Month: February 2025

I feel sympathy mixed with Schadenfreude when watching dogmatic followers of any ideology in action. Sooner or later they run headlong into the stonewall of irreconcilable contradictions, and their brains scramble.

Since they can’t give up their ideology for, well, ideological considerations, they have to give up reason and any semblance of intellectual integrity. Instead they indulge in rhetorical calisthenics to put any circus contortionist to shame. Yet no twists and turns can lead them out of their predicament.

Take Left-wing ideologues, for example. They have a set of unchallengeable pieties, and I don’t have to give you the full list.

One such piety is the conviction that only denizens of the Third World have virtue. They may not be impeccably pristine but, compared to the vile West with its [colonialism, imperialism, misogyny, inequality and so on], they stand out as victimised paragons of goodness.

Muslims make up a large swath of Third World hagiography, which makes them saintly fighters against Western wickedness and hence ipso facto icons of woke ideologies.

But then the icons begin to crack, and seeping through the fissures are some disconcerting reports. For example, it turns out that Muslims treat women without the reverence demanded by woke, in this case feminist, sensibilities.

In fact, the status of women in some Islamic countries is similar to that of livestock. They are seen as strictly functional beings created by Allah for the sole purpose of waiting on men hand and foot, not to mention other parts of the anatomy. On hearing that, a woke ideologue begins to squirm.

And then – shock, horror. Apparently, rather than obediently treating same-sex relationships as equal, perhaps even superior, to the more common kind – Muslims tend to throw homosexuals off tall buildings. Squirming turns into agony.

Or take the sacrosanct human right to identify as any of the 100-odd sexes. Any doubt about the sanctity of that right brands the naysayer as an enemy. But then it turns out that feminists are perhaps the greatest opponents of accepting former men as women. Trans is good, feminism is a virtue, so how come they clash? And how do wokers of the world reconcile that conflict?

I could perhaps think of a way, but won’t. I enjoy too much watching conflicts of pieties from the sidelines – especially since it’s not just Left-wing ideologues who tie themselves in knots trying to untangle such conundrums.

I know quite a few people who treat Trump as a messiah. Their whole Weltanschauung is the flesh built on the skeleton of their deified idol. And deities can do no wrong by definition.

Anyone who attempts to find fault with anything the idol says or does is a heretic to be immolated in the pyre of fiery invective. If Christ could say “He who is not with Me is against Me,” then Trump and his zealots are also entitled to say the same thing.

But here’s the rub. Some of my Trumpist friends have been staunch supporters of the Ukraine from 2014 onwards – and avowed enemies of Putinism for quite a bit longer. And now that Trump is obviously trying to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper by bypassing Zelensky and striking a deal (dread word) with the fascist aggressor, my ideological friends find themselves in a pickle.

They bang their heads against the wall trying to find a way out, but that door is nailed shut. Either you betray the Ukraine in your own mind, or commit apostasy by admitting that Trump is neither divine nor even angelic. He is a flawed individual with some good ideas, but also with many tragic failings that may yet cancel out whatever good he does.

The most current example of that is his concerted effort to throw the Ukraine first and Europe second under the bus, which supporters of the Ukraine’s heroic struggle try in vain to square with their hagiographic adoration of Trump.

Their last line of defence is saying that things aren’t what they appear to be. This reminds me of the Polish aphorist Jerzy Lec who once quipped, “Reality isn’t what really happens”. In this case, reality is for real. Trump is betraying the Ukraine, setting up the stage for a wider conflict in the near future.

My aim here isn’t Trump-bashing but ideology-bashing. The point is that no set of beliefs rates a dogmatic status on earth unless it comes down from heaven.

A cogent system of thought has to rest on a solid philosophical and theological base that alone enables the observer to look down on world events from a high vantage point, rather than being mired in their midst.

A bird’s eye view provides a clear sight of the vicissitudes and relativities of politics, leading the thinker to the realisation that, as often as not, the moral, absolutist solution to any problem also happens to be the most practical.

In the absence of that vantage point, petty relativities often take on aspects of the absolute – until they turn out mutually exclusive with other putative absolutes, proving that most of them are simply fallacies.

A propensity to succumb to ideological fervour is a symptom of intellectual laziness, a pandemic disease of modernity. What’s especially risible is various fire-eating ideologues claiming that their particular obsession is commonsensical and pragmatic, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky idealistic.

In fact, secular obsessions have nothing to do with common sense – and everything to do with worshipping a secular idol in defiance of reason and morality. The wages of that sin can only ever be disastrous.

The other day JD Vance correctly outlined the deleterious effect of woke ideologies on the core values of the West. However, he fails to realise that the ideological totem at which he worships, Trumpism, can be as damaging.

In his Republic Plato explored the concept of a state ruled by the philosopher king. That, as he himself knew, was only a hypothetical proposition. It’s not philosophers but men of action who tend to run countries.

But no action will succeed unless inspired by sound and dispassionate thought. Anyone capable of thinking about politics in that manner has to proceed, perhaps unwittingly, from a system of thought that transcends politics and supersedes ideologies. If he doesn’t, a disaster will never be far around the corner.

Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is a good book whose author has to know everything I’m saying. Alas, his political ambitions force him into an ideological straitjacket that can’t be shaken off.

He hitched his wagon to Trump’s star against his own original instincts. Back in 2016, when Trump won his first presidential term, Vance publicly called him “reprehensible” and an “idiot”. Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler, which has to be put down to febrile polemical ardour.

Since then Vance has changed his tune by selling his soul for a pot of ideological message. Such transactions seldom end up well – ideologies, whatever they may be, are deadly toxins of the mind. And once bargained away, one’s soul can seldom be bought back.

Some of my readers are going to gasp in disbelief, but I’ll say it anyway: I am not perfect.

I’m overweight, I drink too much, I’m messy, and these are just my minor failings. But because I’m aware of them, I’m always grateful for criticism and advice – provided these are offered politely and in good faith.

Alas, when those conditions aren’t met, another weakness of mine comes to the fore: I’m short of temper and inclined to swear at the slightest provocation. Hence, even if I realise that my impolite critic is right, I’m certain to tell him exactly what he can do with his remarks.

Extrapolating from me to my country and then to my continent, I feel like swearing at JD Vance after the speech he delivered in Munich. This though I agree with many things he said.

Trump and his emissaries ought to remind themselves of Georges Buffon’s maxim: le style c’est l’homme même. The style is the man himself or, in the populist parlance they affect, it ain’t just what you say, but how you say it.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” announced Vance in the language of Western flicks favoured by his boss. That I suppose is true, but it doesn’t mean American politicians should talk in the language of ill-bred gunslingers.

However, this once I’m prepared to overlook the censorious tone Trump and his people adopt when talking to their allies and concentrate on the content of Vance’s oration.

His heart is largely in the right place, but at times it parts ways with his mind. He started well:

“The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.”

I couldn’t agree more. Great civilisations don’t perish just because of an outside threat. They do so when an outside threat coincides with a period of internal decay and concomitant decline in self-confidence. These can do their suicidal job even on their own, but an outside threat can make ruin faster and surer.

While objecting to the tone of Vance’s remarks and indeed his right to make them (if the US wants to leave Europe to its own devices, it thereby forfeits the privilege of offering unsolicited advice), I could happily sign my own name under most of them.

Yes, Europe should stop illegal immigration, and it should definitely spend more on its defence. How much more? When survival is at stake, there is only one possible answer to that question: as much as it takes. Europe has been riding America’s coattails for too long and it should learn how to stand on its own hind legs.

And yes, the ongoing orgy of wokery debauches Europe, undermining such vital aspects of Western identity as free speech. But what is the root of all such aspects, the ubiquitous sine qua non of this identity? In common with most Americans, Vance believes it’s democracy, a method of government he misconstrues as being co-extensive with virtue and hence self-sufficiently redemptive.

This leads him into conceptual cul-de-sacs. For example, Vance cites the case of a 51-year-old British veteran who was arrested, charged and fined for “the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.”

Vance is absolutely right: HMG’s commitment to protecting abortion clinics from even such innocuous opprobrium is indeed revolting. It strikes at the very foundations of our Judaeo-Christian civilisation.

However, one value the cordon sanitaire around abortion clinics doesn’t violate is democracy. On the contrary, the cops who arrested the veteran affirmed it by complying with an act passed by a democratically elected Parliament in full compliance with democratic procedure.

This should remind Mr Vance that, in the civilisational order of priorities, democracy appears low down the list, if at all. Other commitments supersede it by a long way.

As a practising and thinking Catholic, he knows this as well as I do. But, as an American politician, Vance worships at the altar of God only in private. In public, he worships at the altar of democracy – and the First Amendment that protects it from religious encroachments. Is he aware of the possibility of inherent contradiction? Perhaps not.

“We must do more than talk about democratic values,” continued Vance. “We must live them.” That, according to him, is something Romania failed to do:

“The Romanian Constitutional Court made a startling decision: It cancelled the country’s presidential elections… citing a newly declassified intelligence report that pointed to Russian election interference on behalf of Călin Georgescu, an obscure far-right nationalist who unexpectedly became the favourite to win after the first round of voting.”

Moreover, “the very same thing could happen in Germany too,” and this is something Mr Vance can’t countenance under any circumstances: “For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy.”

Mr Vance’s commitment to democracy über alles is misplaced, specifically in the cases he cites. It’s also selective: before he became Vice President, Sen. Vance had been the most consistent opponent of any aid to the Ukraine, which is after all a democratic country heroically fighting against a fascist dictatorship.

The same fascist dictatorship invests billions in a massive disinformation and trolling campaign to promote extremist pro-Putin candidates in all European elections, including those Vance mentioned. Romanian authorities have laid bare the extent of Russia’s hybrid warfare aiming to undermine the very democratic institutions Vance holds so dear.

Unfortunately, they had failed to nip Russian interference in the bud. When they came to their senses, it was too late for half-measures. The only way to prevent their country from becoming a Russian satellite was to cancel the compromised elections and start from scratch. That’s unfortunate, but better than killing freedom in the name of democracy.

Vance’s reaction to that belated but correct decision is both frivolous and dishonest: “Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.”

Putin’s puppets must indeed be prevented from winning elections in free countries. But not because they have “an alternative viewpoint”, but because they aren’t free agents. They are agents of a hostile power trying in word and deed to stamp out freedom in Eastern Europe, for a start.

If Vance doesn’t understand this, he needs a remedial course in European politics. If he knows it but still insists on upholding the rights of avowed enemies of democracy to impose their evil rule, he needs a remedial course in morality.

As for “ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation”, the Trump administration has indefinitely banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One. Why?

Because the wire service refuses to comply with Trump’s vindictive whim and refer to what has for centuries been called the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’. That, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, “is not just divisive, but it also exposes the Associated Press’s commitment to misinformation.”

Hey chaps, fair is fair. If the Romanian government is scolded for citing “ugly Soviet-era words like misinformation and disinformation” when trying to curtail the advance of fascism in Europe, then surely Vance’s colleagues shouldn’t use such offensive terminology about a reputable wire agency? It does tend to be anti-Trump, but that’s just an “alternative viewpoint”, isn’t it?

In fact, the AP is taking a conservative stance against arbitrary name changes. This is a crime I’m guilty of myself (I did tell you I’m not perfect).

That’s why I sometimes anger my Ukrainian friends by sticking to traditional English usages and writing ‘Kiev’ not ‘Kyiv’, ‘Kharkov’ not ‘Kharkiv’ and ‘the Ukraine’ instead of ‘Ukraine’. I also write ‘Peking’, not ‘Beijing’, which would anger my Chinese friends if I had any.

Mr Vance commendably wants to be on the side of the angels, but he needs to sort out who they are in Europe. Otherwise he may end up supporting the cause of demons, such as Georgescu, AfD – and their paymaster Putin.

Many years ago, a dinner guest stormed out of our flat in a huff.  Or rather in hysterics.

She was married to an old friend, who was less intolerant of Left-wing sensibilities than I was. Alas, though we do choose our friends, we don’t choose their wives. They make that mistake on their own.

Anyway, the conversation veered towards political taxonomies, and such elusive categories as Right and Left or conservative and liberal. I was then writing my first book, How the West Was Lost, where one chapter dealt with language as a vital battleground of political conflict.

Whoever controls the people’s language controls their minds, a dominance I described as glossocracy, the rule of the word and by the word. When verbal volleys come in a steady barrage and tempers fray, political terms part company with their real meaning, both etymological and customary.

They are turned into shells fired at the enemy, acquiring the ad hoc meaning enabling them to act in that capacity. When the battlefield situation changes, so does their meaning.

That’s why, for example, liberal has got to mean illiberal; conservative, a libertarian – and the connotation of Right-wing and Left-wing became so jumbled that the same person could be branded as both or either in the same sentence.

That was the nature of the conversation that so excited my friend’s wife. She visibly winced every time the word ‘conservative’ came up, while I was playing host and trying not to upset her too much. I failed miserably.

We were talking about Texas, where I had lived for 10 years. My friend described it as a conservative state, which, I agreed, was by and large correct. But some Texans I knew called themselves conservative mainly because they disliked blacks.

When communicating that point, I imitated, badly, the Texan accent and, accurately, the pejorative term for the race in question. Had I written my statement down, that statement would have been enclosed in quotes, leaving the reader in no doubt that I was using someone else’s way of speaking, not my own.

But even in oral speech what I said couldn’t possibly have been interpreted as anything other than mockery of certain attitudes. But my friend’s wife, by then rather liberally oiled, as it were, didn’t even try to interpret or indeed understand anything I was saying.

The only word she heard was that pejorative term, and never mind the context. The dread word had the galvanising effect of an electric prod on the poor woman. She jumped up, shouted horrendous obscenities at all of us, including those who had taken no part in the discussion, and rushed out into the street, leaving her coat and handbag behind.

She was wearing only a silk blouse, and it was bitterly cold outside. Since she left her handbag behind, she had no money for a taxi or even a bus to get home. Death of hypothermia beckoned and would have occurred, but for Penelope’s lightning-quick response.

While the rest of us, including the lady’s husband, were momentarily too stunned to act, Penelope grabbed the woman’s belongings and ran after her at what by my estimation approached an Olympic speed. She came back a few minutes later, breath short, mission accomplished, a life possibly saved. Festivities were resumed, with my friend never missing a beat. He was used to that sort of thing, he explained.

Now, that woman was obviously hysterical and half-mad with ideological fervour. But extreme behaviour often provides a clue to general tendencies.

Political discourse nowadays tends to bypass reason on its way towards a realm ruled by emotions. In that realm it’s knee-jerk reactions that reign, not sensible arguments resting on a foundation of logic, analysis and facts.

When that tendency develops to its full maturity, one’s mind becomes cauterised and one no longer hears coherent human speech. One’s hearing latches on to a single word replete with either positive or negative connotations – and out comes that electric prod.

These days in the US and increasingly elsewhere such a word is ‘Trump’. I haven’t seen any sociological studies, but I don’t think there ever has been such a galvanising shibboleth consisting of a single man’s name.

Utter that word, and emotional outbursts will follow instantly. If you dare say something positive about the US president in ‘liberal’ company, the reaction wouldn’t be drastically different from that of my dinner guest. You’ll be instantly branded as a reactionary and a political dinosaur if you are lucky, a fascist if you are not.

Conversely, any attempt to criticise Trump among those who call themselves conservatives will get you castigated as a Leftie, preceded with an intensifying modifier. That has happened to me on occasion, when that transgression earned me the tag of a Left-winger.

When emotions take over, most people begin to think in strictly binary terms, for or against, us and them, friend or foe. Balanced, nuanced arguments need not apply.

In this case, the underlying logic, such as it is, is uncompromising and syllogistic. Trump’s nemesis was Joe Biden. Biden is Left-wing. Ergo, anyone who criticises Trump for anything is Left-wing.

The thought that reactionary conservatives like me can find fault with Trump’s actions and indeed may not recognise him as one of them doesn’t even cross the accuser’s mind. Nothing does, really. The buzz word has put his mind on hold.

Such primitive reflexes have been seen in action throughout modern history. That’s how, for example, Hitler acquired a Right-wing tag.

Unlike many such developments, this one can be traced back to a precise date: 22 June, 1941, when Hitler’s Germany attacked Stalin’s USSR. Until that date, the two totalitarian states had been allies, with commentators noting how much they had in common.

Since at that time the main demarcation between Right and Left ran through economics, analysts couldn’t fail to spot the startling similarities between Stalin’s Five-Year Plan and Hitler’s Four-Year version (FDR’s New Deal wasn’t all that different either, but this is a separate story).

Both were socialist, placing Hitler next to Stalin on the left side of the political spectrum. The Western Left had a warmer spot for Stalin than for Hitler because the latter was politically incorrect long before the term was coined. Yet both of them were undeniably on the Left.

However, that date in June had a polarising effect, with a syllogism taking charge. Hitler was Stalin’s enemy. Stalin was Left-wing. Ergo, Hitler was Right-wing.

Hitler was also a fascist, which is why this term is rather indiscriminately applied to anyone deemed Right-wing. Such as, for example, Margaret Thatcher, who was a Whiggish radical if she was anything.

Such are the political word games, but it’s vital to understand that they are akin to children playing cowboys and Indians with real guns. A fight for glossocratic positions can easily result in a political chaos that can only be resolved by a real, blood-letting war.

Emotions have a place in life, but they should be barred from entry into any political arena. When they sneak in, they’ll eventually take over, turning a symbolic fencing joust into a gladiatorial fight to the death.

Trump or any other politician says and does things. These ought to be analysed dispassionately and as deeply as the analyst’s mind allows. Since the things Trump says and does have already caused a turmoil, it’s vital that analysts keep their knees in check and their minds in full gear.

The fallout from the turmoil can eventually result in a prosperous and peaceful stability or in a devastating chaos. Which it will be largely depends on the mental acuity and self-restraint of the direct participants and their supporters.

A message to the Trump adulators I know: he who criticises Trump isn’t necessarily your enemy; he who praises him, isn’t necessarily your friend. Take it from me, the inveterate Left-winger of some people’s fancy.

P.S. Happy Valentine’s Day to all my women readers!

American commentators and even some of our so-called conservatives are trying to put a spin on what amounts to an act of gross betrayal. But surrender by any other name smells as vile.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said that America would “no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship” with her Western allies. “Europe,” he added, “must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, any peace negotiations “must start by recognising that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective”. The Ukraine will never be admitted to NATO, he continued, US troops will never take part in any peace-keeping force, Putin will get to keep the Ukrainian provinces currently under Russian occupation.

And oh by the way, Trump spoke with Putin on the phone, and the two friends ironed it all out between themselves. Zelensky can do only two things: grin and bear it.

A few empty reassurances followed after the truthful statement that the US “is no longer focused” on Europe: “’The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defence partnership with Europe, full stop.”

Experienced liars know that their fibs have a better chance of being believed if they contain a kernel of truth. Trump and his retinue are absolutely right that Europe has been too negligent about its own defence for too long. We should definitely invest more into protecting ourselves from our enemies, of which fascist Russia takes pride of place.

Trump demands that this commitment amount to five per cent of GDP, as compared to America’s 3.3 per cent, and he has a point: there is a lot of ground to make up. However, the long-standing disparity between America’s and Europe’s defence expenditures, though unfortunate, isn’t as appalling as Trump paints it.

The US derives enormous benefits from her position as the leader of the free world, which includes having the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That, inter alia, has enabled America to amass an irresponsible public debt of over $30 trillion, which otherwise would prove ruinous. And, as we are taught, extra gains presuppose extra responsibilities.

But there is no denying that Europe should spend more on defence. That, however, must be a separate conversation from helping the Ukraine resist the fascist onslaught.

Even assuming that Europe embarks on a massive rearmament campaign, and I’ve got to see it to believe it, it’ll take years for it to build up to a level where it will no longer need American involvement. How many years is open to discussion, but quite a few in any case.

With the best will in the world, more than doubling defence spending isn’t something that can be done instantly – the logistic hurdles will take time to clear. And even when the spending is up to the desired levels, it’ll take years to convert more cash into more brawn.

This raises that $64,000 question of America’s past: why do Messrs Trump and Hegseth think Putin started the war in the first place? The answer will reveal the true enormity of Hegseth’s animadversions, justifying my use of the harsh word ‘betrayal’.

Putin doesn’t need any more land. He already has much more than he knows what to do with, and Russia has de facto ceded more Siberian terrain to China than the Ukraine possesses altogether.  

The war was started for the intermediate objective of restoring the Russian/Soviet empire to its former size and grandeur. What the Russians historically understand by their national grandeur is being able to instil fear into her neighbours and bully them into submission.

The ultimate objective, stated thousands of times by Putin and his henchmen, is to subjugate the West and establish Russia as the dominant world power. As a minimum, Putin would settle for dividing up the world with the US and China, with Europe becoming his bailiwick.

If Trump and Hegseth don’t understand this, they are either idiotic or, more likely, disingenuous. They are pretending to accept Putin’s assurances of limited aims, the better to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper and Europe down the Rhine.

This runs contrary to the recently published report of Danish intelligence, according to which the Kremlin will take any ceasefire only as a way of rebuilding its military strength to be able to pounce again after a few years. The entire Russian economy is geared up towards that objective, and the underlying long-term commitment is unmistakable.

After two years, said the report, Russia will be ready to start another local conflict; after three, she’ll be able to take on a NATO country on her borders, testing NATO’s commitment to Article 5 of that organisation’s Charter. Should that commitment predictably prove tepid, after five years Russia will be ready to confront NATO in a full-blown European war.

The Ukrainians have been bleeding white trying to stop the fascist offensive, using their bodies as ramparts protecting Europe from evil hordes. Most Europeans understand that the Ukraine is fighting not only for her own freedom but also for theirs. Trump and Hegseth understand it too, but pretend not to.

Disgustingly, Trump has started negotiating with Putin without involving Zelensky. As far as he is concerned, all the Ukraine is entitled to is being informed post factum.

“We have also agreed to have our [American and Russian] respective teams start negotiations immediately, and we will begin by calling President Zelensky, of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation…,” Trump said on his social media platform. 

That’s nice. A lesser man would strike a deal with Putin without even telling Zelensky about it, but Trump in his munificence isn’t like that. The Ukraine has a right to know how her fate has been decided by the big boys, and Trump respects that right.

What he doesn’t respect is the right of the Ukraine and other former parts and satellites of Russia to keep their hard-won freedom. The Ukraine, Trump said the other day, “may be Russian someday”, and he’ll do his best to make sure his friend Vlad gets what he wants.

If he wants all of the Ukraine first and most of Europe second, so be it. That’s what friends are for.

If Europe is no longer a “focus” for the US, what is? Hegseth obligingly provided an answer that was self-evident to begin with. “The stark strategic realities” are such that the US must reorient herself away from the Atlantic and towards the Pacific.

This tale of two oceans is all about competing with China, curtailing her ambitions to become the greatest superpower. Those ambitions palpably include an attack on Taiwan, and China’s massive military, especially naval, buildup points at that intention.

Trump may legitimately fear that America is spreading herself too thin and has to prioritise her commitments. But betraying the Ukraine first and Europe second isn’t the way to go about it.

A president who understands the nature of the geopolitical defence alignment after the Second World War would want to give the Ukraine maximum leverage to end the war on her own terms. He’d then agree to provide the security guarantees to make sure Russia won’t come again in the foreseeable future.

That could be done quickly and without jeopardising the American position in the Pacific. Then Trump could threaten to use Hegseth’s measures as a way of blackmailing Europe into boosting its defence spending. Then America could gradually diminish her military presence on the continent, pari passu with Europe building up its own muscle.

That would leave NATO in good shape to defeat any future aggression. By contrast, what Trump is doing now is being pennies-smart and strategy-stupid. Whatever good policies he is putting in place, and many of them do look promising, will be undone by this treachery.

Whether or not it springs from prior collusion with Putin should matter only to Trump’s future biographers. What matters to us today is that he is putting the survival of European civilisation at risk. But such incidentals don’t seem to concern Trump.

Finally, there’s no denying it. Britain has gone bonkers.

Or perhaps our judges misunderstood Trump’s idea of relocating Gaza Palestinians. I’m fairly certain the destinations he had in mind were Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia. Correct me if I’m wrong, but he didn’t mean that two million Palestinians should settle in Britain.

Yet an immigration court made such a development a distinct possibility when granting Palestinian refugees the right to live in Britain. Somehow they were deemed to qualify for a scheme created for Ukrainians fleeing from Russian aggression.

That scheme included provisions for families to be reunited in Britain if they had relations already living here. Now a precedent has been created for Palestinians also to take advantage of that welcoming generosity. This though few of them resemble Ukrainians, even those from the southern parts of that country.

When a family of six from Gaza – a mother, father and four children – applied under that scheme to join a fifth sibling already living in the UK, the Home Office said no. But an immigration judge has ruled that the family’s human rights were thereby violated.

That precedent, according to Home Office lawyers, issued an open invitation to Palestinians and other aliens living in war zones to come to the UK. I’ll spare you a why-oh-why comment on how that ruling may prove disastrous for the country.

All you have to do is look up recent history and find out what happened to Lebanon and Jordan when thousands of eternal Palestinian refugees settled there. Those countries were quickly turned into blood-soaked shambles, and one can confidently predict something like that happening here when Hamas supporters and/or members (aka Palestinian refugees) begin arriving en masse.

Judge Norton-Taylor’s imagination is vivid enough, and he is aware that his ruling runs contrary to “public interest”. But, he explained, since the family faced an “extreme and life-threatening situation”, its human rights took priority over such parochial concerns.

When brought to task, His Honour cited Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) that establishes the right to family life. Now, that’s a conclusive argument for leaving that contrivance if I’ve ever heard one.

When Britons overwhelmingly voted for leaving the EU in 2016, they did so to regain the country’s sovereignty. In Britain, this loaded word means not adherence to liberal abstractions but the rule of law laid down by Parliament… Sorry for being so vague. By Parliament I mean the legislative body sitting in Westminster, not the one headquartered in Strasbourg.

Judge Norton-Taylor obviously shares in the universalist outlook typical of the liberal mind. His Honour speaks the language of human rights with enviable fluency, and whenever he is stuck for a word, he can use EU documents for a dictionary.

The very fact that Britain didn’t withdraw from the ECHR at the time of Brexit shows that our liberal elite is hanging on to it as a rope it can use to climb back into the fold. The elite’s minds are poisoned by the toxins of modernity. As a result, they’ll always prefer the abstract to the concrete, the central to the local, the global to the national, ‘our planet’ to our neighbourhood.

As a side effect, they have to worship the sacrosanct principles of egalitarianism, which is why they refuse to see the difference between Ukrainian refugees and Hamas sympathisers (or even members).

Being a solicitous chap by nature, I’ll be happy to explain. There are several points of difference to consider.

First, Ukrainians are our friends who have fallen victim to a barbarian onslaught launched by our avowed enemies. Conversely, Palestinians are our enemies who launched a barbarian onslaught on our avowed friends – and lost.

Treating the two groups with equal consideration is tantamount to treating friends the same way as enemies and enemies the same way as friends. This isn’t equity. It’s amorality.

Second, Ukrainians are Christians and Palestinians are Muslims. Christianity is an essential, even formative, aspect of Western, and therefore British, identity. Islam, on the other hand, is infinitesimally marginal to that identity and, moreover, hostile to it.

With characteristic liberal mendacity, our opinion-formers proudly announce that all religions are equal, and none merits a privileged treatment. Yet Christianity deservedly enjoyed a privileged position for many centuries, whereas no other religion did.

Therefore, equalising them all in status is in effect dragging Christianity down to the level of religions of no consequence in British history. In other words, this is yet another manifestation of the anti-Christian bias that was the natal impulse of modernity.

Just imagine the confusion of children if told they must treat everybody with the same deference and affection as their parents. Before long, they won’t know who their parents are. Liberal egalitarianism creates the same confusion in grown-ups’ minds. They no longer know who their spiritual and historical parents are, nor can they easily distinguish between friend and foe.

On a more mundane social level, the presence of a large Ukrainian diaspora is unlikely to have an adverse effect on British identity, whereas another swarm of Muslim immigrants is guaranteed to do so.

This isn’t conjecture, but an observable fact, for we already have three million Muslims in Britain. Anyone who thinks they’ve improved life in the country and strengthened the long-term prospects of the British ethos should visit Leicester, Leeds or Bradford and admire signs saying that this or that area is governed by sharia.

This isn’t to say that Britain should turn away our friends in danger of extinction. That same religion that’s supposed to be equal with all others mandates against such cruel insularity. We shouldn’t forget that both Britain and the US were complicit in the Holocaust, when the two key members of the anti-Hitler coalition refused to accept Jewish refugees in sufficient numbers.

But, as I never tire of repeating, our civilisation is called Judaeo-Christian, not Universalist-Liberal, nor anything that includes the word ‘Muslim’. It’s that discernment again, being able to discriminate between good and bad, moral and immoral, beneficial and harmful.

I’m taking swipes at the very essence of modernity in full realisation that things are too far gone for opposition even much stronger than mine to change anything fundamentally. But certain things can still be done – and they should be done quickly before ‘liberalism’ advances any further.

Judge Norton-Taylor’s perverse decision must be overturned, and he should submit to a moral and legal MOT to establish his suitability for the bench. And, now we are talking in the automotive idiom, Britain should leave the ECHR in the rearview mirror.

The sovereignty of king in Parliament is the blood and soul of the British body politic, in fact of Britain tout court. And the ECHR, that distillation of liberal universalism, is the deadly contagion.

Here I am, no longer young but following my own advice. The inside front cover of my blue booklet reads:

“His Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of His Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”

This statement is unequivocal: the British state intends to keep up its end of the bargain. It will do all it can to protect His Majesty’s subject when he travels abroad – and it “requires” that other countries follow suit.

“Or else” used to be implied, a threat that was then taken more seriously than it is now. You mess with a British subject at your peril – few countries tremble on hearing that nowadays, but the text still survives.

This is part of the broader contractual arrangement between state and citizen known since time immemorial as protectio trahit subiectionem et subiectio protectionem (protection entails allegiance and allegiance entails protection).

Like all contracts, this one is bilateral: we exchange our allegiance for the state’s protection. Our passports remind us of one side’s obligations, but what does the other side undertake?

This seems to be straightforward: we must remain loyal to the state, which for these purposes embodies the country. That implies any number of things, including our duty to defend the country when the country needs us.

If someone isn’t prepared to do that, the arrangement unravels. Since that person denies the state his allegiance, he is no longer entitled to its protection. By refusing to do his civic duty, he has forfeited his citizenship rights, such as the one to bear the passport.

Sorry to spend so long on such obvious things. My only justification is that for many of our young people these things aren’t at all obvious. In fact, they dismiss them out of hand.

A recent Times poll of Generation Z youngsters showed that only 11 per cent would fight for Britain – and 41 per cent said there were no circumstances at all under which they would take up arms for their country.

Let’s see. If a Russian airborne brigade landed in Kent and advanced on London, almost half of the people eligible to fight would refuse to do so, while most of the rest would only agree to defend their country if they thought her cause is just.

The view that Britain isn’t worth fighting for thus varies between widespread and dominant among young Britons. And what exactly has made Britain so unworthy?

Almost half of the respondents explained that Britain is a racist country mired in her awful past, against a small minority who felt otherwise. This marks a great shift from 20 years ago, when 80 per cent, almost twice as many as today, said they were proud to be British. Also, back then 60 per cent thought the country was united, against a mere 15 per cent today.

Assuming that the findings are statistically significant, the conclusion is dire. A revolution has occurred, and Britain has lost.

Before revolutions explode in city squares they detonate in people’s minds. Yesterday’s saints become today’s demons, objects of veneration turn into targets of mockery, old truths are seen as lies. And barbarians lie in wait, ready to pounce when the critical mass of nihilist anomie has been reached.

Hilaire Belloc described that situation poignantly: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

At some point, those creatures with unsmiling faces may decide their time has come: the revolution has already taken over people’s minds. Now it must claim its due in city squares.

That poll shows that we are now reaping the harvest sown years ago, when the liberal mind began to realise its full ideological potential. It was then that children began to be indoctrinated to accept new for old, abandoning spiritual and intellectual certitudes for what their teachers described as progress.

Patriotism gradually became ‘uncool’, British history got to be portrayed as generally evil and barbaric, equality was proclaimed the highest goal and everything standing in its way as a wicked hindrance. It wasn’t so much the long march through the institutions as the long march through the minds – and it has borne fruit.

If that poll is to be believed, and I see no reason not to believe it, Britain is lying defenceless in the face of any danger lurking in an ambush. It’s not guns that defend a nation, but the people firing them. If they aren’t prepared to do so, no amount of defence spending will ever protect the country.

Alarm bells should sound all over the land: our education has failed to inspire patriotism in our young. This isn’t its greatest failure, but one that can have the most devastating consequences should some barbarian regime fancy its chances against a morally enfeebled Britain.

Far be it from me to suggest that children should be brainwashed in the spirit of jingoism. One task of education is to help pupils develop a capacity for critical thought, and unquestioning nationalism isn’t conducive to that.

Moreover, patriotism is a relatively new virtue in the pecking order of loyalties. Pupils used to be taught to love their God, their families and their parish before love of the country even came up.

But come up it did, because it was logical to extrapolate from the particular to the general. Their country was a place where most people worshipped the same God, loved their families and their neighbours, helped one another.

A country was a sum total of communities just like theirs, and they knew that any failure to defend the larger entity would also put the smaller ones at peril. The liberal mind loathes all that.

It inculcates a generalised, impersonal, abstract love of mankind, ‘our planet’, ‘equality’, ‘diversity’ and so on, all the way down the list. No extrapolation from large to small occurs. The supranational large is all there is.

Children who grow up to become a generation with its own initial, in this case Z, learn to criticise their country but not how to think critically. Uncritical loathing precludes the development of that faculty as surely as unquestioning love does.

Pupils leave school as deracinated individuals owing no loyalty to anyone or anything: their God in whom they no longer believe, their parents whom they tend to resent, their community that they happily leave behind.

And their country? Oh well, it’s racist, isn’t it? Homophobic, transphobic, misogynist, polluting, torn apart by social and economic inequalities – all those things they’ve been brainwashed to hate as affronts to the ‘liberal’ mind.

When France declared war on Nazi Germany three days after the latter attacked Poland, Left Bank intellectuals would sneer: “Mourir pour Danzig?” Today’s young Britons pick up the Anglophone echo: “Die for Britain?” The idea sounds just as preposterous.

All we can do is cross ourselves, or our fingers if such is our wont, and hope that the need to defend Britain by force of arms never arises. If it does, we are in trouble.

Sorry, I mean Canada. Friedman has been dead for 24 years, and in any case how do you annex a scholar? Canada, however, is still alive, and she is a burr under Donald’s blanket.

Hardly a day goes by that Trump doesn’t fulminate against Canada. That northern neighbour should become the 51^st state, he keeps saying. We can do it the easy way or the hard way.

But to get Canada he still has to go through Friedman first, who puts up a formidable bastion of economic logic, with Adam Smith bringing up the rear. You see, Trump justifies his offer (threat?) by appealing to economics, where he runs headlong into the ramparts of wisdom erected by Messrs Friedman, Smith and a regiment of economists in between.

“It’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit [with Canada],” Trump recently complained to the World Economic Forum in Davos. And the intervening fortnight failed to derail his train of thought.

The other day, the president clarified his meaning: “It’s too much. Why are we paying $200 billion a year essentially in subsidy to Canada?” was how Trump posed a rhetorical problem, for which he offered an instant solution: “Now, if they’re our 51^st state, I don’t mind doing it.”

The other 50 states might though. As they look wistfully at that eye-watering promise, I can hear them mutter, “And what am I, chopped liver?” California, whose population is almost the same as Canada’s, only rates $162.9 billion in federal subsidies, and the other states much less. And that upstart will get $200 billion? No way, Jose.

Comparing the two numerals Trump mentioned a fortnight apart, he clearly confounds a trade deficit with a subsidy, at which point Messrs Friedman and Smith are up in arms. Eschewing the latter’s 18^th century idiom, the former explains the issue in simple words even Trump ought to be able to understand:

“The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is a cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so that we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”

And, “a sustained trade deficit is the best possible outcome… we get physical goods like cars, flash memory, oil, computers, toys and all sorts of other goods for cheaply produced paper known as currency.”

In other words, rather than being a subsidy the US pays Canada, the trade deficit actually represents a net gain. This is what Americans would call Economics 101, a beginner’s course in that discipline, as taught by conservative scholars. But before Trump takes it, a refresher course in arithmetic would come in handy.

In 2024 America’s trade deficit with Canada was about US$45 billion, less in 2023. That means the number Trump cited, $200 billion a year, is off by an order of magnitude. Someone should remind the president how to do simple sums.

Sorry for adopting this mocking tone, but Trump does encourage it by his logorrhoea. He doesn’t seem to hold his statements down to any tests of logic and veracity.

Trump is often described as a populist, but there’s populism and populism.

It’s one thing to appeal to the people’s common sense over the head of bureaucratic institutions resisting sound ideas, quite another to mouth any gibberish just because the masses might jump up and salute. I’m rather suspicious even of the first kind, whereas the second drives me up the wall and through the ceiling.

Populism based on fallacies is an attempt to dupe the masses, in this case with waffle about protecting American jobs and hence the good old US of A against the grubby fingers of variously hairy foreigners who talk funny — or not, as is the case with Canada.

Has Trump given any thought to the logistics of making Canada a state in the USA? Canada consists of 10 provinces, each fiercely independent and mistrustful of central authority. At least one of those provinces, the Francophone Quebec, has a virile strain of separatism, often expressed by militant means.

Does he think people in Alberta or Quebec will be more receptive to power emanating from Washington DC than from Ottawa? I rather doubt it.

Interestingly, I’ve read all sorts of objections to Trump’s idea except the one that came to my mind first: Canada is part of the British Commonwealth. Her head of state is King Charles III. Her top barristers are called KCs. Her national police force is called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (Gendarmerie royale du Canada in French).

Trump often professes undying love for our royal family, including the reigning monarch. Has he considered the constitutional implications of his pet idea? Or does he wish to convert America First into America by Her Lonesome?

I don’t know how to put this without sounding condescending, but it strikes me that Trump sees annexing Canada as a simple real estate transaction, sort of like Penelope and me buying the plot adjacent to ours in France, to make sure no one builds on it.

Or does he see himself as a latter-day Col. Benedict Arnold who in 1775, during the early days of the Revolutionary War, led an expedition into Canada, presaging Trump’s project by 250 years?

Trump has so far forsworn a military invasion, but if he still harbours such notions, he should read up on that expedition and find out why it came to a sticky end. As for Col. Arnold, he later secured a rather questionable place in American history, but let’s not push the parallel too far.

President Trump is doing many wonderful things in America, the kind that make every British conservative sigh enviously. “If only we had…” is the mantra one hears from all and sundry.

Yet the president clearly forgets that it’s not just ships that can be sunk by loose lips. A leader’s pronouncements can sometimes go so far as to demand actions, and if the pronouncements are foolhardy, the action may be ruinous.

If Trump isn’t careful, he can turn America into a pariah, or else a resentful bully. He shouldn’t try so hard to make America great again – she is great already. Most of Trump’s policies can make her even greater, and the rest of the free world more secure.

But some of the things he says, does or threatens to do are fool’s gold or potentially petards to hoist America and the rest of us with. His designs on Canada are among those.

Trump could do worse than remind himself of the prayer originally composed by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the early 1930s: “O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”

An absence of transparency leaves room for conjecture relying on indirect evidence. Thus we don’t know when Putin will stop the war. Never, would be my guess.

The whole Russian economy has been reconfigured in a war mode, and swarms of Putin’s cronies depend on perpetual conflict for their further enrichment. Moreover, demobilising several hundred thousand trained killers and releasing them into civilian life will spell a social disaster.

The precedent was set after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan ended in 1989. That was the onset of the so-called ‘Afghan syndrome’, when thousands of demob-happy soldiers failed to integrate into normal life. However, they did integrate seamlessly into criminal gangs, turning Russian cities into Chicago, circa 1930, with shootouts a normal daily occurrence.

The decade the Russians call ‘the roaring 90s’ saw the rise of organised crime fused with the secret police, with the ‘Afghans’ taking care of the muscle end. And the number of soldiers deployed in Afghanistan was half that of the troops involved in the Ukraine.

All things considered, I see little possibility for lasting peace in the region, certainly not while Putin’s regime is still around. When Trump et al. talk about peace through negotiations, they really mean only a temporary ceasefire. Before long Russia would strike again, with the Ukraine or any other former Soviet republic as her target. (Unless, of course, the Russians make good on their threat to bomb London, which on balance I’d rather they didn’t.)

In any case, the smoke signals Putin is sending out suggest he won’t enter into any negotiations that include Zelensky. The Russian dictator and his acolytes keep mouthing lies about Zelensky being an unelected dictator of an illegitimate country, which is par for the course.

Say what you will about, or against, Zelensky (and there’s a lot to say), but he has led his country heroically during the Russian invasion, rallying his people to arms.

I remember him telling his TV audience on 24 February, 2022: “The next time you see me I’ll probably be dead.” And yet he didn’t flee, the way Putin’s quisling Yanukovych did in 2014. Instead he inspired a fightback against overwhelming odds.

It would be incongruous if Putin felt anything other than visceral loathing for Zelensky as the embodiment of Ukrainian independence, which is abhorrent to Russian fascists.

Yet even dictators like Putin can’t just say they detest their enemies and leave it at that. They have to come up with some justification for their hatred, and Putin has focused on the supposed illegitimacy of Zelensky’s tenure.

His propagandists picked up that theme and have been coming with all sorts of variations on it. Fair enough, they are earning their keep. But why are pro-Putin propagandists in Western governments and media repeating the same lies, usually verbatim?

Biden’s and Trump’s administration are united in their underhanded attempts to oust Zelensky. On 14 May, 2024, Anthony Blinken, Biden’s State Secretary, visited Kiev where he insisted that the Ukraine hold presidential elections immediately.

Just a few days ago, Gen. Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for the Ukraine and Russia, repeated that demand. Let’s hold both parliamentary and presidential elections, he said, and then we’ll talk peace.

Since Messrs Blinken and Kellogg clearly believe that Zelensky is no longer electable, they simply echo Putin’s demands, giving credence to his lies. I don’t follow the Ukraine’s domestic politics closely enough to comment on their premise, but their sycophancy to Putin is unconcealable.

The two gentlemen, or rather the US government, ought to be commended on their unwavering attachment to democratic procedure. However, the two linchpins of the anti-Hitler coalition, Britain and the US, didn’t show the same rigour during their war.

Britain held no general election for 10 years between 1935 and 1945. The proper date for it was in 1940, but at that time Hitler’s bombs, mostly Soviet-made, were raining on London. Normal democracy was put on hold. And FDR was elected to four consecutive terms in the White House during roughly the same time.

Legal niceties fell by the wayside too. The US incarcerated, without due process, 120,000 Nisei (ethnically Japanese) Americans, while Britain did the same with Nazi sympathisers and refugees from Germany, including Jews. I wonder how they coexisted in the same internment camps, but I’ll have to read up on that.

So now the US government demands that, with his country at war and martial law in place, Zelensky scrupulously worship at the altar of democracy – something even the countries with a much longer democratic tradition refused to do under similar circumstances.

This is so manifestly absurd that one has to believe the demand is motivated by bad faith and the urge to kowtow to Putin. Next thing you know, the CIA will underwrite a plot to assassinate Zelensky, who in their eyes may resemble Diem.  

At least the two gentlemen I’ve mentioned are quite subtle about it. Tucker Carlson, on the other hand, can’t be mentioned in the same sentence with subtlety. He repeats Putin’s lies with febrile alacrity and no regard for facts.

Thus, more zealous commentators than I counted 74 boldfaced lies Carlson uttered in his conversation with Piers Morgan. Each one of them comes with an FSB approval stamp.

“The first feature of a dictator is that he is not elected, Zelensky is not elected,” said Carlson, and I wonder if his nose got twice as long as he was speaking.

Zelensky was elected on 21 April 2019, when he received 73 percent of the vote. That sort of majority is usually described as a landslide, but as far as Carlson is concerned anything short of 100 per cent makes Zelensky a dictator.

“He [Zelensky] has murdered his political opponents,” added Carlson. Now that’s a serious accusation that’s crying out for prima facie evidence. Can Tucker kindly name any victims of Zelensky’s beastliness?

He can’t because there aren’t any. The same job would be much easier with Putin’s Russia where political assassination is the ubiquitous political ploy. Putin’s opponents are shot, poisoned, beaten to death, defenestrated, strangled, murdered in prison, and the open season never stops.

In the name of globalism, that type of business is pursued internationally, with numerous hits carried out in Britain, Spain, Germany, France. What does Carlson think about that?

“He [Zelensky] has also banned religious denominations,” insisted that big fat Tucker, referring to the ban on the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox churches under the aegis of the Moscow Patriarchate.

I don’t know whether Carlson is aware that Patriarch Kirill is a lifelong KGB/FSB agent, whose ‘denomination’ has been actively involved in anti-Ukrainian, pro-Putin propaganda. Carlson should exercise his imagination and picture the reaction of Messrs Churchill and Roosevelt if, say, the Lutheran Church had engaged in incessant pro-Nazi agitprop in 1942.

What would they have done? Don’t answer that, just think of those German refugees and Nisei Americans. And Zelensky hasn’t interned any clergy.

“He [Zelensky] has banned a language group,” was how Carlson continued to weave his tissue of lies. I assume he meant Russian, which is at best ignorant and at worst consciously mendacious.

Russian (which is one language, not a ‘group’) was never banned in the Ukraine, and in fact Zelensky himself is a native Russian speaker. As is to be expected in any former colony, an emphasis was placed on the indigenous language in all official communications, but millions of Russophone Ukrainians happily converse in their mother tongue.

I occasionally listen to intercepted radio exchanges among frontline Ukrainian soldiers, and at least half of them are in Russian. Are they ignoring the ban or is Carlson a Putin poodle? You decide.

And then the powerful final chord, synchronised with Hitchens’s noises: “Ukraine had a coup, sponsored by the United States government, the CIA, in 2014.” Hitchens prefers the word ‘putsch’, whose Nazi implications add an emotional pow to the punchy lie. Tucker should take lessons from Peter.

The Ukrainian revolution was a grassroots reaction to the Ukraine’s president selling his country out to Putin. The people demanded independence in fact, not just in name, and they wanted the Ukraine to turn westwards towards Europe.

When Putin’s stooge Yanukovych instead tried to push the country back into Putin’s embrace, the people spontaneously rose in revolt. The ousted puppet (whose CV included convictions for robbery and rape) escaped to Russia, his spiritual motherland. I’ve seen no proof that the CIA sponsored that uprising, but I’ve heard Putin say it hundreds of times.

I’m not often given to reveries, but I do cherish some fleeting images. One of them involves Carlson, Hitchens and other witting or unwitting agents of Putin joining him and his clique in the dock, and then in prison cells.

I know that’ll never happen, but a man must be allowed the odd daydream. What’s life without hope?   

A Mancunian whose daughter was murdered by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, publicly burned a copy of the Koran, live-streaming the event for our delectation.

He was immediately arrested, charged under the blasphemy provisions of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, tried and acquitted by the jury. Correctly observing in his Telegraph article that no Muslim would be arrested for a similar abuse of the Bible, Tom Harris is appalled.

This kind of two-tier justice, he writes irrefutably, is an offence against such fundamental tenets as free speech and equal protection under the law. And in any case, blasphemy shouldn’t fall under the purview of a secular state:  

“Why should anyone, whatever religious views they have chosen to adopt, have the right to use the police or courts to guard against being offended? Religious faith is a personal thing, not one that the state has any right to become involved in.”

Mr Harris’s heart, if not his syntax, is in the right place, but his treatment of the issue is facile. To begin with, religion, as discrete from faith, isn’t just a personal thing, certainly not in a country where it’s an integral part of the state.

We have an established religion in Britain, which must have slipped Mr Harris’s mind. Our head of state is also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which job sharing alone should have given Mr Harris a clue.

Our civilisation is historically – and, in Britain, officially – Christian, or Judaeo-Christian if you’d rather. That’s why protecting Christianity and Judaism is tantamount to protecting the core values of our civilisation, including those Mr Harris holds in such high regard.

Both free speech and equality before the law can be traced back to Christian origins. Islam, on the other hand, not only denies such things in its creed but is aggressively hostile to them. Quite right too: if condoned, free discussion would have put paid to Islam centuries ago.

Hence, if any religions merit preferential treatment under our laws, it’s Christianity and Judaism. An offence against Christianity is an offence against the foundations of British statehood and, more broadly, Western civilisation.

By contrast, Islam may be tolerated but not singled out for any special protection. That kind of two-tier justice would be consonant with the core essence of our civilisation – if it were still Judaeo-Christian in anything but name.

But that old civilisation was ousted by post-Enlightenment modernity, whose core values demand extra protection for any systems of thought and worship that are inimical to Judaeo-Christianity. These could be secular cults, such as Marxism and its offshoots, or marginal religions, such as Islam.

Modernity is defined by a revolt that goes deeper than the one pointed out by Ortega y Gasset. The mass revolt he described was directed against traditional hierarchies, social and economic, and it had indeed taken place. But that revolt was only a sub-set of the tectonic shift Nietzsche identified in his Zarathustra.

God is dead, wrote that coroner to divinity, meaning that the educated – and educating – elite no longer believed in Him. But man is ontologically and existentially conditioned to believe in some cause. Modern Man is no exception.

For him, that cause has two principal components, positive and negative, or philistine and nihilist, as I call them. The positive end is defined by striving for physical comfort (and political conditions conducive to it) above all else; the negative one, by the urge to spread coarse-grained salt on the spiritual soil of the old civilisation, making sure that nothing similar ever grows there again.

The two components are observable in every modern country, but their ratio differs from one place to another and from one time to the next. The philistine holds the upper hand in the West, the nihilist in Russia.

Hostility to Western tradition is thus alive in all those places, although its manifestations vary from open aggression, as in Russia, to surreptitious subversion, as in the West. However, it’s becoming more overt by the day.

Against this background, preferential treatment for the West’s doctrinal and visceral enemy, Islam, is easily explicable. Conversely, openly offering more or even equal protection to Christianity, which is after all the state religion, would mean reaffirming the very ethos modernity detests and wishes to expunge. That would be like a carnivore promoting veganism.

Islam has been used as a battering ram of modernity for a relatively short time. Until the 1960s Muslim presence in Britain was insignificant. Thus, during the first quarter of the 20^th century there were only around 10,000 Muslims in the UK. Now there are close to three million, and these are just the ones we know about.

Under the guise of respecting their delicate religious sensibilities, HMG turns a blind eye on what increasingly looks more like colonisation than immigration.

Before Islam, it had been Buddhism that awakened the protective, maternal instincts of the modern British intelligentsia. Thus Chesterton wittily wrote over a century ago that: “Students of popular science… are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.”

He was right: where Christianity and Buddhism differed, it was fashionable to believe Buddhism was better. But today’s counterparts of those “students of popular science” don’t necessarily believe Islam is better than Christianity.

Christianity survives in their mind only as an unfortunate relic of the past whose vestiges are still extant in some of our institutions and culture. Islam, on the other hand, is very much active at present, and it’s a useful tool for eradicating those vestiges.

That’s why it must indeed be given extra protection in the name of religious equality. Mr Harris commendably doesn’t share such subversive notions. But by insisting that the two religions be treated equally, he inadvertently works towards the same goal.

“In modern Britain,” he writes, “Islam and the Koran are protected by the law, by the courts and by the police. Christianity is not. That is not an argument that Christianity should receive equal protection; it is an argument that Islam should receive the same level of legal respect and protection as Christianity – ie, none.”

If our laws are to include injunctions against blasphemy (which Blair’s Crime and Disorder Act does), these should protect only the two religions after which our Judaeo-Christian civilisation is named. Affording equal protection to Islam, that is none, means admitting publicly that Britain is no longer a Christian country.

The logical next step is disestablishment, removal of all references to faith in the title of our monarchs and reshaping British education in line with DEI demands, something already proceeding apace.

You can’t dismiss, as Mr Harris does, the toxic offshoots of the liberal mind simply by appealing to the values it holds sacred. “Freedom of speech means the freedom to offend, the right to say awful things that some people dislike”, he writes, sharing with his readers a self-evident cliché.

Of course it does. But freedom of speech has no self-sufficient absolute value. To act as an essential entitlement, it must coexist with freedom from speech as a defence mechanism of our civilisation. That’s why I believe that blasphemy laws should be on the books, but they should protect only Christianity and Judaism, the core religions of Western civilisation.

How, whether and under what circumstances they should be enforced is a different matter. I don’t mean that films like The Life of Brian should be banned, for example. No legal protection for someone offended by that spoof is needed – he can protect himself by not going to the cinema.

Nor do I think that a bonfire of Islamic vanities should be condoned: burning the Koran is a barbarous act that deserves censure. But the need for civilisational self-defence demands that a similar offence against the Bible must be punished more severely.

The same goes for public anti-Christian and anti-Muslim rants. Both are unpleasant and, if they violate public order, they should be punished. But rants against Christianity or anti-Semitic diatribes at a street corner ought to incur a stiffer penalty.

When it doesn’t rest on a solid premise, which R.G. Collingwood called an ‘absolute presupposition’, the liberal mindset can easily turn into a suicide pact. The process is gradual, sometimes imperceptible. But, like tuberculosis, when it becomes clearly visible, it’s too late to do anything about it.

What we are witnessing at the moment is the middle stage of that development, rapidly approaching the final stage. Nothing short of aggressive treatment is required, and this is something that Donald Trump understands. Our government doesn’t, and good-natured support for basic liberties isn’t going to work, not by itself. That ship has sailed.

Even people who’ve never laced up a pair of boxing gloves realise that taking thousands of blows over a few years may play havoc with a man’s head.

That part of the body isn’t designed to replace a speedbag, and the constant jarring effect of punches leaves many pugilists demented. After all, when a boxer is knocked out or even down, he suffers a concussion. How many concussions can a brain take before its wiring goes awry?

I’d suggest you ask Mohammad Ali, but you can’t. He died nine years ago, having battled Parkinson’s since his late 30s. No wonder: according to experts, Ali took over 20,000 blows in his career, most of them to the head.

A personal note if I may: I took up boxing when I was 15, and the coach thought I was doing well in training. But then I started taking punches to the head and decided I could find a better use for it.

My football career was longer: I was seldom without a ball at my feet whenever I wasn’t at school or playing chess. When I was 12 or so, a friend’s mother told me to quit or at least not to head the ball if I insisted on playing. “You don’t want to end up more idiotic than you are already,” was how she put it with a singular lack of tact.

She was no doctor, and yet I knew she was right: heading those heavy leather balls felt like heading a brick, especially when they were wet. That was a long time ago, and yet the risk of a degenerative brain disorder for footballers was already widely known.

So much more surprising it is these days to read news articles about this or that professional player developing dementia at a relatively young age. Such pieces appear every year or so, and every time the link between football and dementia is presented as a startling discovery.

People who downplay the risk insist that today’s much lighter balls aren’t as damaging. I’d suggest those people retake their school physics course. Yes, today’s balls are much lighter to begin with and they don’t absorb quite so much moisture. But as a result they fly through the air much faster, which makes them as dangerous if not more so.

That’s where physics comes in, telling us that the force of an impact equals mass times speed squared divided by two. That squaring puts a premium on speed, not weight. A 10 per cent increase in speed makes the ball’s impact much stronger even if its weight is down 20 or 30 per cent.

Gary Lineker, a striker turned expert commentator, was certainly aware of the risks when he played, until 1994. He says he never headed the ball unless he felt sure to score.

Defenders don’t have that option, which is why they are five times more likely to develop neurodegenerative disease than someone who never played professionally. In fact, the Federation is currently working with over 200 former players suffering from dementia, and that disease may sometimes be slowed down but never cured.

In 2021 the FA introduced guidance that recommended no more than 10 “high-force” headers in training per week. And, starting from this season, there is a ban on headers in all under-seven to under-nine matches, then to include the under-10 level in 2025-2026, and the under-11s the season after.

Yet Premiership coaches readily admit they don’t keep count in training, and in a decade or so they’ll complain that the new crop of players don’t know how to head the ball. Taking heading out of football isn’t exactly like taking punching out of boxing, but close enough.

Either one takes up those sports seriously or one doesn’t. And if one does, there is a good chance of ending up demented at an early age. So why do so many boys – and increasingly girls – dream of such careers?

The answer is obvious: most of them can’t ever hope to achieve as much, in many cases any, success in any other field. For example, at the beginning of his career Mike Tyson had an IQ of 70 – and that’s before he took those thousands of punches from people trained to throw them. His chances of earning a living as a systems analyst or stock broker weren’t good.

Many footballers are brighter than that, if not necessarily better educated. They could find some jobs, but none that would offer the rewards of professional football. During my whole career in advertising, for example, I met a few people earning £300,000 a year, but none getting as much a week, which is less than some top players make.

Then there is anthropology that says that men are conditioned to take physical risks even when no financial reward beckons. Mountain climbers and sky divers risk their lives (“If at first you don’t succeed, sky diving isn’t for you,” as the saying goes) and, rather than getting paid, they actually pay for the privilege.

The joy of doing such things escapes me. Though no more cowardly than the next man, the idea of risking my life for a trivial cause appals me. Life is a precious gift, of which we aren’t only possessors but also guardians. Higher causes than staying alive exist, but sport isn’t one of them.

“He that loseth his life for my sake will find it,” said the supreme authority on such matters. “For my sake” are the key words, and they mean something other than for the sake of winning a sporting contest.

(In more up-to-date versions of that book, the same phrase reads “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it.” The medium insults the message.)

Every time I watch a boxing match, I feel glad those chaps are doing it in the ring, not in my street. If they do it with style, rather than indulging in an ugly brawl, I enjoy the show. And I don’t think of cerebral trauma when watching a goal scored with a diving header.

But afterwards, having a drink, I ponder such matters and decide that what I feel for those athletes is closer to pity than to envy. But that’s only me.