Month: July 2024

When Argentina players were celebrating their victory in Copa America the other day, they sang a chant going back to their 2022 victory over France.

Considering that France is in Europe and hence took no part in Copa America, I don’t understand why the Argentines chose to revive that song. But I do understand perfectly the indignation expressed in no uncertain terms by the French Football Federation (FFF).

In fact, when I glanced at the lead paragraph in the article about that outrage I too was incandescent, as a part-time resident of France. Apparently, the chant claimed that all French players were from Angola.

“How dare they!” I said out loud within Penelope’s earshot. Everybody knows Angola used to be a Portuguese possession, not French. Don’t they teach geography in Argentina? They should have sung that all French players came from Senegal or Côte d’Ivoire, then everyone would be happy…

It fell upon Penelope to do her wifely duty and get me on the straight and narrow. Read the whole article, she said. Then you’ll know why everybody’s up in arms.

So fine, I read the whole article, or rather the first half of it, and as a result my anger subsided somewhat but didn’t disappear altogether. Here are the offensive lyrics:

“Listen, spread the word, they play in France, but they are all from Angola, they are going to run well, they like to sleep with trans people, their mum is Nigerian, their dad is Cameroonian, but on the passport it says: French.”

Fine, Cameroon indeed used to be a French colony, I’ll grant them that. But Nigeria was British, so what on earth does it have to do with anything? Those ball-kickers are still geographical ignoramuses, and the FFF has every right to be aghast.

To their credit, Argentina footballers redeemed themselves in my eyes by praising the athleticism of their French colleagues (“they are going to run well”) and their broadminded approach to the most burning issue in today’s global affairs (“they like to sleep with trans people”). Anticipating that the FFF would excuse the geographical faux pas, balanced as it was with unreserved accolades, I then read its statement in full:

“Faced with the seriousness of these shocking remarks, contrary to the values of sport and human rights, the President of the FFF decided to directly challenge his Argentinian counterpart and FIFA, and to file a legal complaint for insulting remarks of a racist and discriminatory nature.”

Excuse me? Racist? Discriminatory? Legal complaint? I had to go back to the chant’s lyrics to see if they contained any derogatory remarks about other races – and found none. If we abandon geographical hair-splitting, the chant simply stated a fact in lexically neutral terms.

Looking at France’s 26-player squad at Euro 2024, anyone can see that all but four of its players are of African origin. That makes most of them, if not quite all, as the chant claims. But hey, what’s a little poetic licence among friends?

And how is the contention that France players like to sleep with trans people discriminatory? If the claim were that they hate to get their jollies with transsexuals, now that would be clear-cut discrimination.

According to the prevalent ethos, transsexuality is perfectly normal, and in fact commendable. Thus denying people sexual favours just because they used to be another (not the other!) sex would be discrimination at its most blatant. Granting such favours, on the other hand, means striking a blow for diversity, equity and inclusivity. The FFF should have congratulated Enzo Fernandez and other Argentina players on being so free of bias.

Enzo drew most fire in England because he plays for Chelsea FC. It has to be said that protecting the delicate sensibilities of the French has seldom figured high on the British list of priorities. But we can rise above parochial concerns when an accusation of racism wafts through the air.

The outcry was thunderous, especially since Fernandez isn’t the only Argentine player in the Premier League or even at Chelsea. Some of his teammates unfriended and unfollowed him on social media. Others complained to the FA (this stands for the Football Association, not its do-nothing approach to its job).

The FA and Chelsea FC have had to launch a forensic investigation, which one wouldn’t think should require the detective skills of a Sherlock Holmes. In fact, the purpose of this effort isn’t to establish guilt or innocence – anyone accused of racism is guilty as charged – but to decide on the commensurate punishment.

So far the talk is of a lengthy ban, 12 games or more, not a criminal prosecution. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the Met got interested too. After all, since London is famously crime-free, our police can concentrate on things that really matter.

Actually, South American players have some previous in this area. Two years ago, Edison Cavani of Uruguay and Manchester United was banned for three games. When a Uruguayan friend had congratulated him on his performance, Cavani wrote back, saying “Gracias negrito”, which means “Thank you, my dear friend” in Uruguayan slang.

However, the FA gentlemen didn’t care about the niceties of Uruguayan usage. They cared about the pejorative meaning a partial homophone of ‘negrito’ can have in English. This isn’t just a matter of semantics, but also of phonetics.

Words like ‘niggardly’ have been known to get officials in trouble, and I wouldn’t be surprised if barmen serving Negronis had their collars felt. This gives a palpable meaning to the expression ‘I don’t like the sound of that’.

If a perplexed Cavani was banned for using a normal term of endearment, Enzo could well be drummed out of English footie for good. Since he is aware of that possibility, he hastily produced a profuse written apology. One can admire his eloquence in English, for just a couple of months ago he could barely manage “My name is Enzo” in that language:

“I stand against discrimination in all forms and apologise for getting caught up in the euphoria of our Copa America celebrations. That video, that moment, those words, do not reflect my beliefs or my character. I am truly sorry.”

I’ll let you in on a secret. Nobody is genuinely offended by that unfortunate chant: not the FA, not Chelsea FC, not Fernandez’s teammates – not even the French who do tend to offend easily. However, the governing woke ideology mandates that they all register their indignation, the more hysterically the better.

English football chants in general aren’t known for heightened sensitivity to voguish taboos, including racial ones.

Thus Liverpool supporters are treated to “Your mum’s your dad, and your dad’s your mum, you’re inbred and you’re benefit scum.”

Tottenham Hotspur, based in a largely Jewish neighbourhood, is regaled with the chant of “Yid army!” and “Where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?// where’s your foreskin gone?”

The Spurs Korean striker Son plays to the accompaniment of: “He’ll run and he’ll score, he’ll eat your Labrador.”

And then there’s the ubiquitous chant of “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack!” at all football venues.

Sexual allusions are also rife, such as: “[Player’s name] is queer, he takes it up the rear.” (This, irrespective of the player’s sexuality.)

Such is the culture of English football, and the background against which Fernandez’s transgression should be judged. Footie in England is a working class game, mostly played by athletes who grew up in degrading poverty. Many of them come from racial ghettos in Britain and elsewhere.

Holding them and their fans down to the standards that woke ‘liberal’ intelligentsia wishes to impose on society the better to destroy it is criminal. People like Enzo are more sinned against than sinning.

Imperfect people can’t produce a perfect world, which doesn’t prevent them from hoping. And when hopes get frustrated, people refuse to blame their own failings.

Proceeding from the presumption of their own infallibility, they have to ascribe all sorts of problems to some dark and unidentified forces conspiring against everything that’s good in the world.

In the distant past, the culprits nominated for the role of conspirators were all supernatural: demons, witches, the devil himself. The demons were exorcised, the witches were burned at the stake, the devil was told in no uncertain terms to go back where he had come from. Yet nothing worked: life went on and problems multiplied.

Since then mankind has moved onto a less mystical ground, and human candidates have assumed the role of conspirators in the public mind. Jews and Freemasons, the Bilderbergers and the Club of Rome, vaccinators and cryptocurrency mongers, the Deep State and the New World Order, the World Economic Forum and Skull & Bones all figure prominently among the likely conspiracies planning either to destroy or to dominate the world.

This leaves me frustrated at never having been asked to join. Every time a prominent individual is described as a member of one such group, I have to ask that popular rhetorical question: “And what am I, chopped liver?”

This levity shouldn’t suggest that I don’t believe any conspiracies have ever existed. They have, and communism springs to mind as an obvious example as a vast plot to take over the world. Yet, while specific actions planned by the communists were usually kept secret, their goals weren’t.

In fact, anyone scanning the works of communist chieftains will notice their commendable frankness: they never bothered to conceal their plan to foment a world revolution, which is to say a violent global conquest. It’s not for nothing that the Soviet state emblem featured the hammer and sickle superimposed on the whole globe.

However, that real conspiracy hasn’t satisfied the public’s hunger for mythical ones, those concocted so deeply underground that no evidence of their existence has ever been uncovered. Blaming the Soviets or the Chinese was too humdrum. On the other hand, blaming the Judaeo-Masons or the Illuminati tickled imagination into onanistic satisfaction.

Moving on from big to small, every attempt to assassinate a public figure has been blamed on a conspiracy even in the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And fair enough, some were indeed fiendish plots hatched by villainous groups.

Many other assassination attempts, however, weren’t. They usually resulted from a confluence of two factors: existence of a deranged individual with a firearm and a monumental lapse of vigilance on the part of the security detail. A cock-up in other words, and this version of history appeals to me more than any conspiracy theory.

With that in mind, let’s put conspiracy theories aside for the moment, whip out our Occam’s razor and try to cut the most direct path to the attempt on Trump’s life.

The first precondition was in place: Thomas Crooks with his AR-15 rifle. The lad is generally described as a deranged loner, and perhaps he was just that. Spy services have been known to recruit such people “in the dark”, to do their dirty work often even without knowing the employer’s true nationality.

The possibility of such a false-flag recruitment shouldn’t be discounted altogether. But first we must consider a simpler and likelier explanation: Crooks was an impressionable youngster who was misinformed.

Since before his teens he had been exposed to grownups highly placed in government and media telling him that Trump threatened to destroy American democracy and introduce a fascist dictatorship. Now, if you were certain that some individual harboured such dastardly designs, and that you could save your country with a well-placed shot, wouldn’t you at least consider it?

By the same token, as C.S. Lewis once explained, medieval people had no doubt that every natural disaster and pestilence was a result of witchcraft. Hence they burned witches as a way of saving the crops and livestock that fed their families. That was a failure of education, not morality: most people would kill to save their families from certain death.  

The same thought process might have led Crooks to believe he was a hero, dying so his country would live. He might have been led to this conclusion by wily conspirators, but it’s not beyond the realm of psychological probability that he reached it all by himself.

But why was he allowed to get those shots off in the first place? Again, one hears all sorts of theories involving plots hatched by Iran in cahoots with the Democratic Party. In the absence of concrete evidence, these proceed from the old cui bono principle.

If anyone wishes to investigate the crime on that basis, good luck to him. The number of groups wishing to see Trump dead runs into dozens, and the number of such individuals into millions. Hence I have to be sceptical about any such forensic investigation ever reaching an end other than a dead one.

The cock-up explanation lacks the cachet of an involved conspiracy theory, but it offers the advantage of simplicity and greater probability. The cock-up in question is produced by the pandemic of moral and intellectual corruption infesting every public institution in the West.

The source of that corruption might have been partly conspiratorial at the very beginning, a century or so ago. But by now it’s so all-encompassing that it has infected great swathes of Western public opinion. I’d describe that source as the primacy of ideology over reason and morality, or else as the triumph of virtual over actual reality.

Various ideologies have always made inroads on decent life, but society used to be robust enough not to cede its core even when accepting minor compromises at the periphery.

That strength has now been lost, and the West is reeling from the blows delivered by one cock-up after another. People like me, those who used to live under the sway of pernicious ideologies, shudder with recognition.

We’ve seen it before: important public jobs from government ministers all the way down to lowly cops filled not with the best candidates but those who pass the test of ideological purity. In Russia, one got ahead by mouthing Party drivel with eye-popping conviction and also by having simon-pure ancestry (no relations abroad, no capitalists, no Jews or other undesirable ethnics, ideally several generations of manual workers).

That eventually led to the whole country becoming one giant cock-up at every level, a megalomaniac exercise in ideology-induced incompetence and corruption. And now the West is going the same way and for the same reason, if led by an ostensibly different ideology.

It would be counterintuitive to expect the US Secret Service to remain an oasis of sanity keeping ideology off-limits. So, if such is your wont, you are welcome to ascribe the ease with which Crooks climbed that roof and started firing to a conspiracy. I ascribe it to an ideological cock-up.

First question: how come no agents were placed on the roof offering a perfect firing position just 150 yards from the target, practically point-blank for the AR-15? Kimberly Cheatle, head of the US Secret Service, explains that oversight was deliberate.

“That building in particular has a sloped roof at its highest point,” making it dangerous for Secret Service agents to climb there, she says. British readers will instantly identify this reply as pervasive obsession with ‘elf and safety. People must be protected from every manner of danger – and their managers from every manner of lawsuit.

Now, Secret Service officers are expected to take a bullet aimed at their charges. Compared to that, climbing onto a sloped roof seems to be a doddle, and in fact the roof from which Secret Service snipers fired at Crooks was just as sloped.

Cheatle’s reply is thus nonsensical, or would be had it come from reason. But it came, in fact, from the visceral reaction of an apparatchik loyal to the dominant ideology, not to her job.

‘Health and safety’ is only a minor part of that ideology. Much more important is DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), an eerie reminder of the Soviet accent on ideological purity. Cheatle wouldn’t be in her job if she weren’t a DEI martinet.

Thus, she said that by 2030 she wanted at least 30 per cent of all agents to be women: “We need to attract diverse candidates and ensure that we are developing and giving opportunities to everyone in our workforce, particularly women.”

It has to be obvious to any sensible person that women have certain physical disadvantages that may curb their performance on the muscle end of law enforcement. It’s possible that some women may overcome such innate weaknesses and become, say, great Secret Service officers. Yet putting a percentage target on such overachievers suggests that women would be recruited simply on the basis of their sex.

In fact, when Cheatle took over and spelled out her life’s philosophy, many officers quit, leaving the service grossly understaffed. But Trump’s security detail did include three women, whose response strongly suggests they were DEI hires.

All three were short and overweight (chivalry prevents me from saying ‘fat’). After the shots were fired, they had no idea what to do. They were running around in circles, pointing their guns at all and sundry. One fumbled with her holster, unable to put the weapon back in. Another, about a foot shorter than Trump, embraced him and put her head under his armpit, leaving his head exposed.

Meanwhile, a male officer tall enough to shield Trump from another possible bullet was behind him, which showed a remarkable lack of coordination. Even worse was the lack of coordination between the Secret Service and local police, drawn in to secure the wider perimeter.

The whole thing was a cock-up, and the ideological explanation of it strikes me as more plausible than the conspiratorial one. One way or another, I fear we’ll never know the truth, which doesn’t prevent me from hoping we shall.

Donald Trump’s choice of running mate has won a ringing endorsement – not only from the Republican Convention but also from Putin’s propagandists.

“Reasonable people could come to power in the States,” commented Alexander Dugin, the ideologue of Russian Nazism. Translated from the Russian Nazi, ‘reasonable’ means ‘willing to deliver the Ukraine to Putin’.

But fair enough, J.D. Vance is indeed an intelligent and capable man. And he is misguided the way only an intelligent and capable man can be.

Vance’s intelligence was honed by his career as venture capitalist, just as Trump’s was by his lifetime in property development. It’s understandable that both men have to see the world at least partly through the prism of their experience.

Alas, that prism tends to distort the real picture. That’s why Trump seems to think that any foreign threat can be nullified by ‘making a deal’, a phrase I think should be banned from political discourse.

Property developers think deals; political leaders think alliances, blocs, partnerships, treaties, power relationships. Property developers make deals on the basis of short-term profit. Once the project has been completed and all the cheques have cleared, the deal is done – on to the next one. Political leaders, by contrast, must think on a loftier timeline: decades, possibly even centuries.

Property developers and their clients engage in a bit of give and take to strike a mutually beneficial deal defined in monetary terms. The only moral requirement is to stay a hair’s breadth inside the law. Political leadership relates to that activity the way philosophy and morality relate to double-entry accounting.

Everything that can be said about property development also goes for venture capitalism. This isn’t to say that men trained in such professions can’t rise to statesmanship and strategic thought. They can, but such an ascent requires a qualitative upward shift, making which is never easy, and it becomes harder with age.

Vance is young enough to make it, but the starting point should be a realisation that so far his thinking on foreign policy has been at best shallow. He doesn’t seem to understand the tectonic shifts in world order currently under way.

Vance doesn’t see Putin’s Russia as “an existential threat to Europe”. Speaking about the biggest European war since 1945, he said: “I got to be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” And in any case, Trump will “bring this thing to a rapid close so America can focus on the real issue, which is China. That’s the biggest threat to our country and we are completely distracted from it.”

Trump doubtless shares this point of view, yet even he doesn’t pronounce on “this thing” so forthrightly. Moreover, when Trump suggested he’d stop the war in 24 hours, he didn’t go into much detail. Cutting aid to the Ukraine is what he probably had in mind, but Vance has already acted in that spirit in the Senate, by manfully trying to block the aid package for the Ukraine.

He couched that effort in pragmatic-sounding but in fact spurious terms: “We lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war. By committing to a defensive strategy, Ukraine can preserve its precious military manpower, stop the bleeding and provide time for negotiations to commence.”

‘Defensive strategy’ and ‘negotiations’ are in this context synonymous with surrender. As to America’s inability to make enough weapons, that claim is simply false. The US was able to act as ‘the arsenal of democracy’ (also of Stalin’s totalitarianism, it has to be said) under the much greater demands of a world war. That enabled her to emerge as a great power and undisputed leader of the free world.

In this case, America wouldn’t even have to manufacture all the arsenal that could win the war for the Ukraine. Much of it already sits in warehouses ready to be decommissioned and replaced with the next generation of weapons. Yet what has become obsolete for the US army could be life’s blood for the Ukraine.

For example, the USAF is now flying 5^th generation fighter planes, which will be replaced with 6^th generation by 2030. However, a few hundred 4^th generation F-16s could throw a security blanket over Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Such planes wouldn’t have to be manufactured: they are already parked in hangars, and there’s some life left in them yet.

In common with his boss, Vance is suspicious of America’s Atlanticism. He sees NATO as “a tax on America”, which no doubt plays well in the swing states. Yet this is sheer demagoguery because the ‘tax’ comes with a hefty refund.

This isn’t to argue that Europe shouldn’t spend more on defence – its approach to such matters has been criminally irresponsible for decades. If Trump only threatens to withdraw from NATO to make Europe loosen its purse strings, I hope this works. Yet it’s hard to overestimate the economic benefits America derives from being the dominant Western power.

Without going into too much detail, the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement established the dollar as the world’s reference currency, which was consistent with America’s newly acquired global status. Should America relinquish that status, just think what would happen if her staggering $35 trillion debt were denominated in some other currency, such as the yuan. The ensuing catastrophe is hard to imagine.

Also in common with Trump, Vance feels that America’s vital interests lie in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. Yet he is wrong to discount the “existential threat” of Russia while emphasising that presented by China. Both threats exist, and in fact they are one and the same.

The two evil powers work in concert to destroy the post-1945 world order, as underwritten and enforced by NATO. China is the senior partner in that relationship, the feudal to Russia’s vassal. Xi is using Putin the way the Golden Horde used Russian princes who did much of its fighting, mostly against other Russian princes.

China herself stays on the side lines, openly encouraging and secretly supplying Russia’s war effort, while buying up Russian hydrocarbons at dumping prices. Meanwhile, China’s own designs on Taiwan have never gone beyond hysterical threats, and it’s far from clear that Xi is planning an invasion.

His vassal Putin, on the other hand, is already attacking Western interests on the battlefield. Hence Vance’s belief that America needs to keep her weapons for a potential war with China is misguided. And if he doesn’t realise that the Ukraine is defending our vital interests, he hasn’t delved into this issue as deeply as it requires.

In any case, his main problem with China has to do with matters economic rather than martial. According to him, too much production is outsourced to China, which makes American workers suffer. His – and Trump’s – solution is to impose stiff tariffs on Chinese imports, stiffer than the 10 per cent Trump put into effect during his first term. In fact, Trump is threatening to slap protectionist tariffs on all imports, not just Chinese ones.

This is bad economics, which has been known since at least the 18^th century. Thus Adam Smith: “To give the monopoly of the home-market to the produce of domestic industry… must, in almost all cases, be either a useless or a hurtful regulation. If the produce of domestic can be brought there as cheap as that of foreign industry, the regulation is evidently useless. If it cannot, it must generally be hurtful.”

Protectionism “must generally be hurtful” because it raises the price of goods produced by uncompetitive domestic industries, thereby diverting funds from the competitive ones – and hurting consumers in the process. Limiting or even eliminating trade with hostile powers is a different proposition, but that’s achieved with sanctions and boycotts, not tariffs. All such measures spring from political necessity, not economics.

I recall seeing bumper stickers in America, saying: “Buy a foreign car, put 10 Americans out of work”. One would expect the once and future leaders of the free world to think of the economy on a higher level than the owner of a pickup truck with deer antlers attached to its roof.

At my advanced age, I know better than to take politicians at their word. It’s possible that Trump and Vance won’t act on their statements, coming up instead with a sage policy designed to contain and roll back evil powers. But something tells me they are likely to practise what they preach, which would be bad news for all of us.

I think the Donald will miss a trick if he doesn’t start his speech at the Republican Convention by saying: “Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me an ear”.

On the one hand, this will demonstrate his knowledge of English classics, an erudition he has so far securely kept under wraps. On the other hand, it’ll show he’s a man who can afford treating English classics cavalierly, which only highly educated people can get away with – and only in the company of other highly educated people. And then, of course, taking his near brush with death so lightly will reinforce his image as a man of courage.

Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to offer unsolicited advice to any politician. Hence I’m sure Trump won’t make light of that tragic episode. Then again, he doesn’t have much in the way of a sense of humour, at least none that’s instantly discernible.

American politicians in general tend to come across as sombre people who don’t find the world a laughing matter. They are inclined to take the world, and especially themselves in it, seriously. Sure enough, they all have a repertoire of stock jokes they deliver at the beginning of their speeches, but then they tend to wipe the smile off their faces and start waxing serious or rather solemn.

When they do crack a humorous aside, it often comes across as rather inappropriate and heavy-handed. Thus J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, attempted humour by identifying Britain as the first Islamist nuclear power. “I was just beating up on the UK,” he explained when asked what he meant. That’s a time-honoured kind of fencing, but perhaps it would be better if practised with a rapier, rather than a cudgel. Anyway, what happened to making France the butt of American jokes? She too is a nuclear power, and she has more Muslims than Britain does.

Ronald Reagan stood apart from most American politicians, what with his ready chuckles and “oh shucks” asides. His famous joke about his age during a debate with Walter Mondale (“I’m not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent’s youth and inexperience”) was probably pre-prepared, but I remember his amusing lines delivered off the cuff at talk shows even before he was elected president.

But Reagan was rather an exception – just compare his reaction to being shot with Trump’s. Reagan’s response was a charming quip delivered with a smile; Trump’s, a gesture of belligerent defiance made with a scowl.

In general, it’s hard to imagine an American politician like Boris Johnson, a P.G. Wodehouse Englishman pretending to be a P.G. Wodehouse Englishman, full of one-liners, wisecracks and anecdotes, all introduced with “I say…”. The desired impression to convey thereby is that there is a man of substance lurking behind the light-hearted exterior.

A closer examination of Mr Johnson’s political career, however, reveals no such man ready to spring to action from the depth of his real character. The flimsy outer shell is all there is.

By the accounts of people who know him personally, Johnson is a joy to have around at a dinner party. But when it comes to leading the Tory Party, one would rather have a man short on sense of humour but long on character. And even public figures who have a knack for keeping us in stitches with witty epigrams and clever asides should limit that ability to a bare minimum.

People like humorous men, but they follow serious ones – even in Britain and certainly in America. That point was made by the advertising guru David Ogilvy, a Scotsman who spent most of his career in the US. “People don’t buy from clowns,” he wrote. True. But they used to buy from salesmen who charmed them with inoffensive humour.

When advertising was at its best, in the second half of the 20^th century, it was full of humour both in Britain and the US, but more so in Britain. It wasn’t wit of the calibre of Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse or, for that matter, Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. But then neither was it usually the hard sell preaching that a different brand of toothpaste or deodorant could change a person’s life.

If we study the famous witty aphorisms by American and British politicians, we’ll find that most of them go back decades if not centuries. As time went by, politicians apparently began to lose their sense of humour, or perhaps politics no longer attracted people endowed with that talent.

Again, this tendency is more noticeable in the US than in Britain, though my experience of the two nations doesn’t suggest that Americans in general are any less humorous than Britons. The explanation, I think, has more to do with class than with nationality.

Until relatively recently, it was the British upper classes that staffed most political institutions, including government. And not taking themselves seriously, or at least not showing that they do, is a hallmark of British aristocracy and the upper reaches of the middle class. Actually, that attractive feature cuts across the whole British social ladder, but skipping a few steps in the very middle, those occupied by unsmiling nouveaux riches bourgeoisie.

And yes, I agree that my blackish jokes at the beginning of this article aren’t in the best of taste. But I can afford the luxury of questionable humour. After all, I’m not standing for any political office – and, between you and me, hold a rather dim view of those who do.

When President Reagan lay on the operating table having lost half his blood after being shot in 1981, he told the masked surgeons: “Please tell me you’re Republicans”.

The lead surgeon, a life-long Democrat, responded to the brave joke with the words in the title above. That wasn’t just a witty and noble response. It was accurate political analysis.

An attempt to kill a president starts a wave of sympathy carrying even many former detractors on its crest – especially if the target responds with courage. Reagan was seriously wounded: the bullet had punctured his lung, and he had difficulty breathing. He still found the strength to smile at his wife Nancy and chuckle: “Honey, I forgot to duck”.

The assassination attempt happened shortly after Reagan had been inaugurated to his first term. John Hinckley’s shot and the president’s response to it made a second term practically guaranteed – and would have done even if Reagan’s record hadn’t been as good as it was.

Political assassinations have political consequences, and what happened yesterday won’t provide an exception to that rule.

Donald Trump wasn’t wounded as seriously as Ronald Reagan – Thomas Matthew Crooks’s bullet only grazed his ear. But the former president’s response was as courageous, if expressed in his own manner, not Reagan’s. Trump waved aside the bevy of Secret Service agents rushing to drag him off the stage, raised his fist above his bloodied face and shouted “Fight!”.

There, that’s the election sewn up. For gunfire, and courage under it, occupy a special place in the American heart. It was the gun that created the American nation, and it was the gun that delivered half the continent to it.

The first settlers keeping the tomahawk-wielding natives at bay, the revolutionaries taking on the British army, the Indian fighters during the westward expansion, the Yankees and the Rebs killing one another to put the finishing touches on the Constitution – the American nation entered the world stage to the accompaniment of gunshots.

Americans see the gun as a guarantor of their freedom, from foreign invaders and domestic tyrants alike. This is canonised in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and it’s a culture that older European countries have difficulty getting their heads around.

Americans don’t care. They might have come from Europe, but they aren’t Europeans any longer. In fact, many of them agree with their novelist John Dos Passos, who said: “Repudiation of Europe is, after all, America’s main excuse for being.”

A culture in which the gun has a significant role to play is bound to feature assassination as a way of settling political differences. Four US presidents have been shot dead while in office – by comparison, only one prime minister of Britain, a much older country, suffered the same fate (Spencer Perceval in 1812).

In addition to the successful assassinations of presidents and other politicians, there have been many unsuccessful attempts as well. Altogether, at least 60 American politicians have been fatally shot in the country’s history, which is pretty good going for a young nation. Add to this the scores of unsuccessful attempts, and the context of Donald Trump’s shooting becomes clear.

This has everything to do with culture and nothing to do with the availability of guns. Until relatively recently, guns were as widely available in Britain as in the US. A hundred years ago, British commercial and other travellers routinely packed revolvers next to toothbrushes in their luggage, and handguns were completely banned only in 1996. And yet this never produced a free season on politicians.

Every time a widely publicised shooting occurs in America, there’s clamour to repeal the Second Amendment and ban all or most of the guns in private ownership. Apart from the practical infeasibility of confiscating such a vast number of weapons (393 million at the last count), such calls betray ignorance of, perhaps even contempt for, the national culture, as formed over the past 400 years.

Some other reactions to the attempt on Trump’s life are already in the public domain, and they range from legitimate to insane. The latter category includes insistence that Trump himself staged the botched assassination to boost his electoral chances.

We are still awaiting the results of forensic investigation, but even the preliminary frame-by-frame analysis of the assassination videos evokes the 1971 novel The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth.

There a professional hitman has President De Gaulle in his crosshairs, but just as he pulls the trigger De Gaulle moves his head and the bullet misses him by a whisker. Apparently, exactly the same happened this time: Trump turned his head just as Crooks fired, which made the bullet hit the target’s ear, not the middle of his forehead.

Suggesting that something like this could have been staged takes a madman or a fanatical Trump-hater, which is the same thing: any fanaticism presupposes a mental disorder. Yet legitimate questions do remain, and I hope we’ll get some answers soon.

First, how could a killer toting a rifle find himself on a roof a mere 150 yards from the presidential candidate? A Secret Service sniper instantly shot Crooks after the shots were fired – if the lawman was able to identify the shooter and draw a bead on him seconds after the attempt, why hadn’t he seen him seconds before? Was the protection detail spread too thin? Does this have anything to do with Biden’s attempts to have Secret Service protection removed from Trump following his trial?

It’s tempting to ascribe this crime to the divisive nature of current American politics, something on which I commented the other day. Yet this temptation must be resisted, even though the Democrats routinely portray Trump as a fascist and an existential threat to freedom. Republicans, especially those of the MAGA variety, respond in kind, which puts even more electrical charges into the thunderous political atmosphere.

However, anyone who looks at the hundreds of American assassination attempts I’ve mentioned, including the 60 successful ones, will find it hard to find a common political thread running through all of them, or to ascribe them to a particular political climate.

It’s true that the current scene is more polarised than any I’ve ever seen in a rather long lifetime, but pot shots have been taken at American politicians at all sorts of historical moments and for all sorts of reasons. Reagan, for example, was hated by many ‘liberals’, but he was shot not by one of them, but by a deranged man who wanted to impress the actress Jody Foster.

Kennedy was cordially detested by American conservatives, but it wasn’t one of them firing from the window of the Dallas Book Depository. In fact, Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist.

Anyway, let’s not second-guess the forthcoming investigation and try to predict its outcome. Predicting the outcome of the November election, on the other hand, is easier.

Trump was probably on course to win it anyway, but the physical courage he showed yesterday will put even more wind into his sails. He may well be unstoppable now, which I doubt was Crooks’s intent.    

Any serious analysis thrives on precise definitions and dies on loose ones. And if there’s one word that many hacks – including, alas, me from time to time – use loosely, it’s ‘fascism’.

Thus, I’ve occasionally described Putin’s Russia as fascist, which is almost correct. But in the realm of serious analysis, it’s a miss as good as a mile. Almost correct means wrong.

Mea culpa and all that, but now is the time to atone for my sin. So here comes: Russia isn’t fascist. It’s Nazi, which is almost the same thing but not quite. So let’s sort out our definitions.

Umberto Eco famously enumerated 14 distinguishing features of fascism but, being a Leftie, he obfuscated the issue rather than elucidating it.

Eco and his ilk use the words ‘fascist’ and ‘conservative’ interchangeably. Hence all his 14 points spin out of an overarching definition of fascism as: “essentially rejecting the spirit of 1789, the spirit of the Enlightenment. Fascism sees the Age of Reason as the beginning of modern decadence.”

I suggested in an earlier article that we add another redolent spirit to the list, that of the Vendée. Following the 1793 regicide, the revolutionary government slaughtered 170,000 inhabitants of that province (about 20 per cent of its population) who had risen in protest against the closure and robbery of churches.

Thinkers like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre instantly saw the link between “the spirit of the Enlightenment” and revolutionary violence, leading to a frontal assault on Western civilisation. And later commentators considerably brighter than Eco showed how ‘the Age of Reason’ begat modern savagery – including fascism and Nazism.

Both of them combine totalitarian control over the population with an aggressive foreign policy, corporatist economy and an ideology of national superiority. But their legitimising claims to such superiority differ.

Both fascism and Nazism seek support for that claim in their history as a smithy of national character. However, rather than staying faithful to historical facts, they interpret, pervert and often invent them. For example, Mussolini preached an uninterrupted continuum between the glory days of the Roman Empire and his Italy, which was good propaganda but shabby history.

Yet, though Mussolini and other fascists insisted on national superiority, their claim had no biological component. That’s where the Nazis are different: though they too accentuate their superlative national character, they ascribe it not just to history but also to racial genetics.

The fascists treated their opponents as enemies. The Nazis treated them as sub-humans, a category that included Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.

While the world always boasts a nice complement of fascist regimes, Europe was spared Nazi ones for a period demarcated by Hitler at one end and Putin at the other. That period was so long that it couldn’t last.

Putin and his acolytes routinely claim racial superiority for the Russians who, according to them, boast an extra gene of spirituality in their biological makeup. Conversely, Russia’s enemies, as nominated by Putin, are described as racially inferior – to the point of not being human at all.

As I often do under such circumstances, I let the Putinoids speak for themselves, with me acting only in the humble capacity of translator. So here’s how one of Russia’s leading TV channels responded to the outcry following the deadly attack on a children’s hospital in Kiev the other day:

“Such enemies can’t be regarded as human. We must accept this simple and frightening thought: there are no human beings on the other side. Not a single one. Our missiles aren’t killing people. Not a single person. There are no persons there.

“If we don’t accept this as a given, if we don’t forbid ourselves to consider them human, to pity and protect them – we’ll weaken ourselves. We’ll limit our capacity to save our own children. We’ll complicate our way to Victory.

“Yours truly keeps repeating (and I’m not the only one who talks and thinks this way) that: the only way of defeating terror is to annihilate the terrorists and petrify the nation that produces terrorists. If the aim of the Special Military Operation [Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. A.B.] is to de-Nazify and demilitarise the Ukraine, then this is how this aim must be achieved: surviving Nazis [Ukrainians. A.B.] and their whole families must panic and flee to the West. Across the Polish border. Away from the shelling. Away from the ruins of their homes and cities. Dropping their yellow-and-blue flags and slippers [? A.B.] along the way.

“So yes – it may be simple and frightening, but we shouldn’t apologise for hitting a children’s hospital. We must say: ‘You want this to stop, friends? So surrender. Capitulate. And then we may spare you’.”

I must emphasise that this isn’t a one-off rant of a madman. It’s the standard fare nourishing the minds of Russians, and it’s cooked by everyone who ever appears in mass media: Putin himself, members of his government, MPs, columnists, talk show hosts and their guests.

Remove references to the Ukraine from that soliloquy, and it wouldn’t have looked out of place in an oration delivered by Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels or Julius Streicher, circa 1942. So let’s stop complimenting Putin’s Russia by calling it fascist. It’s even worse than that. It’s Nazi.

When I mentioned that extra Russian gene of spirituality to a friend of mine, he said wryly: “As is evident to everyone.” It is indeed.

Our crime rates are climbing on a Harrier jet trajectory, and London is giving New York a good run for its money. Britain has already outstripped the US in many crime categories, most notably in car thefts. We are still lagging slightly behind in murder, but even that gap is closing.

As a result, our prisons are filled to the gunwales, and it has been announced that by the end of the month there will be no more room left in the cells. The situation is dire, but our new government has found an ingenious solution.

Before I tell you what that is, I encourage you to activate your common sense and decide what you’d do, given the same problem. I bet you won’t beat my own two possibilities that seem to be the only ones making sense even in theory.

One, we reduce crime, thereby lowering the demand for prison places. Two, we build more prisons. If there exists another possibility, I’d like to hear about it.

Actually I have, thanks to Starmer’s Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood. In a recent interview, Miss Mahmood credited Islam with being her political inspiration: “My faith is the centrepoint of my life and it drives me to public service.”

If this inspiration is unmitigated, we can conceivably look forward to new punitive measures, such as mutilating thieves, stoning adulterers and throwing homosexuals off tall buildings. That, however, is hypothetical. For the time being, Miss Mahmood and her boss have outlined their solution to the problem at hand.

Their idea is the automatic release of prisoners who have served 40 per cent of their sentences. The current cut-off point is 50 per cent, which already constitutes a travesty of justice.

If you’ll forgive a blindingly obvious observation, imprisonment is there to serve three purposes. First, it keeps prisoners isolated from society they have harmed and could harm again. Second, it deters others from committing crimes. Third, and by far the most important, it serves justice, that cornerstone of civilised society.

Automatic release before the full term is served fails on all three counts, which makes it profoundly corrupt. Add to this the staggeringly lenient sentences routinely passed in the first place, the fact that some crimes, such as burglary, often go unprosecuted, and we begin to understand why our streets are unsafe to walk.

Not enough criminals are isolated. Crime isn’t sufficiently deterred. And a compromised system of justice encourages criminals, while discouraging society from seeking restitution.

So much for the theory. In practice, some 20,000 criminals will be immediately released to ply their trade at our expense. Before long, a quarter of our prison population will be unleashed into the streets. But, as Miss Mahmood hastily explained, terrorists and sex offenders won’t qualify for early release.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would comment. Terrorists I can understand. But why sex offenders? The implication is that maiming or even killing a woman is less criminal than having sex with her without permission. Surely that can’t be right?

Well, you see, killing a woman is a crime against her person, family and friends. But raping her adds a whole new dimension to the evil deed: it’s a crime committed against the dominant ethos, specifically against its feminist constituent.

In the same vein, planting an unwanted kiss on a woman’s lips is treated as a felony. Insulting a man racially is worse than assaulting him physically. Making statements tagged as transphobic incurs harsher sentences than burglary. In short, our Lady Justice isn’t blind. She is vindictively woke.

Getting back to Labour’s plan of how to reduce prison overcrowding, I think Starmer and Mahmood are missing a trick. For, given the confidently expected rate of recidivism, our prisons won’t stay empty for long.

Hence releasing criminals early is a palliative measure at best. Not only will most of the same chaps be back soon, but their soft treatment will encourage many others to follow suit. No, a more permanent solution is required, one that’s guaranteed to keep our prisons sparsely populated.

I can propose one that would be consistent with Labour philosophy and also with Sir Keir’s track record as the Director of Public Prosecutions. Whole categories of crimes should be made legal: drug offences, burglary, mugging, robbery, assault – the potential exculpating list is long.

Only sex offenders, racists, transphobes, misogynists, terrorists and – if you insist – murderers should receive custodial sentences. All other criminals should be told they should go and sin no more. They will then become choristers at their nearby churches and get jobs as hospice carers.

As I’ve mentioned, Starmer has form in this sort of thing. When he was the DDP, he was called ‘Sir Softy’ in some circles. Americans would have probably called him ‘Minimum Keir’, by analogy with ‘Maximum John’, Federal Judge John H. Wood known for his harsh sentences.

Thus Sir Keir secured the release of an arsonist who had racked up 36 convictions on 171 offences. Not only was he set free, but he also received £30,000 in compensation for ‘unlawful’ imprisonment. Sir Keir found a loophole through which that hardened criminal was unleashed on a terrified community, and 15 others soon followed in his tracks climbing through the same opening.

Another signature case was Starmer’s ruling to release Gary Afflick, a sex offender, drug dealer and satanist, who lured children into a life of crime. Known as a Fagin-like character, Afflick ran a gang of youngsters he controlled with beatings. Eventually he got 14 years for supplying drugs, kidnap, blackmail and indecent assault – only to be released early thanks to Starmer’s ruling.

Starmer’s record and first policies bode ill for the country. I have no doubt that the Labour government will destroy the economy, quickly making us all poorer, but that’s not the worst thing that can happen.

Britain can survive a collapse of the economy, but she can’t survive a collapse of justice. The rule of just law is the very essence of our polity – everything else is secondary or tertiary.

Justice must be done and be seen to be done, this seminal legal principle was established by Lord Chief Justice Hewart in 1924, and it’s among the most perceptive legal aphorisms I know.

A crime that goes unpunished, or insufficiently punished, disturbs social tranquillity, sending destructive waves through society. When such outrages multiply, society may never again find itself at rest, and the consequences will be unpredictably dire. Sir Keir and his acolytes are playing with fire, but it’s the electorate that gave them the matches.

A piece of unsolicited advice to the government: if you can’t reduce crime, build more prisons and fill them to the brim. If you are short of funds, just ditch your cretinous commitment to net zero – that alone will be enough to finance proper justice. That way we’ll be better off, not to mention safer.   

Such a house, said the book that used to define our civilisation, will not stand. The same goes for the civilisation that book used to define.

Much as I dislike biologism as applied to humans, it does offer useful shorthand. Thus, when it comes to civilisations, one could say they all go through the biological cycle of birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, gradual decline – and death.

Or else one could eschew determinist biology and rely on historical analysis instead, such as the kind offered by R.G. Collingwood: “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”

In other words, when the termites of self-doubt and disunity infest the foundations of a great civilisation, it can then, and only then, succumb to a push from within or without. If Collingwood were with us today, he’d doubtless shudder at the sight of the situation he warned against.

The push is being applied from the outside by the new axis of evil: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The bloodiest war in almost 80 years is already raging in Europe, with Russia leading the way and the other evil powers firmly in its corner. Commentators are drawing all sorts of dystopic scenarios, and many of them ring true.

One precondition for a civilisational demise is in place, but what about the other one? Is our civilisation united in its sense of purpose? In fact, what exactly is its unifying purpose, its binding mission?

The on-going NATO summit is expected to answer such questions, but it can’t do that. NATO is a defensive military alliance founded in 1949 to deter or, barring that, repel Stalin’s aggression.

That has now been transposed into the new aggressive reality created by Putin’s Russia. But NATO has always focused on what it was supposed to fight against, not on what it was supposed to fight for.

Such is the nature of all military alliances: they are ad hoc formations brought together by a specific strategic need, not the need to define core civilisational values. NATO realistically acknowledges this in its motto: Animus in consulendo liber (“a mind unfettered by deliberation”).

This slogan doesn’t obviate the need for deliberation. It only states, correctly, that such pondering is beyond NATO’s remit.

Yet those of us who aren’t part of the NATO command must identify the core values of our civilisation, and these have to be pro- rather than anti-. Great civilisations are defined by what they love, not by what they hate.

A civilisation is never static; it’s always work in progress. That’s why it can only ever be properly assessed in a historical context. We’ll never know where a civilisation is going unless we know where it has been.

In the centuries before the US graced the world stage with its entry, Europe, or the West as it then was, had been more or less united. But that unity came out of a conflict ever-present in human societies, that between universalism and particularism.

This conflict is still going on, but its pendulum is now swinging the other way. If in the distant past it used to swing towards universalism and therefore unity, it’s now noticeably swinging toward particularism and therefore disunity.

When the West still went by its original name, Christendom, it was Christianity that served as the binding universal agent. Nations in our sense of the word didn’t exist, and various kingdoms and principalities had more things bringing them together than those setting them apart.

This doesn’t mean Europe was war-free. It wasn’t: war is an ever-present part of the human condition. Yet medieval wars were strictly dynastic squabbles, fights for territory. They were never clashes between mutually exclusive views of the world – it wasn’t only nations that didn’t exist at the time, but also ideologies.

The great 11^th century schism between West and East was caused by a fissure in the concept of religious universalism, exacerbated by an acute phase of secular particularism. Yet the West still remained more or less monolithic – it just no longer treated the Christian East as part of the same monolith.

The Reformation changed all that. Suddenly, France and Holland or England and Spain acquired a divisive difference, one that couldn’t easily be settled by nuptial arrangements or by bartering territory. From then on, European countries were no longer just Christian. They were either Catholic or Protestant, and their respective churches had to take political sides. Thus, one instant effect of the Reformation was the politicising of religion, a development that had to be harmful to that institution.

Above all, the Reformation represented the first triumph of particularism over universalism. Had that not been the case, the Church could have disposed of Luther and Calvin the same way it had earlier disposed of Jan Hus.

As it was, many German princes saw in the Reformation their chance to break away from the Holy Roman Empire and establish their unchallenged sovereignty within their own realms. By waving the banner of anti-Papism, the princes sacrificed millions at the altar of secular particularism. What today is Germany lost half of its population in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17^th century.

The house now stood divided, and it turned out defenceless against the battering ram of modernity known by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Understood in my terms, it represented a triumph of particularism over universalism – the West quickly acquired a vast number of fault lines, each threatening to produce a deadly eruption at any time.

Christianity was tossed away as a universal blanket altogether, and it was replaced with a patchwork quilt of nations, ideologies and politics. Man was deemed to be nothing but an animal, but a sufficiently wise one to sort out his problems all by himself, without any need for divine intervention. That false premise was bound to produce deadly effects.

The West began to rend itself asunder, and the process has been continuing ever since, with the curve steadily moving in the same direction through assorted peaks and troughs. The house is still standing, but deracinated squatters have driven the original owners out and are now taking the building apart brick by brick.

It has turned out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a poor substitute for Christian universalism, and the European Union is a far cry from a united Europe. The West has lost its Christian adhesive and failed to find any secular replacement offering the same binding effect.

There are indications that the West is beginning to realise that its whole way of life is under threat, and some signs of inchoate unity are appearing. Yet no civilisation can survive if it only defines itself negatively, by what it’s opposed to.

In the absence of a strong positive component, even its will to resist an outside threat will weaken, as Collingwood pointed out. That’s why fault lines are appearing in NATO, and weblike cracks are spreading fast.

The United States, the metropolis of the NATO empire, looks as if it’s losing interest in the organisation. Biden’s Democrats mask their growing indifference to Europe with fiery phraseology, but the mask is slipping away constantly. At the same time, MAGA Republicans and their peerless leader are quite upfront about that, questioning why America should pay for European defence.

This is a typically crude argument designed to pluck the thickest of the American heart strings. One could respond that America has methodically supplanted Britain as the West’s leading empire, and that ascendancy brings benefits that outweigh the costs. But one can’t argue rationally against slogans – and the underlying reality they communicate.

And the underlying reality is that the perennial clash between American proselytism and isolationism is going the way of the latter. Americans increasingly seem to treat themselves and Europeans as ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the erstwhile sense of familial unity attenuating all the time.

The fissures within Europe are even more noticeable. The travesty of the EU might as well have been designed by enemies of Europe craving its demise. The attempt to build a surrogate secular universalism on the basis of bureaucratic socialist megalomania was doomed to failure from the start – particularist pressures were always going to be too strong.

German and French patriotisms, to name one example, can happily coexist, but German and French nationalisms can’t. And nationalism is a natural, one is tempted to say inevitable, offspring of the very idea of a nation. The EU hoped to toss all the nationalisms into a cauldron and boil them together into a sort of universalist stew, but it was bound to end up with a pie in the sky.

It seems more and more that the Russian threat isn’t producing a sense that all of Europe is in it together. One detects instead the spirit of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

The NATO summit has issued a declaration of unwavering support for the Ukraine’s struggle against Russian expansionism, but the words ring hollow. Nor is there any guarantee that Article 5 of the NATO charter will be invoked if a member comes under attack.

A unity that can only come from a sublime universal idea is absent, and our enemies sense that. That’s why they are likely to become even more recklessly aggressive. One can only hope that there’s enough residual spunk left to resist them in a civilisation no longer certain what it stands for. We should have listened to Collingwood.

Neither does talent. Neither does courage. Neither does loyalty. Neither does self-sacrifice. Neither does any other fine quality.

All such ostensibly good things only mean something positive if they are applied to a good cause. If someone puts such qualities to an evil end, I’d much rather he were stupid, giftless, cowardly and disloyal.

This seems like an elementary thought, but it escapes many people. That’s why, for example, pundits whose IQ leaves the average level in the rear-view mirror often describe suicide bombers as ‘cowardly’.

Now, the English language boasts hundreds of thousands of adjectives, and hundreds of them can be appropriate to describe a suicide bomber. But if there’s one adjective that can under no circumstances be applied to such a fanatic, it’s ‘cowardly’.

A man who sacrifices his life for a cause he holds dear is certainly not a coward. By any sensible standards, he is a hero. But his heroism serves an evil cause, which makes him evil. Now that adjective fits him like a latex glove.

The core of a man’s personality is his character, which can be anything between noble and rotten. And when it’s manifestly rotten, the natural human tendency is to deny such a man any qualities that are good in the abstract.

Thus, I’ve heard it said, for example, that Stalin was stupid and ignorant. He was neither. He was a highly intelligent man and better-read than most people I’ve ever met. Yet, when assessing him, many commentators activate a simple yet erroneous syllogism: intelligence is good – Stalin was bad – therefore, Stalin was stupid.

Because you and I aren’t evil, we find it hard to comprehend the deeds committed by evil people. On our plane of reference, everything they do is irrational and hence dumb. We don’t realise that they exist on a different plane, where our standards are null and void, and where everything they do makes perfect sense.

A topical illustration hot off the press:

Yesterday it was announced that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, whose hard-Left coalition won the French elections, is planning to introduce a wealth tax of 90 per cent on all income above €400,000 a year. Thus a man earning €1.4 million annually will clear only about €300,000, if he’s lucky.

Commentators are up in arms, and not just dyed-in-the-wool conservatives and libertarians. This isn’t a tax, they shout, it’s confiscation. True. So?

So it doesn’t makes sense, they reply. Wealthy people, especially businessmen, aren’t going to grin and bear it. They’ll up their sticks and leave for sunnier economic climes, taking their businesses – along with the jobs and tax revenue they produce – with them. Again, true. But so what?

What do you mean so what? The net effect of that measure will be negative, that’s so what.

Irate commentators whip out their trusted calculators and do some serious number-crunching. I can follow neither their fingers nor their calculations, but I’m more than happy to accept their conclusion: introducing that tax will lose money for the public purse.

The only people to benefit will be tax lawyers and accountants. They’ll devote thousands of billable hours to finding more loopholes than one can see in the walls of all the medieval castles in France combined, and there are hundreds of them.

Couldn’t agree more. However, my recurrent question still stands. So what? All such arguments make perfect sense only on the plane where decent, rational people operate.

Such people may have never heard of the Laffer Curve, but they’ll find the logic behind it easy to grasp. There are two tax rates that will produce no tax revenue whatsoever: 0 per cent and 100 per cent. The former rate means not taxing the income people earn; the latter, people deciding not to earn any income if it’s going to be confiscated anyway.

There has to be an optimum tax rate that will give people an incentive to work hard and produce more income both for themselves and the public treasury. Most economists believe that figure to be somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent, but whatever it is, it’s nowhere near 90 per cent.

You understand it, I understand it, my neighbour’s spaniel understands it. Does this mean Mélenchon doesn’t? Is he dumber than that annoying dog who keeps barking at odd hours?

Not at all. He’s smarter than the spaniel and, for all I know, he may even be smarter than you and me. It’s just that he inhabits a plane so different from ours that anything he does seems senseless to us. Yet it all makes perfect sense from where he’s sitting.

Mélenchon is hard-Left. As such, he is driven by an all-consuming hatred of the rich, Jews, conservatives, Americans, even the soft-Left – all the traditional bogeymen of his ilk. He, or his fellow socialists like Starmer, will talk your ear off speaking about their affection for ‘working men’. But in fact, they don’t give two flying francs about working men, especially those who are successful at what they do.

If anything, socialists much prefer the unemployed, those who depend on the state’s largesse to survive. People who are good at their jobs run the risk of becoming wealthy and hence Mélenchon’s enemies.

He’ll suffocate them with taxes and possibly run them out of the country not because he thinks the state will be better off as a result. He knows as well as you and me that won’t be the case, but he doesn’t care one way or the other. His aim isn’t to extract more tax revenue for the state. It’s to punish those who are or may become independent of the state.

Evil men like him aren’t driven by the rational calculations of an accountant. They are driven by febrile hatred and insatiable thirst for power. These are their prime motives, and confiscatory tax rates serve both.

The tragic tendency one observes in today’s world is that evil, as personified by Mélenchon et al., is on the march. The masses have been sufficiently dumbed-down to shrug with indifference or even to go along with enthusiasm.

But the evil-doers themselves aren’t necessarily dumb. They are just evil, which makes all else irrelevant.

It wasn’t the Tories who lost the election last Thursday. It was a socialist party clinging on to its traditional name while betraying its essence.

The media are dissembling when claiming the Tories have been in power for the past 14 years. They haven’t. The last time the Tories governed the country was in 1990, only for an internal socialist coup to oust Margaret Thatcher and smother the last gasp of conservatism.

British politics since then has boiled down to a contest between the soft Left and the hard Left. The latter claimed their victory this time around, but it’s the Left of various consistencies that have dominated every public sphere for decades (and not just in Britain).

I’d suggest that the Left’s political dominance is perhaps the least critical fragment of the general picture. And that picture is bleak: one struggles to name a British institution painted any colour other than different hues of red.

Our schools and universities are solidly Left-wing. Only 20 per cent of British academics describe themselves as remotely conservative, and in the humanities and social sciences that proportion drops down to 10 per cent.

The most influential media are as anti-Tory as it’s possible to get without losing any claim to impartiality, however tenuous. The principal TV channels, BBC, Sky News, ITV and Channel 4, are all Left-wing. So are most newspapers and magazines. So are most on-line publications. And even former bastions of Toryism, such as The Times, endorsed Labour, paving the way to power for the hardest-Left government in British history.

The few conservative voices in the arts and entertainment industry are drowned in the flood of Left-wing propaganda masquerading as books, theatre productions, films and even music, supposedly the most apolitical of all arts.

The police and the judges have become instruments of wokery, not justice. Medical and social services collude in enforcing Left-wing diktats, even at a huge cost to their mission in life. And even the army bases recruitment and promotions not so much on any battle-worthiness as on diversity and inclusion.

The civil service, the administrative branch of the British establishment, remains just that. But it’s Left-wing now, because such is the way of the new establishment. It’s no longer the same class that British comedians so love to mock. It’s now made up not of tweedy, clubbable gentlemen, but of the top slices off the Left-wing groups I’ve mentioned.

This raises two questions: Why has the Left won? and Why has conservatism lost? The first one is easier to answer.

The Left have triumphed by being patient and smart. Such qualities have enabled them to replace a strategy based on a frontal assault, aka revolution, with one the Russians call ‘hybrid warfare’. Revolutionary violence has been mothballed, not abandoned. It’s still used sporadically, but only as one prong among many, and not the sharpest one.

The Left are winning not by overthrowing traditional institutions, but by infiltrating them, undermining them from within and eventually taking them over. That strategy goes back to Lenin and the secret service he created, but in the West it was developed by clever Left-wing thinkers, such as Gramsci and those belonging to the Frankfurt School – Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin et al.  

In 1967, it was Marcuse’s disciple, the socialist activist Rudi Dutschke, who coined the phrase in the title (der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen in the original) inspired by Mao’s takeover of China. Dutschke’s mentor approved: “Let me tell you this: that I regard your notion of the ‘long march through the institutions’ as the only effective way…”.

In his letter, Marcuse especially emphasised “the development of radical, ‘free’ media”, but he and his fellow Frankfurters envisaged an offensive on all fronts. They came up with an 11-point programme, which to the best of my knowledge never appeared as such in any of their writings. But it can be gleaned from any number of their works, each highlighting one or several of these points:

1. The creation of racism offences
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family

It’s remarkable to observe how that programme, first concocted three generations ago, continues to be put into effect at an ever-accelerating rate throughout the West. If Marcuse were still with us, he’d keep all 11 points intact with only minor embellishments.

For example, he’d add a few -isms to Point 1, transsexuality to Point 3, drugs to Point 6. He’d then flash an avuncular smile of pride in his descendants’ achievements. They’ve done exceedingly well.

Looking at Britain’s public life, one can easily see that it has unfolded according to the plan outlined by the Frankfurters. The incoming Labour administration only has to remove the pseudo-Tory varnish from the plan, not to change it fundamentally.

Of especial interest to me is Point 9, turning widening swathes of the public into dependants of the state. This is the essence of socialism, as conceived by Marx and executed by all Western governments, albeit to various extents and by different means.

The guiding light here was another socialist, Benito Mussolini, a contemporary of the Frankfurters. He expressed his philosophical credo with the brevity that was usually beyond Marcuse and his comrades: “Everything in the state – nothing outside the state – nothing against the state.”

This is the ideal towards which most Western countries strive regardless of who is in government, but especially when the socialists gain political power in addition to their control of all public institutions. And Starmer’s government will add lurid touches to the canvas of statism.

Starmer and his jolly men welcome only one method of acquiring wealth: membership in the nomenklatura. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the government itself. Some 300 quangos already in existence are also acceptable, and Starmer is guaranteed to increase their number.

Anyone seeking financial or other independence from the state is fair game. Under the soft-Left Tory administration, the tax burden already was the heaviest in history. The new hard-Left government will add weight to it as a way of levelling down (the only direction in which it’s ever possible to level). Personal income, inheritance, businesses will all come under extortionist attack.

At the same time, the government will launch a devastating raid on anything else that can make people independent of it. Taxes will be used to raid private pensions yet again, and also to discourage people from using private medicine and private education.

Members of the nomenklatura, on the other hand, will be offered an intricate pattern of loopholes to get around such extortion. For example, when Starmer himself stood down as Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013, he was granted a ‘tax-unregistered’ pension scheme by an act of Parliament.

Such is my schematic answer to the question of why Labour won. Its sails have been billowed with the wind of zeitgeist – which also happens to be the answer to the other question I posed above: Why did the Tories lose?.

As any reader of my book How the West Was Lost will know, I regard the collapse of conservatism as a logical by-product of modernity, inaugurated by the Enlightenment.

The edifice of Western conservatism rested on the pillars of church, monarchy and aristocracy. These have either been blown up in one fell swoop or gradually eroded. All Western countries are now democratic republics or at best democratic-republican monarchies.

They are devoted to the advancement of the common man, a notion they all interpret publicly in the crudest materialist terms, and privately in terms of state paternalism. Paternalism is impossible to practise without a continual effort to manipulate the masses, making them responsive to state control.

The most direct route to such control is for the state to dangle the carrot of elevating the masses or, barring that, at least pulling the erstwhile elites down to their level. The more people become direct clients of the state, the better – social freebies create a dependant class tricked into believing the state serves its best interests. In fact, the only interests the nomenklatura serves are its own.

This creates a vicious circle of corruption: the nomenklatura corrupts the masses; they in their turn corrupt the nomenklatura. As the Frankfurters knew, the main battlefields of this war on what Tony Blair called “the forces of conservatism” are cultural and social. A decisive victory there makes political gains as inevitable as they are irrelevant, if cordially welcomed.

Both Britain and France have now delivered political power to the hard Left, which is merely an endorsement of the status quo. But the status quo was established in different arenas and by methods other than voting.

I happen to think that this process is irreversible, which is why I’m amused by Tory pundits promising that the party will eventually come back. It very well may, but Toryism won’t. It’s dead and buried.

The long march will gather momentum, and everyone will have to fall into step.