Month: February 2025

My friend Tony and I live a couple of hundred miles apart and, though we both also have houses in France, we maintain the same safe distance there.

This explains why we hardly ever see each other more often than once a year. Since we’ve been friends for some 35 years, that’s about as many encounters over half a lifetime. Nevertheless, thanks to the wonders of technology, we probably spend an average of at least three to four hours a week on the phone.

You do the maths but, in round numbers, that’s a lot of talking. Penelope apart, and yes, I know it’s hopelessly infra dig to talk to one’s own wife, I don’t think I spend as much time chatting with anyone else.

Since Tony is an atheist, our conversations stay close to the ground, mainly because any attempt to soar higher bores him to tears and he switches off. So we keep to current events, especially those that confirm our shared dim view of modernity, and also things like art, architecture – and language.

When this last subject comes up, we tend to swap our pet peeves about the wounds English suffers at the hands of modernity.

For both of us language isn’t just what we use but also what we do. It’s our instrument in the same sense in which the piano is Penelope’s instrument, and she would be aghast if someone took a sledgehammer to it.

The two words in the title above came up earlier today, with ‘to reference’ being my contribution and ‘to refute’ Tony’s. We disagreed on which one was worse, but agreed that both were appalling when misused.

Unlike the favourite word of our football commentators, ‘lacksadaisical’, the two words we find objectionable do exist. But God in whom Tony doesn’t believe created them to denote something dramatically different from the way our illiterate hacks use them.

‘To reference’ something means to cite an established source supporting one’s statement. This is routinely done in scholarly literature, with footnotes, endnotes and bibliography used for that purpose. When an editor tells me “You need to reference this”, I recognise the validity of the verb, even though I wince at its ungainliness and deplore the extra effort required.

I believe firmly that verbs are verbs, nouns are nouns, and never the twain should meet. Verbs made out of nouns are always jarring, although at times they are unavoidable, as in this case.

Alas, the way ‘to reference’ is widely used these days, even in writing, isn’t only jarring but also illiterate, pretentious and generally offensive. Lexically underdeveloped individuals use it in place of ‘to say’ or ‘to mention’, words they regard as inadequate to communicate the culture they haven’t got.

Thus one often hears abominations like “as I referenced yesterday”, with nary a cited source anywhere in sight. What the sledgehammer wielder means is “as I said yesterday”, but such a monosyllabic is five syllables short of what ignoramuses see as sophistication.

In his entertaining 1983 book Class, Paul Fussell referred to that sort of thing as a ‘prole syllable creep’, but that book was written before the wrong people scored the final victory in the class war. Today this craving for extra syllables at any cost is more likely to be caused by cultural rather than social pretensions. That doesn’t make it any less risible though.

Bad as that ugly solecism is, in the end I had to agree with Tony that the misuse of ‘to refute’ is even worse. ‘To reference’ testifies only to the speaker’s tin ear and ignorance he tries to mask, only succeeding in making it even plainer.

The use of ‘to refute’ to mean ‘to deny’, in addition to other deadly sins, also betokens the decommissioning of the most basic intellectual tools. Someone who says “as I referenced yesterday” doesn’t know how to use English. But someone who says “I refute what you are saying” also doesn’t know how to use his mind.

A refutation is a conclusive argument using evidence to disprove a statement. It means more than just denial or disagreement, neither of which requires any proof. Using it the illiterate way brands the speaker as someone who doesn’t know what constitutes an argument and what kind of argument can provide a refutation.

In the days when we still had educated classes, as opposed to isolated educated individuals, common folk made do with a vocabulary of under 2,000 words, most of them short and of Anglo-Saxon origin. They never misused longer words of Latin or Greek etymology because they didn’t know them.

Whenever they misused ‘posh’ words they had overheard by accident, educated people exchanged knowing smiles, reserving open derision for literature. Dickens, for one, was scathing about pretentious solecisms, which today would earn him the tag of elitist and, by ricochet, also possibly misogynist, transphobic and of course racist.

The OED helpfully informs us that the verb ‘to refute’ doesn’t enjoy a high frequency of use. It occurs only once per 200,000 words in modern written English. I suspect its correct use is much less widespread.

Language is indeed an instrument of oral and written communication. But it’s also a cultural and social indicator, a sort of compass showing the direction taken by society.

When England sat at the centre of a flourishing empire, her language was dynamic and creative. It was constantly expanding, but without losing its beauty and unmatched precision.

Even when lent out to various colonies, it didn’t suffer much attrition. Moreover, cross-Atlantic colonies enriched English with their own quaint, idiosyncratic usages (Tony dislikes them anyway).

England – and I’d suggest the Anglophone world in general – is undergoing a cultural and social collapse, and hence so is the English language. Rather than expanding, it’s actually contracting, in any area other than the profusion of specialised terminology.

English is getting smaller, uglier and much less precise, which to both Tony and me parallels and reflects similar tendencies in culture, along with the life of the mind and spirit. And if you wish to refute what I’m referencing, you’d better come up with sound arguments.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a mental condition that can afflict anybody. Unbeknown to him, an NPD sufferer may make the people around him uncomfortable, sometimes even fearful.

And if he has a wide audience, his typically charismatic, solipsistic persona can have far-reaching adverse effects on society.

While NPD isn’t considered a serious mental disease, it is what in the medical parlance is called co-morbid. This means NPD is often accompanied by other, more serious, disorders. In extreme cases, these may include delusions of grandeur and paranoia.

No cure exists, but psychotherapy has been known to keep the condition in check, especially if treatment is initiated shortly after the onset of NPD. As is usually the case with progressive conditions, time is of the essence.

So take a couple of minutes to run through the simple checklist below. This will enable you to recognise the symptoms of NPD in yourself and, if needed, get a head start on the treatment.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) describes NPD as possessing at least five of the following nine criteria:

• A grandiose sense of self-importance (exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognised as superior without commensurate achievements)
• Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believing that they are “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requiring excessive admiration
• A sense of entitlement (unreasonable expectations of especially favourable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations)
• Being interpersonally exploitative (taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends)
• Lacking empathy (unwilling to recognise or identify with the feelings and needs of others)
• Often being envious of others or believing that others are envious of them
• Showing arrogant, haughty behaviours or attitudes

A High-Functioning/Exhibitionistic subtype of NPD has been described as “high functioning narcissists [who] are grandiose, competitive, attention-seeking, and sexually provocative; they tend to show adaptive functioning and utilise their narcissistic traits to succeed.”

If you show such symptoms, make sure you take immediate action lest the condition progress beyond any chance of successful therapy. And if you know someone who may be an NPD sufferer, suggest to him that he seek medical help immediately.

NPD sufferers often succeed in business, especially as salesmen or negotiators, areas where their overbearing personalities and lack of scruples often give them the upper hand. But they naturally gravitate towards careers promising a higher visibility, such as those in show business or politics.

Once they’ve reached a position of power, they demand unquestioning loyalty and sycophantic adulation. These are the main, often sole, criteria on which they choose their entourage. Whenever they detect a hint of disloyalty or insufficient obeisance, NPD sufferers tend to lash out, often to the detriment of their core business.

If it all possible, keep NPD sufferers away from ponds, highly polished tables, mirrors, TV monitors and other surfaces in which they can admire their reflection or projection. This protective measure is akin to barring a drug addict’s access to his preferred narcotic substances.

And if you find yourself in a conversation with an NPD sufferer, try not to contradict his idea of himself too forcefully. If you do, he may instantly turn abusive and, in especially advanced cases, physically violent. Keep in mind that an NPD sufferer will never forget a presumed slight, and he will harbour vengeful designs for a long time.

Hope you’ll find these tips useful. Remember, if we take NPD seriously, we can protect society from its toxic effects.

P.S. On a totally unrelated subject, the adulation of Trump has reached hagiographic proportions in some quarters. Not only the president himself but also members of his family have become the objects of cultish worship.

By way of illustration, here is a video of Barron Trump’s encounter with a homeless waif: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wfFpGFTnOo. The language and narrative structure haven’t been widely used since the Gospels, although one can detect some parallels with the glorification of Lenin’s family in the Soviet Union.

The simulacrum gospel according to Trump features the president as God the Father, Barron as God the Son and Melania as the Holy Vir… oops! Oh well, perhaps this analogy doesn’t work in every detail.

Another one, with the Kim family in North Korea, may be more accurate. Actually, that giant gold statue makes it airtight. It’s good to see that America’s First Family and its adulators have found a perfect role model.

HEALTH WARNING: If you decide to watch the video, have a sick bag close at hand.

The term ‘special relationship’ describing the putative kinship between Britain and the US was first used by Winston Churchill in 1946.

It certainly made sense at the time. Churchill had just led his beleaguered country to a victory that might never have happened without the help of the United States.

American Lend-Lease aid arrived in the nick of time, when Britain was running out of the wherewithal to continue keeping the Nazis at bay. The relationship between the two countries was then indeed as special as that between a drowning man and his rescuer.

But contexts change over history, and what’s true today may prove false tomorrow and might have been false yesterday. So let’s just say that it’s not only the common language that divides the two countries, to quote Churchill again.

That’s why I think the subtitle of Daniel Finkelstein’s article in The Times is wrong: “Conservatives have always admired the US,” he writes, “but the Trump camp is causing chaos, so it’s time we found better friends.”

The peg on which Lord Finkelstein hangs his narrative is the Nazi salute given at a rally by Steve Bannon, “one of the political leaders of the Trump right.” The peg is solid: the gesture was indeed disgusting, as is Steve Bannon.

I doubt, however, that most Trumpists share Bannon’s apparent innermost cravings. The issue is deeper than that, and it’s not just the Bannons of this world who bring the special relationship into doubt.

The thing is, Lord Finkelstein is mistaken. English conservatives haven’t always admired the US. In fact, I doubt they ever did. Saying otherwise betokens playing fast and loose with historical facts or else, more likely, using the word ‘conservative’, capitalised or not, in an arbitrary meaning.

“How is it,” wrote the quintessential Tory, Dr Johnson, at the start of the American Revolution, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” He was expressing a widespread Tory attitude to the colonists as rebellious, sanctimonious upstarts in the grips of a faddish ideology.

I can’t cite any statistically significant research, but I’d suggest from personal observation that many real Tories still feel roughly the same way. The people who unanimously worship America aren’t British conservatives, but British neocons in the mold of Douglas Murray and Niall Ferguson.

The difference between conservatives and neoconservatives is that between a trilby and a MAGA cap, or that between an 18^th century Whig and a 21^st century liberal, or that between chicken stew and chicken manure (I’ve promised Penelope not to use the word I really mean).

Neoconservatism is an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, American chauvinism (not exclusively on the part of Americans), expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic verbiage on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics and welfarism – all mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to broader public support.

This movement has thrived in its original American habitat, and its British followers unfailingly pay obeisance to the US. Murray, for example, has been known to say ‘we’ when talking about Americans. Real Tories ‘identify’ by different pronouns.

That Toryism, which is really English conservatism, has little in common with the US ought to be clear to anyone taking the trouble to see what Toryism’s essential features are. They can all be summed up by the triad “God, King and country”.

Tory patriotism is based on monarchism and commitment to the established church, especially its High Anglican branch (that used to be called ‘the Tory Party at prayer’). They trace their heritage back to the Cavaliers who supported the Stuarts in the seventeenth century – and in the next century opposed the secession of the American colonies.

The briefest scan of Toryism will show nothing in its political and philosophical makeup that Americans don’t loath. Theirs was the first successful rebellion against European monarchy, and they detested not just established religions but also apostolic ones.

Catholic proselytising was a capital offence in 11 out of the first 13 American colonies, and High Anglicanism didn’t fare much better either. And American patriotism is at odds with ours as often as not. The buzz phrase, “We stood shoulder to shoulder in both World Wars”, ignores all the wars in which the two countries stood apart.

For example, President Eisenhower threatened to crash the pound sterling if Britain didn’t stop her invasion of Egypt in 1956. And in 1982 President Reagan put pressure on Britain not to resist the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. When the South Atlantic Operation did start anyway, Reagan tried to withhold vital intelligence information, and only the surreptitious intercession by Defence Secretary Weinberger overturned that attempt at sabotage.

Even during the Second World War, America enjoyed a much more special relationship with Russia than with Britain.

After all, Lend-Lease aid was provided to Stalin free of charge. But America’s arrangements with the moribund British Empire, whose commitment to the democratic values touted by the USA was rather firmer than Russia’s, were different.

The UK had to pay for everything in cash, IOUs being accepted only grudgingly and with the understanding that no defaults would be allowed. (Britain finished paying her wartime debts only in December, 2006). Specifically in 1940, when Britain’s survival hung by a thread, all transactions had to be done strictly on a cash-and-carry basis.

Alas, both cash and precious metals were rapidly running out, and Britain had to dump all her overseas investments at derisory prices to settle her accounts with the transatlantic champions of democracy. The entire gold reserves of the British Empire had to be used up to pay for American generosity.

Victory was won at the expense not only of British lives but also of Britain’s post-war economic prospects. Churchill knew this was coming.

On 7 December, 1940, he wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the brutally unsentimental terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”

Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold.

Churchill pretended not to understand that “such a course” was precisely in America’s “moral and economic interests”. Morally, the demise of the traditional British Empire, the last major stronghold of Christendom’s political order, played into the hands of American ambitions of leading the post-Christian world. And economically, British cash helped America emerge from the war better off than she had been before it.

That the ‘special relationship’ is a travesty has been manifest for a long time, and what keeps the two countries together is mutual interests, not necessarily mutual admiration, certainly not on the part of British conservatives or American masses.

NATO represents a confluence of such interests, those dealing with defending the West from barbaric invasions. Trump’s understated commitment to keeping the US in NATO, and his siding with the barbarian invaders against vital Western interests, smash common interests to smithereens.

Lord Finkelstein is more correct in the second part of his subtitle than in the first: “the Trump camp is causing chaos, so it’s time we found better friends”. I’m open to ideas: exactly where should we find those better friends? Russia? China? Hamas?

No, of course not. As a committed Remainer, Lord Finkelstein desperately wants Britain to rejoin the EU, a project that real conservatives admire even less than the US.

Should the US leave NATO, a pan-European defensive alliance would become a matter of civilisational survival. But that ought to be as far as it goes. British conservatives find the socialist, supranational European Union abhorrent – for some of the same reasons they don’t invariably admire the US.

Membership in the EU represents the debauchment of each element in the triad of God, King and country. That’s why a conservative British Remainer is an oxymoron. But then lifelong socialists like Lord Finkelstein don’t understand that.

P.S. Not having at my disposal a pen as sharp as Jonathan Swift’s, I can’t do justice to Trump’s AI design of his Gaza Riviera.

Clearly, there are no boundaries of gaudy bad taste that his MAGAlamania can’t expand. I only wonder if the giant statue of himself in the middle of the Trump Gaza Plaza will be hollow inside or made of solid gold. The man is in urgent need of psychiatric help.

“You are an Englishman, and have subsequently drawn the greatest prize in the lottery of life,” said Cecil Rhodes who wasn’t known for his attachment to equity and diversity. (He probably meant ‘therefore’, not ‘subsequently’, but then Rhodes was a man of action, not words.)

Since such attachment has since become de rigueur for anyone daring to open his mouth in public, that simple statement of patriotism would now be seen as politically controversial, possibly even actionable.

The word ‘Englishman’ especially is objectionable on many counts, and, unless you’ve spent the past few years in a different galaxy, you’ll know why. ‘Man’ alone violates a political taboo with flagrant disregard for progressive sensibilities. As for the implied claim to English superiority – well, choose your own term from ‘racist’, ‘jingoist’, ‘colonialist’, ‘white supremacist’, ‘little Englander’ and all the others that spring to mind.

Such is the way of the world: formerly innocuous words have become political statements, each capable of inciting febrile passions. To be able to act in that capacity, words often have to part ways with their dictionary definitions.

Such debauchment is characteristic of modern politics in general, and words aren’t the only victims. Reason and morality are the other targets pinned to the wall for politics to snipe at, and it hits the bullseye every time.

Relativism reigns in morality, scholarship and even linguistics. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the late philosopher of language, would have approved.

He once objected to the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ as a semantic solecism: “For a large class of cases of the employment of the word ‘meaning’ – though not for all – this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

It has been a long time since I read his books, so I don’t remember how he qualified that statement. And qualifications are needed because different people may use the same word differently. Educated people tend to stay close to dictionary definitions, whereas someone like Trump may use ‘lay’ to mean ‘lie’ and ‘deal’ to mean ‘capitulation’.

Athenian rhetoricians were aware of the ambivalence of language, which is why before every debate they insisted on making sure both parties agreed on the terms. That kind of rigour is a thing of the past, and modern people insist that words mean whatever they want them to mean.

For example, ‘English’ rivals ‘man’ for its ambiguity and negative connotations in modern usage. Hence the provocative question “Is Rishi Sunak really English?” that Fraser Nelson asked in the title to his article.

When queried on the subject by the Russo-British comedian Konstantin Kisin, Nelson replied that yes, of course. Sunak was born and bred here, which makes him as English as, well, Cecil Rhodes. To that Kisin replied that his son was born in England too, but he’d never become English. So much for paternal pride — the little boy has every reason to feel dejected.

I couldn’t claim dispassionate objectivity there, for the issue concerns me personally. However, Wittgenstein would instantly spot that the disagreement isn’t substantive but only semantic.

Adjectives describing people by geographic locations can have at least two meanings: ethnic and civic. In some countries, each of those commands its own word. In some others, one word covers both.

The word ‘American’, for example, is predominantly political and vestigially cultural. It implies citizenship of, and hence allegiance to, the USA, and also loyalty to the American idea, although this last demand is on the wane. That’s why the House Committee investigating communist infiltration in the 1950s dealt with un-American rather than anti-American activities.

The word’s ethnic meaning is muted, which is why Americans often identify themselves by adding the land of their ancestry to their self-identification: Irish-American, Russian-American, Italian-American and so on.

Since the US is a country of immigrants, there used to be – still are, but let’s not talk about it too loudly – a premium put on being American born and bred. In the past, that used to be called ‘100 per cent American’, which made the concept arithmetically quantifiable.

The word ‘French’ is more voluminous, with the cultural and linguistic aspects stronger than in most such appellations. In addition to designating citizenship and ethnicity, ‘French’ also means a native Francophone living in France, to some extent even regardless of his citizenship and ethnicity.

The French are more likely to describe, say, a Senegalese or Algerian as French than the English are to refer to a Ghanaian or Nigerian as English. This doesn’t mean the French are any less racist than the English, only that they attach a greater importance to culture.

The Russian language has two words keeping the ethnic and political aspects apart: Russkiy and Rossiyanin. Both are translated into English as ‘Russian’, which loses a valid distinction. Russkiy is ethnically Russian; Rossiyanin is any citizen of the Russian Federation, who may be Kazakh, Uzbek or even Jewish.

This takes me back to the misunderstanding that arose between Messrs Nelson and Kisin. They ignored the recommendation of ancient Athenian rhetoricians and failed to agree on the terms. The two parties may use the words rightly or wrongly, but they’ll still understand each other provided they both use the words the same way.

For our language also keeps ethnicity apart from politics by offering words like ‘English’ (‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Irish’) to identify ethnicity and the word ‘British’ to denote citizenship. Any holder of the British passport is thus British; some Britons, such as Penelope, are also English, and some others, such as Kisin, Sunak and, well, me, aren’t.

If we accept this classification, we’ll agree that becoming British is possible but becoming English isn’t. But the idea of ‘born and bred’ doesn’t quite wash as the definition of the latter.

When the British Empire built by people like Cecil Rhodes was still going strong, many Englishmen were born and bred thousands of miles away from England – and yet were every bit as English as lifelong denizens of Sussex or Norfolk, perhaps even more so. Conversely, many people born and bred in England today would swear at you, or possibly even resort to physical violence, if you called them English.

The deeper I go into this linguistic labyrinth, the more hopelessly lost I get. For ‘English’ and ‘British’ don’t just have objective meanings of, respectively, ethnicity and political allegiance. The subjective aspect of culture and self-identification refuses to be ignored, and that’s where the labyrinth puts the Hampton Court Maze to shame.

The former Tory politician Norman Tebbit (who could have made a much better PM than any we’ve had since) offered the cricket test of Britishness: which side the person rooted for when England played a test match against India, Pakistan or the West Indies.

I pass with flying colours: in any sporting contest involving England and Russia (or the US, whose expired passport is gathering dust somewhere in my drawer), I support England with enthusiasm. But then I also did so living in Russia, when my claim to Britishness was rather more tenuous.

These days, one is supposed to identify by one’s personal pronouns, and in this case that may be as good a solution as any. The personal pronoun of salient importance here is ‘we’. How a person defines his ‘we’ determines his identity.

Speaking for myself, I could never force myself to say ‘we’ when spending the first 25 years of my life in Russia and the next 15 in the US. I did try to do so in America, but the word felt contrived and awkward.

In Britain, the word naturally rolls off my tongue, which organ these days has to bend itself into all sorts of painful shapes when I speak any language other than English. Britain is my ‘we’, English is my first (though not native) language, my wife is English, I write exclusively and read mostly in English.

Add to this my British passport, always kept up to date, and I’m definitely British. But I lack the delusions of grandeur to claim I’ve drawn the winning ticket in the lottery of life. I’ll have to leave ‘English’ for people of a more fortunate nativity.

P.S. None of this prevents me from feeling pride in the achievements of my native land. It has just been announced that Russia tops the list of industrialised nations with the greatest part of the population having no access to lavatories. A country by any other name would smell as sweet.

Three years ago today, people stopped asking “Will he or won’t he?” The question was answered in no uncertain terms: he will and he has. Moreover, given half the chance, he’ll do it again. And again. And again.

On 24 February, 2022, hordes of Russian murderers, rapists and looters invaded the Ukraine and proceeded to do what murderers, rapists and looters do: murder, rape and loot.

Their declared aim was to stamp out the Ukraine’s independence, turning her yet again into an enslaved satellite of an evil Russian regime. That objective, boasted the Botox Boy, would be achieved within three days, a week at most.

Kiev would fall, Zelensky and his cabinet would be ‘de-Nazified’ (the Putin for murdered) and NATO would be rolled back. After all, the Ukraine was only the vanguard of that dastardly organisation spawned by the West, the perennial enemy of unmatched Russian goodness and spirituality.

As Zelensky called his nation to arms, its cause looked lost. “This is probably the last time you’ll see me alive,” said the Ukraine’s president in a televised address. Three years later, he is still with us – and so is his heroic, long-suffering and still gloriously independent nation.

A country that repels aggression and frustrates the invader’s ends has a right to celebrate victory. The outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainians have every reason to be proud, as does a pusillanimous West. For all its myopic penny-pinching and weak-kneed fear of Russia, it gave the Ukraine just enough to keep her in the fight.

The West could and should have given the Ukraine enough to drive the fascist hordes back to their Kremlin lair, but it didn’t, for being, well, pusillanimous. But the West needed an excuse for its half-hearted effort to arm the victim of an aggression threatening to overrun Eastern Europe, for starters.

Excuses weren’t in short supply. One such was the pretence that Putin’s dread of NATO so close to Russian borders was justified. The Botox Boy supposedly had every right to fear NATO using its new eastern members as the beachhead from which to attack Russia.

When such fears are justified, they are called prudence. When they have no bearing on reality, they are called paranoid delusions, and no sane person thought that NATO, a purely defensive organisation, harboured aggressive designs on Russia.

Yet many Westerners feigned understanding of Putin’s concerns as a way of masking their own cowardice. Courtesy of Angela Merkel, whose sycophancy to Putin was borderline treasonous, that type got to be called Putinversteher, someone who understands the Botox Boy, feels his pain.

In many cases, the more appropriate term would be Putinverehrener, someone who worships Putin and considers his muscular brand of fascism to be a viable alternative to flabby Western wokery. This sort of thing has a ring of familiarity to it.

In the 1930s many American isolationists and British aristocrats voiced similar feelings about Hitler. Read their pronouncements and you’ll see that replacing Hitler with Putin would make them sound like today’s reportage.

Unlike the decadent West mired in sybaritic hedonism, Hitler was strong, patriotic, vigorous, decisive and he was doing wonders for Germany. We should have such leaders, and all this talk about his aggressive plans is nonsense. He just wants to reclaim what’s rightfully German, lands we stole at Versailles. Jews? Well, that’s not nice. But one can understand the Führer: Jews can be rather obnoxious, what?

Such rationalisation was in fact the post-rationalisation of a seething deep-seated craving. Those people had the embryo of fascism gestating in their innards, and Hitler sent them a signal that the situation had become propitious for it to come out. They used the mask of understanding to conceal admiration.

The same goes for today’s mouthpieces of Putin in the West, whose name is legion. They keep coming up with spurious arguments to justify their own need to channel their inner Putin.

Mostly these reprobates come from the ranks of those described by a glaring misnomer of ‘conservatives’, but who are in fact fascisoid radicals. Put a different way, they are like physicians who can correctly diagnose a disease, but then prescribe cyanide to treat it.

Everything they bemoan about the West is correct. We do live in a moribund civilisation showing every sign of accelerating decay. Like a snake devouring its own tail, the West is debauching every virtue that made it Western in any other than the geographic sense. The vertebrae of our unifying spiritual spine are being knocked out one by one, and the body is sagging onto itself.

Yet the way to treat that malaise, progressive in more ways than one, is to take stock of our civilisational core and rebuild its essential features – not to use as the role model a frankly fascist regime that imprisons, tortures and murders its opponents, suppresses every semblance of free speech, routinely executes POWs, makes a mockery of elections, rivals the Nazis for racist claims and also for imperialist aspirations.

To be fair, even some decent Westerners fall into the trap of diagnostic precision combined with therapeutic ineptitude. In their case, it’s not evil longings that are to blame but old-fashioned ignorance and insufficient understanding of such matters. Thus, for example, Tim Stanley, a generally sensible young man, tries to vindicate Trump’s betrayal of the Ukraine:

“His approach might be brutal, but is it irrational? Trump’s claims that Ukraine started the war or Zelensky is a dictator are certainly bizarre and offensive; insisting Kyiv sell its mineral resources suggests a return to amoral imperialism.”

No, it’s not irrational, explains young Tim who clearly knows little about the issue in question and understands even less. “This isn’t the Cold War: Russia doesn’t want to conquer the world, and bullying its neighbours poses no direct threat to the US.”

Enter the new breed, the Trumpversteher. True, this isn’t the Cold War, Tim. It’s worse – the war has been hot for 11 years and red-hot for the past three, or haven’t you noticed? Russia may not want to conquer the world, but she does want to make it hospitable to her brand of kleptofascism, which means exerting an influence bordering on domination.

But at least Stanley isn’t a card-carrying Putin stooge like Peter Hitchens. This utterly objectionable personage has been playing lickspittle to Putin since before the latter’s first injection of Botox.

Putin, to him, was the leader of “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”, not a murderous ghoul bent on reviving the Soviet empire, but this time run not by the communist party but by history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime.

Hitchens spent a few months in Russia back in the 90s, which he claims gives him a Gnostic understanding of the country, its leaders and everything they do. Since few people share Hitchens’s idea of himself, he gets more and more defensive, in a hysterical sort of way.

His favourite trick is to claim that his opponents are ignorant. Hitchens, on the other hand, is a polymath savant of Renaissance proportions.

Last week, for example, he wrote that anyone who finds anything wrong with Putin doesn’t know whether it’s Vienna or Prague that’s farther west. “I do,” he announced proudly. Good on you, Peter, you know your elementary school geography. That nonsensical statement entitles you to shill for Putin.

This week came another wild claim. Speaking of the on-going war, Hitchens wrote: “And yet I doubt whether one person in 10,000 can work out why it happened, while nobody at all can point to any good it has done or could ever have done.”

As a service to the hapless 9,999 in 10,000, I’m prepared to fill in the gaps in their education. What happened was that a fascist regime launched an unprovoked aggression against its smaller neighbour trying to preserve its freedom. The why question is easy to answer: that’s what fascist aggressors do. What good it has done is that the smaller country has managed to preserve its independence against overwhelming odds. Glad to be of help.

What’s especially nauseating is that miserable Tuckers like Carlson and Hitchens shed crocodile tears for all those innocent lives lost on both sides. Rather than admitting honestly that they want fascism to win, they claim empathy for human suffering. At the same time, they apportion the blame for the suffering equally at best, and usually assigning the greater portion to the Ukraine.

All that is repeating Kremlin propaganda word for word, and I for one don’t care whether they do so because they are paid by Putin or of their own ghastly accord. The result is the same.

At least all those fascisoid hacks work surreptitiously, by eroding the will to support the Ukraine. The spiritual leader of that tribe, Trump, does nothing surreptitiously. He is Putin’s friend, the Ukraine’s enemy, and he doesn’t care who knows it.

Even so, he doesn’t express his feelings in so many words. Trump too feels the need to explain. In his case, that means lying through his teeth.

Thus it was the Ukraine, not Russia, that started the war (a leaf right out of the Kremlin propaganda book). The US has spent more on supporting the Ukraine than Europe did (a lie). Specifically, Zelensky’s obstreperousness has cost America $350 billion (another lie: the actual number is $58 billion). Zelensky is an unelected dictator (yet another lie: Zelensky was elected by a landslide, and no democratic country holds elections when she is under attack). Zelensky’s public support is four per cent (another lie on top of the others: it’s in fact 57 per cent).

Again, I don’t know and don’t care whether Trump is Putin’s agent of long standing, as some people claim. The important thing is that he wouldn’t be saying or doing anything different if he were.

Collectively, all such small lies add up to a big one: the Ukraine has lost the war and must accept any ‘deal’ Putin and Trump can shove down her throat. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, if the West truly understood the existential danger presented by the fascist threat from the east, the Ukraine would have been armed sufficiently to rout the Russian hordes.

She showed her ability to do so even with one hand tied behind her back. Ukrainian troops soundly defeated Russian offensives on Kiev and Kharkov, drove the Russian navy out of the Black Sea having sunk several warships, closed their skies to the Russian air force and even managed to occupy a chunk of Russian territory. When ceding their own land, they make the invaders move in over a carpet of Russian corpses.

The fact that a free Ukraine is still standing is a triumph in itself. If properly armed and spared the defeatist talk of the likes of Stanley, the pro-Putin propaganda of Peter ‘Tucker’ Hitchens, and Trump’s open sympathy for, and support of, Russian fascism, Ukrainians could still rout the invaders.

As it is, this gruesome anniversary is a chance for all decent people to repeat the slogan of Ukrainian resistance: “Glory to the Ukraine!” “To the heroes the glory!”, is the stock reply to that one.

No, not really, is the short answer to that. Yet, every time we visit provincial England, this question crops up.

We live in London and have a bolthole in rural France, where we spend a few months every year. The only realistic way of getting there is by car, and over the past quarter-century we’ve tried every conceivable route down from Calais.

As a result, we know places like Senlis, Rouen and Rheims better than any comparable places in Britain. And of course, our regional centres, Auxerre and Nevers, are intimately familiar, but without breeding contempt.

We also strike out quite often, sometimes as far south as Provence, as far east as Lorraine or as far west as Bordeaux, and our gasps of delight come in a steady stream. But there is also guilt gnawing underneath, somewhere near the pancreas.

After all, Penelope is English born and bred, and I’m bred if regrettably not born. Our passports are British, we converse in English, our culture is more English than any other, I write in English only and, if you can forgive such a mundane detail, the means enabling us to enjoy France came from our activities in England.

We both love England, Penelope in an understated native fashion, I with a neophyte’s zeal. London is by far my favourite city in the world, and the only one where I’ve ever felt at home.

Then why on earth do we find provincial English towns stultifying while taking such delight in their French counterparts? Surely, that must be because we aren’t making the effort to get in touch with the salt of England’s earth.

This line of thought tends to make us hop in the car and go on exploration missions. Now, anyone who has ever driven in both Britain and France will easily believe this piece of trivia: France has the same number of cars, but two-and-a-half times more territory and, crucially, ten times the number of road miles per car.

Such dry statistics come alive when the same journey that would take 30 minutes in France (outside the Paris area) takes three times as long in Britain, especially in its South East. Hence embarking on such forays takes some resolve and an additional stimulus.

On Sunday the other day it came from some silly ranking of England’s most beautiful towns, in which the top rating went to Lewes in East Sussex – within striking distance from London, less than 70 miles away. Why not go there, have a pleasant walk and a nice pub lunch with a pint of good old English ale?

Easier done than said. The drive took almost two hours, but in light of the statistics cited above, that didn’t come unexpected. But our culinary hopes got frustrated.

The only edible part of the ‘nice pub lunch’ was peas cooked from frozen. The ‘good old English ale’ was a watery local brew. If you sent it out to a lab, the report would probably say that your horse has diabetes. (A disclaimer is in order: I’m sure we could have found better food and drink in Lewes had we known where to go. But we didn’t.)

The place itself was pretty enough. The ruins of a Norman castle were impressive, many houses were only a little younger, everything was in good nick. Actually too good for my taste – I missed the genteel decrepitude of similar towns in France.

But on balance Lewes is a good-looking place. We also passed by several bookshops and saw three posters advertising classical concerts – in similar French towns you may find the former but seldom the latter.

They why did we experience the same sensation of walls closing in on us that comes every time we find ourselves in towns strewn over England’s green and pleasant land? Does this mean we aren’t patriotic? Isn’t England our home?

The answer came to me a few days later, after the gastric ill effects of that lunch had subsided, and the toxic taste of that godawful beer had been washed out of my mouth with French wine and Scotch whisky. We feel that way not in spite of England being our home but specifically because of it.

When we travel in France, we are tourists exploring a foreign land. When we travel in England, we are looking at different rooms in our extended home. The different perspective creates different assessment criteria: our eyesight changes focus.

This tallies with the findings of modern science, specifically those dealing with the relationship between the subject and object of study. This sounds like voodoo science, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand: different researchers conducting exactly the same experiment with exactly the same equipment and exactly the same sample may get different results.

The object is identical, the subjects aren’t and neither are the test results. The only possible conclusion is that the mental energy emitted by investigators skews the outcome of the investigation.

I’m sure those who are better versed in such subjects than I am find such observations trivial. I find them fascinating: the material world may not be just material. Mind over matter may not be such an obsolete notion.

So why do we find Lewes and similar places stultifying while finding similar towns in France utterly delightful? Because when we find ourselves in a provincial English town, we always ask ourselves whether we’d like to live there. The answer is a resounding no, and that adds a bias to our aesthetic judgement.

The answer would be the same in Auxerre or Nevers, but we never ask the question. We are emotionally involved with English towns, and emotions queer the pitch of both aesthetics and reason. French towns, on the other hand, aren’t to us places of hypothetical habitation. They are closer to being museum exhibits, paintings we admire in a gallery.

These don’t leave us emotionally cold, but such emotions don’t overlap with quotidian life. They are detached and thus aesthetically purer and unencumbered.

Home is indeed where the heart is, but it’s also a place that comes laden with emotional baggage. With it comes a heightened critical judgement, sometimes fair, at other times not so much.

Some of our best friends live in provincial English towns and seem to enjoy it. They must be more philosophical than we are, less dependent on their physical environment.

Then again, they are our friends, not identical twins. They are neither blessed nor cursed with the same experience we’ve had, nor are their genes identical to ours. Vive la différence, as they say in Auxerre.

Such was the caution issued by the political philosopher Eric Voegelin (né Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin) with his Germanic heavy-handedness.

Adding the lighter touch demanded by his second language, English, this simply means: “Don’t try to create heaven on earth.” The Kingdom of God is an eschatological ideal, not a how-to guide to running world affairs.

That was a grave error committed by, inter alia, Tolstoy who insisted that political life be organised according to the Sermon on the Mount (hence his pet idea of non-resistance). Tolstoy tried to turn the commandments of one kingdom, that of God, into the constitution of another, that of the Caesar, an attempt doomed to failure even theoretically, never mind in practice.

A keen observer if a poor thinker, Tolstoy saw that his plea was being ignored so consistently that it was obviously going to be ignored in perpetuity. That observation led him to out-and-out nihilism, with him flailing away at, well, everything: the state in general, every state in particular, the West, capitalism, art, property, sex, marriage – and even the author of his favourite sermon. (For details, I selfishly recommend my book God and Man According to Tolstoy.)

However, the other road, that of a political society devoid of any shared ideals, preferably noble ones, leads to the same destination, nihilism. This understanding goes back to Aristotle, with his concept of homonoia, which can be loosely translated as ‘like-mindedness’.

This brings to mind the only words in the Declaration of Independence I really like: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”. A nation does become a nation when a general understanding exists of what truths are indeed self-evident. That’s what turns a population into a people.

Homonoia is a sort of catalytic converter, turning an aggregate of atomised individuals into a political society or, to use today’s buzz word, a community. Like-mindedness here cuts deeper than simply so many people agreeing on so many policies.

Homonoia is a widely shared understanding of what it means to be a human being and, consequently, what kind of political arrangement should result from this understanding. It was clear to Aristotle, and Plato before him, that an erosion of homonoia would lead to a collapse of the state or, broader, civilisation.

Such like-mindedness can’t be legislated by government and enforced by coercion. It has to come from a collective understanding of common interests ultimately based on a shared metaphysical core.

Aristotle’s idea laid a foundation for all subsequent political theory, especially the kind that deals with civilisations rather than just the rough-and-tumble of electoral jousts. Thus, for example, Tocqueville:

“It is easy to see that no society will prosper without such belief… For without ideas in common, no common action would be possible, and without common action, men might exist, but there could be no body social.”

That was written before the nuclear age, hence Tocqueville’s optimism. When homonoia disintegrates these days, the result may be the demise not only of body social, but also of body physical.

While no state can be run on the Sermon on the Mount, Western civilisation was held together for many centuries by the spiritual premise of Christianity. That didn’t rid people of sin, including their propensity to kill one another, but it did create a cogent society sharing the same inner core.

Our civilisation didn’t become perfect but at least it became viable. Apocalyptic disasters, such as the two world wars, only happened when the West’s homonoia developed cracks.

It’s as clear as it is lamentable that Christianity no longer acts as homonoia in our civilisation. But what does? Anything?

If the answer to these questions is ‘nothing’, which seems plausible, then we are in deep trouble. Following Voegelin’s advice and rejecting Tolstoy’s pleas, we have refused to “immanentise the eschaton”. So what homonoia do we immanentise? (Yes, I agree: Voegelin’s word is unwieldy, but I did tell you he was German.)

What is the common spiritual core that holds our civilisation together, preventing the atoms of individual countries, parties or even people from spinning out of the collective molecule?

Since I’m writing a short article rather than a long book, I have to skip the intermediate steps and put my conclusion up front. As is becoming more blindingly obvious every day, Western man has been able to oust Christianity as his homonoia, but not to replace it.

Belief in the eschatological nature of liberal democracy, enunciated with particular obtuseness by Francis Fukuyama, doesn’t hold water. Western people pay lip service to it by rote, but deep down they see that these days democracy run riot is less likely to bring people together than to tear them asunder.

Trump’s shenanigans leave little doubt on that score – he is illustrating with every word and deed the divisive nature of today’s democracy. In the distant past, most people sensed that, even if their views were different, their interests weren’t. Underneath it all they shared a Mowgli-like understanding: “We be of one blood, thou and I”. Today, people holding different views look at one another through the red mist of hatred.

The West lost its homonoia long ago, but in the absence of a deadly crisis it has been able to paper some of the cracks. Now that a deadly crisis is looming, the cracks are becoming too wide to cover with pretence.

I am genuinely worried that we may not survive. This isn’t alarmist panic-mongering but simply an observation that a deadly danger exists. We may find a way around it or we may not, but denying it exists makes the second possibility more likely than the first.

Believing that unlike other great civilisations in history ours is immune to destruction is foolish arrogance at its most soaring. Ask those old Babylonians, Egyptians, Athenians and Romans for confirmation – they’ll tell you what’s what, shouting from their graves.

“Does any living composer write better for choirs, or more demandingly when circumstances allow, than James MacMillan?”

This obviously rhetorical question opens one of the reviews of James MacMillan’s oratorio Ordo Virtutum, premiered in the UK last Thursday.

I agree, but with one minor amendment: even of the composers no longer living only Bach stands side by side with MacMillan, certainly in his handling of vocal harmonies. Sir James has the misfortune of being our contemporary, which is why reviewers hesitate to place him next to the giants of the past. Let’s wait a century or so, shall we?

The Latin text of Ordo Virtutum comes from Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), medieval polymath with a fair claim to being the greatest woman in history.

Hildegard was a mystic visionary whose faith illuminated all her works, be it philosophy, theology, botany, medicine – or musical compositions. She was one of the few composers ever to write both the music and the words for her sublime chants, and many of them still survive.

Her Ordo Virtutum is a liturgical drama and also perhaps the world’s oldest morality play. Hildegard found poignant verbal and musical messages to depict a soul torn between virtues and Satan. One detects echoes of her personal fight against the devil, with his claims on her body, and one rejoices with Hildegard at the victory hard-won by her glorious soul.

Hildegard’s own chants, hymns and antiphons were monophonic, that is consisting of a single melodic line. Their drama is meditative and understated, drawing the listener in gradually and getting him in touch with his own soul note by note.

Anyone using her compositions as a starting point for his own faces the task of preserving Hildegard’s contemplative subtlety while adding the bold rhythms and dynamism expected from modern composers. That is what MacMillan did to perfection, and Hildegard would have been proud of him.

While Sir James did justice to Hildegard, the performance did justice to him. Both the choir and soloists of BBC singers were superb, as was the conducting of Sofi Jeannin. But I was especially impressed with the percussionist Andrew Barclay, the sole instrumental accompanist.

MacMillan has always treated percussion as a solo instrument, and Barclay played his crotales, vibraphone, suspended cymbal and tom-tom with subtlety and virtuosity. As a dilettante, I had never suspected that lurking within percussive instruments is so much range and finesse of expression. Hence I found the evening as instructive as it was moving.

The reviewer in question said most of the same things, and it’s always nice to see a kindred spirit sharing my aesthetic and spiritual tastes. However, if you look at the title above, you’ll know that he also found words of criticism.

Those words came across in the last paragraph: “… with the performers, however committed, facing us motionless, you’re also conscious that diversity is never the name in British professional choral singing, not even in the youth division.”

Excuse me? I’ve heard of non sequiturs, but this one stopped me dead. What in God’s name does this have to do with MacMillan, Hildegard, music, virtues, Satan, liturgy or anything else relevant to the performance?

Should the singers have turned their backs on the audience to conceal their irredeemable whiteness? I suppose that could have worked, especially with high collars covering their necks. Not sure about the acoustics though, but some things about musical performances seem to be more important than sheer sounds and the meaning they convey.

The reviewer had to send a message of political virtue ad urbi et orbi, but was it an inner compulsion or a diktat imposed from outside? I don’t know, and when I read that sentence I couldn’t think straight enough to ponder such questions. Distant memories came flooding in, and I shuddered.

When I was growing up in Moscow, no speech or written work passed muster if it didn’t contain quotations from Lenin. Alas, unlike Hildegard, the father of all progressive humanity wasn’t a polymath. He mostly wrote engaging texts on usurping power, using it to exterminate whole social classes and to rob people of whatever little property they possessed.

One typical statement was: “It matters not if 90 per cent of the Russian people perish so long as 10 per cent bring about a world revolution.” (90 per cent of the Russian population made up over 100 million at the time – Lenin thought on a large scale.) Regardless of what you think of such sentiments, you must agree they don’t fit easily into, say, research papers or concert reviews.

But Soviet leaders weren’t out to make life easy for scholars, writers or critics. They knew what mattered in life and had the means to enforce their view. Lenin couldn’t possibly be irrelevant to any subject, be it microbiology, music, physics, pharmaceuticals or, in my case, linguistics.

When I was at university, I once submitted a paper on the Great Vowel Shift, a sweeping change in English pronunciation that occurred between the 15^th and 17^th centuries. The work took much effort and long hours, what with the reference materials being almost impossible to find. In the end, I was quite proud of myself, a sentiment emphatically not shared by the academic panel.

They regretfully had to reject my paper because it contained not a single quotation from Lenin. My protests, such as that the great man had more important things to worry about than the articulation of English vowels, were in vain. My academic superiors shrugged and explained that such things were beyond their control.

Context be damned: even instructions on the use of electric appliances had to include Lenin quotations. Everything ever published was nothing but commentary on the 45 volumes of Lenin Collected Works.

That experience left scars, which open every time I see the same sort of thing happening in a supposedly free country. As they did the other day, when I read that review of a remarkable performance.

Do the editors of that paper demand expressions of wokery in every article, regardless of subject or context? I doubt it. Things haven’t degenerated quite as much yet, although they are definitely moving in that direction.  

So I don’t think the critic was censored prescriptively. The situation is much worse than that: he censored himself. His sensitive antennae caught the emanations of the Zeitgeist, sent electric signals to his brain, the brain to the fingers – and out came a statement of loyalty to a pernicious ideology.

But why did he stop there? The English translation of Hildegard’s Latin text was projected above the platform, but why just English? The organisers are guilty of blatant discrimination against people who may not understand the language of white colonialism.

NHS leaflets, for example, are available in 32 languages, including such essential ones as Yoruba, Oromo and Pashto, with not a whiff of Anglo-white supremacy anywhere in sight. (I wish I owned the translation agency handling NHS work – it must be raking in millions.)

Putting so many translations on during a concert would have been logistically difficult, but at least such ubiquitous languages as Urdu, Bengali, Mandarin and Arabic surely should have been accommodated.

Or do the organisers think concert goers are more linguistically advanced than NHS patients? Surely not – such thoughts are elitist, classist and discriminatory.

You can understand my frustration: When I left the USSR, I didn’t expect it to follow me everywhere I went. It now has, and things like re-education centres and labour camps may well follow. A harrowing thought, that.

Generally, I try to vary my subjects not to bore readers more than is unavoidable. Well, not now. Every other subject seems trivial compared to what’s going on in the Ukraine.

I’m convinced that the consummation of the love affair between Trump and Putin is by far the most pivotal event of my lifetime (I missed the Second World War by a few years).

Every day brings new outrages, each one pushing the world closer to a devastating global conflict, and the two lowlife personages are to blame. I’d even suggest that Trump is worse than Putin, if only because the United States is supposed to be the leader of the free world.

Trump’s effrontery is most refreshing. Yesterday he went so far as to blame Zelensky for the war, which is like saying that the rape victim egged her attacker on by wearing a short skirt.

Like a gangster holding a victim at his mercy, Trump feels he can get away with mouthing any gibberish. Who cares about words? He’s the one holding the big gun. Just look at his statement yesterday, when Trump sneered at Zelensky for protesting against not being invited to the negotiations on his country’s fate:

“I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat. Well, they’ve had a seat for three years and a long time before that. This could have been settled very easily. Just a half-baked negotiator could have settled this years ago without, I think, without the loss of much land, very little land, without the loss of any lives, and without the loss of cities that are just laying on their side.”

“Laying”, sic. All one can say is that Trump’s expensive education failed miserably. “To lay”, Donny, is a transitive verb in English. Saying ‘lay’ instead of ‘lie’ is a sure and, alas, widespread sign of illiteracy.

This is a minor quibble about a major problem: the United States is currently governed by a savage lout in Putin’s pocket. Every word in Trump’s tirade is a lie, including, to quote Mary McCarthy, ‘and’ and ‘the’.

The war could indeed have been prevented by the Ukraine’s surrender before the invasion or stopped at any time thereafter. But that wouldn’t just have involved “the loss of very little land”. Since Trump knows this, what he is saying is a boldfaced lie.

When pushing the button for the invasion, Putin declared that his goal was to “de-Nazify and de-militarise” the Ukraine. In other words, to stamp out her sovereignty. And the original thrust of the Russian offensive was aimed not at “very little land” but Kiev, which Putin said would be taken in three days.

Anyway, as far as Trump is concerned, it was the Ukraine that started the war: “Today I heard, oh, we weren’t invited. Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years – you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

“You should have never started it” – has there ever been a more mendacious statement uttered on who started a war? Oh yes, both Hitler and Stalin justified their 1939 rape of Poland by declaring the Poles had provoked it. Trump is in good company there.

You must understand that, when Trump says such things, he is merely being the dummy to Putin’s ventriloquist. Just think about it: the president of a free country is repeating verbatim words put into his mouth by a fascist dictator.

One cretinous claim that dictator makes and Trump repeats is that Zelensky isn’t a legitimate leader because there have been no elections since the war started. Of course, Zelensky could have ensured his legitimacy by doing a Putin: having ballot boxes stuffed all over the country. But he neglected to do that, so he’s no democrat.

Trump doesn’t question Putin’s legitimacy, only Zelensky’s: “Well, we have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law, essentially martial law in Ukraine, where the leader in Ukraine, I mean, I hate to say it, but he’s down at 4 per cent approval rating and where a country has been blown to smithereens.”

Actually, Zelensky’s approval rating is closer to 50 per cent, but I did tell you that a gangster holding the big gun feels entitled to say anything he wishes. However, by Trump’s (or rather Putin’s) logic Churchill wasn’t a legitimate leader either, and Britain stopped being a democracy between 1935 and 1945 when no general election was held.

The Ukraine, according to Donald ‘Putin’ Trump, forfeited any claim to legitimacy by declaring martial law when coming under attack. The word ‘martial’, deriving as it does from Mars, the god of war, should have given him a clue: it’s a temporary law introduced at war time.

Following Pearl Harbour, Trump’s own country arbitrarily interned thousands of Americans for the crime of being ethnically Japanese. People who cherished due process winced, but they acknowledged that the measure was excusable. Democratic bets are off when there’s a war on.

Trump’s musings would be absurd if taken at face value. But, in fact, he doesn’t give a damn about the Ukraine observing democratic niceties.

Trump simply shares Putin’s hatred of Zelensky and, broader, of the Ukraine’s independence. Zelensky had the temerity to rally his country when Trump’s fascist friend committed an act of blatant aggression, and now he doesn’t deserve his post any more than his country deserves her sovereignty.

Trump-Putin demands elections as a precondition for any peace talks involving the Ukraine. Yes, but what if the Ukraine complies, holds elections, and Zelensky wins? Wouldn’t that be a slap in Trump-Putin’s face?

Yes, it would be. That’s why Zelensky would never be allowed to stand in any such mockery of a presidential election demanded by the partners in crime.

The Ukrainians would be told that what’s needed isn’t any old election, but one on which their wartime leader wouldn’t be allowed to stand. If they refuse, Zelensky would probably be assassinated, and it could be either Putin or Trump sending the murder squad out.

After that, an election would be held at gunpoint, just like the travesty conducted in the Crimea after the Russian invasion. Some Quisling would be elected, and the Ukraine would fall under Russian rule yet again, with America’s blessing. And then massacres would start, with thousands, possibly millions, murdered for having dared resist Russian invaders.

Other observers also noticed that Trump simply parrots Putin, and Trump hastened to assuage their fears: “You know, it’s been a long time since we’ve had an election. That’s not a Russia thing. That’s something coming from me and coming from many other countries also.”

Out of idle curiosity, which many other countries? Iran? North Korea? China? Other champions of democracy? Come on, Donald, the people have a right to know.

Meanwhile, Putin and his foulmouthed ‘diplomat’ Lavrov are making hay while Trump’s sun shines. For weeks now, it has been mooted that, following a ceasefire, an international peace-keeping force would move into the no-man’s land separating the two countries.

Trump said that no US troops would take part, but everyone confidently assumed that the contingent would come from European NATO members. Now, emboldened by Trump’s treachery, the Russians are saying that the presence of NATO soldiers in the Ukraine wouldn’t be tolerated. They don’t want peacekeeping because they don’t want to keep peace.

Yet again the world is approaching the brink of a global catastrophe, and yet again the world is reacting the ostrich way. For Trump gives every sign of delivering Europe to Putin the way Roosevelt and Churchill delivered the eastern part of it to Stalin.

That eventually put the world on the threshold of nuclear disaster, narrowly averted several times at the eleventh hour. Next time we may not be so lucky.

I won’t countenance the laments of some of my conservative friends who wish Thomas Matthew Crooks had shot straighter. But I understand how they feel.

Trump walks and talks like a two-bit gangster, whose whole education came from the school of hard knockers followed by Screw U.

Yet a hope flickered that at least he wouldn’t act according to type. That hope has now been dashed.

First Trump betrayed the Ukraine by cutting her out of the peace negotiations. She is being treated like a child sent out of the room while the grown-ups discuss serious business.

Now I haven’t read Trump’s book on the art of making a deal, but I wonder if he recommends relinquishing all the leverage by giving the other party everything it desires before the negotiations even start. If he doesn’t, then the ongoing spectacle will be covered in a sequel: Putin was already promised everything he wants.

Zelensky, on the other hand, is treated as a supplicant who has no say in the matter and must accept whatever crumbs he is thrown. Or else – we know where you live, where your wife shops, where your children go to school.

Trump’s version of such gangster talk differs in exact words but not in substance. If Zelensky plays silly buggers, he won’t even be allowed to keep the rump of his country: “They may make a deal. They may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday or they may not be Russian someday. But I want this money back.”

The last sentence is a reference to the reparations Trump insists the Ukraine must pay. Or rather “pay up”, which is his favourite way of putting it. The price of the country not becoming “Russian someday” has been established at a cool half-trillion, $500 billion.

Even assuming that the Ukraine is obligated to “pay up”, which is pay back every cent she has received from the US in aid, the number is fanciful. So far Congress has approved five packages amounting to $175 billion.

Trump, however, insists the US has spent $300 billion, and he isn’t so “stupid” as to approve any more. (“Whadja think I am, stupid?” I can just hear him say.) Even so, if my arithmetic is correct, 300 is still less than 500. So what’s going on is old-fashioned “we know where you live” extortion.

As a percentage of GDP, Trump’s blackmailing demand exceeds the reparations imposed on defeated Germany at Versailles, and you remember how well that worked out. It’s debatable whether Germany was the aggressor in that war, but she definitely was in the next one, and so was Japan. However, the reparations the two countries had to “pay up” after 1945 were minuscule. In fact, they came out as net recipients under the Marshall Plan.

Trump is magnanimous enough not to demand cash on the nail. Instead, he wants to turn the Ukraine into a US protectorate, but without offering any protection.

The leaked terms of the “deal” offered Zelensky are take it or leave it. And if you leave it, we know where you live.

Zelensky is told to turn over control of the country’s minerals to the US. And not just that.

The agreement covers every asset of the Ukraine, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”. “Other infrastructure” sounds a bit open-ended to me, but gangsters make such demands when they think the victim is at their mercy.

The US will take 50 per cent of all revenues from production of natural resources, and the same cut of  “all new licences issued to third parties” for future exploration. The US will set up a designated fund to handle such transactions, and the fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences.

This would effectively turn the Ukraine into an American colony, with the country having no money to reconstruct its cities and infrastructure destroyed by Russian fascists. Once Trump or his successors have squeezed the Ukraine dry, she will be left to the tender mercies of Putin or his successors.

Meanwhile Putin will get 20 per cent of the Ukraine’s territory and with it political control of the devastated, impoverished nation. A Russian puppet, such as Yanukovych, will be installed in Kiev and the freedom-loving nation will be enslaved politically by one power and economically by another.

This is the way to treat aggressors finding themselves on the losing end, except the victorious allies didn’t treat the vanquished belligerents that way in the two World Wars. Meting out this kind of punishment to a country that heroically resisted aggressive barbarians for three years, thwarting their dastardly aims, is worse than immoral.

It’s a criminal affront to honour – not Trump’s for he has none, but America’s, a country that likes to claim a moral high ground towering above the rest of the world. Now the country is letting a gangster president make her act as a criminal family, which has to sadden anyone who had high hopes for America.

And Putin still isn’t happy. “A lasting and long-term viable resolution is impossible without a comprehensive consideration of security issues on the continent,” said Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman. 

This Aesopian language means NATO rolling back to its 1997 borders. Since Trump has no time for NATO anyway, I shan’t be surprised if Putin gets that concession too. There have been reports already that Trump will remove American tripwire troops from the Baltics, and leaving all of Europe without an American umbrella is sure to follow.

It’s not just the Ukraine that’s being betrayed but Europe and, even broader, Western civilisation. If Trump goes so far as to withdraw America from NATO altogether, and I wouldn’t put it past him, that defensive organisation will disband, certainly de facto, but probably de jure as well.

Putin will then be able to pick off Eastern European countries one by one, starting probably with the three small Baltic republics. Whatever symbolic protection Article 5 of the NATO Charter offers will no longer be there, and every country will be left to fend for itself.

Even assuming European countries embark on a massive rearmament campaign, and Trump is right when saying they should have done so long ago, it will be years before Western armies will be able to deter or, barring that, defeat Russian hordes. And we may not have years at our disposal.

Europe is in danger of being plunged into decades of war, and Asia won’t be far behind. Seeing the preferential treatment received by the aggressor and the humiliation of its victim, China will be emboldened to attack Taiwan – after all, Chinese communists haven’t been creating the world’s largest navy just to fight India.

The US will cede her superpower status step by step, with evil predators accepting one surrender after another, the sort of thing Trump calls a “deal”. America’s interests will go the way of her honour, and the net effect of Trump’s presidency will be disastrous – regardless of how successful he is in trimming the federal budget and securing his country’s borders.

But gangsters don’t plan far ahead, and neither do old presidents with less than four years left in their term. Tomorrow they may be dead, so the time to grab all they can is now.

Trump is transparently acting in Putin’s interests and, perhaps unwittingly, against America’s. What do you think the Botox Boy has on him? It has to be something major, and I used to wonder about that in all seriousness.

Then, allowing for the possibility that I might be wrong, I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. It’s now pushing its way back to the very front. All I can say is that the free world can ill-afford as its leader a Manchurian candidate with gangster tendencies.

Can someone talk sense into Trump, explaining to him that it isn’t the Ukraine who owes us, but we who owe her? No, is the answer to that.