Author: Alexander Boot

Some Eastern thinkers insist on the cyclical nature of life. Solomon, or whoever wrote Ecclesiastes, had a similar idea: “… the wind returneth again according to its circuits.”

Even though that view denies Christian teleology, which is by definition linear, looking at Russia I sometimes feel those ancient chaps had a point. The latest occasion that inspired such heretical thoughts was the 12-year prison term handed out to Ksenia Karelina.

This young woman, a talented amateur ballerina, holds dual Russian-US citizenship, having acquired the second part by marrying an American. She settled in Los Angeles and was supposed to live happily ever after.

But then Ksenia made a fatal mistake: she decided to visit her 90-year-old grandmother in Yekaterinburg, the city she herself was from. When Ksenia landed, she was welcomed home by friendly customs men, who checked her phone for suspicious contacts.

The key word they tapped in was ‘Ukraine’, and sure enough, Ksenia turned out to be a seasoned criminal. Brace yourself, for I’m now going to divulge the gruesome details of her crime. Are you ready?

Here comes: it turned out Ksenia had donated about £50 to Razom for Ukraine, a New York-based charity that provides humanitarian aid to children and old people in the Ukraine. The officers were shocked by the evidence of that heinous crime, as I’m sure you are.

Ksenia Karelina was summarily arrested and charged with high treason. She was then tried in camera and, having pleaded guilty, sentenced to 12 years in, not to cut too fine a point, a concentration camp.

Knowing a few things about the investigative techniques favoured by Russian jurisprudence, I suspect the closed trial was necessary to conceal the reasons for Ksenia’s mea culpa. Spectators might have spotted the aftermath of vigorous interrogations.

That made me think of my own life in Russia, which mercifully came to an end 51 years ago. Those were the halcyon days of Brezhnev’s reign, when anyone finding anything wrong with communism – and sharing his thoughts with other people, either orally or especially in writing – risked a prison term.

My memory of that is still quite vivid, because I was a rather active dissident, going quite a bit further than just grumbling. Hence KGB major Sazonov had a father-to-son talk with me and threatened me with Article 70 of the USSR Penal Code: “agitation and propaganda aiming to undermine the Soviet Union” or words to that effect.

And here’s the thing: the maximum prison term for that crime was specified as seven (7) years. True enough, some people did get such draconian sentences, but not many. Back in 1973 political prisoners in the Soviet Union numbered dozens, a few hundred tops. And most of them had sentences shorter than seven years.

The Code also has an article for high treason, but take my word for it: that wouldn’t have been invoked just for a little change donated to a charitable cause, no matter how objectionable.

Karelina’s case harkens back to much earlier times, those of Stalin, when millions were executed or murdered ‘the dry way’ (wasn’t Soviet slang wonderful) – killed by starvation, cold, torture and backbreaking labour in concentration camps.

It appears that Putin has jumped backwards, leapfrogging Khrushchev’s and Brezhnev’s time, and landing smack in the middle of Stalin’s, if not yet with full force.

There are some 1,200 political prisoners in today’s Russia, and those are just the ones we know about. Terms like 15 years are routinely handed out to evildoers who describe the war in the Ukraine as just that, rather than the mandated ‘special military operation’.

There’s still no death penalty, not officially at any rate. Unofficially, prisoners – or even people at large – are being murdered apace. The methods vary from poison to shooting to stabbing to savage beatings, the usual repertoire of violence.

Russians who aren’t blinded by the flying shards of round-the-clock propaganda fear that unbridled mass terror, unseen since Stalin’s time, is on its way back. They have much to be afraid of.

I’ll now translate for your delectation a few choice excerpts from an indictment passed on some NKVD executioners in 1940, when even Stalin’s mass murderers felt the boys had overstepped the mark.

The accepted killing technique was a bullet in the nape of the neck, and just one NKVD/KGB executioner, Vasily Blokhin, ran up a score in six digits. He even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records by dispatching 7,000 Polish POWs in just 28 days.

But such methods didn’t satisfy the refined tastes of Blokhin’s colleagues in the Vologda Region. They were eventually charged with “perverse methods of applying capital punishment”.

According to the official indictment, the officers: “drove 55 prisoners to the field and hacked them with axes. Two women were beaten to death with logs of wood.”

During the interrogation of one suspect, he had his nose broken with a metal hook and his eyes gouged out, after which he was buried under the floorboards. Two “citizens” were killed with sledgehammers and buried under the floor of the local register office, apparently taking the overflow from the NKVD’s own headquarters.

“One evening a meeting was called at the local NKVD office, where everyone was told of the CPSU Central Committee directive to kill about 70 people without using firearms. After that, the boss took an axe and a sledgehammer out of the cabinet, saying that was how they were to kill some 30 people that night. They were to chop people’s heads off and then bury pieces of their flesh in the pre-prepared graves at the cemetery.

“Prisoners, 15-20 at a time, were taken out of prison to the register office, where they were tied up, put into sleighs and covered with blankets, with NKVD officers sitting on top. When arriving at the graves, prisoners were taken out one by one, dismembered with an axe and buried in pieces. That way officers dispatched a large number of prisoners within three days. Afterwards they burned their own clothes covered with blood and the clothes of the killed prisoners.”

The grandsons of those Vologda monsters are now running the country, and, though ostensibly Russian politics has changed, the NKVD/KGB/FSB has enjoyed an unbroken continuity of monstrosity. It’s under their tutelage that Russia has become what a certain British columnist likes to describe as “the most conservative and Christian country in Europe”.

At the moment, they mostly vent their best urges on Ukrainians, trying to match and outdo their NKVD progenitors. But those Russians who know the history of their country are quaking in their boots. The wind of unrestrained violence is gusting full blast, and it’s not long before it’ll indeed “return again according to its circuits”.

That sinister organisation has been running Russia de jure for 25 years through its frontman, Col. Putin. And those Russians who understand something that columnist doesn’t are running for their lives. As did I, all those years ago.

Just over a week ago, the Ukrainian army moved four crack motorised brigades, some 10,000-strong, to the border of Russia’s Kursk region.

The Russians either failed to recognise the significance of that deployment or missed it altogether. When the attack came, it caught them off-guard.

Since then the Ukrainians have managed to grab 400 sq. miles of Russian territory. That’s more than the ongoing Russian offensive in the Donbas has claimed in three months. How come?

To some extent, the answer lies in the skill and courage of the Ukrainian army. But to a larger extent, the reason is the historical drawbacks of the Russian army. That was something Generalissimo Suvorov knew and tried in vain to correct.

Alexander Suvorov (d. 1800) comes close to being canonised as a Russian saint. He certainly is already canonised as a Russian general.

Suvorov fought successfully against the Turks, not so successfully against the French and brilliantly against his own people, when he brutally suppressed the Pugachev Rebellion (1773-1775). That last achievement was downplayed during the Second World War, when Stalin used Suvorov’s name to rally the Soviet troops.

Suvorov was known not only for his victories and contributions to military doctrine, but also for his knack for coining aphorisms. Some he originated, some, such as “Train hard, fight easy”, were merely attributed to him. One aphorism, however, comes to mind at the sight of the surprise attack by the Ukrainian troops.

“Every foot soldier should know his manoeuvre,” Suvorov once said in a wistful exercise of wishful thinking. He meant that even the lowliest infantryman should understand both the overall strategic objectives and the tactical means of achieving them. That way the soldier would develop the initiative and speed of thought required to respond to a changing situation, improvising if necessary.

For all his talent, Suvorov never managed to train his army in that spirit. Neither has any Russian general since.

They’ve all failed not because Russian soldiers lack courage – quite the opposite: few nations breed so many young men ready to die en masse. Nor is it the failure of academic training: since the Second World War, the Russian officer corps has become well-versed in the ins and outs of military arts.

The problem lies deeper than that, and I must refer you to the brilliant book Carnage and Culture by the American historian Victor Davis Hansen. He shows that throughout history, from the Battle of Salamis (480 BC) onwards, Western armies have consistently defeated their enemies from elsewhere.

He analyses many contributing factors, but the overarching principle is that an army is always a reflection of the country that sends it into battle. Hence a Westerner growing up in conditions of even inchoate freedom perceives himself as a citizen, whereas his Persian or Carthaginian adversary knows that ultimately he’s a slave.

This distinction begets numerous ramifications. One of them is that a Westerner is imbued with a sense of individual responsibility. And when he becomes a soldier, he’s trained in the same spirit.

That gives him the confidence and flexibility to react instantly to a rapidly changing situation, something a slave can’t do. A soldier raised in a tyranny fears his own officers, the officers fear their generals, the generals fear their ruler – and such fears are greater than those caused by the enemy.

Taking initiative before a direct order arrives from high above is hard when a soldier of any rank knows that a setback will get him executed by his own people. (During the Second World War the Soviets executed 158,000 of their own soldiers. The corresponding number for the Wehrmacht was 8,000.) He has been trained since infancy that independent thought can get him in trouble.

Prodded by commanders who see soldiers as expendable material, such an army may astound the world with its readiness, nay eagerness, to take massive casualties in a human-wave assault. But it’ll hardly ever succeed in a situation where it has no numerical advantage and where the speed of improvisational thought and movement is at a premium.

That’s why the outnumbered proto-Western Greeks under Themistocles defied the odds to rout the Persians under Xerxes at Salamis. And why a small Anglo-French expeditionary force thrashed the Russian army in the Crimean War (1853-1856).

For Russia has always been typologically closer to the Persia of Xerxes than to the Greece of Themistocles. That’s why Friedrich Engels, Marx’s accomplice, pointed out that the Russians had never won any major battles where they hadn’t had much greater numbers than the opposition. (Engels’s views on Russia weren’t widely publicised in the Soviet Union.)

The wars Russia fought in the 20^th century, against Japan, Poland, Finland, Germany and Afghanistan, all vindicated that observation. Some of those wars Russia won, some she lost, some she drew, but in each one her army demonstrated innate weaknesses similar to those pointed out by Hansen.

In 1939-1940, a tiny Finland managed to retain her independence, if not all of her territory, against the might of the Red Army, by far the most numerous and best-equipped in the world. In addition to defending the fortified Mannerheim Line, the Finns deployed small mobile units to strike fast and vanish into the forests. Meanwhile, the Soviets lost 500,000 men by sending wave after wave against entrenched positions, with each subsequent wave advancing over the corpses of the previous one.

In 1941-1942 the Nazis wiped out the professional Red Army, taking over 4,000,000 POWs in history’s greatest such harvest. This though the Soviets outnumbered them in practically every category, such as five to one in tanks, the principal weapon of that war.

German generals of the new generation, Kleist, Guderian, Manstein et al., vindicated another adage by Suvorov: “Fight by skill, not numbers.” It took the combined efforts of the whole world to defeat the Third Reich, which Stalin ruefully acknowledged by telling Roosevelt and Churchill that, but for their help, the Soviets would have lost.

The ongoing war in the Ukraine is, mutatis mutandis, yet another confrontation between East and West, with the Ukrainians cast in the latter role.

They are by nature more individualistic and, shall we say, European than the Russians, and always have been. In the past, Ukrainian agriculture rejected Russian collectivism. If the peasant commune was ubiquitous in Russia, Ukrainian peasants always resembled Western farmers, with a single family, not a commune, being the essential unit.

Ukrainians are in general more civilised than the Russians. Travellers are always struck by the instantly changing landscape the moment they cross from Russia into the Ukraine. Houses become sturdier and neater, fields better-tended, the populace more sober. The farther west one goes, the starker the contrast with Russia – for example, Lvov has always looked more Austrian than Slavic.

The Ukrainian Army was largely trained by Westerners, and it proved receptive to European tactics because its soldiers are themselves European, certainly more so than the Russians. The problem for the Ukrainians so far has come from the dampeners the West applied to their war effort.

Prohibited to attack Russian territory either with troops or long-range bombardment, the Ukrainians were forced to rely on trench warfare, where the Russians’ greater numbers and firepower negate the traditional tactical superiority of West over East.

Now some of the tethers have slipped off, and the Ukrainians are taking advantage of their superior mobility, tactical daring and personnel motivation. Looking at their continuing thrust deep into the Kursk region, one is tempted to think that, had they been properly supplied from the beginning and not artificially held back, the war would already be over.

I don’t know what plans the Ukrainian high command have for the future, nor what the strategic objective of the current offensive may be. The possibilities are numerous.

The Ukrainians may hope to hold on to some Russian territory and use it to barter for the occupied Ukrainian land in future negotiations. Or else they may feel they are strong enough to use their territorial gains as the beachhead for further advances.

Also, the objectives for the raid may be more political and diplomatic than purely military. Zelensky’s people may want to show the West that the weapons it supplies won’t be wasted in a lost cause. Given the right level of support, the Ukraine may well give Putin a bloody nose.

That was the conclusion reached by a by-partisan Senate delegation that visited Kiev on Monday: “After listening to President Zelensky, we urge the Biden Administration to lift restrictions on weapons provided by the United States so they can strike the Russian invaders more effectively.”

One thing is clear already: the true heirs to Suvorov’s legacy are fighting under the blue-and-yellow flag, not the Russian tricolour. More power to them.

P.S. I first heard of Carnage and Culture from my good friend, Prof. David Martin Jones. David tragically took his own life in April, and I miss him tearfully. RIP.

The other day one of my readers commented that my squeamish contempt for the Tommy Robinson types isn’t so much moral as aesthetic.

I wrote back, saying that all aesthetic judgements are latently moral and vice versa. The response was automatic, involving no conscious deliberation at all. For me, that was like saying that water is wet and Sancerre is dry.

However, the issue rates more than a throwaway line. In fact, the link between morality and beauty has attracted the attention of some of history’s greatest minds: pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, followed by medieval scholastics like Albertus Magnus and Aquinas, then subsequent Catholic theology, and of course classical German thinkers, most notably Kant.

Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness. The key word there was ‘objective’: the transcendentals weren’t contingent on personal tastes, ideologies or cultural diversity.

Moreover, they existed as One – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.

Aquinas, who was said to have baptised Aristotle, saw the obvious link between the transcendentals postulated by the Greeks and Christian doctrine. God is One, and He is Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The unity of the three thus made a natural journey from philosophy to theology.

Common to all the pre-Christian, Christian and post-Christian thinkers on aesthetics is their insistence on the objective nature of beauty (natural or artistic), and its inseparable unity with truth (thought and logic) and goodness (morality).

That beauty is objective and not contingent on personal tastes is in no way contradicted by the obvious fact that some people find Bach’s fugues beautiful and rap ugly, and for some others it’s the other way around. Beauty is a signal that can be clearly picked up by some receivers, distorted by others and missed altogether by others still. But the signal remains the same. It’s an objective wave that exists irrespective of any receiver’s capacity to grasp it.

This is merely the post-rationalised background to something I had felt intuitively long before I lay my hands on the writings of Plato or Aquinas. My first judgement of people, their actions and ideas has always been aesthetic. However, it took me decades to learn to trust my aesthetic judgement, especially as related to truth and goodness.

For whatever it’s worth, I think my judgement has earned a measure of such trust, for all the times it has gone wrong. Hence I believe that good and intelligent people have to be beautiful – but not necessarily in the sense of every such woman resembling Venus de Milo or every man Belvedere Apollo.

It’s just that a lifetime of pondering the subtle complexities of life and trying to work out a true and moral response to them has to leave a biographic imprint on a person’s face. So does a life of coarse amoral venality dominated by the pursuit of unworthy gains, but that would be a different imprint.

This isn’t at all the same as Cesare Lombroso’s version of criminal anthropology. He was a social Darwinist who believed that criminality was hereditary. If so, an analysis of a man’s physiognomy should provide a reliable clue to his moral character.

I more or less agree with Lombroso’s conclusion, but not with his premise. Heredity may give a bias to a man’s life, but it doesn’t determine it. That task falls on the aggregate of moral, rational and aesthetic choices a man makes freely throughout his life. No set of genes, however strong, takes away a man’s free will. A criminal’s DNA doesn’t decide to kill. He does.

Free will is to me axiomatic, as it was to Dr Johnson, who once said: “Sir, we know our will is free, and there’s an end on it”. If we are but automata whose life is predetermined by God (for those who believe in him) or DNA (for those who swear by it), then our humanity is a total waste – then Bach, Shakespeare and Vermeer are merely background noise, bedtime reading or interior decoration.

This is a long response to my reader’s comment, something that I originally reduced to a few words. It’s also an explanation of my feelings about some of our contemporaries, especially those involved in politics.

Speaking of Tommy Robinson, for example, all the best men I know share his concerns about the growing Muslim presence in our life. Even I share it, although this doesn’t form the axis around which my worldview revolves.

But that’s neither here nor there. One look at that tattooed thug’s face, typically contorted by hatred, one second of listening to his harangues, and aesthetic judgement kicks in, saying: “This man is rotten.”

The same – and here I know I’m going to upset some of my American friends – goes for Donald Trump, with his Mussolini-like gurning. How does a man acquire such facial expressions over a long lifetime? Certainly not by constantly holding his actions to moral tests and his thoughts to intellectual ones.

My aesthetic alarm goes haywire every time Trump struts his stuff in front of cameras, every time I hear or read his crude and illiterate pronouncements. I just know he’s a bad man, even though he does have many good ideas. I can see why many Americans will vote for him – I’d do so myself, given the current choice. What I can’t understand is how anyone can genuinely like Trump, this utterly unlikeable man.

I hope I haven’t upset my American friends too much. If I have, I can only take refuge in the old saying: Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

Speaking of old sayings, the one about beauty strikes me as wrong. Beauty is no more in the eye of the beholder than truth is in the mouth of any speaker or goodness in the actions of any man. Such things are ontological properties of everything that is.

Conservative people all over the West are beginning to fear that there soon will be nothing left to conserve.

Left-wing governments are coming to power everywhere, but that by itself hasn’t traditionally spelled catastrophe. One would be hard-pressed to name a single Western country that hasn’t had any socialist governments over the past few decades.

Such governments invariably cause damage to everything they touch: economy, education, social order, culture, medical care, political institutions. Yet socialists come and then go, leaving their successors to apply balm to the wounds.

So they do, with variable success. Reasons to feel optimistic suffer attrition at times, but they never quite disappear. Traditional institutions seem sturdy enough to withstand the odd squall from the left. They might deflect and totter but they don’t tumble down.

Therefore, when yet another socialist government takes over, conservatives grit their teeth and repeat the sacramental adage “this too shall pass”. A little patience, and things will go back to normal. We may bleed, but we won’t bleed out.

That sense of latent optimism is no more. Talking to conservative people in several countries (England, France, the US and Holland, to be exact), I’m struck by the gloom of despondency descending on all of them. Everything conservatives hold dear seems to be debauched at best, wiped out at worst. The ongoing collapse is no longer political. It’s existential, civilisational, possibly even ontological.

Voting one lot out and the other lot in can offer no cure for such ills. There is no other lot. They all seem the same, give or take. History may indeed have ended, but not the way that intellectually challenged neocon declared in 1989.

That’s when people turn away from Dr Pangloss and towards Guy Fawkes. “A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy,” they say, fully aware that the original dangerous remedy was an attempt to blow up the king and the House of Lords during the opening of Parliament.

Good conservative people wince when watching mobs of extremists rant and riot in the streets, or rabblerousers get into governments. But they then suppress the wince and just shrug: if the rabble doesn’t resist the nightmare, no one else will. And someone has to.

The hope is that tattooed thugs will turn into a giant blanket smothering the fetid zeitgeist, only for the good conservative people then to reclaim possession of Western civilisation with its rarefied air of traditional virtues.

“If not [Tommy Robinson or any typological equivalent in any other country], then who?” conservatives ask what they think is a rhetorical question. They know, and they expect you to agree, that there is no one else. Populist extremism is our only hope.

Sorry, but I can’t agree. When I hear such sentiments expressed, and this is almost a daily occurrence, I always respond with the phrase in the title above.

A barbarian onslaught can’t save a civilisation; it can only destroy it. If you don’t believe me, read Edward Gibbon who wrote over 700 pages on this very subject.

I wonder how these good people, who have every reason to be desperate, envisage the mechanics of a victory thus achieved. We all agree on the generalities, but what about the specifics?

Let’s say expert rabblerousers drum up much wider support than they enjoy now. Instead of driving thousands into the streets, they manage to put together mobs numbering in hundreds of thousands. What then?

Such mobs will then march on [Capitol Hill, Westminster, the Elysée Palace, etc.] and overrun the defences. Everyone working at such locations will be summarily [thrown out, exiled, imprisoned, guillotined, drawn and quartered – take your pick]. Then what?

Will good conservative people, a sort of collective Jacob Rees-Mogg, ride in on a white steed, disperse the rabble and restore everything they hold dear? Anyone who believes that lacks both historical knowledge and imagination.

History shows that a revolutionary overthrow of traditional institutions, flawed though they may be at that moment, invariably leads to a blood-soaked chaos, a Hobbesian war of all against all. No modern revolution over the past 250 years disproves this observation.

Even the American Revolution, the most benign of them all, claimed hundreds of thousands of victims, if one justifiably regards the Civil War as the Revolution’s second act. And the less said about the French and Russian revolutions, the better – and God knows enough has been said already.

Let’s just mention that France took at least a century to recover a semblance of traditional order, and some naysayers will maintain she hasn’t really recovered it even to this day. As to Russia, all those moderate pince-nezed socialists and bearded conservatives so eager to let the revolutionary monster out fell its first victims, and Russia turned from a mildly objectionable country into a downright evil one.

What should terrify any real, which is to say temperamental, conservative is that the consequences of any violent mass outburst are totally unpredictable. And if we go by European historical evidence, it’s not the cream but the scum that tends to rise to the top.

A civilisation under threat or in decline has to have the inner strength to repel the former or reverse the latter. If there is no indigenous source of such strength, the civilisation is already dead, even if it may be unaware of this.

Those of us who hope that such strength, though not immediately obvious, still exists must realise that its source can’t be the Tommy Robinsons of this world. Belief that it might be shows woeful misunderstanding of the roots of the problem.

For any civilisation is a physical expression of a metaphysical fact. It’s a body growing around the core of self-defining beliefs.

Only when such beliefs are strong, obvious and more or less universally shared can a civilisation garner enough strength and self-confidence to defend itself. Conversely, no matter how physically strong a civilisation may appear to be on the periphery, a weakness at the core will always bring it down.

All it takes is a push, from without or from within. When the spiritual muscles of a great civilisation grow flabby, it falls prey to barbarians clad in wolfskins or to some internal turmoil – the kind of challenges it used to swat away with ease when it still knew what it stood for.

In the West that core was Christianity, first the faith, then the religion, then the civilisation. Yet at some point Western people began to believe that they could dispense with that core, while keeping and strengthening the body it had produced. All they had to do was find an equally viable replacement.

What at that point seemed easy has since proved impossible. No replacement has been found, although many have been tried. As a result, every muscle in the body began to atrophy, a symptom recognised by many even if the cause isn’t.

Recovering the original core is our only hope, and losing hope is as wrong morally as it may be appealing rationally. However, vesting such hope into the revolutionary zeal of the mob is a terrible mistake. So vested, the hope will be stamped to death by the jackboots of conquering modernity – even if that footwear is made by Adidas or Nike.

Don’t know why, but the 1967 song The Last Waltz has been stuck in my mind ever since Kamala Harris announced her choice of running mate.

Of the foursome now vying for the top two jobs in Western politics, only Trump is old enough to remember the song, and at some point I fully expect him to say something like: “This last Walz won’t last for ever.” I know from personal experience that puns based on people’s surnames are as irresistible as they are silly.

So, by the evidence of the on-going campaign in the US, are personal attacks. That’s most unfortunate because both Harris and Walz are less vulnerable to slings and arrows than Trump and Vance.

Harris hasn’t done enough in her personal life to cancel out the advantages conferred by her sex and race. That these incidentals are seen as advantages raises uncomfortable questions about the American electorate and indeed about the very idea of universal franchise. But such things are what they are, and an ethnic woman gets a head start in any race.

As to Walz, he comes across as everyone’s favourite uncle and has a CV to match. A Midwesterner, educated at a state college, married to the same woman for 30 years, NCO in the National Guard, schoolteacher and football coach, a long political career as first a congressman, then Minnesota governor. Though raised Catholic, he later converted to evangelical Lutheranism, a more mainstream religion in the US. If there has ever existed a set of chinkless armour, Walz is wearing it.

Any personal attacks against him, or Harris for that matter, are bound to backfire. For example, saying, as Trump does, that Harris discovered her black identity only to score political points is counterproductive. So what else is new?

Of course, Kamala had to play the only two cards in her hand, race and sex. What else could she boast of? A record of statesmanship? Success at securing the border? Towering intellect? Oratorial talent? Don’t make me laugh.

And Vance is making a bad mistake by attacking Walz’s military record, which, unlike his own, included no combat postings in 25 years. If I were Walz, I’d barge through the door thus opened by mentioning Trump’s rather iffy deferments during the Vietnam war.

In short, neither Harris nor Walz has any glaring personal weaknesses that can be exploited for political gain. Yet that doesn’t mean they have no exploitable weaknesses altogether.

Trump and Vance should take their cue from the recent general election in Britain. Starmer won his landslide by the strategy of doing nothing, but doing it well. He pointed out every weakness in the Tory record, and there were many. But at the same time Starmer was reticent about the policies he’d adopt if elected, and how they’d make things better.

Instead, he was mouthing woke platitudes and bien pensant generalities, studiously avoiding any specifics. He even refused to give a straight answer to the question of whether or not women have penises, saying instead that 99.99 per cent don’t. That slandered some 35,000 British lasses who didn’t deserve such calumny. But the Tories failed to drag Starmer out into the open and bombard him with demands to specify his policies on everything that matters.

Since the media in the US are even more left-wing than in Britain, the Republican ticket must be extra-sharp to counteract all the free publicity the Democrats are getting. Shouting that Kamala isn’t as black as she paints herself or that Walz never fired a shot in anger isn’t going to do it. Attacking them on policies may – and should.

For example, Walz, good all-around egg that he is, has had an appalling record as Minnesota governor. Under his tender care, per-capita GDP went down (dropping below the national average for the first time) and crime went up.

When Minnesota police were being overrun during the 2020 BLM riots, they pleaded with the governor to send in the National Guard. Yet Walz sat on his thumbs for three days, and only managed to stop himself from taking the knee by a huge mental effort. (Starmer succumbed to that temptation at the same time.)

His wife, meanwhile, went on record claiming that, in the midst of the riots, she stood by an open window, breathing in joyously the aroma of burning cafés and shops. If that’s Minnesota’s first family, I wonder what its last family is like.

As to the religious faith Walz wears on his sleeve, I’d be curious to know how he reconciles it with his secular policies and beliefs. For example, he signed a law permitting abortion up to the moment of birth, which even evangelical Lutheranism must see as infanticide.

Under his aegis, Minnesota hospitably invited children from all over the country to come for “gender-affirming care”, meaning puberty blockers and castration. He also ordered that tampons be provided in the boys’ lavatories at all high schools. That has earned him the nickname of ‘Tampon Tim’ in some quarters.

I’d relish watching him squirm when asked how many American boys have periods. That’s one of those questions to which there are no good answers, sort of like “Mr Smith, when did you stop beating your wife?” or, for that matter, “Do British women have penises?”

During her tenure in the US Senate, Kamala Harris was rated as its most left-wing member, which is saying a lot in the context of the overall leftward shift in US politics.

Then it should almost go without saying that both Harris and Walz are exponents of the critical race theory and the DEI catechism. This means that, if he’s to be consistent, Walz ought to hate himself. After all, he is a straight white male, and a Christian Midwesterner to boot, which is to say the bogeyman of his ideology.

Many Americans regard Trump as toxic, and they’d vote even for Che Guevara if he were the Democratic candidate. Nevertheless, however low my opinion of the American (or any other Western) electorate may be, I don’t believe most voters are as extreme Left as Harris and Walz.

The task Trump and Vance face is forcing their opponents away from generalities and out into specifics. Both men’s records stack up favourably against Harris and Walz, much more so than their personalities. And Donald? No puns of Walz’s name, please. That’s neither grown-up nor clever.

P.S. Speaking of left-wing politicians, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo displayed her cosmopolitan savvy by slipping the ubiquitous English word into her otherwise French-language diatribe.  

“F*** reactionaries, f*** the extreme right, f*** all those who want to shut us in a war of everyone against everyone,” she said in an interview to Le Monde, the French answer to The Guardian. One can only regret the paucity of the French language, with politicians having to rely on English to express their innermost convictions. Still, it’s good to see that the much-vaunted French sense of style extends even to Lefties.

When I talk to my French or American friends, I go out of my way to object whenever they mention British citizens.

To them, the difference between citizens and subjects is trivial. To me, it’s vital.

In republics, heads of state are elected. In monarchies – real monarchies, that is – they are anointed. In some mysterious or not so mysterious ways, a monarch isn’t just a symbol of continuity, a link between generations past, present or future. He’s also the embodiment of metaphysical unity between God and nation.

A nation so constituted can have any number of laws protecting life, property and the rights of every subject. The government guarantees such protection in exchange for its subjects’ allegiance. But the government’s claim to legitimacy derives from that transactional arrangement only to some extent. To a greater extent, a monarch establishes his sovereignty at a level high above such factors.

Today’s France and America started out as revolutionary republics, whose claim to legitimacy was based on repudiation of subjecthood and assertion of citizenship. Repudiation of subjecthood went hand in hand with repudiation of God as the origin of sovereignty. Assertion of citizenship went hand in hand with assertion of man as the subject of sovereignty.

Man was now the master of his own destiny, and hence the sole giver of his own man-made laws with no claim to divine inspiration or lineage. The life, property and dignity of an individual were now protected not because this was God’s will, but because it was a good idea.

That led to a different understanding of nationhood. In a country like France, where a republican revolution overthrew the ancient monarchy, most of the old adhesives of nationhood (language, culture, customs, an intuitive sense of belonging) still held. But man-made ideas now reigned supreme.

The problem is that man’s thinking is fickle. What seems like a good idea or a just law today, tomorrow may draw widespread opprobrium. And if the government consistently failed to come up with good or at least popular ideas, its claim to sovereignty was weakened. A sovereignty that lives by ideas may die by them.

In America, the post-revolutionary problems were even greater. The country’s language came second-hand, so did most of its laws; its population was a mishmash of arrivals from various European countries. Thus, if the founding ideas of the French republic were added to a nationhood of long standing, in America the founding ideas became more or less coextensive with nationhood.

One can hear many intelligent Americans say even these days that Americanism isn’t a nationality but an idea. Hence anyone sharing that idea and legally entitled to settle in America can become an American the moment his feet touch the tarmac at JFK.

Every American knows that, whenever he was born as a person, he was born in 1776 as a citizen. The French have something similar but to a lesser extent: they had been French for centuries before 1789.

In both countries, as well as in any other republic built on the ideas of the Enlightenment, politics has to play a much greater role than in ancient monarchies. And republics’ presidents have infinitely more political power than a British monarch, who has next to none.

But he has something no president can have: a lineage that goes back so far in time that one may as well accept that it was originated, not just anointed, by God. That acceptance went into the making of Englishness, and it was perceived either consciously or intuitively by every English subject for many centuries. Even in our godless time, it still is.

However, over the past century or two, that self-perception came under a concerted and ever-accelerating attack. At present, one may think it has been expunged, but that conclusion would be too hasty and superficial.

England is no more pious than France and perhaps even less so than America. But the link between nation and God, with monarch as its conduit, was too deeply wired into the national psyche to disappear overnight or even over a century.

That’s why an English monarch, no matter how much he may be ridiculed and dismissed as an irrelevance, draws something no president can ever have: residual if understated love and filial devotion. These may only slightly etch today’s sense of nationhood, but they do add a vital touch.

That’s why poll after poll shows that the English don’t want to become a republic. Not yet at any rate. Good thing too, for the monarch sits at the very centre of a constitutional ganglion of interlacing synapses, and removing him would create a chaos the nation might not be able to survive.

Such is the rational argument in favour of the monarchy, but it’s insignificant compared to the irrational ganglion of loyalties, ancestral affections and intuitive kinship also centred on the monarch. That’s what makes subjecthood profoundly different from citizenship, for all the external features they have in common.

One can become a citizen legally, by being born or naturalised in a country and pledging allegiance to it. One can even become a citizen who passionately shares the founding ideas of the country. But sharing the intuition passed on from generation to generation for centuries is a different proposition.

Both America and France have to look for slightly different national bonds, and they find them in man-made ideas and practices all converging on collective amour propre. Since repetition is the mother of all learning, ideas must be constantly reiterated lest they may weaken their grasp on the national psyche.

That’s why every public building in France prominently exhibits the founding triad of the republic. But whatever the French think of that tripartite slogan, and whether or not they realise that the middle element, égalité, makes the other two untenable, they still crave extra-rational bonds.

Religion has been legally disqualified from acting in that capacity since 1905, and monarchy is no longer an option. Hence the French have found their metaphysical surrogate in their culture and especially language. Any native speaker of French, regardless of where he comes from, is accepted as French to a much greater extent than a native speaker of English from, say, Canada or South Africa, is accepted as English.

Americans too need constant reminders of their nationhood, and those are almost exclusively civic and political. Schoolchildren reciting the pledge of allegiance, hand over heart whenever the national anthem is played, Stars and Stripes flying outside people’s houses – these are all reiterations of nationhood.

Britain is different from them and also from England. Britishness is a civic identity that can be acquired in ways not that different from an equivalent process in France or the US. Englishness, however, isn’t something that can be acquired, not without a total immersion for decades and usually not even then.

A parallel distinction between civic and ethnic identity doesn’t exist in France and America or, if it does, it’s not reflected in terminology. A naturalised American is an American, a naturalised Frenchman is French, but a naturalised Englishman doesn’t exist.

Subjecthood plays a critical role in that sense of both British and, more subtly, English identity. Unlike the truths declared self-evident in the American Declaration of Independence, this identity is indeed self-evident, and hence not in need of constant reassertion and reiteration.

A British politician ending his speech with “God bless Britain” would be laughed out of Westminster, and not just because most MPs and their constituents are atheists. They just know, some consciously, most subliminally, that an anointed monarch is an eternal conduit between them and God. Their personal beliefs don’t really matter in that regard.

English identity is like the English language. It’s easy to acquire good command of it for everyday purposes – but acquiring perfect mastery is harder than in most other languages. There are too many nuances that have to be sensed and can never be explained.

In the context of the on-going events, it would be interesting to consider how all of the above relates to the issue of integrating and assimilating new arrivals. But that discussion is for another time.

Mike Tyson, former world heavyweight champion, is to make a comeback – as a woman.

He has begun to train for the 2028 Olympics, where he plans to compete as a superheavyweight. “I’s the baddest woman on the planet, see,” he told me in an exclusive interview.

Mr – or rather Miss – Tyson specified he isn’t coming back for the money or fame. It’s just that she feels her CV is incomplete. Although, fighting as a man, she won WBC, WBA and IBF titles, she never triumphed at the Games.

Mike, or rather Mirabel as she now calls herself, will be 62 when the next Olympic Games come along, but she doesn’t see that as an obstacle. “I be young enough to kick any bitch’s ass,” he said.

But the real story unfolded when I asked Mirabel since when she had seen herself as a woman. “Since I was born, man,” she replied.

True enough, many observers have remarked on Tyson’s high-pitched voice that indeed sounds more feminine than masculine. That voice, explained Mirabel, belonged to the woman trapped in a man’s body.

Why then has she had to wait so long to come out? Mirabel explained that it was as a boy named Mike that she had been incarcerated 38 times before she was 13. “You try telling those bad mofos at the juvy you’s really a girl,” she said. “They do you in turn and then you get the shank.”

As was inevitable, the issue of chromosomes came up, and Mirabel had a ready answer. “Ain’t about no chromosomes, man,” she said in her mellifluous tremolo. “Is about how you feel, see. And I feel like, well, you know, giving’em bitches the old one-two.”

In addition to filling that lamentable gap in her boxing record, Mirabel acknowledged that the idea of violence towards women had always held certain attractions for her. “Now I ain’t got to marry them bitches to punch their lights out,” she explained.

When I reached the IOC to get their take on the story, they commented that, apart from Tyson having lived the first 58 years of his life as a man, there are issues with his eligibility, as a professional, to fight in an amateur event.

“Ain’t no problem,” insisted Mirabel. “That license, it be given to Mike, not Mirabel. And it lapsed anyway. Ain’t no longer valid, see.”

The interview then turned informal, we cracked a bottle of the Olympic spirit and had a few shots to toast Mirabel’s new career. As the evening progressed, she was getting a bit amorous and I decided to beat my retreat. We parted as just friends.

Welcome back, Mike – sorry, Mirabel. Olympic boxing needs you. Pierre Coubertin is smiling at you from wherever he is.  

The walls of Holiday Inn Express in Rotherham were yesterday adorned with two graffiti.

One of them said “Get out England”, which was upsetting. It should have been “Get out of England”, which would have satisfied the pedant in me, if not the realist.

The other inscription was a colloquial rendering of ‘copulating persons from the Indian subcontinent’, which failed to satisfy any of my constituent parts. All in all, I have to return to the subject of rioting – the issue just won’t go away.

Yesterday, I wrote that “uncontrolled immigration is a serious problem. By all means, we must discuss it – but not with the likes of Tommy Robinson.”

So let’s pick up where I left off and try to discuss it – the way all serious problems should be discussed: dispassionately, analytically and without name-calling rancour.

Home Secretary Yvette Cooper describes the rioters in uncompromising terms: “’They are thugs, criminals and extremists who betray the values our country is built on.” I can’t argue with her epithets, but the second part of her sentence raises all sorts of questions.

Prime among them concerns the values Britain is built on. What exactly are they? The question is too broad, and it would take many a volume to cover adequately. So let’s narrow the enquiry down and look at the British values that are immediately relevant to the unfolding mayhem.

All such values ultimately boil down to the matter of British, and specifically English, identity. Miss Cooper, poor Ed Balls’s wife, evidently thinks that these values are identical with those espoused by the woke consensus. But she is wrong.

All modern nations are ethnically synthetic, and neither England nor Britain is an exception. The indigenous population of the British Isles boasts numerous inputs: Celtic, Basque, Germanic from various tribes, Norse, French, Norse-French – and these are just the most obvious ones.

However, while such groups were ethnically heterogeneous, they were racially homogeneous. Moreover, they all shared the same religion and hence the bulk of the same culture over many centuries, folkloric variances apart.

That’s why Englishmen hardly ever qualify their ethnicity the way Americans do. You are unlikely to hear people describing themselves as, say, Norse English or Saxon English the way Americans routinely qualify their nationality with their ancestral origin.

Neither will you hear many Scotsmen stressing, say, their Danish, Pict or Irish origin. Their ethnic identity is Scottish, their civic identity is British, and most of them won’t repudiate the latter by advocating separatist particularism.

Hence national identity was never a problem until the disintegration of the British Empire after the Second World War. Suddenly millions of people of different ethnicity, race, religion and culture began to insist that citizenship in any Commonwealth country entitled them to live in Britain.

Now, about 2.5 billion people currently have Commonwealth citizenship. At that time, the number was smaller, but still undeniably too large for unlimited admittance. Hence the Commonwealth Immigrants’ Act was passed in 1962, stripping most Commonwealth citizens of the right to settle in the UK.

The inflow of immigrants consequently slowed down, but not to a trickle. Racial, ethnic and religious tensions appeared, and further restrictions were deemed necessary. In 1968 Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech warning against the dangers of mass immigration, and three-quarters of all Britons agreed.

As a result, the Labour government passed the Commonwealth Citizenship Act, which effectively put a moratorium on immigration from the former colonies. Still, many people found legal or illegal ways of circumventing such restrictions. The door was still cracked ajar – until another Labour government, that of Tony Blair, flung it wide-open.

If until then Commonwealth immigrants had been coming in their thousands, they now began to arrive in their millions, and the “foreboding” with which Enoch Powell was “filled” was coming true. Multiculturalism became the official ideology and, like all ideologies, it exacted a frightful cost.

British identity gradually became, or rather was presumed to be, ill-defined; English identity almost shameful. Both were assumed to carry the stigma of colonial oppression, racism, jingoism and everything else that was rotten in life.

The new ideology demands that indigenous Britons see themselves as just one group among many, with none entitled to any special status. Now, ideologues tend to be as strong of conviction as they are weak of foresight. They naively expected Britons to do an Esau and happily trade their birthright for a pot of message.

That was never going to happen. British identity in general and English identity in particular were forged over so many centuries that they have entered the nation’s psychological and mental DNA. When that core found itself under attack, tectonic plates began to move, tensions grew, cracks appeared.

Out of those cracks crawled the kind of creatures both Yvette Cooper and I abhor. But even every moderate, conservative Briton I know is in broad sympathy with the rioters’ declared grievances, even if he’s contemptuous of their methods and indeed personalities.

Thuggish ideologues like Tommy Robinson were always likely to fish in troubled waters. However, much as we despise that lot, we shouldn’t deny that the waters are indeed troubled.

It’s possible that at some point decent Britons will join the indecent Yahoos because no legitimate recourse seems to be on offer. If – or rather when – that happens, social order may disintegrate altogether, with consequences as awful as they are unpredictable.

Britain was indeed built on certain values, and one of them is disdainful distrust of any ideologies. All of them are seen as alien and threatening, and Yvette Cooper lives in cloud cuckoo land if she thinks that the ideology she cherishes, that of multi-culti self-righteousness is any exception.

Britain is becoming a powder keg of identity, and the likes of her are playing with fire.

Having left Britain while out on bail, peripatetic thug Tommy has been floating around Europe, posting videos from variously exotic and expensive locations.

His 800,000 followers watch, listen and evidently pay attention. Tommy is living proof that an expert rabble-rouser doesn’t have to be physically present in the country to stoke up mayhem.

Following the Southport stabbings, masked thugs inspired either by Tommy or just by their own monstrous instincts, have gone on a rampage all over the country.

Bristol, Stoke, Liverpool, Manchester and Hull are on fire, and dozens of police officers who tried to stop the mayhem are in hospital. Today, similar riots are planned in Rotherham, Weymouth, Middlesborough and Lancaster, and police are spread thin.

English flags are flying, Nazi salutes are made, shops are being looted and burned. And not just shops: Liverpool’s new library was also torched, adding a nice touch to the practice popularised in Germany, circa 1933.

There the typological precursors of our ‘patriots’ yanked books out of libraries and burned them in the street. Our lot have introduced the time-saving innovation of burning the whole building, books and all. That’s one way to stop the boats, I suppose.

Meanwhile, Robinson continues to lay it on thick: “The British have been pushed too far. Once you start f***ing with their children, taking away their safety. What do you expect to happen?” Why, looted shops and burned libraries, of course. Did I get it right, Tommy?

Our papers and TV channels are having a field day, sputtering righteous indignation at such ‘far-right’ outrages. Yet anyone with a passing knowledge of geometry and some understanding of dialectics would expect that a spectrum that features a far right would also have a far left.

Yet our media refuse to countenance such a Hegelian equilibrium. Hence when BLM, Just Stop Oil or pro-Hamas fanatics do their own spot of rioting, they are never described as ‘far left’. The political spectrum our hacks envisage is oddly lopsided.

I often comment on the inadequacy of our political nomenclature. If you disagree, then you must believe that Margaret Thatcher and Tommy Robinson are political twins. After all, both are routinely described as ‘far right’.

Yet politics, right, left or centre, is usually a mere pretext for mass violence, hardly ever the reason. The reason is human nature, shaped as it is by original sin and unchecked by civilisation. Given the right motivation, propitious circumstances and a realistic hope of immunity, most people are capable of looting, arson, rape and murder.

When such cards fall into place, an inner voice thunders inside people’s skulls: Now you can! And when they get together in mobs, the collective scream is synergistically louder than the sum of its individual parts. Now we can! roars the crowd inwardly – and Muslim shops burn as bright in England, circa 2024, as Jewish shops did in Germany, circa 1938. Our own Kristallnacht is happening all over the country.

Riots can’t be stopped by rational arguments or by satisfying the mob’s political grievances, because their gripes are neither rational nor political.

A Jew set upon by SA thugs in Berlin would have wasted his breath trying to argue he didn’t really want to destroy Germany, and neither did he feast on the blood of Aryan babies. Similarly, the yobs who looted and destroyed a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Manchester, wouldn’t have been stopped by the management’s assurances that they had never run an illegal immigration ring.

If civilisation can no longer contain the beast inside man, the beast pounces, singly or in packs. When that happens, the time for cajoling, pacifying and assuaging has passed. The button for counterviolence has to be pushed.

Yet so far I’ve seen no reports of police acting decisively. No water cannon, no tear gas, no – God forbid – firearms. We are proud of our police going unarmed, which feeling is grossly misplaced.

It would be something to be proud of if Britain were so civilised and law-abiding that our cops didn’t need guns to protect the public and themselves. Alas, as all those photographs of bloodied policemen lying shellshocked on the pavement prove, that’s not the case.

Yet meeting violence with superior violence requires an inner conviction of being in the right. The frenzied mob has its evil spirits expertly whipped up by the likes of Tommy Robinson, and they have no trouble telling themselves that every time they hit a cop they strike a blow for England.

No one inspires our policemen the same way, and their own motivation doesn’t appear to be strong enough. If anything, some cops secretly (or not so secretly) sympathise with the causes assorted rioters claim as their own. We all remember the photographs of policemen ‘taking the knee’ during BLM mayhems, with the media winking at that dereliction of duty with avuncular approval. I wouldn’t be surprised if, likewise, many other cops think Tommy Robinson has a point.

Law enforcement is the cutting edge of civilisation, or else its bulwark keeping at bay the savage beast lurking in barbarians’ breasts. When the cutting edge is dulled and the bulwark collapses, there is no limit to what can happen.

Both civilisation and barbarism tend to leave their marks on people’s faces. Looking at the feral mugs of Tommy Robinson and his ilk, and also of the BLMers, Just Stop Oilers, anti-nukers and pro-Hamasers, one sees plenty of fodder for a future breakdown of order and civility in Britain.

And yes, uncontrolled immigration is a serious problem with severe consequences to the fabric of society. By all means, we must discuss it – but not with the likes of Tommy Robinson.

Common criminals like Tommy and extremists of any kind or hue, right, left, pink, red, brown or green, are to be excluded from civil discourse because they aren’t civilised. Their place is in prison, not at a negotiation table or in a debating studio.

Having spent 15 years in Russia as ambassador of the Sardinian king, Joseph de Maistre (d. 1821) summed up his experience by saying that every nation gets the government it deserves.

Two centuries later, Vladimir Kara-Murza disagrees. He is one of the 16 Russian prisoners involved in the swap the other day. That operation flies in the face of the old proverb about fair exchange being no robbery.

Russia sends out FSB hitmen and spies, electronic or traditional, to do in the West what such people are trained to do: spy, hack and murder.

These are high-risk jobs, but those agents receive a solemn promise that, should they get nabbed, a grateful Russia will trade them back. The FSB then arrests foreign journalists and businessmen or else Russian dissidents known worldwide, sentences them to the kind of prison terms that haven’t been seen since Stalin, and uses them as a sort of exchange currency.

This is done with the cynicism characteristic of Russian secret services and the government behind them. Correction: these days the secret services are the government, led and staffed as it is by career KGB officers.

Kara-Murza and Ilya Yashin are perhaps the best-known among the released dissidents, and they are remarkable men. Having been sentenced to 25 and 8.5 years respectively, they accepted their martyrdom with courage and dignity.

Both refused to cooperate with their jailers which earned them long stints in punitive solitary confinement. They also didn’t give Putin the satisfaction of pleading for mercy, even though they knew they’d be unlikely to survive their ordeal, the way their friend Navalny didn’t survive it.

Now they are in the West, and whatever is left of the free world should rejoice. But Messrs Kara-Murza and Yashin aren’t rejoicing. On the contrary, they insist that they didn’t want to be exchanged, and they certainly wanted to stay in Russia – even in Russian prison.

The swap, they insist, is banishment and exile, not liberation. They’ll go back at the first opportunity because Putin should be opposed from inside the country, not from Germany, Britain or America.

Alas, their first press conference in the West proves that, while Russia continues to produce heroic people ready to give their lives for the cause, the country still lacks effective opposition. For any successful resistance must start with an accurate, dispassionate assessment of the situation – not with consuming and purveying a diet of red herrings.

Kara-Murza, incidentally, is an historian educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a fluent speaker of English and holds dual British-Russian nationality. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, he disagrees with de Maistre.

“I care about my country,” said Kara-Murza, “and I think Russia deserves better than a corrupt KGB dictator. I want to make sure that Russia becomes… a normal, modern, democratic country.” He also wants “to remind people in democratic countries that Russia and Putin are not the same thing”.

If I didn’t admire Kara-Murza’s heroism as much as I do, I’d think that he and his fellow dissidents weren’t just released by Putin but sent out as his secret emissaries.

That’s the time-honoured strategy of the Russian and Soviet governments. While raping their own population and pouncing on their neighbours, they inundate the West with conciliatory messages sent through private channels.

Pay no attention to what our government is saying and doing, the messages go. These are just a few ghastly hawks who in no way represent the people. The good and freedom-loving people of Russia are staunchly opposed to whatever their leaders are perpetrating. So if the West could kindly ratchet down the tension, the opposition will triumph and Russia will become a worthy member of the Western family.

This sort of thing, a sustained campaign of disinformation designed to dupe the West into acquiescence, has been going on for over 100 years. A case that springs to mind is that of Nikolay Berdyayev, one of the Russian thinkers exiled from Russia onboard the notorious Philosophers’ Steamers in 1923.

His first stopover was Prague, at that time the nerve centre of the Russian emigration. The night after his arrival, Berdyayev found himself at a gathering in the flat belonging to Anton Kartashev, the last Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod. He and other prominent émigrés were discussing ways of fighting the Bolsheviks.

To everybody’s surprise, Berdyayev preached a different message. The Bolsheviks, he said, are the true practitioners of the Russian idea. Hence all Russians living abroad should renounce opposition and wait for the glorious Russian people to sort themselves out.

Once the initial shock subsided, Kartashev uttered his severe verdict: “We thought you were exiled, but it turns out you were infiltrated.” (It’s more poignant in the original: Мы думали вас выслали, а вас оказывается заслали.)

I wonder what Kartashev would say about the message delivered by Kara-Murza and his friends. Please, they said, stop sanctions against Russia because they hurt the good Russian people who are opposed to Putin and his dirty war. Instead, target specific officials with personal sanctions.

The Russians know they don’t deserve Putin and they certainly want to have no part in the war. Give them time, and they’ll create a democratic heaven on earth.

I don’t know what kind of history they teach at Trinity, but analysis of historical continuity and dynamic tendencies doesn’t seem to have been part of Vladimir’s curriculum. What does it mean that “Russia and Putin aren’t the same thing”?

This seems to suggest that Russia has had a long history of just government reflecting the people’s sterling quality and only occasionally put on hold by evil exceptions. But this suggestion is false.

Which just rulers would that be? Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian tsar, who only ever laughed when watching people being flayed or fried alive? Peter the Great, a sadist who personally tortured and beheaded dozens of people? His daughter Yelizaveta, who had society ladies knouted and mutilated for daring to wear the same dresses as Her Majesty’s? Catherine the Great who spread serfdom to the Ukraine? The tsars of the 19^th century under whom Russia became known as ‘the prison of nations’ and ‘the gendarme of Europe’? Lenin? Stalin? Khrushchev? Andropov? Yeltsyn? Who?

The newly released heroes woefully misunderstand Russian history, politics and indeed people. The problem with the country isn’t that it lacks democracy but that it lacks civilisation (not to be confused with culture).

In fact, Russian liberals have learned their misapprehension from their Western counterparts, who believe that democracy is a panacea able to cure the ills of the world. Yet civilisational problems have no political solution. Giving barbarians democracy is like giving a Stradivarius violin to savages. They’ll just use it for firewood.

Every attempt to disprove this observation is doomed to failure, as the Americans found out in Iraq. Egged on by neoconservative (in fact, nonconservative) liberals, the US invaded, set up a chain of voting booths and embarked on a programme of nation building. In short order, that created a blood-soaked chaos rapidly spreading over the whole region.

There are indeed a few thousand Russians who oppose the war, which isn’t many for a country of 140 million. And most of those protesters object not to the war as such but to its cost in lives and money. More Russians, perhaps as many as 30 million, are directly involved in the war effort, some in the military, others in the armament industry and related businesses.

Spontaneous support for the war – and Putin – is huge, which isn’t surprising given the state’s monopoly on propaganda. Democracy, on the other hand, has a bad name among the masses weaned on the notion of imperial chauvinism.

They still remember the 1990s, the only decade of supposed liberty in Russian history. Few people still recall the previously forbidden books that became easily available. Yet everyone remembers looking at shops full of goods – and having no money to buy them, what with rampant inflation and devaluations having wiped out people’s savings, and pensions and salaries sometimes not paid for months.

Kara-Murza and his friends doubtless love liberty, even though they are prepared to sacrifice their own at the altar of woeful misconception. Their heroism will be in vain: democracy may sometimes contribute to a civilisation, but it can’t create it.

The Saturn of the Russian state will avidly devour all the sacrifices offered to it, but it won’t change its essence – even if it may pretend to change its ways. This state is exactly what the Russians deserve. De Maistre was right, and Kara-Murza and his friends are wrong – much as I’m happy that these heroic if misguided people are now free.