What’s necessary is impossible Jean-Claude Juncker, the boozy former president of the European Commission, once said something that struck a chord with me. Since then, I’ve been repeating his aphorism ad infinitum: “We all know what to do. We just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.” Chancellor Healey’s new budget reminded me of this cynical witticism. Or rather it wasn’t so much the budget itself as the way conservative commentators have responded to it (I’m singling out conservative commentators because I read no other). Talking about the state of our economy, they seem to keep dipping into their thesauruses (thesauri?) to see how many synonyms for ‘disaster’ they can find. Each one is perfectly legitimate as a characterisation of our economy, but then the trouble starts. When they try to suggest ways of improving the sorry state of affairs, they come up with what one has to see as merely palliative tweaks. Lower this tax, cut this item of spending, remove waste, that sort of thing. Alas, some systems are beyond tweaking. This brings back a rather more distant memory of Houston, circa 1978. I met an inventor who I thought was nuts. His claim was that his understanding of thermodynamics was so profound that he could fix any technical problem with the production and transportation of oil and gas. Just in case my diagnosis of his mental faculties was awry, I introduced him to some oil companies I was doing business with. My friend’s proposal to them was simple: tell me which system malfunctions, give me a few days, I’ll come back with a solution, you pay me. And what do you know, the blighter was as good as his word. However, most of the time he didn’t fix the faulty system – he’d get rid of it altogether, replacing it with something that worked much better. “In my experience,” he’d tell me, “most problems aren’t symptomatic but systemic. If a system never works properly, chances are it’s fundamentally flawed and can’t be fixed.” That approach has implications that go beyond oil wells and gas pipelines – and it certainly applies to the economic model followed by Britain and, mutatis mutandis, just about every other Western country. That model is systemically flawed. Therefore it can’t be improved; it can only be replaced. No economy can sustain the burden of debt breaking its back; no economy can function at its best when the state extorts half of the nation’s wealth (and I’m being conservative). The problem has many facets, one of which is demographic. As the population gets older, the ratio of people producing and consuming wealth is constantly shifting towards the latter. And the picture becomes even darker, when we factor in younger people on welfare. At the moment, about 10 million working-age Britons receive some form of state benefits – in addition to 13 million state pensioners. That’s a third of the UK population, and every constituent of this proportion is trending upwards. As Rabelais’s Gargantua remarked, L’appétit vient en mangeant (“Appetite comes with eating”). And yet our government is doing nothing to curtail such appetites and much to enhance them. A ship is heading for the rocks, and its captain is shouting: “Full speed ahead.” When I wrote my book about the 2008 crisis (The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, 2010), the sum total of the world’s indebtedness equated ten times the world’s combined GDP. Since then things have only got worse. The UK is currently paying £124 billion a year to service the national debt which has just gone over £3 trillion. This means that our government isn’t paying its way and hasn’t done so for a long time. (The US national debt is much higher even in per capita terms, but the country benefits from the dollar being the world’s reserve currency.) At the same time, the productive economy is being strangulated with taxes that always go up. Over 581,000 businesses ceased trading in one year covering parts of 2024 and 2025. In addition, 53,756 British firms are reported to be in “critical financial distress”. Wealthy people are leaving Britain in droves, taking their capital with them, along with the jobs they generate. At first, these were mostly foreign businessmen who had at some point found the British trading climate more clement than elsewhere. They are fleeing now, closely followed by their British colleagues born and bred. Getting back to Juncker’s aphorism, I’m not sure our government knows what to do. I am, however, certain that it doesn’t care one way or the other. As I’ve mentioned many times, its view of the economy and politics in general is wholly informed by Marxist dogma or at least Marxist instincts. If a sound government seeks reducing the number of people dependent on it, a Marxist government is eager to increase it. Our powers that be feel that wealth, except their own, is the work of the devil. People independent of the state financially would be less malleable, less prepared to accept the state’s diktats on every aspect of their lives. The ideal government our rulers see in their mind’s eye is the closest approximation of the Soviet Union they can get away with, ideally minus the concentration camps. That’s why, if they are at all bothered by the shameful state of our economy, it’s only in the context of their being able to hold on to power for a long stretch. At the moment, they feel they can trick enough people with statistical legerdemain and the odd crumb, like slightly cheaper gherkins, to keep conservatives out of power. However, even supposing for the sake of argument that I’m wrong and our ministers are genuinely concerned about the declining standard of living, there is precious little they can do about it. They probably do know what must be done, which is a sweeping reform of our tax-and-spend model. That would involve tightening, in due course reducing, the money supply, cutting the social budget down to the bare essentials, reducing the public sector to at most 25 per cent of the economy, privatising everything feasible including the NHS, rolling up most of the red tape, cutting all taxes but especially those on companies new and old, turning Britain into a kind of offshore paradise for business foreign and domestic – I could go on for ever, and so could you. More important, so probably could Messrs Burnham, Healey et al. But even if they wanted – which they don’t – to restore Britain’s economic freedom, along with all other kinds, they wouldn’t be able to. No semblance of such a reform is politically possible, which is why even our supposedly conservative parties steer clear of the subject. They keep coming up with tweaks, trying to treat cancer with paracetamol. Their idea of running the economy is doing a bit less of what Labour are doing, which may delay the total collapse but not prevent it. The circle is vicious: co governments over at least the past 80 years, with a brief Thatcherite interlude, have been corrupting the people with socialist twaddle about equality, class war, the rich getting richer and so on. Governments have been competing against one another as to which cardinal sins they can encourage and reward. Eventually the people bought the notion of a paternalistic provider state letting them trade much freedom for a little security, and now they quite like it. They won’t like it when the whole structure collapses, burying them under the rubble. But then it’ll be too late. A change of ruling party may make things slightly better quantitatively but not qualitatively. Things won’t get better; they’ll just get worse at a slightly slower pace. But the final destination will remain the same until a government is willing to introduce meaningful reform. But their will won’t produce a way: what’s economically necessary is politically – also socially and culturally – impossible. http://www.alexanderboot.com/whats-necessary-is-impossible/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=whats-necessary-is-impossible #europeancommission #juncker #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/its-jail-for-you-mr-robinson/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=its-jail-for-you-mr-robinson #robinson #trump #american #donaldtrump #newyork #however #france #cesarelombroso #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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 #trump #canada #american #breakthrough #huckleberryfinn #lake #marktwain #gulf #mexico #war #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/why-do-people-hate-jews/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-do-people-hate-jews #jews #sowell #sartre #church #henryford #thomassowell #southeastasia #however #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/blandy-andy-does-europe/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=blandy-andy-does-europe #andy #blandyandy #europe #france #duke #shabanamahmood #burnham #homesecretary #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/i-love-president-donald-j-trump/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=i-love-president-donald-j-trump #love #god #jesus #thou #tolstoy #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/finally-witkoff-has-understood-putin/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=finally-witkoff-has-understood-putin #newyork #witkoff #steve #putin #trump #finally #russia #metternich #castlereagh #donald #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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 reco 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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/dawkins-only-atheists-have-virtue/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dawkins-only-atheists-have-virtue #dawkins #militantgodless #christianity #richarddawkins #atheists #goddelusion #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/did-marine-bribe-french-pollsters/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=did-marine-bribe-french-pollsters #french #pen #muslims #france #elyseepalace #party #franceinsoumise #gaullistrepublican #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

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. http://www.alexanderboot.com/what-a-family-the-wittgensteins/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-a-family-the-wittgensteins #wittgenstein #war #paul #napoleonicwars #german #ludwigwittgenstein #peterwittgenstein #family #worldwars #god #rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit