of Putin in his heart.

Johnson, a Southern Baptist, is a conservative’s conservative, in the American sense of the word. And Putin has used the electrodes I mentioned earlier to excite every erogenous zone in Johnson’s brain.

Evolution, climate, abortion, homomarriage, Gay Day parades, immigration, Christianity – Putin has enunciated every belief Johnson cherishes (as do I, for that matter), except perhaps one about the Earth being only 6,000 years old. That’s why Johnson had no problem accepting a $38,000 campaign contribution from American Ethane, a company controlled by Russian ‘oligarchs’ (Putin’s proxies) Nikolayev, Yuriev, Kunatbayev and Abramov.

I’m not implying he has been bribed to support Putin’s corner, only that doing so doesn’t go against his convictions, both rational and intuitive. Putin may be a bastard, but, to paraphrase FDR, he is Mike Johnson’s bastard.

Johnson shares my misgivings about Trump’s presidency. When the latter first appeared on the political stage, Johnson dismissed him out of hand: “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief. … I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

As a faithful Republican and practical man, however, Johnson supports Trump’s bid, and his attempts to torpedo the aid package for the Ukraine may be part of the overall party strategy.

I think the Republicans are setting up a grandstanding gesture for Trump to re-enter the White House as the peacemaker and possibly a Nobel laureate.

As close to 5 November as possible, Trump may announce a ‘deal’ he has struck with Putin and Zelensky. I can’t speculate on the specifics, but it’ll be an exchange of some Ukrainian territory for Putin’s empty promise to respect the integrity of whatever is left.

How much territory, I don’t know. Probably whatever Russia currently occupies or a bit less, but that’s sheer conjecture. The important thing is that Putin will get off with what he’ll be able to sell internally as a win or at least an honourable draw.

Yet how can Trump and his Republican friends ensure that Russia and the Ukraine will accept that deal? The only lever they have in their hands is aid: bringing Zelensky around by denying it, and Putin, by threatening to step it up.

Meanwhile the Republicans have a vested interest in making sure the Democrats don’t use the same lever to prise their own deal out of that war. That would steal Trump’s thunder, conceivably denying him entry into the White House.

This explains the current tactics used by Mike Johnson and other Republicans in Congress. They want their man to win, and they don’t care how many Ukrainians have to die to make sure he does.

Lest you accuse them of naked cynicism, I must come to their defence. Cynicism, yes, of course, but not just that. There’s also a small compartment in their hearts where love of Putin lives, or used to.

And today of all days, who can speak ill of love? Happy St Valentine’s Day!  

… sed magis amica veritas, goes the ancient saying, a Latin paraphrase of what Aristotle said in Greek (“Plato is my friend, but truth is a greater one”). It’s in that spirit of friendly and regretful criticism that I’ll comment on the Russian émigré press and the United States.

The former has never denied column inches to the latter, and it’s now even more generous than ever. Understandably so, because the anti-Putin publications are still abuzz with comments on that interview.

Most writers accuse Putin of playing fast and loose with Russian history, and Carlson of being too ignorant of it to make that point, not to mention too sycophantic. All of that is as true as it is beside my point today.

For much to my chagrin I have to remark that most of those commentators are as ignorant about the West as Carlson is about Russia. That’s most unfortunate, especially since the West is where most of them live now.

Moreover, they use the West in general and the USA in particular as the gold standard Russia fails to meet, and again there’s no objection in these quarters. Indeed, the US is a much better country than Russia any way you look at it, and so she offers much to learn. However, if in the process those commentators falsify American history to make their point, they do more harm than good.

The only proper response to falsifications of history is the truth, not other, contradicting falsifications. Thus it’s true that American history is more benign than Russian. But it’s not true that American history is as white as those commentators are painting it.

By way of illustration, I’ll focus on today’s article by Andrei Nikulin, which is, regrettably, typical of those publications. Mr Nikulin is commenting on Putin’s outrageous claim that Russia attacked the Ukraine because she had to, with NATO having left her no other choice.

To wit: “An important part of justifying Russia’s actions in this imperial conflict is a question constantly asked: What would the US do if a hostile state appeared on her borders? Empire-hounds assume a supposedly self-evident answer suiting their purposes: probably the same thing Russia is doing now and always has done.”

Those ignoramuses miss the point, says Nikulin. They “cite Mexico as a hypothetical example, but ironically this example works only for those who don’t know the history of North America. For the States used to have such a neighbour, but to the north, not to the south. It was called Canada, and still is.”

Fair enough, continues Nikulin. Britain did use Canada as a base for harassing the US. That’s why America indeed tried to annex that territory in two wars, first during the Revolution, then in 1812. However, a negotiated peace was worked out eventually, which produced an amicable accommodation lasting to this day. “This proves that, in the long run, the way of quiet, dull, long and difficult negotiations turns out to be the most reliable and profitable.”

Be that as it may, words like ‘glass houses’ and ‘stones’ spring to mind. For Nikulin is guilty of the same sin of ignorance he justifiably ascribes to others.

Actually, there was nothing hypothetical about the history of US relations with Mexico. And, though it pains me to point this out, the way America handled those relations wasn’t so drastically different from what Putin is trying to do to the Ukraine.

The US annexed Texas in 1845, thereby bringing slavery to a territory where none had existed until then. The annexation was welcomed by most Texans, but as a result the US inherited the border disputes Texas had with Mexico.

President Polk resolved the situation in a fairly Putinesque way: by attacking Mexico in 1846. The war raged for two years and ended in Mexico’s defeat. As a result she lost 55 per cent of her territory: present-day Texas, California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of today’s Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming.

I’m not going to delve into the complexities of American history now. It’s Russia, not America, that’s my subject in hand. Suffice it to say that, though the US isn’t doing all that well at present, over history the country has shown her ability to ride all sorts of storms, both at home and abroad. There is always hope for America.

That, alas, is more than I can say for Russia. She is currently governed by a frankly evil, fascist regime pouncing on Russia’s neighbours like a rabid dog and threatening to embroil the whole world in a cataclysmic conflict. Moreover, one can’t discern much in Russian history, especially that of the 20^th century and the first quarter of the 21^st, that would encourage an optimistic outlook into the future.

But that, as the Russians say, is only half the trouble. What spells trouble with a capital T is the absence of any realistic opposition, the kind that can combine intellect with courage and resolve to give Russia a brighter future in the post-Putin era.

In the beginning, we are taught, was the Word, which applies equally to sacred and temporal history. A successful physical attack on a way of life (which is what all revolutions worthy of the name are) can only proceed from a solid metaphysical beachhead.

That Russia lacks any sizeable group of potential revolutionaries is visible to the naked eye. But unfortunately she also lacks any profusion of sound thinkers who could give potential revolutionaries a bouncy springboard.

The émigré press is trying to find a viable alternative to Putinism in the pages of The New York Times, The Guardian and Le Monde, which are the last places where it could be found. Regurgitating woke platitudes that are even more alien to the Russians than to Westerners isn’t going to make Putin run scared.

Desperately needed is a political philosophy blending together everything usable in Russian history and everything useful in Western history. But mindless borrowing of faddish Western fallacies has already done much harm in Russia from the 18^th century onwards, and it will do more if the Russians aren’t careful.

They need to analyse the history of the West deeply and dispassionately to see what has and hasn’t worked, and also what saplings could conceivably bear fruit if transplanted into the Russian soil. The starting point of such analysis is understanding based on knowledge. Alas, both are in short supply, and the article under review is only one proof among many.

This tactless question makes materialists squirm in every context in which it’s posed. Especially if the question is backed up with a reference to Parmenides who already knew in the 5^th century BC that “nothing comes from nothing”.

In other words, before things develop they have to be. And when a materialist tries to explain how things came into being, he sounds childish at best.

In this as in most other areas, the Biblical explanation makes more sense on a purely logical and factual level – even if it’s read as a purely historical account and not a sacred text.

For example, Genesis helpfully provides the exact dimensions of Noah’s Ark. It so happens that these are ideal for any sea-going vessel, which mankind only discovered, or rather re-discovered, in the 18^th century AD.

Here’s what the same book says about the origin of language: “And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” (Genesis 11:6)

Keeping the Lord out of it and staying impeccably secular for as long as logic allows, this says that to start with all people had the same language. Actually, linguists agree.

An overwhelming majority of them accept that all Indo-European languages (which is to say just about all languages) came from a single source, what they call the Proto-Indo-European Language. The general belief is that it was Sanskrit, but most linguists agree that Sanskrit too had precursors.

That stands to reason for any polyglot. He’d notice that all the languages he knows share a whole glossary of common roots, and practically every word recurs in one form or another throughout the linguistic atlas. That much is beyond dispute.

But how did the very first language, whatever it was, come about? Was it a collective human effort similar to that which produced the King James Bible translation? Then, 54 scholars led by the poet and philosopher Lancelot Andrewes got together and spent several years arguing in Latin about every English word to be used.

We know that’s how the KJV was produced, just as we know that the first language couldn’t possibly have been devised the same way.

For language is inseparable from thought, and thought from language. Every word is the symbol of a thing, action or concept. These can’t exist in man’s mind without their symbols, and nor can the symbols exist without them.

For the proto-Lancelot-Andreweses to design their proto-language, they already had to have a language to discuss which symbols were appropriate for which concepts. This is a logical oxymoron we have to dismiss with the contempt it deserves.

Thus we arrive at what looks like an irrefutable syllogism. Thesis: thought is the defining and exclusive property of man. Antithesis: thought is inseparable from language and vice versa. Synthesis: ergo, thought, language and man are co-extensive. The proto-man always had his proto-language.

Plato knew all this, as he knew most othe things: “For myself, I consider it an obvious truth that words could only have been imposed on things originally by a power above man.”

Now let’s cast another glance at that Genesis 11:6. Suddenly it’s a bit harder to argue against, isn’t it? That perfect logician Sherlock Holmes did say that, when all the options but one have been discarded, the remaining option is correct no matter how improbable it sounds.

A materialist may argue that, since thought uses information delivered by the senses, and all animals are capable of processing sensory data, thinking isn’t man’s exclusive property. This is a logical fallacy known as petitio principii (begging the question, assuming the conclusion).

This particular fallacy, that thought comes from the senses, was destroyed by Aquinas back in the 13^th century. He distinguished between passive and active intellect. The former is indeed the ability to gather and process sensory data, and it’s common to all animals. Yet active intellect, the ability to raise sensory data to a generalised concept, belongs to man only.

Thus a dog may know that it gets dark at night, but only man can come up with the concept of night darkness. Language clearly divides its time between both types of intellect, which is why it belongs only to man and has done so since man took his first steps on earth.

Has it developed? But of course it has. Everything and everyone develops. However, insisting that development explains origin is another fallacy – but I’ve promised myself not to say nasty things about Darwin just this once.

The same logic can be applied to any institution man is assumed to have created, but could only have developed. The state is one such.

The materialist explanation is that at some point those primordial half-apes, the noble savages of Rousseau’s fancy, decided they needed to cooperate the better to protect themselves against other half-simian savages who were, by contrast, ignoble.

At that point, they got together in their cave, put their clubs aside, and designed a proto-state, the primitive entity that eventually evolved into the United Kingdom. This is yet another case of the simplest explanation being the silliest.

One can see how those proto-humans felt their natural rights to life, liberty and pursuit of wild animals were being violated by other proto-humans and indeed the stronger wild animals. In fact, people only ever talk about their rights when they feel they are under threat.

Yet for our ancestors to feel that way, they already had to have at their fingertips (or talontips, if you’d rather) the concept of their inalienable rights, something they were all entitled to and hence something they all had to come together to protect.

Hence the basics of social organisation had to exist from the very beginning, for otherwise there wouldn’t have remained any ‘primitive’ people to produce those ineffably beautiful cave paintings at Santander. That inchoate social organisation wasn’t delivered by any development, though of course it later evolved into more complex institutions.

The ancient thinkers knew all about such development millennia before Darwin, and they were aware of natural selection as one of its essential biological mechanisms.

Already in the first century BC Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses, contributing to the survival of the faster ones and thereby speeding up the whole species.

“I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before,” was how Chesterton described his arrival at theological truth. Darwin could have said the same thing about his ‘discovering’ natural selection, but didn’t. He was a different kind of man…

Yes, I know I promised not to be beastly to Darwin. But you know better than to trust an old liar like me.

Joe Biden is “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory [suffering from] diminished faculties in advancing age.”

Thus spoke special counsel Robert Hur, explaining why President Biden has to be cleared of mishandling classified documents. It doesn’t take a logician of Aristotelian attainment to see that a man deemed mentally incompetent to stand prosecution isn’t competent enough to sit in the White House.

The finding created a maelstrom of rhetoric, making up in breadth for what it lacks in depth. Mooted proposals ranged from invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (dismissing a president medically unfit to govern) to amending the Constitution.

If we have the lower age limit of 35 for any prospective president, the argument goes, it stands to reason that a higher limit should also be introduced. The most popular cut-off point is 75, although one gets the feeling that, if Trump were 57 rather than 77, most American pundits would favour nominating 56 as an age beyond which senility beckons.

A few remarks are in order. First, the existing threshold is too low: the 18^th century’s 35 is today’s 50.

That limit was set when the average life expectancy wasn’t much higher than 35. A man that age (the possibility of a female president was discounted at the time) was thus in an advanced middle age and at the peak of his powers.

These days, he is widely regarded (in my family of two) as a barely post-pubescent youngster. Looking at this more objectively, it’s easy to argue that no one under 35 has enough experience of life to lead a nation. Such a man can be trusted to head a major bank where he’d only be risking other people’s money, but not a major country where he’d be risking other people’s lives.

Such a blanket premise seems straightforward to me. However, any specific upper limit is too open to dispute. One could make a persuasive argument that each case ought to be judged individually.

Show me a septuagenarian who claims his cognitive abilities haven’t declined, and I’ll show you a liar. The decline can be expressed as a proportion, say 10, 20 or 30 per cent. But a proportion of what?

Speaking from personal experience, my memory is nowhere near what it was 50 years ago, when I could memorise long poems after a single reading. But it’s still pretty decent, with most lapses occurring when I’m stuck for a word being interviewed in Russian.

Having an excellent memory is an accident of birth; its decline is a consequence of age. Fair enough. But what matters is the absolute cognitive level, not a relative one. If a chap has a capital of £500,000 and loses 50 per cent of it, he is still richer than someone who merely loses 10 per cent of his £50,000.

Getting back to Biden, of course he isn’t qualified to be president. And of course it’s instantly obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear that he isn’t compos mentis. But that’s not because he is 81, but because his proportional decline started from an abysmally low point.

Has he ever been fit to be president even when his cognitive faculties were in working order? Which career highlights prove Biden’s superlative statesmanship? Or indeed his towering intellect and razor sharpness? If there ever has been a walking argument against one-man-one-vote democracy, Biden is it.

There have been dangerously senile presidents before him. Woodrow Wilson’s wife ran the country in his second term. During Eisenhower’s second term, Nixon was more influential than vice presidents traditionally are. During Reagan’s second term, the country was effectively run by James Baker.

Yet ‘second term’ are the key words. Yes, there have been senile presidents before Biden. But he holds the distinction of having started out that way when first elected. His cognitive ability should have been tested when he first declared his candidature, which would have removed him from the ballot there and then.

That, to me, points to the solution. If insufficient experience before age 35 is universal, cognitive ability at any age is individual. Hence all presidential candidates regardless of age should undergo appropriate tests, including those measuring their IQ. Then it would be possible to talk in reliable absolute values, not meaningless relative ones.

Biden’s defenders, which in reality means Trump haters, point out that their bogeyman isn’t exactly a spring chicken either. And he too has had memory lapses in public.

Of course he has. A 77-year-old with the memory of a youngster would be superhuman and, whatever Trump’s fans aver, he isn’t. But he started from a much higher intellectual and cognitive plateau than Joe Biden. Hence a similar proportional decline has produced a less detrimental effect, and I for one am convinced that Trump is cognitively qualified to be president.

His other qualifications are something else again. Yesterday, for example, Trump made a staggeringly irresponsible statement that, if a NATO country didn’t spend enough on defence, he’d encourage Putin to attack it.

Putin has shown on several occasions that he doesn’t need any encouragement from US presidents. However, I’m sure he’d welcome this call to action. Saying what Trump said is especially inexcusable because it can’t be put down to any cognitive decline.

If he wanted to make the perfectly valid point that other NATO countries should spend more, much more, on defence, he should have just said it. In fact, those countries are beginning to get the message on their own, if too slowly.

However, it may come as a surprise to Trump, but some issues are more complex than just dollars and cents. It’s not just how much but also how effectively money is spent on defence. Britain, for example, is the world’s sixth biggest defence spender, and yet much of the funds are squandered by incompetence and corruption (for details, I recommend this article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13066863/Andrew-Neil-Britain-biggest-defence-spender-Armed-Forces-badly-equipped-incompetence.html)

The issue of NATO defence must be discussed seriously and urgently. However, doing so in Trump’s loose-cannon terms makes one wonder how much safer America would be in his hands.

Whenever anyone offers the slightest criticism of Trump’s logorrhoea, his admirers have a ready-made mantra: it’s not words but deeds that matter. It’s almost unsporting to offer the blindingly obvious retort to that: words become deeds when uttered by top politicians. Much blood has been spilled throughout history because of injudicious phrasing.

One example off the top: when meeting Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon unwisely alluded to the role the tsar had played in the assassination of his father. No lasting peace was possible after that. Alexander formed or joined one anti-Napoleon coalition after another, which eventually led to the carnage of 1812.

On balance, I’m glad I no longer vote in US elections, although if I did, I’d close my eyes, pinch my nostrils and go for Trump – hoping that, if he can encourage Putin to attack a Nato country, he’ll also be able to discourage him from doing so.

P.S. Speaking of imbecilic pronouncements on Putin, Peter Hitchens has outdone himself in his pro-appeasement article today. In the middle of it, à propos of nothing, he informed his geographically curious readers that Moscow is “magnificent amid snow”. The only conceivable logical connection I could think of was that we should stop arming the Ukraine because Moscow is pretty in white.

It’s possible to stop working as English teacher, but impossible to stop being one. So, as a tribute to my education and first career, here’s the first mistake many people make: it’s indeed deserts, not desserts.

The second is usually sweet, the first is as often as not bitter. Both words come from French, respectively deservir (deserve) and desservir (clear the table).

The first word migrated to English some 600 years earlier than the second, married the word ‘just’, and the couple got to mean getting either the reward or punishment one deserves. The expression got a long lease on life because the English cherish the idea of justice – and words of French derivation.

These days, however, many use the word ‘justice’ interchangeably with ‘fairness’, which is another solecism. To make matters worse, they then identify fairness with equity, which in its turn they misinterpret as sameness and, consequently, mandated equality of outcomes.

For Miss Smith to feel she is getting her just deserts, she first has to change her honorific to ‘Ms’ and then get exactly the same reward for what she does as Mr Jones. Pursuing this quest to its supposedly logical end, she may also insist on acquiring the same primary sex characteristics as Mr Jones. That necessitates another change in the honorific, this time to Mr Smith, and typically also in her preferred pronouns, chosen from a growing list that puts Dr Johnson to shame.

Since such transition involves hormonal treatments, a person who only recently was Ms Smith may end up going bald or, even worse, getting testicular cancer. This possibility is relatively new, but the tendency towards it isn’t. I can prove this with a longish quotation from my favourite political thinker, Joseph de Maistre. It appears in his book St Petersburg Dialogues (1821):

“Hippocrates, the illustrious founder of the guild and profession of medicine, remarked that women never lost their hair or suffered pain in their feet; and yet nowadays they run short of hair and are afflicted with gout. They have put off their womanly nature and are therefore condemned to suffer the diseases of men. May heaven curse them for the infamous usurpation that these miserable creatures have dared to perpetrate on our sex!”

Note that in those unsophisticated times, the definition of a woman seemed to be rigid, lacking our progressive fluidity. None of those simpletons, including Maistre, envisaged the possibility of a Ms Smith turning into a Mr Smith, complete with all the fixtures such a transition would entail.

Since I prefer women to men, I’m not so much bothered by their usurpation of our sex as their betrayal of their own. But the problem, as you can see, goes back a long way.

Thanks to the ideas that were popular in Maistre’s time, the concept of equality, woefully misunderstood as sameness, became standard, and eventually dominant, currency. But this currency is counterfeit. Those who pass it are villains.

Just as women want to become men or men to become women, so have familiar concepts been turned inside out and upside down. Thus justice got to mean injustice in many contexts, and fairness now really stands for unfairness.

This takes me back to just deserts, everyone getting what he deserves. I’d suggest that, if this concept hadn’t been perverted, and people really got their due, no more and no less, millions of Britons would starve, few women would remain in the labour force, and unemployment among certain social and racial groups would be off the scale.

People’s rewards increasingly depend not on what their actions merit but on the volume of egalitarian clamour produced by the group they represent. Everyone hails meritocracy whenever it’s time to knock hereditary privilege. Yet meritocracy has got to mean clamocracy (my portmanteau neologism based on the Latin for ‘to scream’ and the Greek for ‘to rule’).

I first detected this problem in the mid-70s, when I worked as translator at NASA. There were eight of us in the department, but I was the only native Russian speaker fresh off the boat and the only professionally trained translator. Hence I did as much work as the other seven combined, and twice as fast.

Four of my colleagues were women, and somehow they discovered that I was earning some 15 per cent more than any of them. Considering both the quality and quantity of our comparative outputs, that disparity was more than fair. However, considering the insipient madness of modernity, the women weren’t getting their just deserts.

An investigation followed. We were all questioned, but the outcome was predetermined. The ladies all received backdated compensation for the injustice they had suffered. I was actually happy for them – we were all good friends. But that was the first time that I began to reassess my understanding of fairness and justice, by itself or in combination with ‘deserts’.

Today, it’s fashionable not just for children to ‘transition’ to a sex other than their natal own, but also for hitherto indisputable notions to ‘transition’ in the direction of their opposites. This, I believe, leaves the domain of philosophy, linguistics, political science, sociology and even psychology, to enter one of psychiatry.

The world has become certifiably mad, and Maistre thought he had problems. Had someone seriously demanded that he define a woman, he would have called for the men in white coats. Being locked up in a loony bin would have been just deserts for his interrogator.

Tucker Carlson spent two and a half hours lobbing puffballs at Putin, predictably letting Vlad run off at the mouth, uttering one deranged lie after another.

The former Fox hack clearly didn’t go to the Nancy Astor school of interviewing evil despots.

When Lady Astor met Stalin in 1931, she asked him point-blank: “When will you stop killing people?” “When it’s no longer necessary,” replied Stalin, which was his tactful way of saying ‘never’. Though Lady Astor later went on to blot her copybook, that one question earns her my retroactive gratitude.

Today’s journalists have refined the art of subjecting politicians to third-degree interrogations, but they practise that art selectively. The Kennedy years come to mind, when he was the journalists’ darling and Nixon their bogeyman.

Comparing the questions put to the two politicians at press conferences, one could be forgiven for wondering if freedom of the press had a downside. Watching Carlson’s sycophantic interview of Putin, one could be forgiven for wondering just how free our press is.

Regardless of how much Carlson admires Putin, he should have remembered he was questioning an indicted war criminal. Basic professional integrity demanded that he ask Putin to respond to that indictment.

Launching an unprovoked aggression of a sovereign country, Mr Putin? Torturing and murdering civilians at Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol and elsewhere? Mass rapes and looting? Kidnapping Ukrainian children and shipping them to Russian re-education camps? Indiscriminate bombing of residential areas? Threatening the West with nuclear annihilation?

And what about Russia’s internal situation? Meting out long prison terms for even the gentlest dissent? Murdering dissidents at home and abroad? Suppressing free press? Turning elections into a sham? Conducting a propaganda offensive so vile, mendacious, thunderous and incessant that even post-Stalin Soviets look moderate by comparison?

Any honest journalist, in fact any journalist, would have asked such questions. He wouldn’t have started an argument – that’s not what interviews are for. He wouldn’t have accused Putin of lying. But he definitely would have asked tough questions.

Yet Carlson is no objective journalist, certainly not when he covers this subject. He makes no secret of admiring Putin and taking Russia’s side in this conflict. That’s why he started out by letting Putin waffle on for about an hour about Russia’s God-given history.

Anyone with a modicum of education would have known he was listening to the rant of a man suffering from paranoid delusions. Russia, said Putin, had suffered foreign invasions from the time Scandinavian marauders arrived in the 9^th century and the Mongols in the 13^th.

Does Carlson know that Russia didn’t even exist in the 13^th century, never mind the 9^th? That it was merely so many separate and typically hostile principalities? That it was only in the 15^th century that the word ‘Russia’ was first used? Carlson probably doesn’t know any of this. But he wouldn’t have interrupted his idol’s monologue even if he did.

Yet even Carlson probably knew enough history to take issue with Putin’s assertion that the Second World War was started by Poland provoking Germany and leaving Hitler no option but to attack. Putin was clearly implying a parallel between Poland and today’s Ukraine. But then what does it make him?

A point of logic, Mr President, please. Let’s assume all you are saying is correct. Russia has been on the receiving end of foreign invasions since the time she didn’t even exist. But how is this relevant to the problem in hand? Are you suggesting it was the Ukraine that attacked Russia, not the other way around?

Rather than asking this question, Carlson asked what Mark Twain used to call its third cousin twice removed. Did Putin think America was going to invade Russia? Putin responded by describing that question as childish and for once he was right.

Then came leading, and clearly pre-arranged, questions that allowed Putin to repeat his stock lie about having been provoked into action by NATO’s eastward expansion. I would have asked two questions at that point (which explains why I’ll never be in a position to do so).

If Putin correctly regarded the question about a possible NATO invasion of Russia as silly, then how did that expansion threaten Russia in any way? And why did he think not only former Soviet colonies but even Finland and Sweden wished to join NATO? Could it be because they justifiably feared a Russian invasion?

In fact, Carlson screwed up his courage and did ask if Russia had any plans to attack Poland. Only if Poland attacked us, replied Putin. Russia had no interest in Poland, Latvia or anything else, other than the Ukraine. We would never invade, he promised.

Considering that Putin had dispelled provocative rumours of an impending Russian invasion of the Ukraine a few days before it occurred, the promise was somewhat lacking in credibility. But Carlson didn’t bat an eyelid.

What about a negotiated end to the war? he asked. Are you up for it? But of course, replied Putin. He had always been ready to negotiate. But that ghastly Zelensky had banned any talks with Russia, ever.

In fact, the war could have ended a year and a half ago, added Putin, when Russia had prepared a thick volume of premises for peace talks. The Ukraine was amenable, but then another ghastly politician, Boris Johnson, then Britain’s PM, expressly forbade her to sit down with the Russians.

Mr Johnson ought to take that as a compliment. I doubt he was aware of the dictatorial powers he had over foreign leaders.

Still, Johnson is no longer in politics, Putin pointed out gleefully. That’s the problem with Western politicians: here today, gone tomorrow. Hard to do business that way – dictatorships, such as Putin’s own, implicitly work much better.

Still, he had good working relationships with some US presidents, notably Clinton, George W. Bush and Trump. No wonder.

Clinton supposedly mooted the possibility of Russia joining NATO. Bush met Putin and: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” And the less said about Trump’s pronouncements on Putin, the better.

Speaking of America, continued Putin, expertly guided by Carlson’s loving hand. She has her own problems galore: no control of the Mexican border, a $33-trillion debt and so forth. Does she really need arming the Ukraine? Does she, hell.

Stop supplying weapons to the Ukraine, explained Putin, and the war would end within weeks. That’s true, it would. But not the way either the Ukraine or the West would find acceptable.

Lest Carlson’s detractors accused him of bias, he did ask a semblance of a tough question. Was Russia planning to release the WSJ reporter Elan Gershkovich, arrested on a trumped-up espionage charge? (Carlson continued to pronounce his name as ‘Hershkowitz’, subtly denying that Elan’s parents had a right to spell their name as they pronounced it when they emigrated from the Soviet Union.)   

“We’ve made so many gestures of good will,” replied Putin, “that we are fresh out of them”. He didn’t specify, and Carlson didn’t ask, which gestures he had in mind.

Carlson was angling for the great PR coup of taking ‘Hershkowitz’ back home with him, thereby becoming a national hero. Yet Putin wouldn’t come out and play.

He did, however, hint he might agree to swap Gershkovich for Vadim Krasikov, the FSB hitman serving a life sentence in Germany for the 2019 murder of a Chechen militant (‘bandit’ in Putin’s parlance) in Berlin. Carlson’s broad smile concealed his disappointment well.

Mine, however, is unconcealable. What was the point of the whole exercise, other than giving Putin yet another loudspeaker for broadcasting his venomous lies? Boosting Carlson’s professional reputation? That didn’t work, as far as I’m concerned. Nancy Astor he ain’t.