Nostr notes by Alexander Boot (Unofficial)

It’s jail for you, Mr Robinson My heart-felt belief is that ...

2026-10-29T21:14:02Z

It’s jail for you, Mr Robinson

My heart-felt belief is that political (as distinct from cultural) conservatism is impossible in America – for the simple fact that, as a revolutionary republic, it violently broke the organic continuity of political development. (The same argument applies to France, by the way.)
The term, however, survives there, albeit in a different meaning. To an American, the positive meaning of conservatism is more or less circumscribed by economic libertarianism. The rest is apophatic: American conservatives define themselves by what they are not, which is Lefties. Whatever the ‘liberals’ are for, the ‘conservatives’ are against.
It’s not for nothing that old rhetoricians always insisted on first agreeing on the terms. I discovered that, when my American friends talk to me about their conservatism, we are often at cross-purposes.
Hence, when a few years ago I began to appear regularly on a New York ‘conservative’, which is to say pro-MAGA, podcast, my main interest was anthropological.
I wanted to find out more about that sub-species of Homo sapiens, and find out I did. Some of my discoveries didn’t really qualify as such: most of the host’s general views weren’t dramatically different from my own.
Yet it’s not generalities but specifics that define political philosophies, and it was at that level that we diverged. One such specific was my host’s adulation, nay deification, of Donald Trump.
For me, Trump was, and remains, a jumped-up parvenu, a vulgar savage with megalomaniac tendencies. I didn’t see him as a fellow conservative, although some of his policies were unobjectionable. As I enlarged on such thoughts, my host’s irritation grew steadily from one programme to the next.
After a couple of years or so my iconoclastic presence was no longer welcome on the show, and both my host and I heaved a sigh of relief. Since then most of my macabre predictions for Trump’s second term have come true, but that’s not my point here.
Now, I don’t mean to sound like a snob, but I am one, and sooner or later this was bound to come out. So I’d better come clean: I don’t believe that vulgar thugs completely divorced from our civilisation can be up to any good.
I also channel my inner Cesare Lombroso by attaching much importance to people’s faces. After a few decades on earth, a man’s character leaves an indelible impression on his face.
Thus – and I know this falls short of scientific exactitude – I think that men with awful faces may make a few good points or, in Trump’s case, introduce a few decent policies. But the net effect of their activities is bound to be negative. Trump is my case in point.
However, following various MAGA media in the US, one can’t help noticing that they don’t see it this way. Give them a pot of anti-Left message, and they are prepared to disregard the personality of its bearer. He may be a bullying, illiterate Yahoo, but as long as he champions a cause they hold dear, they’ll accept him as their own.
In that spirit, my host routinely extolled the virtues of Tommy Robinson, a fascisoid English thug guaranteed to make any English conservative wince in disgust. Compared to Tommy’s face, Trump’s is the acme of refinement. (Incidentally, Trump’s face looked much better when he was younger. Some people just don’t age well – their vices catch up with them.)
Tommy’s bugbear is the growing Islamisation of Britain, and this is indeed a genuine concern. However, even those of us who believe in Tommy’s cause deplore his championship of it. His answer to the problem is a British equivalent of Kristallnacht: riots, assaults, clashes with the police, tear gas in the air, ground strewn with glass shards and writhing bodies.
No matter. To the MAGA lot, from Steve Bannon and Elon Musk to my erstwhile host, Tommy is a hero, a courageous fighter for free speech and a victim of Britain’s ‘deep state’.
It was in vain that I cited Tommy’s CV that included convictions for mortgage fraud, assault (2), contempt of court (also 2), public order offence and – more to the point – using a false passport to enter America in 2012. The latter crime earned Tommy a 10-month prison sentence (one of his several stretches at HM’s pleasure) and a ban on entering the US.
That didn’t even make a dent in my host’s convictions. Himself no admirer of Putin, he was nevertheless even willing to overlook Tommy’s pro-Kremlin sycophancy.
While detesting the British establishment, Tommy extols the virtues of Putin’s take on civilisation. Asked why he had travelled to Russia, he said: “I’ve come to see how this country got itself so well on to the straight and narrow and see the beauty of a civilised society here.”
That beautiful civilisation Tommy admires bans any public criticism of the government, punishes even the meekest critics with prison terms of 10 years and more, assassinates dissidents both at home and abroad, bans all media channels other than pro-government ones, reduces elections to rigged travesties, replaces pluralism with dictatorship, vests unlimited powers in secret police, keeps pouncing on other countries in acts of unprovoked aggression, threatens the world with nuclear annihilation.
When talking about Tommy, I tried to point these things out to my host, but he’d only flash a supercilious smile. I simply didn’t understand.
Now I won’t have the pleasure of asking him to comment on the latest instalment in the saga of Tommy Robinson: he has just been found guilty of harassing journalists and is facing a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
Two Mail journalists, freelancer Andrew Young and editor Jacob Dirnhuber, had the misfortune of publishing an uncomplimentary article about Tommy. Considering that no one can accuse the paper of pro-Islamic bias, the article must have dealt with Tommy’s riot-fomenting peccadilloes in defence of his worthy cause.
Tommy, who isn’t short of a bob or two thanks to Elon Musk’s generosity, hired private investigators to find the home addresses and phone numbers of the two hapless journalists and their boss Ted Verity, the editor-in-chief of the Mail.
He then unleashed a sustained campaign of threatening harassment so vile that his victims had to hire private security and leave home. Tommy’s message was unequivocal: “I’m coming to get you.”
He didn’t even bother to conceal the evidence of criminal harassment. Thus, when Mr Verity didn’t answer his phone, Tommy left a voicemail message, saying: “I’ve already located every f***ing one of you.” This voicemail figured prominently in the prosecution’s case.
After deliberating for 11 hours, the jury found Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy’s real name) guilty as charged. A conviction for harassment with fear of violence carries a custodial sentence of up to 10 years, and I hope the judge will take full advantage of this provision.
Those American ‘conservatives’ do choose rather eccentric British idols to extol. Musk has picked up Tommy’s legal bill again, and no doubt my former host will regard this trial as yet another abuse of free speech in Britain.
For my part, the trial says much not only about Tommy Robinson and the English Common Law but also about MAGA followers. Having chosen a vulgar bully as their standard bearer, they seem to be doctrinally committed to support thuggery everywhere – provided they like the underlying cause.
They call themselves conservatives, amazingly. I call them something else, but in this space I don’t want to resort to Tommy’s mode of self-expression.

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Finally, a breakthrough in Iran war No, the breakthrough isn’t ...

2026-10-28T20:45:56Z

Finally, a breakthrough in Iran war

No, the breakthrough isn’t military – it’s more important than that.
In addition to his numerous other achievements, Trump is establishing himself as a major authority in applied onomatology, the science of names.
Whenever he is displeased with a country, he renames a geographical location in it or on its borders. Thus, when Mexico incurred Trump’s wrath, he went into onomatological action immediately.
On 20 January, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14172, ordering all federal agencies to change the designation of the Gulf of Mexico to the ‘Gulf of America’.
Naturally, there are costs attached: no science, as John Donne didn’t quite say, is an island, entire of itself. This exercise in onomatology is closely linked with everyday life, as expressed through sign updates, education material revisions, map republishing, private industry rebranding and so on.
Depending on how broadly the new name will be implemented, the cost is estimated at anywhere upwards of $15 billion – but hey, daring scientific advances never come cheap. The Donald won’t be held back by a few pennies here and there, or even a few billion.
Then came Canada’s turn. Just like America’s southern neighbour, that northern country began to act in an uppity manner, clearly suggesting she was getting ideas above her station.
To wit: When Trump introduced punitive tariffs on Canada’s goods, that upstart dared to retaliate.
The Donald’s first reaction was to invade Canada and turn her into a 51st American state, thereby finishing the job attempted in 1775 and 1812. However, Trump wisely decided to put off that entirely justified action until he has won another dozen wars on top of the seven he had won already, all of them more than once.
Where polemology, the science of war, was deemed inappropriate, onomatology had to step in. A renowned practitioner of that science, Trump decreed that thenceforth Lake Ontario, which borders both the US and Canada, would be known as “Lake America”.
The trouble was that the lake figures prominently in Fenimore Cooper’s pentalogy The Leatherstocking Tales, a classic of American literature. However, that consideration didn’t cause Trump to skip a beat: according to his niece’s testimony, he is less than an avid reader. Or, as she put it, he has never read anything other than newspaper clippings about himself.
So old Fenimore can go boil an egg, wherever he is. I wonder whether the lake will be renamed in his books, the way Afro-American Jim was rebaptised in another American classic, Huckleberry Finn. The name Mark Twain gave him was deemed inappropriate for our progressive times.
(To be honest, I don’t know whether N-Word Jim was rebaptised. I do know the book was taken out of US school libraries, which is of course a cheaper solution to the problem. If to Hemingway “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” to modern educators this literature and that book are badly in need of a once-over.)
Now Trump is a man who thinks big. Lake Ontario may be scenic and romantic, but it’s small. The Gulf of Mexico is bigger, but it’s still only a gulf. Hence Trump’s next onomatological project was renaming one or both of the great oceans on either side of America.
He demanded that those grotesquely named waterways be renamed after, well, him. One of them could be christened the Trump Ocean, the other the Donald Ocean, or at a pinch he would settle for just one name change.
Alas, that’s where various international authorities drew the line. The Atlantic, they explained, was so named in 550 AD. The Pacific got its designation later, in 1520, but even that happened long enough in the past for the name to have caught on.
So that project had to be pushed to the back burner, to be revived later. Meanwhile Trump decided to concentrate on another resounding victory he has won, this one in the on-going war with Iran. Actually, for the sake of actuarial precision, it has been not one victory but several, each more resounding than its predecessor.
An onomatological commemoration was clearly in order, and the Donald was keenly aware of that. Hence, he went to Truth Social and wrote: “Now that we have it under USA control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT???”
He paused for a second and added: “Like America itself, it would be ‘hotter’ than ever before!” Actually, the Strait is quite hot already, if not necessarily in the sense Trump meant it.
Since he came up with that initiative, about a month ago, attacks on vessels in the Strait have been reported almost every day. For all the military defeat (or rather defeats) Iran has suffered, or rather those Trump has claimed, she continues to hit tankers in the Strait, targets in the Gulf countries and US bases in the region.
Don’t know about you, but I blame Zelensky for that, and the Donald agrees. Should the Republicans get their comeuppance in next week’s midterms, losing the House (almost certainly) and the Senate (possibly if less likely), I probably won’t blame Zelensky. But I’m sure Trump will – as he has already blamed him for the high oil prices.
This stands to reason. Some 20 per cent of the world’s oil has to pass through Hormuz on its way to market, but we know that the Strait is now “American territory” (you know whom I’m quoting). So all those tankers sail through Trump Strait unmolested, meaning that any shortages have to be Zelensky’s fault. What’s there not to understand?
People who call Trump a narcissist or an egomaniac don’t do him justice. The Donald is way beyond such trivial personality disorders, entering into the territory of the kind of pathology I have no professional credentials to evaluate.
I can only hope he doesn’t get cross with Old Blighty. I’m so used to my hometown being called London that I’d be upset to see it renamed as Trumpsville.

http://www.alexanderboot.com/finally-a-breakthrough-in-iran-war/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=finally-a-breakthrough-in-iran-war

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Why do people hate Jews? A few years ago, a clubbable gentleman ...

2026-10-27T19:41:54Z

Why do people hate Jews?

A few years ago, a clubbable gentleman defined anti-Semitism as hating Jews more than is necessary. He said that in jest, but, goes the popular adage, there is a grain of truth in every joke.
My interlocutor’s claim to a grain of truth was his assumption that a certain amount of anti-Semitism is both inevitable and socially acceptable. I don’t know what kind of mental callipers he used to gauge what amount stays within the permissible range and what goes beyond it.
But it’s undeniable that anti-Semitism is pervasive, widespread and indifferent to social class, education, nationality and occupation. No attempt to pigeonhole it within a narrow rubric has so far succeeded. For example, in his book on the subject Sartre defined anti-Semitism as “a poor man’s snobbery”.
Perhaps. But this doesn’t begin to explain the virulent anti-Semitism of, say, Henry Ford or J.P. Morgan, neither of whom was especially poverty-stricken. Then Sartre added that anti-Semitism may also arise from spiritual poverty.
That too is delinquent in not taking account of – off the top of my head – Eliot, Chesterton, Belloc, Dostoyevsky or, in Sartre’s own country, Céline or Maurras. None of them suffered from spiritual poverty; all of them hated Jews ‘more than is necessary’.
A deeper thinker than Sartre, Thomas Sowell operates largely in economic and sociological categories. He developed the concept of a ‘middleman minority’, a small diaspora of successful businessmen from elsewhere who are universally hated by the indigenous majority in the host country.
This group includes diasporic Jews but isn’t limited to them. Sowell mentions oversees Chinese in Southeast Asia, Indians in Africa, Lebanese in Brazil and so on. Such diasporas tend to be more successful than the ambient population, and they mostly act in intermediary roles, such as retail, financing, money-lending or trade.
Sowell correctly points out that animosity to such groups is illogical for they provide the indispensable service of connecting producer with market. Then again, neither love nor hatred usually springs from reason. In any case, Sowell covers one facet of anti-Semitism, but there exist many others.
Christian anti-Semitism is also illogical. It’s true that some Jews rejected Christ and even forced the Romans to execute Him. However, some other Jews, starting with the apostles, carried Christ to the world, building on His person and His teaching a great religion and a magnificent civilisation.
However, such early Fathers of the Church as John Chrysostom and Augustine of Hippo ignored that second part, accentuating instead collective Jewish guilt. Jews, they taught, were condemned to suffer for rejecting Christ.
At a more popular level, the Church prohibited Christians from charging interest on loans. Hence Jews monopolised that activity, drawing thereby the kind of hatred Sowell described and also the old religious kind.
That hatred was far from tacit: though the word ‘pogrom’ boasts a later Russian derivation, the concept existed throughout history. For example, the 1096 Crusaders were avidly massacring Jews on the way to the Holy Land.
Closer to home, an anti-Semitic massacre took place in York in 1190. The mob first broke into the Minster and destroyed all the promissory notes kept there. Some 150 Jews, the city’s entire Jewish population, tried to save themselves by taking refuge in a timber tower, but the mob stormed it and murdered everyone inside.
The Spanish Inquisition was also busy during the reign of Their Catholic Majesties Ferdinand and Isabella, although its score of victims was small by the standards of the progressive twentieth century.
The Reformation made things even worse, largely due to the innermost feelings of its leaders. For example, in his ranting tract On the Jews and Their Lies, Luther explained that Jews were “devil’s children” whose synagogue was a “defiled bride… an incorrigible whore and an evil slut.” Jews were full of the “devil’s faeces… in which they wallow like swine.”
Luther’s remedy for rectifying such hygienic disasters would be these days considered somewhat radical if hardly unfamiliar. He advocated burning synagogues to cinders, destroying Jewish scrolls and prayer books, banning rabbis from preaching, seizing Jews’ money and property, smashing up their houses and forcing these “poisonous envenomed worms” into hard labour or else banishing them “for all time.”
Having thus presaged the Kristallnacht, Luther swiftly moved on to a longing for the final solution. With praiseworthy self-deprecation he admitted an oversight committed by himself and his contemporaries: “We are at fault in not slaying them.” Four centuries later his compatriots tried to correct that fault, with well-known results.
Calvin, who regarded wealth as a sign of divine grace, added nice touches to Luther’s animus, such as: “[The Jews’] rotten and unbending intransigence deserves that they be oppressed unendingly and without limit, and that they die in their misery without the pity of anyone.”
But Calvin’s anti-Semitism was brought on not only by his visceral feelings but also by his assessment of the economic picture that emerged from his teaching.
Since Calvin regarded money-lending not as a sin but rather as a facilitator of divine grace, his followers could indulge in it to their hearts’ content. Therefore, rather than being despised as usurers, Jews could now be loathed as business competitors. Calvin was thus channeling the resentment already felt at the grass roots, and in this he used the stratagem of every successful rabble-rouser.
As Christianity lost its prominence in European life, Christian anti-Semitism was complemented and largely replaced by the racial kind. Hence, if in the past Jews could save themselves from persecution by converting, they now lost even that refuge. “It’s not your identity papers but your mug that gets punched,” sums up the Russian saying.
Another strand of anti-Semitism owed its existence to Marx’s animadversions. He detested Jews as a ‘middleman minority’, which was par for the course. However, he hated not just the intermediary aspect of capitalism, but capitalism as such. Hence Marx began to use the words ‘Jew’ and ‘capitalist’ interchangeably, thus establishing an inseparable fusion in the minds of his followers.
When people talk about rising anti-Semitism in today’s Britain, they mainly have in mind the Left-wing variety feeding off Marx. This hatred extends to Israel, which is seen as both capitalist and Jewish, meaning the devil incarnate as defined by Marxist scripture.
There our socialists converge with the sizeable Muslim presence in Britain, where hatred of Jews enjoys a scriptural sanction. Israel acts as the focus for Muslim anti-Semitism, but it’s merely a pretext for it, not the reason.
Since our government is Marxist in all but name, it continues to utter bien pensant words about racial and religious equality, while being more protective of the Muslims than of the Jews. Perversely, Muslims are seen as today’s answer to downtrodden proletarians, whereas Jews have never shaken off the stigma of Marxist opprobrium.
Another strand of anti-Semitism comes from the understandable human suspicion of otherness, non-PLUs (People Like Us). Since in our godless time, British Jews’ lives are indistinguishable from those of their gentile neighbours, again the logic is rather understated. But old biases never die, and neither do they fade away.
Add to this the snobbish Tory anti-Semitism evinced by my clubbable interlocutor I mentioned earlier, and now we have a benign counterpart to Left-wing malignancy. Our upper classes often look down on Jews as gauche upstarts, and they have never really countenanced the concept of Haute Juiverie. As far as they are concerned, Juiverie is never Haute enough.
If you expected a short and exhaustive answer to the question in the title, you must feel let down. It’s just that complex questions seldom invite short and exhaustive answers. If these are offered, they are almost certainly wrong.
The question of anti-Semitism is complex and multifarious, to be answered in a long scholarly study. I’ve read a few books on the subject, such as the one by Sartre, but they only succeed in flinging the door open for more questions – some of which I’ve tried to elucidate.

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Blandy Andy does Europe Andy ‘Andrew’ Burnham effectively ...

2026-10-26T19:40:56Z

Blandy Andy does Europe

Andy ‘Andrew’ Burnham effectively says he’ll turn the next general election into another referendum on EU membership.
This proves he is au courant with the EU ethos: if a member country votes for secession in a referendum, she is told to vote again and keep doing so until she gets it right.
In a way, one can understand Andy’s predicament. He looks at various possibilities for the central theme of a campaign and finds them all wanting.
The economy is in dire straits and is almost certain to run aground by the time the country goes to the polls. Our education doesn’t educate. Our healthcare does an awful job taking care of health. Our living standards are heading south, with social cohesion going in the same direction. Our borders are porous to the point of being non-existent. Our defences are non-existent.
So Andy is short of options. All he really can do is push all his chips to the middle of the table and blame all our misfortunes on Brexit. He can then try to sell the idea of EU membership as the panacea, a sort of Shangri-la, El Dorado and Xanadu rolled into one.
This is a beautiful image, but it has an obvious flaw: it demonstrably bears little relation to reality. That’s why even some of Andy’s ministers, including Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, seem to demur. But Andy knows how to deal with dissent. His message is as punchy as a solid uppercut: either back rejoining and freedom of movement or good luck in the private sector.
What I like about this predictable development is its timing. For just across the Channel, France is brightly lit by burning cars, shops and institutional buildings.
A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a French friend who tends to be dismissively insouciant about such little peccadilloes. Boys will be boys and all that, another bit of fun soon to blow over. This time, however, he sounded genuinely alarmed. This isn’t just any old riot, he wrote; it smacks of an insurrection.
This reminds me of an exchange between Louis XVI and the 7th Duke of La Rochefoucauld, taking place as mobs were tearing Paris apart. “Is this a revolt?” asked the king. “No, Your Majesty,” replied the Duke, “it’s a revolution.” (Non, sire, c’est une révolution.)
Even withdrawing such macabre analogies for the time being, let’s just say that the moment doesn’t seem propitious to form a closer union with France, lest we get singed by the same fire. And not just France: tongues of those flames have ignited Belgium and Italy too.
The reports that Russia is involved in fomenting this unrest came as a surprise to no one, with the possible exception of Donald Trump. However, the fact that the incendiary grievances are being artificially whipped up doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
Britain’s economy is in the doldrums but, despite all of Andy’s efforts, it’s still doing slightly better than the economies of France and Germany. France, incredible as it may sound, has a higher national debt than we do. Is closing this gap what Andy aspires to?
Sensing the weakness of his position, he resorts to the usual legerdemain of assigning to Leavers claims they never made.
According to Andy, they tricked the nation by promising that leaving the EU would by itself turn Britain into, well, Shangri-la, El Dorado and Xanadu rolled into one. Wave the magic Brexit wand, and our economy would thrive, our borders would slam shut, our government would be the paragon of efficacy and sagacity. Hallelujah!
Since none of those putative dreams has come true, Andy thinks he can score into an open goal. Look, he says, Brexit has failed: “I don’t think things have worked out as they said they would at the time, particularly when it comes to immigration.” Well, actually, they didn’t say.
Unlike Andy, I was friendly with many UKIP people, including some of the party leaders. And not once did I hear any of them utter the kind of nonsense Andy and his ilk are putting in their mouths.
They never said Brexit would give us a better government. Their only, indisputable, claim was that the resulting government would be ours, entrusted to our Parliament, accountable to our nation, presumably pursuing our national interests.
Such a government would acquire the means of, for example, controlling immigration. But having the means doesn’t necessarily translate into performing the action.
Let me illustrate this by using an example close to Andy’s home. Angie Rayner, his Secretary for Housing, has the means to be a prostitute. But as far as I know, and please correct me if I’m wrong, she isn’t one, is she?
Specifically on the issue of immigration, anyone this side of imbecility will recognise that having the legal sanction to stop immigration, as opposed to being hamstrung by a demand for free movement, makes this task easier. But the same achiever will also know that having the legal sanction to do something isn’t the same as doing it.
For 25 years before the Brexit referendum and for 10 years after it, Britain has been cursed by having some of the worst governments in her history. This has been a bipartisan problem, although the Tories were marginally… no, not better, but less subversively useless.
Because of that, Britain would be up against it in conditions of perfect sovereignty or perfect bondage or anything in between. We could be an independent commonwealth or an EU member or a 51st American state – it wouldn’t matter. With strident nonentities like Andy at the helm we’d still be in deep trouble.
Still, sovereignty is its own reward, in that it’s in keeping with over a millennium of England’s political, cultural and social history. So it’s worth preserving regardless of any other considerations, for old times’ sake if nothing else.
There has never been a single rational reason for Britain to join an inchoate pan-European state. There has always been every rational reason not to.
Turning King Charles III into Charlie Mountbatten, a citizen of the EU, wouldn’t just debauch his patrimony. It would destroy Britain qua Britain, because she like no other European country is defined by her political arrangement.
We’ve had essentially the same constitution since 1689, and more or less the same one since long before then. During this period France has had 17 different constitutions – and still managed to remain France.
A stable political constitution doesn’t define France the way it defines Britain. The French blithely went about their daily business even during Nazi occupation, walking the boulevards, watching Sartre’s new plays, arguing about the respective merits of Pascal and Descartes, sharing recipes (even though decent food was harder to come by) – in general, being French.
Take our constitution away, and Britain will no longer be Britain. She will have lost her soul, her civilisational centre. And that’s exactly why Andy and his merry men want to drag Britain back into the EU come what may. They dislike Britain’s soul, abhor her civilisation and correctly identify EU membership as the potential wrecking ball to be swung by their animosity.
This lot can’t be properly understood without reference to their Marxist core. They see themselves as the proletarians of Marxist fancy, a class that according to The Communist Manifesto has no motherland.
Ideological globalism, realised politically as a single world government or its approximations, sits at the root of Marxist Weltanschauung, and this is something Andy, Angie et al. feel in their viscera. This, whether they consciously realise it or not.
That’s why they won’t be persuaded by any obvious facts or rational arguments. They’d want to join the EU even if Britain were thriving and the Continent lay in ruins. And since Britain isn’t exactly thriving, and nor does the Continent quite lie in ruins, they see their task as feasible.
Just blame everything on Brexit and Karl is your uncle, Friedrich is your aunt. Join Europe and win the world. I just hope the British public isn’t so dumbed-down that it’ll swallow that canard without choking. But I’m not holding my breath.

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I love President Donald J Trump When a Pharisee lawyer tried to ...

2026-10-26T00:51:21Z

I love President Donald J Trump

When a Pharisee lawyer tried to trap Jesus by asking Him what the greatest commandment was, Jesus replied by quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
The first commandment is straightforward: faith in God presupposes love for Him. But the second commandment may raise questions – especially since by ‘neighbour’ Jesus didn’t just mean that annoying chap next door who plays proletarian music too loud.
Elsewhere He clarified His meaning by explaining that ‘neighbour’ meant all other people – including our enemies and that annoying chap next door. But this morning the priest didn’t get as far as the Sermon on the Mount in his homily.
Yet even loving my neighbour as myself may sound problematic. You see, I don’t necessarily love myself, in any everyday meaning of the word. It would be closer to the mark, if not quite hitting the bull’s eye, to say that I hate myself.
As we walked to the car after Mass, I asked Penelope whether I should then hate my neighbour too, which is to say the rest of mankind. That was pure sophistry on my part, and we both knew it.
That brought to mind something Tolstoy wrote at a time when he preached celibacy while busily copulating with serf girls on his estate:
“The same word is used to describe spiritual love – love of God and one’s neighbour – and profane love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man. This is a great mistake. The two feelings have nothing in common. The first – spiritual love of God and one’s neighbour – is the voice of God, the second – sexual love between a man and a woman – the voice of the animal.”
Commenting on that remark in my book on the writer, I wrote: “The same word is also used, although not by many, to describe love of broccoli. This goes to show that the word ‘love’, just like many other words, can be used in various meanings.”
The Russian language (and French too, come to think of it) uses the same word for loving and liking, which is unfortunate. For we like people for something, whereas we love them in spite of everything, and this is a useful distinction.
But another thing Tolstoy said was correct: love one feels for God and one’s neighbour, even one’s enemies, is indeed spiritual. As such, it has something, not always much, in common with any other love, but precious little with liking.
Using the word the way Christ used it, it’s possible, even necessary, to love one’s neighbour while cordially disliking him for playing proletarian music too loud.
While liking stays anchored to the ground, love soars to heaven and takes on a whole new meaning. Loving someone in that sense means wishing him well. And wishing him well means hoping that he, his soul, will be saved.
Any attempt to drag that kind of love back down to earth will render it meaningless. When tautological vulgar atheists try to score cheap points against Christianity, which is the only kind of points they can ever attempt, they sneer that loving one’s neighbour precludes things like war or the death penalty.
Yet in the old days, someone about to be executed for heinous crimes always had a priest present who acted as a conduit for God’s love. The priest speaking in God’s name loved the criminal because he hoped his soul would be saved or at least treated mercifully.
The priest and, in the old days, most criminals knew another passage from Matthew: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”
When soon after the sack of Rome Augustine wrote about just war, he knew perfectly well that, just or unjust, war kills people. However, he saw no contradiction between that and loving one’s neighbour or even one’s enemy.
By now you must have figured out that this is the sense in which I love Trump, or rather President Donald J Trump, as he likes to call himself.
I haven’t all of a sudden donned a MAGA cap – since a wearer of one automatically loses 20 IQ points, I can’t afford such diminution at a time of my waning powers. No, I still regard Trump as the most revolting character I’ve ever seen occupying a high Western office in my lifetime.
Moreover, much as he likes to scream off the rooftops that he is the greatest president ever, I suspect that, when the net effect of Trump’s tenure is evaluated in retrospect, he will be considered the worst president ever.
He is entitled to some superlatives though: Trump practises corruption on the greatest scale in the history of US politics – greater than all the other 44 presidents combined, and some of them weren’t choir boys either.
But, in my ecclesiastical Sunday mood, I do love Trump the way Christ told us to love. At his age he can’t be far removed from having to face divine judgement, and I do hope he’ll be treated with mercy. That’s what love means, in the sense in which our priest used the word this morning.

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Finally, Witkoff has understood Putin As far as diplomats go, ...

2026-10-23T20:56:30Z

Finally, Witkoff has understood Putin

As far as diplomats go, Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh had nothing on Steve Witkoff. Those underachievers lacked the necessary credentials for their chosen profession.
They did reasonably well at the Congress of Vienna, I’ll give them that. But Europe was so exhausted by the Napoleonic wars that working out an arrangement for lasting peace was a doddle in 1815.
I’d like to see those effete nobs do so today, when Russia is bristling with aggression, the Ukraine is stubbornly refusing to surrender, and the rest of the European countries are quaking in their boots.
This isn’t a game those nincompoops would be able to play. The situation is so fraught that only a man of Steve’s special talents could acquit himself with glory.
The special talents in question were honed in the dog-eat-dog world of New York property development. A man won’t survive in that jungle unless he knows whose palm to grease or bite, whose ego to stroke or destroy, whose backside to kiss or kick.
It was there that Steve struck the most important friendship in his life. He and his colleague Donald were wheeling and dealing well into the night when finally their hunger caught up with them. Now, New York is the only place I know where one can find food at any hour.
At that particular late hour, only the delis were open, doing brisk business in New York’s epic sandwiches, each able to provide sufficient sustenance for a family of four (more if they are Ethiopians). That happened so long ago that such night establishments still dealt in cash only, and that’s where Trump was caught short.
Perhaps anticipating his future royal status, he never sullied his hands with folding stuff and, but for his pal Steve, Donald would have gone hungry. But Steve was on hand to dip into his own pocket and buy his friend a pastrami on rye. That was the best five bucks he has ever spent.
During his second spin at the White House, Trump felt the need to find someone he could trust to negotiate ‘deals’ with Iran and Russia. And who better than his sandwich-bearing pal?
Steve has forgotten more about diplomacy than Metternich, Talleyrand and Castlereagh ever knew. Would they have known how to slip a few thou to someone in charge of zoning approvals? (Planning permissions to Britons.) Or to dig up dirt on a competitor to make him withdraw his bid? Hell’s bells, Steve could eat those wimps for breakfast and defecate them before lunch.
That very morning in 2025 Trump appointed Witkoff his special envoy, and Steve has hung on to that position ever since despite a rather understated record of success. That is, success as defined by traditional diplomatic wimps who try to uphold their countries’ interests.
Granted, Witkoff is called a United States envoy. But in fact he is a rep for the Trump Organisation, doing what he used to do in New York but on a vastly larger scale. That explains his recent escapade in Russia, where Steve was toiling manfully to secure all sorts of concessions for his friend (and himself, natch).
On behalf of his capo di tutti capi, Steve was there to trade favours for favours. The favours he sought all had to do with business opportunities in Russia, something pal Donald had been pursuing for at least forty years. Vlad Putin was most forthcoming about the money side, offering deals like you wouldn’t believe, one godfather to another.
And the only favour he asked in return was for Trump to sell the Ukraine down the Dnieper. Specifically, that meant stopping all aid, financial and monetary, cutting the Ukraine off Starlink data and easing – eventually rescinding – all sanctions on Russia.
Easier done than said. Steve told Vlad it was in the bag, but in the circles in which Donald, Steve and Vlad move it’s not enough to do what’s right. One must also show rispetto, as Donald’s Italian colleagues call it.
The occasion to do so presented itself. When Putin’s hordes attacked the Ukraine in 2022, they captured the city of Izyum. The Ukrainian forces soon reclaimed the city, but not before Stephen Hubbard, 74, an American living there with a Ukrainian woman, was taken prisoner.
He was accused of being a mercenary, that little earner notoriously popular with septuagenarians, and sentenced to a long prison term. For the next four years, he was moved from camp to camp, beaten, tortured and otherwise abused.
Then Putin decided that a bit of grandstanding wouldn’t go amiss and had Hubbard released in time for Steve’s visit. That called for more than just perfunctory rispetto – nothing short of labioglutteal ammirazione would do.
That Steve was only too happy to provide. “You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” he said. “You are a humanitarian also, sir, and I salute that. I commend you.”
It must have escaped Steve’s attention that Putin is an indicted war criminal under an international arrest warrant. And that’s not his only humanitarian credential. Quite apart from his troops murdering, raping, torturing and looting their way through the Ukraine, Putin is guilty of ordering assassinations of political opponents all over the globe, not just in Russia.
Russian dissidents are sent to hellhole prisons, where, like Hubbard, they are beaten, tortured and often, unlike Hubbard, killed. A dissident, by the way, is a voluminous concept in Russia that includes not only open opponents but also those who dared describe the war on the Ukraine as a war.
The plot sickens. And it’s ever more nauseating because Trump is keeping his end of the bargain. He promptly had Musk put dampeners on Starlink data for the Ukraine, which, inter alia, made it impossible for the Ukrainians to warn their civilians of impending air raids.
Vlad the humanitarian took advantage of that to target civilian areas in several Ukrainian cities, running up the death toll that’s already unbearable.
Trump, assisted by his capo di regime Steve, has effectively betrayed not only the Ukraine but also NATO and the West at large. But, when seen from his lofty height, all those little countries look like the small fry they are. A head of a family doesn’t talk to such underlings. He only ever talks to the heads of other families, those strong enough to rate rispetto.
In the world outside Atlantic City casinos and Donald’s other stomping grounds, only the US, China and Russia merit such distinction. Others may be dismissed out of hand or, if they prove obstreperous, threatened. The threats may include military action against Canada and Denmark, countries that foolishly thought of themselves as America’s allies.
That they might have been, but they’ve never been Trump’s allies. When he demanded rispetto from them, they offered none, and only an involved international situation has forced the Donald to put off the threatened hits.
Both Witkoff and Trump must be commended for their achievements. The former discovered the humanitarian side of Putin, something mass murderers seldom merit. And the latter has achieved the improbable feat of making me root for the Democrats for the first time in my life.
I doubt I’ll ever see the day when these characters find themselves in the dock being tried for treason. The best I can hope for is that Trump will be charged with corruption on a scale never before seen in US politics.
But even this cherished dream is unlikely to come true. Before leaving the White House, the Donald will certainly issue dozens of presidential pardons for his family, friends, associates – and flunkies like Witkoff.
P.S. On a nicer subject, any country where the surname ‘Featherstonehaugh’ is pronounced ‘Fanshaw’ is a place after my own heart.

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Dawkins: only atheists have virtue Having gorged himself on ...

2026-10-23T02:41:13Z

Dawkins: only atheists have virtue

Having gorged himself on primordial soup, Richard Dawkins has regurgitated it into an outpouring of strident ignorance not seen since Lenin founded the League of the Militant Godless.
Dawkins is currently celebrating the twentieth anniversary of his bestseller The God Delusion with a mixture of triumphalism and consternation. He simply can’t understand why, in spite of his masterpiece, so many people – including some 50 per cent of all scientists – persist in their delusional delirium.
After all, didn’t he come up with irrefutable arguments in favour of atheism and againt any kind of religious superstitions? There’s no understanding some people: they just won’t listen to reason.
My counterargument would be that it’s precisely because they listen to reason that they ignore Dawkins’s animadversions. Dawkins appeals only by activating the confirmation bias among those who are as ignorant and strident as he is – and, as Barnum put it, there’s one born every second.
The rest of us, including those who are themselves atheists, know ideologised propaganda when they see it. We can’t help noticing that the image of religion Dawkins peddles has nothing to do with reality and even less with intellectual integrity.
Brighter and better-educated people than Dawkins have written books showing how ignorant he is about all religions including Christianity. In the past, we could boast much better enemies, such as Nietzsche, who disliked Christianity for what it was, not for some concocted caricature of it cherished by Dawkins.
He clearly never took the trouble to familiarise himself with even the rudiments of theology and philosophy, nor even with the common practices of various creeds. I myself might have pointed out those failings a few times.
But I was as wrong as those brighter and better-educated people. The point isn’t that Dawkins is ignorant of the most basic facts. His problem is much worse: as a true propagandist, he doesn’t care about facts.
Dawkins will deny any fact that contradicts his propagandistic message; and he’ll make up any fact that supports it. Let me illustrate this observation by citing one of his pet misconceptions about Christianity.
Dawkins froths at the mouth screaming about Christianity being a devisive sectarian creed pigeonholing people into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and promoting violence towards ‘them’. By contrast, atheists are congenitally peaceful and non-violent, which leads Dawkins to the logical conclusion: get rid of religion, and you’ll thereby get rid of violence.
It would be tedious to quote the scriptural and theological sources giving the lie to such statements. But then we’ve already established that Dawkins is either unfamiliar with such sources or, even worse, chooses to ignore them for his nefarious ends.
Alas, this tendency manifests itself not only with theology and philosophy, but also with elementary historical facts. Having set out to prove that not only believers are violent but also that atheists are docile, Dawkins writes:
“I do not believe that there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca – or Chartres, York Minster, or Notre Dame.”
Now, Dawkins went to secondary school when such institutions still taught essential history. Hence I’m sure that, had little Dicky read that nonsense at the time, he would have winced. However, having grown up to become Prof. Richard Dawkins, he doesn’t think twice (or even once) before comitting such twaddle to paper.
What matters to him is to bleat ‘religion bad, atheism good’, and if it takes distorting or inventing facts to help that message go down, then so be it.
One of the cited shrines supposedly safe from any atheist depredations, Chartres, only survived the atheist French Revolution because the monks reconsecrated it as a Temple to Reason. The invaluable stained glass of that cathedral was prudently removed and hidden away for otherwise it would have been smashed.
Other French churches, such as the Abbey of Cluny, the Abbey of Saint Genevieve and the Abbey of Saint-Victor, weren’t so lucky. Cluny, one of the vital centres of Christian and secular learning in Europe, was taken apart stone by stone and sold to quarries. At that time only eight monks lived there, but for those atheist vandals that was eight too many.
If Dawkins is interested in seeing atheism at work, he shoud take a drive down to southern Burgundy to see the glorious ruins of that Abbey. Each surviving stone would scream ‘Liar!’ to his face.
Actually, he could save petrol and just drive around central France. The important French mediavalist Régine Pernoud estimates that some 80 per cent of all Gothic and Romanesque buildings in France, most of them religious, were demolished during the Revolution and its aftermath.
Those still extant show empty niches in the facades where statues once stood, and many of the surviving statues are headless, in testimony to the atheists’ favoured form of art criticism.
Moving right along from one atheist revolution to another (by this I mean revolutions perpetrated by atheists and largely in the name of atheism), about 40,000 churches were destroyed in Russia when the League of the Militant Godless was still in business.
Roughly the same number of priests were murdered in the kind of horrific ways that are hard to reconcile with Dawkins’s protestations of atheist non-violence. As for the number of parishioners machine-gunned by flying CheKa squads at church doors, no one bothered to count them.
Dawkins interests me not as a person (I find him irredeemably dull) but as a social and cultural phenomenon. Millions gobble up his literary effluvia with relish, unable to see that Dawkins’s ‘arguments’ don’t add up even on their own terms.
This means that people’s critical faculties, this side of the critical race theory, have been cauterised. No better educated than Dawkins, they are as unable to see anything wrong with, say, the logic of saying that, if A equals B, and B equals C, then the 22 bus goes to Oxford Circus. His sentence I cited above ought by itself to be sufficient for any normal person to toss The God Delusion into the bin, eschewing even fashionable recycling. But they don’t, do they?
That forces sensible people to resort to the unsporting practice of arguing with Dawkins. What one wouldn’t give for a chance to debate Christianity with Hume, Nietzsche or, at a weak moment, even Feuerbach. That would have been a proper mental exercise.
Arguing with Dawkins is a bit like arguing with a flat-earther insisting that, if the earth were round, people would slide off it. Oh well, these days we have to make do with slim pickings.

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Did Marine bribe French pollsters? Marine Le Pen’s relationship ...

2026-10-17T21:12:17Z

Did Marine bribe French pollsters?

Marine Le Pen’s relationship with French Muslims closely resembles that between a dog and a tree, and I’ll let you decide who’s the dog and who’s the tree.
Since Miss Le Pen’s innermost, if not often articulated, desire is to send all Muslims back where they came from, certain animosity on their part is understandable.
(Before I forget, our football commentators often say “on their behalf” when they mean “on their part”. They may be driven either by an ideological preference for Anglo-Saxon words rather than those of Latin origin or by ignorance. In either case, I volunteer my services to teach a remedial course in English as a first language.)
Neither are their voting intentions in the forthcoming presidential election a matter of intriguing mystery. They’ll vote against Le Pen’s RN as a bloc. Since Muslims make up some 10 per cent of the population, such uniform hostility may well scupper Marine’s hopes ever to see the inside of the Elysée Palace.
Her best chance lies in drumming up equally unified and impassioned support among voters of other persuasions, and the preliminary results suggest she is doing rather well. The Gaullist Republican Party has been reduced to a nostalgic memory, and the oxymoronic socialist democrats aren’t doing much better. In other words, the centre isn’t holding.
Gathering momentum in France and elsewhere in the West are certain centrifugal forces that push politics to the peripheral extremes. Le Pen’s RN seems dominant at the right rim, whereas Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise hugs the opposite left edge.
The two parties are comfortably leading the polls, with RN quite far ahead. However, the vagaries of France’s electoral system are such that ‘quite far’ may not be far enough. Though France commendably follows Britain’s example in eschewing proportional representation, neither is she a first-past-the-post country.
For a party to go it alone, without shuffling and reshuffling the pack of all conceivable coalitions, it needs to win a large majority. That’s something that RN’s polling doesn’t quite indicate, meaning the party needs some extra bounce.
And what do you know: an Ifop survey just published has found that 46 per cent of Muslims will consider leaving the country should Marine become the hostess of the Elysée Palace, and half of those would leave for certain.
Now, if this isn’t a powerful incentive for the undecideds to swing into Marine’s warm embrace (I’ll never be able to shake the image), I don’t know what is. Those sociologists have practically won the election for her, although my suggestion of bribery was made in jest.
I can just hear millions of French people saying in unison: “Sans blague? No kidding? Is that a threat or a promise?”
The people who see their cities overrun with aliens no longer have to wait for the government to come up with an elaborate immigration policy that won’t be implemented and, if it is, won’t work. All they have to do is tick Rassemblement National on their ballot papers and whoosh! – there go at least two million Muslims, with those left behind suitably cowed.
That’s just for starters. When Marine gets her feet under that Louis XVI desk, she’ll really get the ball rolling.
All those sartorial perversions Muslims impose on their women will be gone, banned, proscribed, penalised. No more benefits whose principal result was creating no-go areas in French cities. No more anti-discrimination laws. No more orders for the CRS police to take it easy when the Muslims get restless.
“I will submit to the French people, by referendum,” wrote Miss Le Pen, “a bill to combat Islamist ideologies with numerous powerful measures, including the banning of the Islamist headscarf in public places.” She was being prudently understated.
Marine omitted those loaded words, pour commencer (to begin with), but French Muslims heard them loud and clear osmotically. They just know their life in France would become uncomfortable under Marine or her locum, Jordan ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce’ Bardella.
However, if Bardella is Marine’s stooge, she herself is one to Putin. This is why her election would be bad news not only for French Muslims but, alas, also for the whole of Europe. And I mean not the European Union that Marine cordially and commendably hates, but the people inhabiting the continent.
One aspect of Russia’s hybrid war on the West is supporting any extreme parties of either Right or Left that Putin hopes can destabilise Western countries politically, economically and socially. All the vast propaganda resources of Putin’s Russia are activated to promote such parties collectively or Putin-friendly candidates individually.
Financial resources are also available, and Le Pen’s party has been known to enjoy Russia’s largesse to the tune of millions. Such generosity presupposes gratitude, and Marine doesn’t disappoint.
She advocates cutting off all aid for the Ukraine, rescinding all sanctions on Russia and treating Putin as a cherished ally. Bizarrely she insists that it’s not Russia that’s waging aggressive war against the Ukraine and potentially all Europe, but Europe that’s fighting a mysterious “energy war” with Russia.
As she recently told the Financial Times, “We the EU have led an energy war against Russia, when we haven’t got any energy. It is not very smart.” This reading of the situation is unencumbered by excessive attachment to intellectual integrity or indeed facts.
Specifically, Marine announced her intention to stop financial aid for the Ukraine within six months of her presidency. If she is as good as her word, other Western European countries are bound to follow suit – Marine would both set the good example and give them a ready excuse.
If, according to her, France can no longer afford helping the Ukraine to stop Russian aggression, that situation won’t improve if Marine gets the chance to run France’s economy.
Essentially her take on the economy is both nationalist and socialist, a combination that has received a bad press for quite a while. As a nationalist, Le Pen is a rabid protectionist and anti-globalist. As a socialist, she favours state ownership of health, education, transportation, energy, social services and banking. Put together, such policies are guaranteed to beggar France more than she is already beggared.
Ever since she took over from her Vichyist father, Marine Le Pen has been doing public-relations calisthenics trying to detoxify her party of its frankly fascist and anti-Semitic heritage. As a former adman, I can both appreciate the effort and see its results.
Marine has made it possible for even many decent Frenchmen to vote NR in the evening and not hate themselves in the morning. But publicity is one thing, and reality another.
As a general rule, I distrust political conversions. The politics of a person or a party aren’t usually, and never merely, a product of dispassionate rational thought. They largely spring from a source buried deep in the viscera, in the DNA. And those things aren’t really subject to change.
The French ought to weigh the advantages of reducing the country’s Muslim population against the disadvantages of crypto-fascist policies both foreign and domestic. Whichever way they go, I hope it’ll be a result of systematic analysis, not a knee-jerk reaction. Dum spiro, spero, as Cicero used to say.

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What a family, the Wittgensteins I first came across the name at ...

2026-10-16T21:13:58Z

What a family, the Wittgensteins

I first came across the name at a single-digit age, when reading about the Napoleonic Wars.
Since at that tender age I knew little about the demographics of Russian aristocracy, I was surprised to see so many demonstrably non-Slavic names among the heroes of 1812.
One such was Prince Peter Wittgenstein, known as ‘Saviour of Saint-Petersburg’. The general had a brilliant career in his adopted country, assuming command of the Russian army after Kutuzov’s death and eventually retiring with the rank of Field-Marshal.
Soviet history books glossed over his feats because in the aftermath of two World Wars German surnames had fallen into disrepute. Even in the 19th century it was fashionable to deny the role German officers played in 1812. Tolstoy, for example, bends over backwards in his War and Peace to extol such simon-pure subordinates of Wittgenstein as Yermolov and Dorokhov, while being scathingly derisory about great Prussian commanders like Stein, Bennigsen – and Wittgenstein.
My critical faculties still inchoate at the time, I filed the name in the farthest recesses of my mind. But I soon came across it again. The occasion was the performance of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire.
Either the programme notes or some erudite adult satisfied my curiosity about the odd idea of composing a piece for one hand when God – or perhaps Darwin – gave us two. However, it turned out that what God gives wars sometimes take away.
The concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm in the First World War. Since he came from one of the richest Viennese families, after the war he could afford to commission the left-handed concerto from Ravel and thereby continue his career.
For many years I thought that the general and the pianist came from the same family, but I was wrong. Peter’s aristocratic German clan certainly wouldn’t have countenanced any association with Paul’s Jewish family. In fact, like many Jews, Paul’s ancestor, Moses, took the name of the Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein principality in which he was born. So after all some, if indirect, link with the princely Russo-German general did exist.
However, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) definitely was related to the pianist – he was Paul’s younger brother. His three other brothers all died by suicide, which isn’t generally considered to be a sign of a healthy heredity.
Nor is it regarded as a sign of piety: the brothers were raised as Catholics, a faith that treats suicide as a mortal sin. That’s why, though murderers are entitled to Christian burial, suicides aren’t.
Like his brothers, Ludwig volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army, having interrupted his studies with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. It was during the war that he became a serious Christian, proving yet again that foxholes are the only places where no atheists are to be found.
Ludwig’s Christianity was indeed serious, but it was also peculiar, at least at the time. For example, throughout the war he was obsessed with Tolstoy’s Gospel, a book that can only charitably be called merely heretical.
Tolstoy’s whole religious quest was about trying to convert Jesus Christ from miracle worker to social worker. To that end he re-wrote the Gospels, expurgating from them everything supernatural, miraculous and bearing any suggestion that Jesus was more than just a moralising chap similar but inferior to Tolstoy himself. He then merged the four Gospels into one, thus becoming the fifth Evangelist.
This, for example, is how Tolstoy renders the Incarnation, and someone must explain to me how a major thinker like Wittgenstein could love the book while considering himself Christian: “There was this girl Mary. This girl got pregnant by nobody knew whom. Her husband took pity on her and, hiding her shame, took her in. It was to her and an unknown father that a boy was born. The boy was named Jesus.”
At roughly the same age, Wittgenstein was also influenced by Otto Weininger, the author of Sex and Character who hated his own Jewishness so much he killed himself at age 23. I suppose Wittgenstein detected some similarity with his own life’s themes of suicide, Jewishness and ambivalent sexuality.
Fortunately for all of us, such little eccentricities didn’t prevent Wittgenstein from writing shortly thereafter one of the most significant works of modern philosophy, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. That was the only book published during Wittgenstein’s lifetime, his other works having been reconstructed from the notes he left behind.
Wittgenstein possibly went further than anyone else in establishing a link between language, religion and reality. Especially interesting to me is the way he showed the intellectual paucity of any attempt to use scientific evidence as proof of God’s existence or, as the case so often is these days, non-existence.
“We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered,” he wrote, “the problems of life remain completely untouched”. I wonder whether the inglorious quartet of vulgarians, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Christopher Hitchens, read Wittgenstein. Actually, that’s a moot point: even had they done so, they wouldn’t have understood the message.
We are all allowed one or two lapses, and Wittgenstein’s attraction to Tolstoy’s Gospel and Weininger’s scribbles were his. I for one can’t understand how he could produce his Tractatus just a couple of years after that infatuation.
But then it’s not only God but also genius that works in mysterious ways. Bach was perhaps the only man meriting that sobriquet who could combine his work with a life of middle-class normality. Most other spiritual giants in history were rather eccentric, sometimes bizarrely so, and Wittgenstein certainly was no exception.
And speaking of Bach, Wittgenstein drew some of his inspiration from him, as this note shows: “Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby’. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”
He was entitled to a similar epitaph.

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Is Englishness quantifiable? And what exactly is it? These ...

2026-10-16T07:50:05Z

Is Englishness quantifiable?

And what exactly is it? These questions are in the news, having been asked in a rather refractory manner by Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, and Suella Braverman, Reform’s spokesman on education.
The two lovely ladies disagreed on the issue in hand. Both of them were born in England, yet while Kemi, who is of Nigerian origin, considers herself English, Suella, whose parents are Indian, doesn’t. And her Reform colleague, Robert Jenrick, agrees.
Since the discussion is close to my heart for understandable reasons, I find it worth pondering. If you don’t mind, I’ll use my wife and myself as the test cases.
My former advertising colleagues, most of them from a lowly social background, always described my wife Penelope as very English.
I found that peculiar because to me Englishness was an unquantifiable notion: one either was or wasn’t English. Yet my co-workers somehow saw Penelope as being more English than they were.
That was interesting because Penelope left England when she was 17, spent the next 10 years in Paris and the 12 after that in New York, where at some point she had the misfortune of meeting me. Eventually we moved to London, for her to be judged more English than the chaps who had never left these Isles for longer than a fortnight.
Penelope grew up in what’s called ‘a good family’ and was educated at a decent public school. She emerged from these two ordeals having the deportment, tastes, manners and accent of a young lady. Her sojourn in foreign lands didn’t make any inroads on the first three, but her accent flattened out a bit.
Though it still remained within the range of what’s called Received Pronunciation, it now reflected her education and culture more than her class. Now, unlike ethnicity, those two aspects of a personality are indeed quantifiable: one can be more or less cultured and educated.
Since my co-workers knew that Penelope was no different from them ethnically, they must have regarded her culture as more formative than her DNA. As she was demonstrably more cultured than they were, she hence had to be more English. I suspect that understanding was more intuitive than rational, but it was still valuable.
English culture isn’t the only one that formed Penelope: she is multilingual and broadly educated. In fact, she feels more at home in France than in England, and the French accept her as one of them. And still she is supposed to be more English than my advertising mates.
My own background is even more esoteric and synthetic. I left Russia when I was 25, spent the next 15 years in the US and what amounts to almost the second half of my life in London. Though English is unquestionably my first – and favourite – language, my mother tongue was Russian, which I still speak natively if haltingly.
My culture is predominantly English, while temperamentally and intellectually I’m certainly more English than anything else. In fact, even this comparative is unfair: linguistically, temperamentally, culturally and cerebrally I am English.
Yes, I’m also more familiar with Russian culture than an average Englishman or even, if you don’t mind a bit of hubris, an average professor of Russian studies. Yet I read, say, Dostoyevsky, with a sense of detachment.
I find his novels interesting ethnographically, anthropologically and psychologically, but he doesn’t write about my kind of people in the sense in which, say, Evelyn Waugh does. I identify with Paul Pennyfeather more than with Alyosha Karamazov.
It would be safer to describe myself in political and administrative terms as British, but that would be a cop-out. Whenever England plays Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland at any sport, I pass the Tebbit test by rooting for England – although I support any of those countries when they play anyone else (a courtesy they don’t always reciprocate).
Now personal pronouns have become a complex issue, the English are my ‘we’ in the sense in which neither the Russians nor the Americans ever were. I’ve gone more native in England than I did even in the country of my birth.
Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesman, seems to attach a greater importance to ethnicity than my erstwhile co-workers used to. He ploughed into the argument between the two ladies by taking the side of his party colleague, London-born Mrs Braverman, who said: “Of course I am not English. I’m not an English person – I’m of Asian origin.”
Mr Jenrick broadly agrees with her, although he is less unequivocal. At first he defined as English “somebody [holding a British passport and] fully embracing of our history, our heritage, our language, our culture, our norms, our manners.” I wiped my brow and heaved a sigh of relief: I’ve made it to full recognition.
I relaxed too soon. For Jenrick then enlarged on the issue by saying that “there is such a thing as ethnicity”: “Holding a passport does not mean that you are culturally English or British. And sadly, there are many, many people in this country who display that, and neither does it mean that you’re ethnically English either.”
Does ethnicity matter? If so, how much? This issue has to be approached at two levels: substantive and political. The first is more involved; the second, more relevant.
First, let me ask you this question: Who’s more likely to riot in the streets, the French or the English? Since the answer is self-evident, here’s the follow-up question: Is the difference predicated exclusively on culture or also on ethnicity?
If I were forced to answer this question, I’d bravely straddle the fence and reply: “Both. Immediately, culture. But at one remove, also ethnicity.”
Southern Europeans, such as the French, are different temperamentally from those farther north, such as the English. Anyone who denies such ethnic differences will have to defend the indefensible proposition that an average Norwegian is no different emotionally and temperamentally from an average Italian. And temperament is a function of DNA, not upbringing – of nature, rather than nurture.
The temperament of a person or nation is a vital constituent of both political and cultural leanings. That’s why, when the subject of conservatism comes up, I always argue that it’s a matter of temperament, not of any set of ideas. The former is primary and paramount; the latter, secondary and contingent.
That’s at least partly why sombre Protestantism, with its stress on work ethic and thrift, sprouted firmer roots in the north of Europe than in the south. (As a result, the per capita GDP in Europe’s Protestant countries is still a third higher than in Catholic ones.)
Congenital temperament definitely has a formative influence on character, both personal and national. This is especially true of an insular country like Britain, where ethnic cross-breeding has been historically muted (though far from non-existent) by comparison to continental Europe.
DNA analysis shows that the ancestors of 70 per cent of native Britons have lived on these Isles for centuries. This situation is rapidly changing, much to the chagrin of Mr Jenrick and his party. I share some of their misgivings: the distinctive English character is too precious a thing to become extinct, and the danger of that outcome is real.
Here we approach the second, political, part of the debate. The three parties to it that I’ve mentioned are after all politicians, and in many ways their public views reflect those of their parties.
Mrs Badenoch is a real Tory, perhaps the first one we’ve had at the helm of the party since Margaret Thatcher. I’m sure she doesn’t fully subscribe to the notion of one-nation Conservatism, but her instinct is to address a rational message to the whole electorate, crossing the borders of religion, ethnicity, status and wealth.
Braverman and Jenrick, on the other hand, are populists, whose party also seeks a broad appeal, but of a different kind. If the Tories try to engage the voters’ minds, populists in general and Reform specifically operate at a more visceral level.
That’s where the fear of strangers resides, and Reform largely shapes its message as blood-and-soil nationalism, with blood as important as soil. When Jenrick voices nostalgia for a Britain that had existed long before he was born, he has a point. He and Braverman even have a point when they insist that non-English ethnicity can never be quite lived down.
But when this point is supported not by serious analysis but merely by a desire to score political points, it’s really not worth making.
The criteria of Englishness as defined by Mrs Badenoch are the best we can hope for, and, alas, Jenrick is right when he says that “there are many, many people in this country” who don’t meet those criteria and still hold British passports.
That’s what our parties should focus on, not on the nostalgic longing for a simon-pure DNA. It’s essential that we stem the influx of migrants who neither are nor have any desire to become English. But if those ethnically different are culturally English, they should be accepted as such. The opposite of that can turn nasty very quickly.
P.S. This year’s Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Navanethem Pillay, a South African judge who led the UN panel that accused Israel of genocide.
I hope next year they’ll give the bloody thing to Trump – as long as they don’t give it to Zack Polanski. Or Putin. Or, posthumously, Stalin.

http://www.alexanderboot.com/is-englishness-quantifiable/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-englishness-quantifiable

Trump sells Ukraine down the Dnieper Just as Russia steps up ...

2026-10-16T06:37:46Z

Trump sells Ukraine down the Dnieper

Just as Russia steps up terrorist raids on Ukrainian cities, Trump has shown yet again where his loyalties lie. In no particular order, they lie in self-aggrandisement, money and Putin.
Put all three together and what do you get? Trump’s announcement that Russia would “immediately supply more than 2.2 million barrels of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace”, followed by another 11 million barrels before the year is out.
The Donald struck his usual triumphant note on Truth Social: “Diesel prices for Americans and, indeed, the world, will be COMING DOWN, IN RECORD NUMBERS, AND FAST!”
Allow me to imitate his sui generis syntax and say: THIS IS ONE OF THE GREATEST BETRAYALS IN RECENT MEMORY! For every dollar flowing into Putin’s coffers will be converted into the liquid equivalent of Ukrainian blood.
World diesel prices have gone up some 70 per cent since Trump’s failure to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz. Not so coincidentally, this is roughly the current percentage of Americans who can’t find it in their hearts to approve of Trump in the polls.
This points to an electoral disaster for the Republicans in the forthcoming midterms, and Trump doesn’t care how many Ukrainian civilians have to die to mitigate the debacle. Serving half his second term as a lame duck president may dent Trump’s image for posterity (not his self-image – nothing can dent that), and he’d happily let Putin bomb not just Kiev but also London and Paris to avoid that.
Officially, the war is consuming 35 per cent of Russia’s budget. Unofficially and realistically, it’s at least half. No wonder the country’s economy is coming apart at the seams – and no wonder Trump desperately wants to help his pal Vlad out.
It doesn’t hurt that the magnanimous gesture of busting anti-Russian sanctions may also benefit Trump politically and financially. For the gangster ethic by which both Putin and Trump live precludes ingratitude.
One hand washes the other; you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; one good turn deserves another; favour for a favour – there is no doubt that the betrayal of the Ukraine will set the Trump Organisation up for lucrative deals in Russian natural resources.
Trump fanatics who used to be my friends aren’t talking to me any longer, which is a pity. I’d love to see how they talk their way out of this one. Since so far they’ve spurned all evidence to deny that Trump is on Putin’s side in this war, I’m sure they’ll do so again. I’m just curious how they’ll do a Houdini this time.
Someone ought to refresh Trump’s memory of why those sanctions were imposed on Putin’s Russia in the first place. Western powers knew that Russia’s unprovoked aggression threatened not just the Ukraine but the whole world order, something that had successfully maintained relative peace in Europe for almost 80 years.
The cornerstone of that order is staunch commitment to the inviolability of countries’ territorial integrity. Whatever disputes exist, they must be settled by peaceful negotiations, not brute force.
Russia got away with her aggression against Georgia in 2008 and even, by and large, with her unlawful annexation of the Crimea in 2014. It’s only the full-scale invasion of the Ukraine in 2022 that brought the weight of comprehensive sanctions on Russia’s head.
Also, the manner in which that invasion was conducted earned Russia a charge of war crimes and put Putin personally under an international arrest warrant. After Bucha and Mariupol, Putin became what the Russians call “non-handshakeable” for all decent countries and people.
Not for Trump though. He has nothing against destroying the existing world order, quite the opposite: he welcomes its destruction.
With simplistic demagoguery appealing to the American great unwashed but deodorised, he has spun the yarn of the good old US of A being ripped off by her NATO allies. To hell with them. In a half-witted attempt at amoral gangster-style realpolitik, he’d rather throw his lot in with the world’s pezzonovante (big cheeses), China and Russia.
China rates that status on the strength of her vast economy and military strength, while Putin has neither the former nor, as the on-going war has shown, the latter. He does, however, possess a big enough nuclear arsenal to blackmail and terrorise the world, and that’s good enough for Trump.
Let’s not forget either the Russian inexhaustible natural resources, which ignoramuses like Tucker Carlson equate with economic strength. Carlson probably has never heard of the Dutch Disease, so called after the 1977 discovery of the massive Groningen gas field had led to a sharp decline in Holland’s manufacturing output.
Overreliance on natural resources causes the nation’s currency to appreciate, which makes other sectors of the economy, especially its exports, uncompetitive. I’m sure both Trump and Putin are familiar with the problem if not the term. But they don’t care.
The whole gangster regime ruling Russia is based on plundering the country’s natural resources, especially oil and gas, for personal gain. This is one of history’s few examples of a national government indulging in asset-stripping on such a scale.
That suits Trump just fine. His whole life’s philosophy is all about turning a quick buck, and he has found a kindred soul in Putin.
I’m not going to give credence to the rumours of some sinister links between the two, although they are believable both factually and especially psychologically. But Trump’s current slap in the face of decency and, potentially, world security shows that he is as inimical to the West as Putin is.
The sooner we realise this and act accordingly, the better. My only hope is that European governments show enough strength not to jump on the betrayal bandwagon.
Just yesterday I paid £110 to fill up my diesel car, which put a dent in our family’s finances. However, and I hope you appreciate my selflessness, it takes an unmitigated villain to be ready to swap Ukrainian lives for cheaper fuel. Yes, it’s Trump I’m talking about.
P.S. Queen Camilla says she acquired her “lust for reading” at 13, when she read Lady Chatterley’s Lover under her blanket by torchlight. Considering that the book is shockingly bad, are you sure it was “for reading”, Your Majesty?

http://www.alexanderboot.com/trump-sells-ukraine-down-the-dnieper/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=trump-sells-ukraine-down-the-dnieper

Dr Darwin, meet Dr Macaulay and Dr Marx Something happened in ...

2026-10-16T05:37:43Z

Dr Darwin, meet Dr Macaulay and Dr Marx

Something happened in Europe on the way to the 20th century, specifically in the middle of the 19th.
During the period between 1848 and 1861, Thomas Macaulay published his principal work The History of England. In 1858 and 1859, Charles Darwin published his Origin. And Marx’s Das Kapital came out in 1867.
All three books sought to provide satisfactory, nay exhaustive, answers to man’s two most fundamental questions: Where did we come from? and Where are we going?
The questions touched on various facets of life, and the three authors approached the problem from different angles. Macaulay came up with a theory of history, Darwin with one of biology, and Marx with one of economics and politics.
The full title of Macaulay’s book was The History of England from the Ascension of James II, but his theory clearly transcended the two centuries that had elapsed from the eponymous ascension. (If he wrote today, he’d probably say ‘accession’, not ‘ascension’ – both words stand for elevation, but of a different kind.)
Macaulay laid down the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ some 70 years before the term was coined. Said interpretation was – and remains – teleological and eschatological. It can be summed up with one word: progress, an inexorable march from bad to good to better to the best to the glittering ideal.
According to Macaulay, the scientific and technological progress of mankind moved in step with moral, spiritual and intellectual progress. He was aware of the potential problems arising from science outpacing morality, happy to report that it hadn’t happened, and optimistic in his certainty that all aspects of life, especially in Europe and definitely in England, would continue their progress in perfect unison.
Darwin ignored the ancient belief that ex nihilo nihil fit, and traced the beginning of life to some parthenogenic event. From that moment on, all species embarked on a never-ending ameliorative march through history from the simple to the complex, from the primitive to the advanced, following a straight path that eventually turned single-cell organisms into Newton, Bach and, well, Darwin.
He had the good sense to describe his theory as “pure speculation”, something that his acolytes refused to acknowledge and continue to do so to this day. Yet Darwin didn’t realise that what Herbert Spencer later described as “survival of the fittest” was a logical fallacy.
He failed to identify the survival mechanisms at work in the successful species, which reduced the whole process to a tautology: we know that some species have survived because they are the fittest. And how do we know they are the fittest? Because they survived.
Marx translated natural selection into the falsehood of perennial class struggle that had throughout history enabled mankind to progress from the prehistoric period to feudalism, from feudalism to capitalism, from capitalism to socialism, from socialism to communism. Overtones of both Macaulay and Darwin thus harmonised with the crudest materialism to produce another teleological and eschatological theory of relentless, predetermined progress.
By the time that trio made their entrance to the world stage, Europe had rejected the formative doctrine of its civilisation, whose teleology and eschatology charted the route from the Creation to the Second Coming. God was dead, as Nietzsche diagnosed a few years later.
That didn’t mean God died the way Nietzsche himself did 15 years after the publication of his Zarathustra. What that coroner to divinity meant was simply that educated people no longer believed in God. The masses still did, but what did they know?
A vacuum thus appeared in what Kant and Hegel called Weltanschauung. Poor people who couldn’t afford such long words were looking to the self-appointed elite in search of answers to what Heine called “accursed questions”. The need was urgent: the book rapidly falling into oblivion did observe, rightly, that man didn’t live by bread alone.
Our trio of determinists tackling those questions from three different directions thus provided new sustenance for a life that transcends bread alone. That explains the extraordinary and enduring power of those three gentlemen to this day, when it’s clear that their theories haven’t survived contact with either reality or sound thought.
The 20th century has shown the Whig interpretation of history for what it is: an arbitrary, unfounded exercise in wishful thinking. In fact, the gap between scientific and moral attainments of mankind is growing faster and wider than it did during Macaulay’s lifetime. The presumption of moral progress was machine-gunned by NKVD squads, starved to death during man-made famines, gassed at Treblinka, executed in China, murdered in Cambodian killing fields.
The first thoroughly atheistic century, the 20th, produced more violent deaths than all the other centuries of recorded history combined. Many of those tragedies were caused by precisely what Macaulay said wouldn’t happen: the diverging paths followed by science and morality. As science and technology were putting more murderous weapons at man’s disposal, man’s restraint in using such diabolical means of exterminating millions evaporated pari passu.
Marx’s materialist determinism doesn’t even warrant so many words: every country that has tried to organise life according to Marx’s prescriptions has produced misery on a scale comparable to the Black Death. And that’s just the physical devastation of bodies – the moral and intellectual degradation imposed by that doctrine claimed even more souls.
And Darwin’s theory has bucked the traditional trend of scientific discovery. A theory is normally afforded some 30-40 years until it must come up with experimental proof and become fact. If it fails to do so, it becomes a museum exhibit – if it doesn’t become a laughing stock.
To say, as Dawkins does, that “evolution explains everything” only proves that he doesn’t understand any of these three words. Before things evolve, they have to be. Suffice it to say that the likelihood of the key proteins combining randomly to produce biological life has been calculated as 20 to the 254th – which is greater than the number of seconds in the most optimistic assessment of the age of the universe.
Darwinism is a collection of variously clever but invariably unsubstantiated speculation. Even Darwin’s natural selection was as old as the hills.
Already in Hellenic times Lucretius observed that it was by their superior cunning and strength that all existing species were different from those that had become extinct. Plutarch made a similar observation when he wrote about wolves devouring the slower horses and thus contributing to the survival of the faster ones.
As a replacement for the Christian version of creation and eschatology, Darwin’s theory is fool’s gold – this regardless of the known examples of microevolution, a species adapting to its environment, as observed by Lucretius and Plutarch.
Marxism too continues to survive, mainly on campuses, as a purely theoretical construct of some utopian bliss. In the absence of God, even Marx passes for a serious thinker.
The presumption of progress isn’t just a fallacy but a dangerous one. It arms assorted villains with an arsenal of excuses for the horrors they visit on humanity. The horrors may be physically murderous or else aesthetic, cultural, social and moral. And each new abomination can be presented as a step forward to some unidentified but certain heaven on earth.
And if any real eschatology seems likely to emerge out of that mess, it’s one that involves science getting so far ahead of morality that the world will perish – with a bang, not a whimper.
P.S. Now we are on the subject of history, in 2020, the greatest scholar ever, Donald Trump, thus found an historical parallel with Covid. According to him, “the closest thing is in 1917 they say, right, the great pandemic… probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick”.
I do hope the Donald has since learned that the World War in question was the First, not the Second; the influenza pandemic broke out in 1918 not in 1917; and the war didn’t end because all soldiers were indisposed. On second thoughts, I doubt he is capable of learning anything.

http://www.alexanderboot.com/dr-darwin-meet-dr-macaulay-and-dr-marx/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dr-darwin-meet-dr-macaulay-and-dr-marx

French food for thought French six-formers are still rioting in ...

2026-10-16T04:54:10Z

French food for thought

French six-formers are still rioting in the streets, burning wheelie bins, fighting with policemen, destroying bus shelters, building barricades – well, you get the picture.
I’m not going to add my penny’s worth to the treasure trove of well-meaning opprobrium being heaped on those Lord of the Flies reenactors. However, to preempt accusations of condoning such behaviour, I’ll just say that I find this sort of thing abominable – and leave it at this self-exculpating truism.
Yet most revolutionary outbursts have a deep meaning hiding beneath their face value and explicit motivation. So, while blaming those pimply adolescents, I also blame Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and their French followers in the 18th century.
They combined their efforts to lay down the blueprint for the edifice of the modern liberal-democratic state. A legitimate government was to them one that arises from the consent of the governed. Later, Rousseau expressed that arrangement legalistically by calling it ‘the social contract’.
All three gentlemen were non-believers, whether they called themselves agnostics, deists or whatever. Hence they happily broadened the notion of consent to turn it into a moral imperative trumping the Christian one they rejected.
Modernity has built a rickety structure on those foundations by following their prescriptions to the letter – including Locke’s countenancing of polygamy and thus destroying the notion of sacral marriage. “He that is already married may marry another woman with his left hand…,” wrote Locke. It’s reassuring to see how faithfully our Lockean modernity is trying to make sure his prophesy can come true – if in Locke’s time hostility to marriage was still inchoate, by now it has grown to full maturity.
Another example of modernity taking Locke on faith was the American revolutionary slogan of ‘no taxation without representation’. In due course, the newly liberated colonists discovered they disliked taxation even with representation.
Still, they followed the ideas of Locke, who regarded representation as sufficient and the only legitimising factor of taxation. That effectively empowered any pluralistic government to extort as much money from the populace as it wished, outdoing in this regard the absolute monarchs of yesteryear many times over.
Getting back to consent and social contract, I don’t recall ever giving consent to any form of government, and neither have I ever signed any social contracts. Then the only plausible assumption has to be that someone, whoever it was, must have done so on my behalf at some time in the past. And his consent and his signature on the social contract are legally and morally binding for me.
However, every legal contract I’ve ever seen stipulated the terms under which it could be terminated. Any other form of contractual consent is indeed contingent: I may give my consent to use Sky and then withdraw it a year later if I feel BT offers a better service. So can I withdraw the consent to be governed, one I don’t recall ever giving? No, that option isn’t on the table.
This is a serious omission. A citizen has no legal recourse to oppose government policies he finds detrimental. The usual argument that he can vote the government out is sheer demagoguery: general elections come once every few years, from four in the US to seven in Ireland. What are we to do in between? Write to our MPs? A fat lot of good that’s going to do.
In the absence of legal recourse, illegal behaviour moves to the forefront. For, not to cut too fine a point, Hobbes and Locke were issuing a carte blanche to arbitrary violence as the only option for withdrawing ‘consent’ never given in the first place.
The people, or often those acting in their name, would thenceforth feel justified to rebel against any legally instituted authority for any reason exciting them at the moment. If it’s ‘popery’, that will do famously. If it’s ‘taxation without representation’, that will work just as well. If it’s ‘bloodthirsty tsarism’, even better. If it’s bad school conditions, ça ira.
The age demographics of most revolutions tends towards the younger end. Young people are generally inclined to anarchy and violence. They are seldom, and never merely, driven by noble motives. Hatred is always present as a significant motive.
Youngsters, especially those in their late teens, tend to be anomic, nihilistic and destructive. Such puerile emotions may be levelled at many targets, often starting with their parents. The existing social and political order excites their youthful temperaments too, and grown-up ophidian seducers know how to convert such animus into violent action.
Also, looking at the photographs of those Paris rioters, one can’t help noticing a heavy Muslim presence among them. This adds another layer of collective resentment: the battle cry of such rebels isn’t only Brûler les poubelles! (Burn the wheelie bins), but also Nique la France! (“Screw France”, to put it more politely).
This part of the problem can’t be traced back to Locke directly, although indirect links aren’t non-existent. Still, I see the unpleasant events in Paris partly as an indictment of the shaky philosophical basis of the modern liberal-democratic state.
Since that basis is probably not going to change, or definitely not for the better, one can confidently predict that such incidents will escalate, becoming both more frequent and more violent. This isn’t a specifically French problem, although violence was encoded into the natal DNA of the French Republic, which makes it more susceptible to such outbursts than, say, Britain.
But none of us is immune: social order may well disintegrate when hordes of youngsters can be called into violent action. The slogans inscribed on their banners may vary, from Down with [insert name]! to Allahu Akhbar!, but whether their grievances are the reason or the pretext for riots, they can only be heard and acted upon if expressed violently.
The notions of consent and social contract have closed off other possible avenues. In general, it’s always useful to remember that every political action rests on a political philosophy. Or, as that outdated book puts it in another context, “In the beginning was the Word”.

http://www.alexanderboot.com/french-food-for-thought/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=french-food-for-thought

Were you missing Greta? Whenever and wherever young people rise ...

2026-10-16T04:05:10Z

Were you missing Greta?

Whenever and wherever young people rise in revolt, one can expect Greta Thunberg, now of age, to be there, inciting, screaming slogans and in general making a nuisance of herself.
No revolt worthy of its name could do without Greta’s laying on hands. However, those Parisian youngsters have been burning wheelie bins for weeks, and Greta hasn’t been there to fan the flames.
Don’t know about you, but I was beginning to wonder. Has Greta, now 23, decided to go back to school to finish her secondary education as a mature pupil? Is she ill? Has she grown up?
Well, now I can heave a sigh of relief. As if to prove that those youngsters are revolting for real, Greta has turned up like a bad penny, stinking like a bad egg. Now we know the rioters mean business.
She went to Saint-Denis where those revolting youngsters were doing their thing outside the Paul-Éluard lycée, named for a Stalinist poet. The problem as Greta saw it wasn’t with the pupils breaking the law but with the police attempting to stop them.
By trying to douse the fires and prevent new ones from getting started, the cops, explained Greta, were guilty of something even worse than “extreme violence”. “Our future is being robbed away from us,” she shrieked.
She clearly sees said future as a sort of brush fire spreading first all over Paris, then all over the world. If so, one has to support les flics unequivocally: they are stopping the firebugs from doing their worst.
Now, Greta stands 4’11’ when on tiptoe, and she like few other people I can think of accurately illustrates the German concept of Giftzwerg (‘poison dwarf’). However, she and I have something in common: we both know that what matters is mayhem, not the putative reason for it.
‘Give us Molotov cocktails, we’ll find a cause’ ought to be the motto of all young malcontents the world over. This is how Greta elucidated this desideratum:
“They should know that all over the world we are following these developments. We are inspired by the young people who are demanding their basic rights.
“Whether it’s not funding schools enough, or the climate crisis, or social injustice crises … it’s about time that young people are stepping up and reclaiming that future.”
Since people like Greta define a period of warm weather as a climate crisis and any disparity of income among people as social injustice crises, and since those abominations will persevere for as long as humanity does, that’s eternal bad news for wheelie bins.
In other words, when people are as febrile of rancour as they are feeble of mind and defective of morals, they’ll always find a reason to create revolutionary mayhem.
And if those reasons Greta singled out seem insufficient, there is a long menu to choose from: misogyny, transphobia, people who look and talk like Jacob Rees-Mogg, racism and hundreds of others. Each grievance is an atom with high valence: it can easily latch on to any combination of other atoms to form a molecule of murderous hatred.
What passes for the French government is scared out of its wits. This can explain why its officials don’t understand the observation above. They don’t realise that, when a cannibal is hungry for human flesh, you can’t assuage his urge by offering him a tofu sandwich.
Accepting that as a valid metaphor, neither can any concessions aimed at satisfying the rioters’ explicit grievances mitigate their destructive zeal. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu tried to buy social tranquillity by promising to hire 3,000 substitute teachers and include pupils’ demands in the 2027 budget.
This only goes to show how little he understands what those feral youngsters actually want: fire, blood, ruins and a hurricane-strength chaos. Then, with the existing world reduced to ashes, Greta Thunberg will do a Phoenix and triumphantly spread her wings over vanquished decency.
It’s no longer correct to refer to the rebels as ‘pupils’. Pupils merely acted as the detonator that set off an explosion clearing the ground for others to roam. University students have happily joined the fun: over 70 French universities were blocked or closed on Tuesday, which is roughly half of the total number.
What I find especially endearing is that students of Sciences Po have joined in by blocking Boulevard Saint-Germain, the main thoroughfare of Paris’s Left Bank.
Sciences Po is the smithy of the French political class, sort of like our Oxbridge and the London School of Economics rolled into one. It’s safe to say that most French ministers either graduated from Sciences Po or at least studied there.
There is no reason to believe that the school will lose its exalted status in the near future. Hence the lads who are paralysing traffic in the Left Bank will in some 20 years man all the top offices of the French Republic. It’s good to see that France’s political future is in safe hands.
So far the police have made 6,877 arrests, 20 per cent more than during the mayhem of 1968. According to the Justice Ministry, 147 staff members at various schools across the country have been injured.
Greta, an imbecilic mirthless smile permanently pasted on her face, is railing against police brutality, with the French Left chiming in. Marine Le Pen, on the other hand, blames the rioters, which is a feather in her tricolore cap.
This just may be the first nice thing I’ve ever said about Marine, and, while I’m on a roll, I might as well compliment Donald Trump. When assorted prime ministers and presidents were prostrating themselves before Greta, smitten as they were by the incoherent thunder of her invective, Trump gave her a cold shoulder. Bien joué, Donald.
I don’t know what Greta’s travel plans are, but I suspect she’ll stick around in Paris until this weekend. That’s when parliamentary debate will start on the so-called austerity budget.
If you aren’t fluent in Modern Political, ‘austerity’ means merely rapacious rather than downright suicidal public spending. France’s deficit and sovereign debt are greater than ours, which is saying a lot. A few more years of that, and the country will become an economic basket case.
However, ‘austerity’ is the bogeyman of the French masses, and they don’t care how many buildings and wheelie bins they’ll have to burn to make their point. It’s expected that joining the fray at the weekend will be such hitherto dormant groups as farmers and the gilets jaunes.
If I were Manny Macron, I’d go on an extended holiday somewhere distant, say Tahiti or Réunion. The French have form in busting into palaces and decapitating their inhabitants. Should that happen, Greta’s hallmark grin will get even wider, and Manny ought to do all he can to avoid this calamity.

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Whose side are you on? Lately, we’ve heard all sorts of ...

2026-10-16T02:45:07Z

Whose side are you on?

Lately, we’ve heard all sorts of criticism of Zelensky and his country. I think it’s time to reduce all thrusts and parries to simple propositions.
The Ukraine, say the critics, is corrupt. True but irrelevant. Putin didn’t attack the Ukraine to stamp out corruption.
Zelensky is also personally corrupt. Irrelevant if true. In any case, I doubt he is as corrupt as his principal detractors, Putin and Trump.
The Ukraine has held no general election since the war started, goes the next argument. True but specious.
Britain, whose democratic credentials were seldom doubted at the time, held no general election from 1935 to 1945. The country was too busy trying to survive, as the Ukraine is now. Moreover, only a malevolent critic would insist on a country observing democratic niceties when 20 per cent of her territory is occupied.
The other day, one such critic pointed out with a QED air that, unlike Zelensky, Putin did hold an election during the war. I was so stunned that I only managed to ask: “He held what?!?”
Yet even that interrogative response sufficed: my opponent got embarrassed because he knew as well as I did that elections in Russia are as rigged as they were under the Soviets. The only relatively free election Russia has ever had in her history was in 1991. Since then all such shams boiled down to the leader’s decision on what kind of majority he’d like to fake.
What else? Many Ukrainians, say detractors, don’t want to fight and press-ganging is rife. Also, many young Ukrainians are fleeing the country to avoid conscription.
My replay is again the same: true but irrelevant. Press-ganging is an invariable if regrettable attribute of all protracted conflicts. The Royal Navy, for example, practised it widely during the Napoleonic Wars and sporadically thereafter. That didn’t prevent Britain from being seen as a paragon of just governance during that period.
The same goes for conscription dodging: there are always some people who see no cause as being worth dying for. Some young Americans fled to Canada during the Vietnam war; some young Ukrainians flee to, well, Canada among other such safe havens during the current war. Sometimes life is like that.
The important thing is that Ukrainians are still fighting well and courageously, and there is no sign that most soldiers operate under duress. One way or another, this again is irrelevant.
Going over such points one by one, we’re bound to reach the inevitable conclusion: The only relevant question is the one in the title above. Or, put another way, which side would you like to win and which one to lose?
First, it wouldn’t hurt to spell out what victory and defeat mean to both combatants.
Victory for the Ukraine would mean preserving its sovereignty and independence, ideally without ceding any territory, but at a pinch even at the cost of some small territorial loss. Defeat for the Ukraine would mean again becoming the Russian colony it was for 200 years. As corollary to that, Ukrainian culture, language and national identity in general would be extinguished.
Victory for Russia would be recolonising and subjugating the Ukraine, erasing every trace of Ukrainian particularity. This would be the first step on the way to rebuilding and possibly enlarging the Soviet empire. Defeat for Russia would be failure to achieve these objectives – this even if Putin could claim a patch of Ukrainian land and declare victory on that basis.
My contention is that the West has a vested interest in the Ukraine’s victory. One reason for it is civilisational.
Any civilisation, to merit this lofty term, narrows the boundaries of the allowable. It survives and eventually prospers by putting limits on human behaviour as practised both individually, by persons, and corporately, by countries.
Such limits may be imposed by coercion otherwise known as laws or by appealing to certain moral dicta or by invoking rational self-interest. When the tethers slacken and human nature is allowed or, worse still, encouraged to run wild, civilisation collapses and barbarism descends.
Appeals to morality ring hollow in international politics, more so now than ever in the past. What remains is rational self-interest policed by implicit or explicit coercion.
The world order emerging after the Second World War was a concrete illustration of this general observation. Countries agreed that such cataclysmic efforts to seek redress for grievances would harm, possibly destroy, everyone. The invention of nuclear weapons made that agreement even more desirable.
Hence the countries agreed to settle their differences peacefully, by invoking an intricate lattice of treaties enforced by overt diplomacy and by an implied threat of violence. As part of the emerging reluctant understanding, they agreed to hold one another’s borders as inviolable.
This arrangement is fragile. It’s a bit like a delicate porcelain cup being handled by a gorilla: one wrong move and shards will fly all over the place. Peace in Europe, a couple of years older than I am, is such a cup and Putin’s Russia is such a gorilla.
By his unprovoked invasion of a sovereign country, Putin smashed that brittle world order that has enabled us all to live in peace and, with luck, relative prosperity. Moreover, Putin exhibits the candour that is such an endearing trait of most dictators: he doesn’t bother to conceal his intention to treat the Ukraine as a step along the way, not the final destination.
Putin is a self-proclaimed enemy of the West, and he is doing all he can to undermine it. And, since we all have a vested interest in maintaining the world order, we also have a vital stake in being on the Ukraine’s side – this regardless of what we may think of her internal politics.
The Ukraine is more than our ally. She is our civilisation’s first line of defence against barbarism. Anyone who takes Russia’s side isn’t just making a mistake; he is committing civilisational treason.
By transparently supporting Russia in the ongoing war, Donald Trump betrays more than just America’s European allies and the Ukraine. He betrays our whole civilisation and, this argument not likely to make much impression in our ignorant age, also the national interests of the United States.
One minor illustration: last year Trump cut off direct supplies of armaments to the Ukraine. The burden of such expenditure was more, he explained, than the American taxpayer was able or willing to bear.
Thenceforth, the US was going to sell the armaments earmarked for the Ukraine to NATO’s European members, who would then transfer them to the end user. The sainted American taxpayer could sigh with relief.
Now Trump is cutting off even that mediated aid – why? US defence contractors are making billions selling their products to the Ukraine via Europe. In addition to creating American jobs, they then pay taxes on their income, thereby enriching the country.
Why did Trump cut off that aid? Help me out there because the only plausible answer I can come up with is that he is on Putin’s side.
Trump has also loosened sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons, which any serious observer has to see for what it is: a first step towards removing all economic sanctions on Russia. This would make the aggressor stronger and his victims, both present and future, weaker. In other words, Trump is on Putin’s side.
In 2022, after Putin’s full-scale aggression against the Ukraine, Western allies froze about €260 billion of Russian state assets.
The only moral action, and one fully justifiable in international law, would have been not freezing those assets but confiscating them and holding them in escrow as a fund for the post-war restoration of the Ukraine. But freezing was the next best thing.
Now Trump is demanding that those assets, most of which are held in the EU, be unfrozen. If acted upon, this demand would certainly prolong the war and put the Ukraine at a severe disadvantage. Why is Trump doing that? Because he is on Putin’s side.
Over the past three days, the US has stopped sharing satellite intelligence data with the Ukraine, and Trump has made Musk limit the speed of the Starlink system. As a result, the Ukraine has become less capable of striking at Russian infrastructure and anticipating Russian raids on her cities. The same question: why? The same answer: because Trump is on Putin’s side.
I’ve seen all sorts of explanations for this bizarre affinity. One such is that Putin is blackmailing Trump with some kompromat. This is possible but unlikely. After all, the Donald could never be confused with an altar boy, and I can’t think offhand of any information that could be more damaging to him than what’s in the public domain already.
Suggestions that Trump is a kind of Manchurian Candidate, a lifelong Russian agent, are seductive but should be forsworn in the absence of tangible proof.
The likeliest possibility is Trump pursuing a personal pecuniary interest, something that defines and circumscribes his transactional personality. For example, his emissaries, Witkoff and Kushner, have been negotiating the purchase of large blocks of shares in Lukoil, one of Russia’s top oil companies.
You must have noticed that Trump has been trying to twist Zelensky’s arm into stopping drone attacks on Russian refineries. Why single out oil and not, say, Russian data centres that have also been hit by Ukrainian drones? For me, the answer is simple: Lukoil’s shares would be worthless if all its production and refining capacity were degraded. Zelensky is welcome to the data centres.
The story of the Ukraine driving up the price of diesel should be told to the marines. Instead Trump is telling it to the gullible US electorate in a desperate attempt to forestall a midterm electoral disaster for the Republicans.
America continues to be a major exporter of diesel fuel. That suggests no domestic shortfall and, if there is one, surely it would be easier to buy diesel from Canada than from Russia, which violates international sanctions.
Everything Trumps has done, especially during his second term, shows that he is on Putin’s side. Well, this side is neither mine nor, I hope, yours.

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