Month: September 2024

Some years ago, I wrote the book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, inspired by the financial disaster of 2008.

The main point was that our financial problems were a symptom of an underlying civilisational malaise caused first by the Reformation and then by the contagion inexplicably called ‘the Enlightenment’.

The former was a rebellion against apostolic Christianity; the latter, one against Christendom as such, not only its religion but also much of the civilisation that the religion had produced.

That included a specifically Christian take on economics, summed up in the past by “not by bread alone”. However, “not by bread alone” didn’t mean not by bread at all.

It’s just that Christianity established a pecking order in which money and everything it bought occupied a low rung on the ladder of values. Such things might have been important, but some other things were more so.

It was as if Jesus had told compulsive money makers, “By all means, go on if you must. But never lose sight of what comes first.”

The Reformation, especially its Calvinist offshoot, perverted that pecking order by treating riches as God’s gift, His reward for virtue. For the first time in history, acquisitiveness received a divine blessing. (Such is the origin of what Weber described as “the Protestant work ethic”.)

Following what Ortega y Gasset called the ‘revolt of the masses’, the Christian pecking order collapsed altogether and was replaced with naked rationalist materialism. The pursuit of material possessions, otherwise known as happiness, was elevated to a secular moral height it had never scaled before.

This eventually led to rapacious, impatient consumption with no holds barred. Happiness, which is to say material possessions, was treated as an inalienable human right, and millions of people tried to defend it by taking promiscuous risks. In due course, the sum of all risks became too heavy for the financial system to bear, and it collapsed.

Such is the schematic representation of a rather involved argument touching on aspects of history, theology, philosophy, politics and economics. Obviously, since I was writing about a civilisational shift from A to B, I had to devote quite a few pages to A, which is to say Christendom.

Anyway, after the book was published I gave a copy to a well-known journalist, at that time my friend and editor. My friend was – still is, God bless him – a highly intelligent man, touching on the upper limit available to an atheist. Hence I was sure he was going to review my Crisis in a high-circulation paper.

No review appeared for a month or so, and finally I asked him if he had had the chance to read the book. “Oh you mean the one about God…” he said dismissively, and I realised my Crisis would remain unread and unreviewed, at least by him.

The book wasn’t “about God”. It was about economics considered historically and philosophically. But mea culpa: words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ did figure prominently in the first half of the book – they had to be there as essential parts of the argument.

Yet such words have become optical taboos: as far as the modern mind is concerned, they don’t belong in a serious discussion. A modern editor casts a quick eye over the text, espies a profusion of the offensive words, and his eyes glass over. The book is ‘uncool’. It’s not worth reading.

Now, I’ve described my friend as highly intelligent, but he won’t be offended if I suggest he isn’t one of history’s greatest minds. Yet several Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries who could have a valid claim to that distinction suffered from the same myopia.

The word ‘God’ burned their lips with the same singeing intensity, and I for one am amused by the dexterity of the mental acrobatics they displayed when trying to zigzag around it. The ‘G’ word was unutterable to them – even when they clearly had it in mind.

They talked about ‘defence mechanisms’, while refusing to mention the existence of a mechanic able to design such protective devices. They discussed the ‘laws of nature’, skipping the need for a legislator who could have laid such laws down. They talked about nature as something endowed with a mind, which wasn’t especially clever.

Thus, in no particular order, Herder insisted that the world is a natural organism designed to produce higher organisms within itself. Designed by whom exactly? Well, nature itself, if you insist. Quite.

But that endows nature with a rationality for surely it takes reason to design anything. I’m unable to discuss the matter with old Johann Gottfried, but had that discussion taken place, he would have doubtless explained that he was speaking metaphorically. If so, the metaphor didn’t quite work.

To Kant, nature had a rational plan, and human nature was the matter through which that plan was to be carried out. The plan was teleological: eventually, at some time in the future, a rational millennium would be achieved, but not quite yet.

Again, unable to utter the word ‘God’, one of history’s greatest thinkers resorts to a lame metaphor that simply doesn’t work. While implicitly agreeing with Herder that nature is predetermined to evolve from low to high, Kant reverts to primitive pantheism by assigning to nature an ability to draw long-term plans.

Kant’s able disciple Schelling treated history and nature as two great realms manifesting the Absolute from the beginning of time. Yes, but what exactly is that Absolute, Herr Professor? And how did time begin?

The Absolute, explained Hegel, is man’s thought expressed through actions. History is nothing but the dialectical development of this Absolute Spirit, or Absolute Thought, if you’d rather.

If I understand correctly, which with Hegel can never be taken for granted, the world is graced with the presence of some collective intellect, of which we all partake. Like any individual mind, this collective intellect develops with age, growing from primitive to intricate, which is to say from a cave dweller to Hegel.

But what is it? Where does it come from? Why didn’t he just admit that he was talking about God? Hegel couldn’t make that admission. Neither could Kant, Herder, Shelling or Fichte. Neither could their French counterparts, such as Montesquieu and Voltaire.

None of them could admit what all of them knew: only God makes man, history – and, for that matter, nature – intelligible. Even the greatest thinkers, which all of them were, couldn’t credibly dispense with that essential starting point. That’s why they had to concoct variously convoluted crypto-theological metaphors to get around the offensive ‘G’ word, hoping their readers wouldn’t be able to decipher their codes.

One thing for sure: my editor friend is in good company, and one of long standing. Not quite as long-standing as mine, but one that’s much more up-to-date. This seems to be the ironclad requirement of modernity: everything has to be up-to-date, progressive and forward-looking.

Never mind intellectual rigour and honesty. Such virtues have gradually faded away over the past couple of centuries.

Had you asked me yesterday what a bus shelter is, I would have said: “A bus stop that has a roof, three walls and one open side”.

In doing so, I would have tried to suppress the disdainful condescension Londoners tend to feel about ignorant out-of-towners. Fancy not knowing what a bus shelter is! I’d be amazed if that country bumpkin has ever even seen a double-decker, I would have thought with the snobbery characteristic of a capital city dweller.

Thus I recall once overhearing an American ask a bus driver whether he was going to Holborn, which word came across as Hall-born. “It’s Hoebn, mate,” said the driver, and the contempt in his London voice had more layers than one would expect to find in a millefeuille at a French patisserie.

Anyway, in my hypothetical case, it’s I who would have been ignorant. For I would have missed a whole new meaning Mayor Sadiq Khan has added to the concept in question. In his capable hands, a bus shelter now means offering protection not only for people waiting for a bus, but also for those riding in it.

The good mayor has introduced a direct bus route in North London, running from Stamford Hill to Golders Green. That development sounds unremarkable in itself. However, what makes it astonishing isn’t that it was introduced but why.

Both neighbourhoods are home to large communities of Orthodox Jews, who often shuttle from one place to the other. But until the new route came on stream, they had had to change buses at Finsbury Park, an area predominantly inhabited by gentiles, many of them of the Muslim persuasion.

Jews waiting for the next bus to arrive were routinely subjected to abuse, both verbal and physical. Hence the new route was opened not so much for their convenience as for their safety.

“For 16 years now the Jewish communities in Stamford Hill and Golders Green have been lobbying for a direct link between those two communities, said Mr Khan. “They were frightened because of a massive increase of antisemitism since October 7 last year.”

That is, since a murderous Hamas attack on Israel, which, according to some London denizens, wasn’t murderous enough.

‘Massive’ is the right word for the rise in anti-Semitism. The Met Police recorded 2,065 anti-Semitic crimes between October and July, a 278.9 per cent increase on the same period in the previous year. Hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks occurred even in Westminster, the central area not known for a large Hebraic presence.

“I don’t want any Londoner to be scared to leave their home because they’re worried about public transport,” added the mayor. “I think we’ve got to recognise the fear that Londoners feel who are Jewish, we’ve got to recognise the tremors of hate that are felt by Jewish people across the country.”

Reports say the Jewish community is “delighted” with the new route, but I would have been happier with another word: enraged. The whole thing is so sinister as to make me wonder in what place and period I live.

If London, circa 2024, even remotely begins to resemble Berlin, circa 1934, the problem has degenerated beyond a point where a new bus route could provide a solution. A local or national government that can’t keep any group safe is in default of its raison d’être, and palliatives just won’t do.

Far be it from me to advocate rough homespun justice, but it’s better than no justice at all. Perhaps London Jews should take their cue from the events in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Between 1903 and 1905 a wave of pogroms swept over Kishinev, one of the centres of the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Dozens of people were killed, hundreds were wounded, hundreds of women were raped, thousands of homes were robbed and trashed.

The government did little to stop the violence and in fact tacitly encouraged it. Therefore the Jews of Odessa, another centre of the Pale, realised their turn would come next. Knowing they couldn’t rely on the government for protection, Odessa Jews decided to protect themselves.

They created self-defence units and, when the marauding mob barged into their neighbourhood, the thugs were greeted with pistol shots. Having left a few bodies behind, the rioters retreated, tail between their legs.

Now, unlike the Russian Empire, Britain is ruled by law. Hence there’s no place here for responding to violence with extralegal violence – provided the law does its job. Yet I’d maintain that responding to such sinister attacks by opening a new bus route isn’t a case of the law doing its job.

It’s the Met reneging on its remit of protecting Londoners from villains, and Mayor Khan being too cowardly (or reluctant) to solve the problem, not just mitigate it. And you don’t solve the problem of mob violence by playing with buses.

You do so by putting more cops on the streets of North London, where most Jews live, empowering the police to do what it takes to stamp out anti-Semitic attacks – and the courts to pass stiff sentences.

After all, England, unlike Russia, has no history of pogroms, not recent history at any rate. The last – or shall we say the latest – such riot happened in York, in 1190. It won’t stay the last one for long, however, if the government acquiesces in anti-Semitic attacks by refusing to deal with them as severely as they demand.

If Jews are forced to do in London what they did in Odessa in 1905, London won’t be London, England won’t be England, and – on the plus side – Sadiq Khan won’t be the mayor. Not much of a silver lining, but still.

Inadvertently, I hasten to add. Deputy PM Angela Rayner would be unable to make any good points deliberately – such an ability isn’t in her intellectual make-up.

The point I have in mind was made after videos of Angie dancing at 4 AM in Ibiza had caused quite a stir.

Some spoilsport reactionaries questioned whether an Ibiza rave is a proper environment for a Secretary of State to display her dancing skills. Words like ‘dignity of office’ crossed a few lips, but Angie brushed them aside.

“Yes I’m working class,” she explained proudly. “I like a dance, I like dance music.”

This calls for at least two comments. The first one is less serious: Angie seems to believe that only working-class people like to dance.

Anyone who has ever attended, seen or read about an aristocratic ball will know that this is simply untrue. Choreographic displays aren’t the privilege of any particular group, far from it. It’s just that some people may dance gavottes and mazurkas, others choose tangos and foxtrots, and Angie prefers mimicking various approximations to coital gyrations.

Some social divides are indeed observable there. Or are these divides really social?

This brings us to the good point Raver Rayner made, albeit inadvertently. She always describes herself as working class, but what does the term mean?

Marx, the shining light of Angie’s world view, defined classes in economic terms (their relation to “the means of production”), dividing people into oppressive haves and oppressed have-nots, and identifying struggle between them as the principal social dynamic.

(Let’s remark parenthetically that Marx didn’t really originate that view. It had been wafting in the air since the early days of the Enlightenment, and Giambattista Vico, to name one thinker, had enunciated it 200 years before Marx.)

On that criterion, Angie isn’t working class. Even assuming she doesn’t fiddle her expenses, her government salary alone puts her firmly into the middle class. Since she nevertheless identifies (dread word) as working class, she clearly isn’t talking about money.

What then? It’s true that Angie’s background isn’t normally associated with the upper reaches of society. She grew up on a council estate, left school at 16 after getting pregnant and has never acquired any educational qualifications other than some training in social care.

But surely what matters isn’t where one begins but where one ends up? I know some erudite and refined people whose beginnings, minus a teenage pregnancy, were as humble as Angie’s. Yet, as they moved through life, they acquired the trappings of the cultured elite, rather than, like Angie, a collage of tattoos specifying their party affiliation.

The closer we look at the issue Raver Rayner touched upon, the more we realise that the only definition of class making sense these days must be based not on economics but on culture. This points at a paradox that brings into question many traditional notions of political taxonomies, specifically the difference between the conservative right and socialist left.

Conservatives are supposed to renounce change and devote tireless efforts to preserving ossified social and economic structures. Socialists, on the other hand, are inveterate progressives. Along with Marx and Darwin they believe in steady meliorative change: things continuously evolving from primitive to complex, from small to big, from bad to good.

However, when it comes to the touchy issue of class, it’s conservatives who believe in upward mobility, social, economic and cultural. Socialists like Angie, on the other hand, insist that one stays for ever in the class of one’s birth. It’s as if class were coded into one’s DNA, along with sex, height and the colour of eyes.

It’s obvious to anyone that, for all the clamps socialists love to apply to the economy, it’s possible for an originally poor person to become rich through industry and enterprise. If that’s the case, then, for a person to get permanently frozen into the same class, it’s culture that has to be held as immutable.

It’s tasteless to be either ashamed or proud of one’s roots, just as it’s silly to be ashamed or proud of one’s hazel eyes. Where or to whom we are born is beyond our control. But living over four decades (Angie is 44) without elevating herself beyond the culture of tattooed raves is indeed something to be ashamed of — and it’s definitely not something to be proud of.

When one finishes in the same place where one started, one has remained immobile. Culturally, one has been running in place, if at all. I’d define such a life as misspent, but Raver Rayner must have different ideas. She likes her cultural savagery and has assiduously cultivated it over a lifetime.

This isn’t just a personal idiosyncrasy. Such is the zeitgeist that Angie has inhaled deeply and filled her lungs with. And every gust must have told her that in matters cultural it’s not upward but downward mobility that’s laudable.

If you compare her to our former chancellor, George Osborne, his social background is the opposite of Raver Rayner’s. A scion of a wallpaper magnate, he had every privilege England can offer: prep schools, St Paul’s, Oxford, the lot. And yet, when asked about his musical tastes, George instantly cited… no, you’re wrong, not Palestrina and Bach. His professed musical preference was a sub-proletarian rap group.

He might have said it just to come across as prolier than thou, but that’s an even stronger indication of where the zeitgeist is blowing. Its squalls send people plummeting to the flinty cultural ground, rather than soaring to the heights of Palestrina or Bach.

“I take my job really seriously and what I do… you’ve got to have downtime as well. Everybody has to have downtime,” says Raver Rayner.

Fair enough. But the kind of downtime she chooses bodes badly for the job she does, however seriously she takes it.

It used to be taken for granted that leaders of Western countries had to be part of Western culture. That requirement has evidently fallen by the wayside, and the consequences are there for all to see.

Commenting on Labour’s decision to cut arms sales to Israel, Boris Johnson asked: “Do they want Hamas to win?”

No, they don’t, is the answer to that one. They don’t want Hamas to win. They just want Israel to lose, and they don’t really care to whom.

It could be Hamas, but it doesn’t have to be. Hezbollah will do just as well. Or Iran. Or Syria. Or Egypt. Or Burkina Faso, if she felt like taking Israel on.

It’s useless pointing out to the likes of Prime Minister Starmer or Foreign Secretary Lammy that Israel is an oasis of Western civility in a desert of barbarism. They know this. And they want Israel to lose not in spite of it but because of it.

Lammy can talk all he wants about “international humanitarian law” that supposedly demands that Israel be disarmed, or as near as damn. Engaging him on this battleground is like trying to explain to Fido that chasing cats around the block isn’t a good idea.

Fido doesn’t do so because he thinks it’s a good idea, but because hostility to cats is wired into his DNA. If the dog could talk, he’d doubtless come up with a seemingly valid explanation, possibly one based on the urgent need to protect the rights of mice and rats. But any sensible person would know the real reason.

Modernity was ushered onto the historical stage by a collectively felt urge to repudiate Christendom, as the West was then called. That was the foundation of the modernity edifice, with everything else, such as the talk of liberty and equality, merely window dressing.

Then, whole classes deemed incurably infected with the emanations of Christendom had to be exterminated en masse. That massacre was portrayed as an unfortunate necessity, a means to glorious ends. But it wasn’t. The only reason for mass murder is always the urge to murder masses. The destruction of Western heritage, be that people or physical plant, wasn’t the means. It was the desired end.

The animating impetus of modernity was negative – it was hate, not love. But in due course modernity bifurcated into philistine and nihilist strains.

The desire to expurgate every vestige of Christendom remained strong in both, as was the craving for physical comfort. The difference was – as it so often is – in the relative emphasis placed on these desiderata.

If the philistine put comfort first and revenge second, the nihilist reversed that order. Push come to shove, the philistine could even forgo revenge if it began to threaten his comfort. Similarly, the nihilist was more prepared to sacrifice his comfort if it got in the way of hatred.

Today’s Left live off that nihilist legacy, which has been lovingly passed on from one generation to the next. They too loathe the West, even though it can no longer be legitimately described as Christendom. Never mind: some earthly fragments of the old order are still extant, and there’s no shortage of secondary targets to aim at.

It’s vital to keep in mind – and I don’t mind repeating myself – that the animus of this lot remains negative. In this case, they don’t love Hamas because it’s a terrorist organisation. In fact, they may not love it at all. They support it because of the shared hostility to the West, personified in that region by Israel.

That’s one problem with Israel the Left identify either viscerally or consciously, doesn’t really matter which. The other is her being Jewish.

The Jew is a traditional bogeyman of the Left, ever since Marx erased the distinction between Jew and capitalist. That gave his followers a semblance of a philosophical justification for anti-Semitism, which was so much more attractive than simple zoological hatred – or rather could be sold to the outside world as being more attractive.

Some Lefties, such as Jeremy Corbyn, use Marxist dogma as camouflage for their primordial anti-Semitism, others may not be intuitive anti-Semites at all. They just feel duty-bound to hate Israel because such is the cost of admission to their ideological club. However, if they happen to be politicians, they have a full set of shibboleths at their fingertips to explain why they regretfully have to do all they can to make sure Israel will lose.

They aren’t going to divulge the real reasons, such as hatred of the West in general and Israel in particular. Professing affection for “international humanitarian law” plays so much better on Evening News. This stands to reason, and they can’t be faulted for it – a professional politician isn’t going to commit professional political suicide.

But it’s not only football but also politics that’s a game of two halves. One half is nonentities like Starmer and Lammy coming up with manifestly false explanations designed to conceal their real feelings. The other half is their opponents’ inability, possibly reluctance, to bring Leftie dissemblers to account.

This too reflects subterranean tectonic shifts of long standing. Just as the Duke of Orléans had to become Philippe Égalité to earn the right to speak (though, as it turned out, not to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs), so do today’s ‘conservatives’ have to play the game by the rules drawn by the dominant Left.

It’s not only the Creation that the Word was in the beginning of. Political power also starts with the Word, the ability to dominate and impose the language of public discourse. I refer to this tendency as ‘glossocracy’, the government of the word, by the word and for the word.

Glossocracy is a rigged game, in that it’s both played and refereed by the same people. The other side is allowed to play the game but, because the glossocrats lay down the rules, there’s never any victory in sight.

In this instance, someone like Boris Johnson may have a go at Lammy, but only on the latter’s terms. Even someone considerably more principled than Johnson (which doesn’t narrow the field down too much) would impose self-censorship on any desire to take the Left to task at a fundamental level.

Any politician or, for that matter, establishment pundit daring even to hint at the ideas I’ve touched upon would be instantly drummed out of the guild for violating its ironclad charter. For example, no one could get away with saying to Messrs Starmer and Lammy that, after Maidanek and Magadan or, come to that, Bucha and Mariupol, any talk of “international humanitarian law” is disingenuous prattle.

The most one would be allowed to argue is that Israel hasn’t really broken that sacred covenant, at least not as badly as her opponents did. Specious arguments one way or the other would then fill the air with their miasma, only then to disappear in a puff of smoke – including the kind coming out of the guns fired by Hamas murderers into the heads of Israeli hostages.

It’s impossible to argue the case at the deeper level, that of our retreating civilisation engaged in a desperate rearguard fight, with Israel and the Ukraine doing the fighting. Dig as deep as that, and the whole existential edifice of modernity will begin to totter. Can’t have that, can we now?

Glossocracy is tyranny imposed by language, and it can only be resisted by fighting for every word, the way Israelis and Ukrainians are fighting for every patch of their land. Whenever someone talks about Israeli ‘occupiers’ and their mistreatment of ‘Palestinians’, or about the Ukraine exclusively populated and run by corrupt Nazis, he mustn’t be allowed to get away with it.

His true motives must come into focus, for all to see what they really are. These people don’t support evil because they can’t recognise it. They support it because they approve of it, and will continue to do so for as long as it coincides with their own cravings.

And people who approve of evil are evil themselves. Even if they are democratically elected to run a great country, or employed to write columns for a great paper.

In 1928, the Nazis almost won the local elections in the state of Thuringia. In 1932, they did win them, with 43.4 per cent of the vote.

Such is the historical background to the triumph of the fascisoid AfD party in the same state a few days ago, when it came in first with 32.8 per cent. At the same time, AfD scored 30 per cent in the adjacent Saxony, coming within a whisker of carrying that province too.

This is the first time that AfD has won an election in a major province, or rather the first time since its typological progenitor did so all those years ago. This isn’t to say that AfD is a carbon copy of the NSDAP, far from it.

But its emotional make-up is similar, though the party takes great pains not to come across as a downright heir to you-know-who. That worthy effort doesn’t always succeed, which is why Björn Höcke, AfD leader in Thuringia, boasts two criminal convictions for using Nazi rhetoric. I suppose the party’s rank-and-file see that as a badge of honour.

Also making huge gains in the same provinces is another extremist party, BSW, a splinter group of the communist Die Linke. This parallels a similar tendency in 1928 and 1932, when the communists won 10.6 and 14.3 per cent of the Thuringian vote respectively.

Those two parties are coming in on the rail while the political mainstream is busying itself with climate, social inequality, decolonisation, gender-bender policies and other such matters that are taken more seriously by politicians than by the electorate.

The two extremist parties converge on their anti-immigration stand, which Thuringian voters seem to favour in preference to unisex lavatories. One can understand and share their feelings, but what often matters in politics isn’t just the face value of a policy but also the accent placed on it.

For AfD, as for its British, French and Italian counterparts, opposition to uncontrolled immigration is the axis around which its whole Weltanschauung revolves. While pretending to put forth a rational argument, the party really appeals to visceral xenophobia that’s sometimes dormant at the German grassroots, but never quite dead.

Voters everywhere often respond not to text but to sub-text, not to denotation but to connotation, not to semantics but to semiotics. The essence of political populism is its direct appeal to such deep-lying strata, bypassing reason altogether or racing through it on the way to the subcortex waiting to be tickled.

That’s the nature of my contempt for all populist demagogues, regardless of whether or not I agree with what they are saying. Often I do agree with much of it, but their real appeal lies elsewhere. It’s pointless to take seriously what they say because what really matters to their audience is what they don’t say.

We could discuss the similarities and differences between the Nazis and AfD, or between the communists and BSW, till the migrants go home. But their anti-immigration appeal isn’t all they have in common.

Both parties also act as outposts of Kremlin propaganda in Germany, and I’m sure, though can’t prove, that their affection for Putin isn’t entirely disinterested. AfD and BSW are both unofficial members of Putin’s anti-Western International, the European vanguard of his hybrid war on our civilisation.

The two parties are in favour of cutting all assistance to the Ukraine and forming close ties with Putin’s Russia. While seemingly sitting at the opposite ends of the political spectrum, they have joined forces in criticising the US, Germany and NATO in general for their involvement in the war.

When President Zelensky asked the Bundestag for greater support in June, many MPs from both AfD and BSW walked out in protest. Putin’s invisible hand grabbed them by the scruff of the neck and dragged them out of the hall where a victim of fascist aggression was begging for help.

What I find especially nauseating about Western Putinistas, and not just in Germany, is their abstract anti-war rhetoric. They shed crocodile tears for all those killed and maimed victims, then overcome the spasms in their throats and call for an end to this horrible war. Our own dear Peter Hitchens is a past master of such lachrymose displays, but he isn’t the only one.

Isn’t war just awful? they ask rhetorically. The implication is that any war is awful, and I’m glad those heroic RAF pilots weren’t so pacifistic in 1940.

Yes, wars are awful, but some wars are nonetheless necessary and just, a concept familiar to Western moral thought since Augustine of Hippo. What matters isn’t just that wars end but also how they end.

When those people call for an immediate ceasefire, one wonders whom they see as their target audience. If it’s Zelensky, then for him a stop to fighting is tantamount to capitulation. If it’s NATO countries, then for them a stop to supporting the Ukraine is also tantamount to her capitulation.

The only proper addressee for that message is the man who started this monstrous, unprovoked war: Putin. Yet one doesn’t hear any urgent appeals from Western Putinistas that the Russians lay down their arms and withdraw to their 2014 or even 2022 borders.

One can’t help feeling that the capitulation of the Ukraine is precisely the outcome they desire, which is to say the victory of the only aggressive fascist power in Europe. I almost wish they came out and said so outright, sparing us the gagging effect of pseudo-pacifist waffle.

I just hope more people realise that every victory for a pro-Putin European party, whether fascisoid right or fascisoid left, is a victory for Putin’s Russia – and a crushing defeat for whatever little is still left of Western civilisation. This ought to simplify the moral assessment of Western Putinistas. In my taxonomy, they sit next to skunks.

P.S. Hitchens keeps challenging Boris Johnson to a debate on the war in every piece he writes. I’d be happy to act as an outlet for his verbal pugnacity, but he wouldn’t stoop to taking on such a lowly opponent – especially one likely to wipe the floor with him.