Month: February 2024

Charles Dickens was born 212 years ago yesterday, and even an insignificant anniversary of a comparably significant cultural figure would be on every front page in France.

In England, however, it largely went ignored. In fact, I espied only one reference to it, and even that was on Facebook. This is what I’d like to talk about, but first a few remarks about our arguably greatest novelist.

In fact, my personal, limited and very inadequate experience suggests that Dickens wrote the greatest half-novels in English literature. Usually, they were the first halves, where the writer’s eagle-eyed social observations, mordant view of human nature and coruscating humour came to the fore.

After that, he tended to sink into gooey sentimentality and rather trite melodrama, thereby losing me as a reader. Then again, I have similar problems with Dickens’s contemporary, Dostoyevsky. I suppose the 19^th century zeitgeist was largely to blame, but giants are supposed to stand tall enough to look down on temporal maelstroms down below.

A propos of nothing, Dickens got a bad turn from Russian translators. When I was little, a 30-volume collection was published in Russia. In fact, it was overpublished, which is why those black-and-green volumes adorned every bookshelf I can recall.

That’s how most people used them, as an aspect of interior decoration. Reading those novels was the lot of the very few, and to a large extent that was the translators’ fault.

There are two basic schools of translation, which in Russia were called ‘literalist’ and ‘adequate’. The former preached verbatim rendering of the text, the latter believed that the translator’s task is for the work to achieve the same effect in the target language as it did in the original one. If that meant deviating from the letter of the text here and there, then so be it. The cost of doing business.

Now literal translation isn’t without merit when it comes to scholarly essays, though even there one must respect the idiosyncrasies of the target tongue. However, when it comes to literature produced by great stylists and satirists like Dickens, literalism is lethal. The translations of his novels into Russian prove that.

The hacks who undertook the task did a good job preserving everything I find objectionable in Dickens, such as his soppy sentimentality and propensity for cheap melodrama. At the same time, they killed stone-dead everything that makes him a writer of genius.

Yet the quotation I saw on social media today had nothing to do with Dickens’s novels. Instead it was his comment on the ongoing Civil War in America: “The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal a desire for economic control of the Southern states.”

If I referred to Dickens’s day job as writing great half-novels, then this is a great half-thought. Dickens saw through the Northern ploy of selling its aggression on the South as a noble effort to liberate enslaved human beings. That indeed was humbug, to use Dickens’s favourite word.

He correctly identified the reason for the war as having little to do with slavery as such, and having much to do with the North’s desire to bring the South to heel. But the control the North sought wasn’t so much economic as political.

True enough, the eleven Southern states seceded largely because the federal government had put obstacles in the way of spreading slavery into the newly acquired territories. However, Lincoln and his colleagues explicitly stated on numerous occasions that they had no quarrel with slavery in the original Southern states.

Their bellicose reaction to the secession was caused not by slavery but by their in-built imperative to retain and expand the power of the central government. “If that would preserve the Union, I’d agree not to liberate a single slave,” Lincoln once said. Note also that his Gettysburg Address includes not a single anti-slavery word – and in fact Lincoln dreaded the possibility that he himself might be portrayed as an abolitionist.

That war was produced by what I see as the key political clash of modernity, one between localism and centralism. This terminology is, I think, more elucidating, in politics at any rate, than the Marxist dichotomy of capitalism and socialism. Both can be seen as merely subsets of the overarching conflict.

The greatest political crimes of modernity have been committed by the centralisers. It mattered little whether they described themselves as socialists (national or international), fascists, republicans or democrats.

Abraham Lincoln, for example, closed down 300 pro-Southern newspapers (and had their presses smashed), suppressed the writ of habeas corpus and, according to the Commissary General of Prisoners, had 13,535 Northern citizens arrested for political crimes from February 1862 to April 1865.

Comparing his record with that of Mussolini, who only managed 1,624 political convictions in 20 years and yet is universally and justly reviled, one begins to see modern hagiography in a different light.

So Dickens only got his assessment half-right, but he still did better than many other commentators, both at the time and now. Tolstoy, for example, a greater novelist than Dickens, had none of his perspicacity. What the Russian wrote on Lincoln has to be described as bilge, and even that would be charitable:

“Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Frederick the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone and even Washington stand in greatness of character, in depth of feeling and in a certain moral power far behind Lincoln. Lincoln was a man of whom a nation has a right to be proud; he was a Christ in miniature, a saint of humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future generations. We are still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”

Quite. I get it. Lincoln was Jesus Christ come again.

So let’s wish a happy anniversary to Charles Dickens. In addition to his artistic achievements, he was a counterweight to the likes of Tolstoy, and we should be for ever grateful.

The other day I suggested that Tucker Carlson was in Moscow to interview Putin, which frankly didn’t involve any oracular powers. Why else would he go there at this time? To watch Spartacus at the Bolshoi?

Then I ventured a few other guesses about the possible content of the forthcoming encounter, and again that was stating the blindingly obvious. Carlson is a Putin admirer of long standing (which I illustrated with a compendium of his panegyrics), and he both buys and sells on the Kremlin version of the on-going war.

Anyway, Carlson’s televised address yesterday has turned conjecture into fact. “Two years into a war that’s reshaping the entire world, most Americans are not informed,” he said. “They have no real idea what’s happening in this region. But they should know, they’re paying for much of it in ways they might not fully perceive.”

Now, I’m not a regular consumer of American reporting, but even the snippets I have seen show that there is certainly no dearth of information on the war. If “most Americans are not informed”, it’s because they have no interest in this particular subject.

Whatever Carlson does in the interview is unlikely to change that state of selective ignorance. So exactly what void is he proposing to fill?

Not to repeat myself, I can again refer you to my Monday article. In Carlson’s view, what Americans are suffering from isn’t the amount of information but its content, which is generally pro-Ukrainian. Putin’s propaganda machine seems short of outlets in the mainstream Western media, and that’s an outrage Carlson will try to correct.

In passing, Carlson tried to come across as a selfless, heroic victim of the Democrats’ attempts to suppress his selfless, heroic attempts to shill for Putin. “But this time, we came to Moscow anyway,” he said, “and did not take money from any government or group.”

The implication is that the mainstream media aren’t so disinterested. It’s that dastardly Joe Biden who pays them to libel Vlad, the strong leader Tucker (and his friend Donald) admires. Moreover, the government censors truthful accounts of the war, which is to say those coming from Putin through Carlson et al.

But not this time: Elon Musk has “promised not to suppress or block this interview.” Since Musk is another self-proclaimed admirer of Putin, no surprises there.

Anyway, all that is on the surface, and I wouldn’t waste your time and mine repeating what I said two days ago unless I had something interesting to add. So I do: more conjecture. This time, however, it isn’t my own.

The following version is being discussed in the Russian émigré press, and I find it plausible enough to share with you. According to that hypothesis, in addition to his journalistic mission, Carlson is acting as Trump’s emissary to Putin.

This stands to reason: it would be politically suicidal for Trump to establish a direct contact with the Kremlin, and Carlson is his friend and trusted ally. Some commentators are even mooting the possibility that Trump may choose Carlson as his running mate.

So what kind of message could that be? Any hypothesis, taught Aristotle, should start from known facts. In that spirit, let’s rely on that time-honoured starting point.

Fact 1: Trump’s main (only?) concern at the moment is winning the presidential election.

Fact 2: Trump has said it a thousand times if he has said it once that Biden’s vacillating policy towards the Ukraine war will conflagrate the world. Trump himself, by contrast, would end that war within days or hours, can’t remember which, thereby saving the world from nuclear annihilation. If he can be seen to be as good as his word, Trump will not only win the election at a canter, but will also gain vast powers to carry out whatever plans he has.

Fact 3: Trump isn’t omnipotent. He may put pressure on Putin or, more likely, Zelensky to stop firing, but he can’t bring peace without their cooperation. Yet neither Zelensky nor Putin will want to end the war as it now stands. For different reasons, that would spell suicide for both of them.

Fact 4: Since Trump has a stronger relationship with Putin, he’d be more likely to choose Vlad as a partner in any ‘deal’ he may concoct – and we know that Trump’s faith in the power of a mutually beneficial transaction is unshakable.

Fact 5: Not only Putin, but also Trump and any number of influential commentators, see the Ukraine as a proxy of NATO in this war. If so, then NATO has a vested interest in an outcome strengthening its short-term position in Europe, or at least not weakening it too much.

These facts act as the building blocks of the hypothesis I’ve mentioned, and the resulting edifice looks sturdy enough to withstand quite a few slings and arrows:

Putin may force NATO’s hand by conquering the three Baltic republics and issuing yet another ultimatum to the West. Either you end the war in the Ukraine on Putin’s terms, or else. Since the Baltics are NATO members, the West will certainly want to respond in kind. But how?

We can safely disregard the possibility of a strategic nuclear response, for obvious reasons. NATO’s counterattack has to be conventional, and the alliance certainly has the wherewithal to rout the invading army. But not instantly.

It would take at least six months to form a coalition, mobilise and equip an expeditionary corps, deploy it at the frontline. Meanwhile, the US elections are getting closer.

Trump would crank up the volume of his I-told-you-so campaign. He told you ‘Sleepy Joe’ would bring the world to the brink of a major war, didn’t he? And he was right. But Trump also told you he could stop that war and he’d be proved right again. As long as you vote the right way.

A Trump landslide would follow, and peace talks with Putin immediately thereafter. And what do you know, Donald would go down in history as one of the peacemakers who are, as we know blessed – in this case with the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump would get the Baltics back peacefully, but on Putin’s terms: a corridor to Kaliningrad, recognition of Russia’s conquest of the Crimea and other parts of the Ukraine, a solemn undertaking never to accept any former Soviet republics into NATO. The public by that time would have been so scared of a world war, it would demand that Trump accept the terms he wanted all along.

And the Baltics? NATO would be welcome to them, in their new, neutered state.

In that scenario, the deal would work a dream for both Trump and Putin. The Ukraine would suffer, but her plight would be seen as strictly a sub-plot to the real drama of saving the world from a holocaust.

Yes, the ‘deal’ could work, but only if Putin and Trump synchronised their timing. If Putin moved too early, NATO would have enough time before 5 November to defeat the new aggression, and Biden would go into the election with the halo of a victor. Too late, and American voters wouldn’t have enough time to get really terrified.

Late spring, early summer would be perfect: NATO would be in no position to mount a decisive counterattack before the election, the threat of a world war would be at its peak. In comes Trump, riding his white horse and wearing the white hat of the man who saved the world.

Could it be that this is the message Carlson is conveying to Putin? This sounds plausible to me, sufficiently so to put the hypothesis before you. We’ll see one way or the other before long. Meanwhile, brace yourself for Carlson’s fawning… sorry, I mean truthful interview.

The phrase was first used in the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Together with much else of our common law, it then moved across the Atlantic to become part of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution (1791).

Like many other legal terms, this one is open to debates, most of them specious but some quite reasonable. This opening is often used, and more often abused, by people taking exception to each of the two adjectives or even the noun.

I’ve twice appeared on BBC shows trying to ward off the arguments that, if stripped down to bare essentials, any punishment is cruel, if, alas, not yet unusual. Criminals, I was told in rather shrill tones, shouldn’t be punished. They should be treated, educated and eventually rehabilitated.

The assumption that crimes were caused by either illness or ignorance took my breath away. Where did one begin pointing out that this view tallied with no empirical evidence, no sensible concept of justice, nor even the most rudimentary understanding of human nature?

My total contribution to the two debates lasted about 30 seconds, which was how long it took the lovely hostess to cut me off once I uttered the word ‘evil’ in the first and ‘justice’ in the second. Anyway, I received £300 for my two appearances, which, at £10 a second, amounts to a decent wage.

Such extreme situations apart, the term ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ usually appears in the context of the death penalty. And in most civilised places it’s these days used to describe the death penalty as such, which makes one wish to enclose the word ‘civilised’ in quotes. Such punishment, say its opponents, negates the value of a human life.

I disagree. In fact, the opposite is true: the death penalty asserts the value of a human life by communicating in no uncertain terms that no wanton, arbitrary taking of it can be weighed against any term of imprisonment.

If I wished to go deep into the issue, I’d perhaps argue that, if Western morality is based on both Testaments, with more accent on the second, our justice relies more widely on OT tenets. Continuing in the same vein, I’d probably insist that the death penalty doesn’t defy the divine commandment to love our enemies. Then I’d test my cognitive health by trying to quote Matthew 10:28 from memory.

But all that is for another occasion. Today, let’s assume that the death penalty is legitimate and acknowledge the fact that 27 American states recognise it as such. However, any civilised advocate of it will agree that some methods of administering the death penalty may indeed be regarded as cruel and unusual.

Pouring molten pitch down the throat, flailing alive, drawing and quartering, unanaesthetised disembowelling, stoning – please stop me before my morbid imagination runs away with me. However, you’ll be happy to know that none of the 27 American states that practise the death penalty does so by such old-fashioned methods.

That, unfortunately, doesn’t mean they are always immune to justified accusations of meting out cruel and unusual punishment. Specifically, the recent events in Alabama give the death penalty a bad name.

Kenneth Eugene Smith was convicted of the 1988 murder for hire of a pastor’s wife. Her hubby-wubby, a minister in the Church of Christ (and I knew those sects were up to no good), paid Smith and his accomplice $1,000 each, which wasn’t all that much money even then. When suspicion fell on the minister, he killed himself, whereas the State of Alabama undertook to provide that service for Smith.

Considering he was only executed on 25 January, a fortnight ago, Smith spent 35 years on death row, which some people may regard as cruel and unusual punishment in itself. Some others, with perhaps better justification, may think that, if it takes 35 years of legal wrangling to execute a man, perhaps he shouldn’t be executed at all.

Finally, legal obstacles out of the way, Smith was strapped to a gurney last November, and the authorities tried to kill him by legal injection, the most widespread execution method in the US. ‘Tried’ is the operative word: it took them four hours to abandon endless unsuccessful attempts to stick two needles into Smith’s veins.

Finally, the inept executioners accepted defeat and sent Smith back to his cell. Now, in the old days, if the first attempt to hang a convict failed, he was usually reprieved, but that was before we became civilised. Drawing on our new-fangled humanism, Alabama decided to have another go. Here the words ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ again gained some validity.

Now, apart from the inexplicable difficulties of using the syringe, execution by lethal injection has another, more real, problem. Our humane pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, now routinely refuse to supply chemicals to be used for that purpose. My recommendation would be to contract Bayer, a company that has plenty of experience in this field. But I understand that using German suppliers may be considered unpatriotic in Alabama — and too evocative everywhere else.

Hence the decision was made to kill Smith by a new, experimental method. The prisoner is made to inhale pure nitrogen, which cuts off the supply of oxygen to the brain and kills by what’s known as ‘nitrogen hypoxia’.

I’d be wary of experimenting on humans, even such rotten ones as Smith, if only because of the negative associations. But according to experts, that method is perfectly humane, with no cruelty anywhere in sight. That, however, isn’t how it turned out.

Smith took 22 minutes to die, and for several of those minutes he remained conscious, thrashing about and shaking convulsively in pure agony. By contrast, the NKVD method of firing a bullet into the back of the head seemed kindness personified.

Yet the executed man had only himself to blame for his suffering, explained John Hamm, the Alabama Corrections Commissioner. “It appeared that Smith was holding his breath as long as he could,” he said. I’d describe that as an involuntary reaction, but perhaps Mr Hamm should try to inhale nitrogen for a few seconds and see how he’d get on.

One, in my view valid, argument in favour of the death penalty is that it’s the only way of attenuating the shock waves that a vile crime sends through society. However, when it genuinely is cruel and unusual punishment, the death penalty does much harm.

The Alabama incident cocks the guns loaded not only by opponents of the death penalty but also by America’s enemies. Having the condemned man experience minutes of agony before dying violates the fundamental principles of morality and justice, not to mention legality.

In civilised countries, that is, of which the US is one. I do hope she’ll provide no more reasons for doubting that.  

America’s answer to our own dear Peter Hitchens has arrived in Moscow, where it’s widely believed he’ll be granted an interview with Putin.

That little junket has drawn a great deal of criticism, which galvanised Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene into springing to Carlson’s defence. “We have a free press in this country and it’s people like Tucker Carlson who we depend on to speak the truth,” she said.

What if we replaced “to speak the truth” with “to provide a mouthpiece for enemy propaganda?” Would Mrs Greene still think the sentence made perfect sense? I bet she wouldn’t.

Therefore she must believe that Carlson’s interview with Putin will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I, on the other hand, am certain that Carlson will turn his little tête–à–tête into a weapon for Putin to use in his hybrid war on the West. Propaganda is as essential a component of that hybrid as warfare, sabotage, terrorism and assassinations, all of them arrows from Putin’s quiver.

Now, neither Mrs Greene nor I possess prophetic powers. We don’t know for sure what Carlson’s interview with Putin could be like.

All we have to go by is history, the only possible, if not always reliable, predictor of the future. Both Mrs Greene and I know how Carlson has covered Putin’s Russia in the past. We just draw different conclusions from this knowledge.

She believes that the supposedly upcoming interview will open millions of American eyes to the truth. I, on the other hand, have no doubt that the KGB colonel will use Carlson either as a useful idiot or a knowing agent to dupe the West into cutting assistance to the Ukraine.

I don’t know what it is about Carlson’s past that convinces Mrs Greene he is likely to speak the truth on this subject. However, I know exactly what the basis for my judgement is. And, unlike her, I’m happy to share my sources with you.

So here are a few ‘truths’ Carlson has vouchsafed his devoted viewers since the start of Russian aggression on the Ukraine in 2014:

“Why is Vladimir Putin such a bad guy? He’s not Saddam Hussein, he’s not Adolf Hitler, he’s not a danger to the United States.”

“The Left sees Putin behind every problem, and they’re trying to convince us to see him too. They want to drum up a new Cold War, and you’re the target.”

“There’s a lot of lying going on, and there’s a lot of propaganda, and there’s a lot of bad journalism. And there’s a lot of people with a vested interest in making us hate Russia. And so we should be sceptical.”

“We should probably take the side of Russia if we have to choose between Russia and Ukraine.”

“Putin, for all his faults, does not hate America as much as [American liberals] do.”

“The Cold War ended a long time ago. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is not our enemy. It’s just not.”

All the following statements have been uttered immediately before and after the full-scale Russian aggression:

“It may be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious, what is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is: ‘No.’ Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.”

“[The Ukraine is] a pure client state of the United States State Department.”

“The Russians don’t want American missiles on their border. They don’t want a hostile government next door.”

“Ideologues within the Biden administration did not want a negotiated peace in Ukraine. They wanted, all along, and it’s very clear now, a regime-change war against Russia.”

“Whatever you think of the war in Ukraine, it is pretty clear Zelensky has no interest in freedom and democracy. In fact, Zelensky is far closer to Lenin than to George Washington. He is a dictator. He is a dangerous authoritarian who has used a hundred billion in U.S. tax dollars to erect a one-party police state in Ukraine.”

These are the lies, or what Mrs Greene regards as truths, that Carlson has been peddling for years. And these happen to be, verbatim, the message bullets Kremlin propagandists and trolls have been firing at the West for the better part of 20 years.

Now if it’s true that Putin has granted an interview to Carlson, my innate inquisitiveness makes me ask why. Dictators don’t agree to interviews unless they are absolutely certain about the interviewer’s loyalty. They want the resulting article to advance their cause, in this case that of eroding the West’s resolve to support the Ukraine.

Say what you wish about our media – and God knows I’ve said plenty – but they aren’t bursting at the seams with Putin’s agents of influence, witting or unwitting. That’s why he hasn’t granted a single interview to a Western reporter since 2022.

Now why would he single out our hero for that career-boosting gift? Tucker Carlson has answered this question himself, many times over (see the quotations above).

Modern conservative thought is the child of two fathers: Edmund Burke (d. 1797) and Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821).

Few conservatives acknowledge this double paternity: while Burke is deservedly fêted, de Maistre is undeservedly ignored. Yet the Anglican Irishman and Catholic Savoyard share many of their ideas and practically all of their premises.

Both owed much of their thought to the galvanising revulsion they felt at the sight of the French Revolution, which they saw as a direct result of atheist Enlightenment philosophy, every aspect of which they recognised as false.

Burke and, even to a greater extent, de Maistre insisted that any successful political theory should start by recognising original sin, which is to say the inherent limits to man’s reason, morality and good will.  

De Maistre in particular was scathing about the notion that, because man is inherently good and rational, people can sit down and draw a workable constitution: “We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the infant who smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself.”

Because Christianity, supposedly based on a myth, produces a realistic view of man, it can spin off a true political philosophy. By contrast, atheism, supposedly based on reason, can only produce an ideology, a secular faith resting on man’s fanciful notions contradicting reality.

Man is by nature flawed, wrote de Maistre. Hence: “The science of government… [is] a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life.”

And also: “Who would not say the best political constitution is that which has been debated and drafted by statesmen perfectly acquainted with the national character, and who have foreseen every circumstance? Nevertheless nothing is more false. The best constituted people is the one that has the fewest written constitutional laws, and every written constitution is WORTHLESS.”

When the Salic Law was being debated in France, its opponents demanded to know where it was written. Developing his line of thought, de Maistre retorted: “It’s written in the hearts of Frenchmen.” The same goes for any constitutional document: if it’s written in the peoples’ hearts, it’s superfluous. And if it’s not written there, it’s useless.

De Maistre’s thought, like Burke’s, was informed by a reverence for tradition and the collective wisdom amassed by past generations. Filial submission to tradition will lead to the wisdom of knowing what works and what doesn’t. This will produce much better results than any set of abstract and ultimately unattainable ideals based on rights.

Even more than Burke, de Maistre despised the theory of social contract. Man, he wrote, was a gregarious animal, which is why governments occurred naturally over time and not as a result of some groups of people getting together in a contractual transaction: “To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government.”

Millions of people died in the immediate aftermath, and as a direct result, of the Revolution. Since then, hundreds of millions perished as a result of fallible men trusting their power to make infallible decisions. Thus de Maistre stands vindicated, though I doubt he’d derive much satisfaction from this.

Today’s conservatives who rail against the depredations visited by modernity but without offering a clear vision of the alternative should learn from de Maistre, who wrote: “What we want isn’t counter-revolution, but the opposite of a revolution.” (It’s more poignant in the original: “Nous ne voulons pas la contre-révolution mais le contraire de la révolution.”)

God, argued de Maistre, produces human institutions and brings them to maturity slowly, which makes patience a great social virtue. Since God’s wisdom, as refracted through centuries of tradition, is superior to man’s reason, we should understand, accept and follow the direction laid down by Providence. The guidance of an authority whose legitimacy derives from God will ultimately prove more reliable and realistic than any ideas concocted by men.

In matters secular, religious authority should work hand in hand with the monarchy, the only institution that accurately reflects the will of God and the nature of man. Yet a monarch will lose his legitimacy if he violates just laws. De Maistre in fact acknowledged that Louis XVI had committed such violations. But the proper response, he argued, was to reform the existing order, not to overthrow it.

A just government, wrote de Maistre, should be an expression of the national character. He despised the Enlightenment idea of universal rights of man: “Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.”

Interestingly, this great master of the French language never lived in France – he was born in Chambéry in the Savoy, which at that time belonged to the King of Sardinia. It was as his ambassador that de Maistre spent 14 years in Russia, where he influenced many thinkers, especially Tolstoy.

De Maistre even appears as a minor character in War and Peace, where Tolstoy quoted, without attribution, whole pages of de Maistre’s articles on history. However, if de Maistre’s determinism was based on divine providence, Tolstoy bizarrely attributed his to some indeterminate historical forces.

De Maistre’s diplomatic mission was a great success, but he was eventually expelled when the tsar found out that under his Ultramontane influence Russian aristocrats had begun to convert to Catholicism en masse (as did, for example, Princess Helen in War and Peace).

It was with Russia in mind that de Maistre uttered his most famous adage: “Every nation gets the government it deserves”. Thousands of people have quoted this aphorism, but most without knowing its provenance. That seems to be de Maistre’s lot: much influence and little recognition. On balance, that’s better than the other way around, as I’m sure he’d agree.

Could it really have been 14 years ago? Let me check… yes, it was 2010 when Simon Heffer invited me to the launch of Strictly English, his book on style and grammar. What can I tell you, time does fly even when you aren’t having fun.

When friends invite me to such events, I feel duty-bound to buy the book being launched and then at least make an effort to read it. In that case no effort was required: the book turned out to be well-written, entertaining and informative.

By and large, I agreed with most of Simon’s prescriptions and proscriptions, except emphatically one. I was reminded of that (and the homicidal rate at which time passes) this morning when spotting the offending title in today’s Telegraph.

It did make me lachrymose, if only inwardly. I mourned the passage of something dear to me but apparently useless to Simon: the hyphen. He berated that time-honoured punctuation mark for slowing the reader down. And fair enough, excessive use of this or any other punctuation may have that effect.

Yet God never creates useless things, and the hyphen is no exception. In fact, I’d venture a guess that, for each instance of the hyphen slowing the narrative down, there are several where its absence misleads the reader and makes him go over the sentence again to understand what on earth the author means.

Let’s see if you react to the headline that made me cry inwardly in a similarly weepy way: Thunberg Cleared after Unlawful Protest Arrest.

Granted, the words ‘Thunberg cleared’ are by themselves sufficient to make any sensible man break out in tears. As far as I’m concerned, that infernal child is guilty as charged, whatever it is she is charged with. But leaving the content of the sentence aside for the time being, let’s focus on its form.

What was unlawful, the protest or the arrest? The sentence leaves the choice up in the air but, if anything, it’s more natural to read it as if it was the arrest that was unlawful. Although, as far as I’m concerned, no arrest of Greta Thunberg for anything can ever be unlawful, some arrests in the history of law enforcement have been just that.

I had to read the lead paragraph to realise that it wasn’t the arrest but the protest that regrettably had been found not to break the law. Had the headline said Thunberg Cleared after Unlawful-Protest Arrest, I would have saved a few seconds of my time, which does fly.

Punctuation is there to help the reader breeze through a sentence without his eye tripping over ambiguities. Yet unlike, say, Russian and German, our language treats punctuation in a way I can only describe by the true-blue English term laissez-faire.

It’s every man for himself and damn the hyphen, the comma – and as to the colon and semi-colon, using them marks the writer as an antediluvian fossil. By and large, English leaves punctuation to the author’s discretion, allowing him to exercise his own judgement of what is or isn’t necessary.

The illiterati like to justify their solecisms by saying “Language changes”. True. It does. But what remains constant is the need for language to communicate clearly.

The general tendency is to get rid of superfluous punctuation. That’s fine, as long as we don’t throw out the baby of necessary punctuation with the bathwater of the unnecessary kind.

Thus it would take an inveterate pedant to insist on hyphenating words like ‘fig leaf’ or ‘pigeonhole’. Yet both fig-leaf and pigeon-hole were standard fare just a few decades ago.

The conservative in me tends to believe that any change is for the worse, especially the kind that comes from the widening use of computers and their lingo. But computers, typewriters or quill pens, the hyphen does come into its own in compound-modifier constructions, a term that itself is hyphenated.

The headline under discussion is a case in point, but one can think of many other such cases. For example, if I wrote another headline, High School Pupils Beat Up Teacher, how would you understand it?

Forgettting justified concerns about the quality of our secondary education, did the unfortunate teacher suffer that assault at the hands of pupils going to high school? Or were the culprits school pupils high on drugs? Both are, alas, possible but, had I written “high-school pupils” there would be no ambiguity.

Another example: Australian football players strike me as thuggish. Do I mean Australian soccer players or those who play Australian rules football? (Note that the latter phrase can survive without a hyphen, though I’d still favour one for old times’ sake.) You can’t be sure.

I have many more important reasons (many more reasons that are important, or many reasons that are even more important?) to defend the hyphen from the encroachments of modernity, as championed in this case, and in this case only, by Simon Heffer.  

But as a hard working man (muscular or industrious working man?), I think I’ll save my time and yours. And no, I’m not angling for a job as Telegraph sub-editor.

“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams. “If so,” said Josef Stalin, “so much the worse for facts”.

In that spirit, whatever facts contradicted “the only true [in fact, the only allowable] teaching” of Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin were hushed up, while their promulgators were either imprisoned or shot.

It’s refreshing to see the alacrity with which Western countries are adopting, mutatis mutandis, the same approach for the same reasons. The protected ideology is slightly different and the punitive measures are less severe. But the principle remains: anyone spreading uncomfortable truths had better shut up – or else.

The German politician and writer Thilo Sarrazin felt the full brunt of this tendency in 2010, when he published his book Germany Abolishes Itself. There he showed, figures in hand, that – and I hope you are sitting down – ethnically different immigrants are differently able to adapt to German life.

Following the publication, nothing was said about Sarrazin that hadn’t already been said about Heinrich Himmler. He was a racist, fascist, Nazi and all those other things. Yes, but what about the facts he cited? Are they true?

Who cares?, was the resounding reply, followed by the phrase in the title above. That was a rhetorical question, but let’s suppose it wasn’t. Let’s insist that we do care and consider the facts, even if we have to scourge ourselves later with the lash of enforced self-reeducation.

Sarrazin looked at groups of second-generation immigrants, people born in Germany to parents born elsewhere. Those groups, all born, bred and educated in the same environment, were assessed for such outcomes as the proportion of school graduates and those going on to university, average income at a certain age, unemployment rate at the same age and so on.

The differences among the groups were staggering, reaching different orders of magnitude in some parameters. People of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese ethnicity outperformed not only other migrant communities but also the average indigenous Germans.

Those from Eastern Europe and the former USSR were within a few points on either side of the average German levels, those from Turkey were below them, with those from the Middle East and Africa bringing up the rear.

Interestingly, these result tally with those in the US, and Thomas Sowell has been writing about this for at least five decades. The incomes of immigrants from South East Asia are higher than the median American levels, whereas people from Africa and the West Indies are at the very bottom of the list.

Any exponent of the only socially, politically and (soon) legally acceptable ideology has a ready response at his itchy fingertips. Discrimination! The inexorable progress of certain minorities is artificially held back by institutional racism prevalent in the West.

Fine. Agreed. Conceded. But in that case, all groups suffering from such bigotry must be similarly held back. And those groups that succeed beyond average statistical expectations must be getting a boost from positive discrimination, known in the US as affirmative action.

The logic is irrefutable. The only trouble is, it’s not borne out by facts, which both Sarrazin and Sowell demonstrate.

American Jews, for example, suffered from discrimination in the past, and even now it’s hard to argue that they are singled out for preferential treatment. Yet they have always been the most successful ethnic group in America, having only recently ceded that position to South East Asians.

Both Sowell and Sarrazin also cite an even more striking example, the plight of the Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia. Actually, ‘plight’ is only applicable to their civil status. When it comes to their economic performance, ‘smashing success’ is more appropriate.

In Malaysia, where the ethnic Chinese settled in the 19^th century, they make up 22 per cent of the population. Indigenous Malaysians have all the political power, which they use to discriminate against the Chinese and violate their basic civil rights.

In spite of that, the median incomes and assets of the Chinese minority are more than twice those of the ethnic Malayans. And the situation in Indonesia is even starker.

The Chinese make up between 1.5 and three per cent of the population there, and in my lifetime they’ve suffered not only run-of-the-mill discrimination but also genocide. In 1965-1966, there was a massive purge of communists, with over a million killed. But, as always is the case, perpetrators of mass homicide also indulge in a bit of genocide while they are at it.

Thus tens of thousands of ethnic Chinese who had nothing to do with communism were murdered out of hand. Since then they’ve kept a low profile, while ethnic Javanese control the country and discriminate against the Chinese. Nonetheless, ethnic Chinese own more than half of the country’s major corporations. And their median income is three times higher than that of the Javanese.

And in the Philippines, where the Chinese make up about one per cent of the population, they are estimated to control up to 60 per cent of the country’s economy.

All this goes to show that discrimination, even where it’s real and not, as in the US, mythical, can’t keep some groups down. And positive discrimination, be it in the shape of welfare handouts or preferential treatment for jobs and university places, fails to pull some groups in the same countries up.

The reasons for this are numerous and complex. They have to do with differences in cultural traditions, strength of families, social expectations, peer pressure, attitudes to education and hard work. But it would take a Stalinist treatment of facts to refuse even to consider a genetic component in that mix.

By all means, reject it with all the righteous wrath it deserves – but only after investigating it with the dispassionate detachment of a scientist, not the fire-eating venom of an ideologue.

However, even if you aren’t willing to undertake such a study, please accept that more conscientious researchers aren’t ipso facto fascists, Nazis or racists. They may just want to know the truth.

Before pulling my wisdom tooth out the other day, the dentist asked me to sign a consent form, whereby I agreed to accept whatever risks the procedure entailed.

I attached my autograph to the piece of paper before me, rendering my soul to God and my teeth to the dentist. The transaction was straightforward, if in my view unnecessarily bureaucratic.

That, however, is more than I can say for my consent to be governed. I don’t recall ever signing a form to that effect, much less a binding social contract. Yet the terms ‘social contract’ and ‘consent of the governed’ are the two legs modern Western governments stand on, by and large firmly.

Both terms were coined by clever people trying to understand what makes governments just and legitimate. The need for a legitimising theory is obvious: governments have to take away some of our freedoms, giving us something in return.

That exchange has to be seen as voluntary, for otherwise the state would be tyrannical, and that’s not the image Western states like to project. I get all that. Yet the two terms in question still strike me as dubious.

In modern times, both were put forth as a refutation of traditional Western legitimacy derived from the divine right of kings. My two favourite political theorists accepted the concept of the divine right, but understood it differently.

Burke was quite literal about it: God willed the state. De Maistre was perhaps more accurate in his phrasing when arguing that traditional institutions go so far back that they disappear in the haze of time – we can’t trace them back to their historical origin. Therefore we might as well assume they come from God.

Either way, divine right was a factor of continuity: monarchies ruling in its name bound together generations past, present and future. The power of such monarchies was seldom absolute: some representative bodies, such as councils of elders, baron assemblies or parliaments kept it in check, but without denying the underlying principle. Divine right, like any other, came packaged with obligations to the issuing authority, which was another, less earthly, check.

When traditional institutions started to totter around the 17^th century, Thomas Hobbes et al. began to ponder other options. Unlike Rousseau a century later, Hobbes didn’t believe in the innate goodness of man. In a “state of nature”, he famously wrote, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. That would lead to an incessant “war of all against all”.

To avoid that calamity, men entered into a social contract, subjecting themselves to an absolute sovereign, either individual or collective. They agreed to forfeit some of their natural rights, getting security in return. The theory was later developed by Locke and Rousseau, with the latter standing it on its head.

In his tract Du contrat social, Rousseau used the theory of the social contract to lay down the foundations of the modern totalitarian state:

“The state should be capable of transforming every individual into part of the greater whole from which he, in a manner, gets his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it. [It should be able] to take from the man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him and incapable of being made use of without the help of others. The more completely these inherited resources are annihilated, the greater and more lasting are those which he acquires.”

The idea of the social contract is thus not without its nightmarish potential, one that was amply realised by Rousseau’s followers soon after his death. That makes the concept too voluminous to be precise, able to include the affirmation of natural rights and their denial, democracy and dictatorship, freedom and tyranny.

That makes me question the validity of the very concept, which strikes me as mythological. Any real contract I’ve ever seen includes certain provisions without which it would be meaningless, such as the date on which it was signed, its duration, the clearly defined end it serves, the terms under which it could be cancelled, notarisation by a superior legal authority both parties accept as unquestionable.

The social contract has none of these. If we look at the traditional, organic state of Christendom, then de Maistre was right: since it can’t be traced back to any specific date, we might as well assume it came from God. Yet modern contrived states do start at a specific time, the USA in 1776, France in 1789, the USSR in 1917, Israel in 1948 and so on.

So was that the time the citizens of those states entered into an eternally binding social contract? If so, what are the cancellation terms? That is a serious problem because neither Hobbes nor Locke nor Rousseau made any such provisions. In effect, their social contract can only be annulled by a violent overthrow of government. In that sense, the social contract both legitimises and presupposes revolutions.

And what serves as the notarising authority standing above both sides? Illogically, it’s one of the parties to the contract, the state, that notarises the agreement. The state codifies the contract in any number of documents it issues and a tiny proportion of the people, if that, vote for. This kind of arrangement may be any number of things, from diabolical to celestial. What it definitely isn’t is a valid contract.

The same goes for the related concept: consent of the governed. This term appears in the very first paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence: “… That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Is one to assume that the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress issued their consent to be governed on behalf of my American friends living today in New York, Texas, California and Michigan? Or was it the roughly six percent of the population able to vote for the US Constitution in 1789?

Looking at the issue synchronically rather than diachronically, today’s democracies operate on the assumption that, say, 30 per cent of the population voting in a government thereby give consent to be governed on behalf of the other 70 per cent. That’s nonsensical.

Let’s say 30 per cent of Britons vote in something like a Corbyn-led government, communist in all but name. Am I to assume I’ve consented to be governed by those I regard as satanic, even though I voted against them?

Both terms, social contract and consent of the governed, are fanciful misnomers. They have little to do with any political realities or even political ideals. For just societies are governed by just institutions lovingly nurtured over centuries.

It’s such institutions that give physical shape to the three pillars on which, according to Burke, government should rest: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

And it’s those institutions that express prejudice, prescription and presumption as just laws that people must obey for as long as they live within the realm governed by such institutions. The word ‘must’ invalidates any notion of consent. And the term ‘contract’ is best kept for the commercial arena, where it has a precise meaning.