So maybe global warming (supposing for the moment that this cherished will-o’-the-wisp actually exists) is not such a bad thing. That’s the Good News that Dave Lindorff, “an award-winning journalist, a former New York Times contributor” and co-author of The Case for Impeachment (three guesses whom he wants to impeach), brings us over at The Baltimore Chronicle.

Instead of running around bemoaning your neighbor’s “carbon footprint” as does Al Gore, leftists should rejoice that the polar ice caps are melting, that the oceans are rising, that the sky is falling. Why? Because, in the world according to Dave, if you look at a map of the United States, most of the soon-to-be-submerged areas are bastions of Red State animus. That’s right, folks, you may not be able to dispense with conservatives at the polls, but maybe mother nature can lend a hand and drown ‘em–or at least drive ‘em from their homes.

[W]hat we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Then there’s the matter of the Midwest, which climate experts say is likely to face a permanent condition of unprecedented drought, making the place largely unlivable, and certainly unfarmable. The agribusinesses and conservative farmers that have been growing corn and wheat may be able to stretch out this doomsday scenario by deep well drilling, but west of the Mississippi, the vast Ogallala Aquifer that has allowed for such irrigation is already being tapped out. It will not be replaced.

So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism. Only in the northernmost area, around the Great Lakes (which will be not so great anymore), and along the Canadian border, will there still be enough rain for farming and continued large population concentrations, but those regions, like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, are also more liberal in their politics.

Hallelujah! Dave, who is also “a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism,” sees a lot of “poetic justice” in this Armageddon for conservatives. He also sees a political opportunity that should not be passed up.

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

The friend who forwarded this little bijoux described it as “the funniest thing I’ve read in ages.” It is that, but what makes it a little sad as well is the fact that poor old award-winning, New-York-Times writing, Columbia Graduate School attending Dave almost certainly fails to see the humor.

As the pious cataract of eulogies for Benazir Bhutto accumulate and briefly eddy before draining away, the connoisseur of cant is tempted to wade in and examine the specimens: which of these cringe-making hagiographical exercises is the worst? The competition is stiff, if for no other reason than that the Musharraf-Bhutto spectacle made for such facile political drama. I cannot claim to have examined all the contenders; nevertheless I would be willing to cede the palm preemptively to the truly stomach-churning performance by Bernard-Henri Levy in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal. “They have killed a woman,” Mr. Levy begins. “A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.”

Students of rhetoric will wish to study Mr. Levy’s histrionic communique. What accounts for its singular awfulness? How has he managed to crowd so much cloying insincerity and grating exhortation into fewer than 800 words? I note that the piece was translated from the French, and it is true that piece is even more horrible if read aloud in a faux-French accent (though that has the compensating advantage of bringing out its unintended comic elements). Yet even when all due allowances are made for that imperfect art, most observers, I suspect, will grant that the author, not the translator, is the source of the essay’s emetic qualities.

[N]ow they have killed Benazir Bhutto–killed her because she was a woman, because she had a woman’s face, unadorned yet filled with an unswerving strength, because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists) floats over the human face of women.

Actually, al Qaeda killed her not because she was the latest incarnation of Das Ewigweibliche but in order to remove a prominent (also, n.b., at least intermittently corrupt) critic and to destabilize an already fraught country further. But the breathless fanzine rhetoric Mr. Levy trowels onto his subject obscures that reality under a suffocating layer of unearned moralism and pseudo-concern.

“The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.”

Really? Or would that have been an act of grandstanding political folly guaranteed to make an already dangerous situation much worse?

Doubtless the Augean stables of sentimentality have more in store for us on this subject. But to date, Bernard-Henri Levy’s intervention is the most appalling piece of sentimentalizing rubbish since irresponsible journalists abetted the transformation of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales from a nuisance for the Paris tunnel cleaners into an international embarrassment.

Everyone says it’s going to be ugly–the election, I mean. Already the claws are bared: “What about those speaking fees, Mr. Huckabee?” “Who’s your hairstylist Mr. Edwards?” “Who paid for that trip to Long Island 10 years ago Mr. Guiliani?” Et cetera, et cetera.

Well, that’s politics. It was ever thus, and in fact it’s generally a lot milder in America than elsewhere. Forget about sites of mayhem and violence like Pakistan. Even Merry England has been distinctly unmerry at certain times. And the memory of such bitterness lingers, as these two disparate items from the London Times’s “In Memoriam ” column on 3 September 1969 remind us (Thanks to John Julius Norwich’s first volume of Christmas Crackers for this tidbit):

Oliver Cromwell, 25th April, 1599 - 3rd September 1658. Lord Protector, 1653-1658. Statesman, General and Ruler.

“Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered.”

–Psalm 68, verse I.

In honoured remembrance.

Cromwell. — To the eternal condemnation of Oliver, Seditionist, Traitor, Regicide, Racialist, proto-Fascist and Blasphemous Bigot. God save England from his like. –Hugo Ball.

I won’t conceal that my sympathies are firmly with Mr. Ball (obviously not the Dadaist Hugo Ball) in this matter. But it is useful to witness the heat of the partisanship, for and against: it seems slightly comic when one hasn’t, so to speak, a dog in the race. How unfunny it seems when one does!

Islamabad is not one of my usual ports of call, but a concatenation of circumstances found me with an invitation to join a small group travelling to that faraway spot next week to witness the Pakistani elections. A local newspaper got wind of the visit, and the invitation was quietly withdrawn two days before Benazir Bhutto was gunned down by an Islamist fanatic (pardon the pleonasm).

Friends and family breathed a little sigh of relief when I announced that I would not, after all, be embarking for Islamabad. At first, I was disappointed; yesterday’s events incline me to temper the disappointment. One friend with whom I discussed the trip when I was first invited suggested that Pakistan was probably the most dangerous country in the world at the moment. Of course, it got a lot more dangerous yesterday.

It will be interesting to see what unfolds in that tormented country–using the word “interesting” in the sense intended by the old Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.”

The first thing we need do is adjust our eyesight so that we can see Pakistan aright. There has been a lot of nonsense written about President Musharraf and “democracy” is recent weeks, as if it was primarily he who stood in the way of a burgeoning liberal regime in The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, home to the second largest Muslim population in the world.

Over at National Review Online, Andrew McCarthy has some wise and sobering things to say about the discrepancies between the two Pakistans: the Pakistan of our beneficent imagining and the Pakistan that actually exists. “There is,” McCarthy writes,

the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.

Then there is the real Pakistan: an enemy of the United States and the West.

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.

“Democracy,” as the etymology of the word revels, means rule by the “demos,” the people. The unpalatable reality we find it hard to digest is that, in many parts of the world, rule by the people is not just contrary to the interests of liberal, Western-style democracy, it is actively hostile to those interests. As McCarthy notes, “Whether we get round to admitting it or not, in Pakistan, our quarrel is with the people. Their struggle, literally, is jihad. For them, freedom would mean institutionalizing the tyranny of Islamic fundamentalism.” It is worth pausing to ponder this unpleasant possibility, so confounding to our generous instincts and liberal preconceptions. Just to get things in focus, remember the fate of the journalist Daniel Pearl who in 2002 was beheaded–beheaded–on camera by a few of the 46% of the Pakistani population who approve of Osama bin Laden.

When you look up Pakistan on Wikipedia, you are reminded by a table of salient facts that the present form of government there is “Military Dictatorship.” We are nice people, and we do not like military dictatorships. They are nasty things, dictatorships, and what could be worse than a dictatorship that is controlled by the military, i.e., people with guns? Nice folks like us do not approve of people with guns who lord it over others, telling them what to do and (even worse) what not to do.

Reading further in that entry about Pakistan, you come across the fact that Pakistan is also a nuclear power. A link takes you to a page that lists those states with nuclear weapons. Pakistan, it is estimated, has about 80 warheads, 30 of which are thought to be active.

Jihad. The world’s second largest Muslim population. Eighty nuclear warheads. Rule by the people. . . Think about it.

Benazir Bhutto’s brutal murder was a horrible thing. What should we conclude from it? That “Musharraf must go”? This from Reuters: “Chants of ‘Shame on the killer Musharraf, shame on the killer U.S.’ were heard from the throng lining the road and standing on rooftops.” The New York Times: “There is no time to waste. With next month’s parliamentary elections already scrambled, Washington must now call for new rules to assure a truly democratic vote.” “A truly democratic vote”?

Reality, alas, does not always conform to our desires. “Democracy” is an easy word to pronounce. The reality we like to believe it fosters is somewhat more difficulty to procure. “Free government,” Santayana once observed, “works well in proportion as government is superfluous.” In Pakistan today, government is the opposite of superfluous. It is not an agreeable situation. But Andrew McCarthy is right: “For the United States, the question is whether we learn nothing from repeated, inescapable lessons that placing democratization at the top of our foreign policy priorities is high-order folly. . . . Jihadists are not going to be wished away, rule-of-lawed into submission, or democratized out of existence. If you really want democracy and the rule of law in places like Pakistan, you need to kill the jihadists first. Or they’ll kill you, just like, today, they killed Benazir Bhutto.”

The actor Will Smith ignited a little firestorm of indignation when, in the course of an interview with a Scottish newspaper, he offered some observations on the inherent goodness of mankind:

“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.

One of the first reactions was a story in World Entertainment News: “Smith: ‘Hitler was a good person’” Then TMZ offered “Will Smith — Hitler, Schmitler; He Wasn’t That Bad.”

Well, no sooner had the indignation machine started up (”What, he is saying nice things about Hitler!”) than Smith issued this comment:

“It is an awful and disgusting lie. It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation. Adolph Hitler was a vile, heinous, vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”

Noted. Instapundit provides a quick round up of the ferocious commentary Smith’s remarks elicited, including this intelligent response from The Volokh Conspiracy:

It seems that “Will believes everyone is basically good” is just the reporter’s characterization of Smith’s statement. Nothing in the quoted material suggests that Smith was saying that Hitler was a good person. Rather, the quoted material simply reports Smith’s quite plausible view that Hitler, like many other people who do evil (Smith must have used Hitler as a referent precisely because Smith acknowledges that Hitler did do evil), believe that they are doing good. I’m hardly a Hitler scholar, but my sense is that Hitler did indeed believe that he was doing good, as did Stalin, Bin Laden, and various others.

Volokh rightly questions Smith’s blithe suggestion that evil “just needs reprogramming.” (Ponder the mountain of questions begged by that little adverb “just,” to say nothing of the inappropriately exculpatory word “reprogramming”: responsible individuals are subject to making choices, not “programming.”) And Volokh is also right that Hitler, like many of the world’s greatest monsters, “believe[d] that he was doing good.” (Volokh posts various reactions to his observation under the rubric: “‘Good’ Intentions and the Nature of Evil.”)

In essence, Smith was merely repeating the wise admonition, which you probably first heard from your mother or father, that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

But why should that be the case? Part of the answer involves the metabolism of benevolence.

Benevolence is a curious creature. Its operation tends to be more beneficent the more specific it is. This was a point that James Fitzjames Stephen, the great nineteenth-century critic of John Stuart Mill, made in his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity:

The man who works from himself outwards, [Stephen wrote] whose conduct is governed by ordinary motives, and who acts with a view to his own advantage and the advantage of those who are connected with himself in definite, assignable ways, produces in the ordinary course of things much more happiness to others . . . than a moral Don Quixote who is always liable to sacrifice himself and his neighbors. On the other hand, a man who has a disinterested love of the human race–that is to say, who has got a fixed idea about some way of providing for the management of the concerns of mankind–is an unaccountable person . . . who is capable of making his love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.

Political correctness tends to breed the sort of unaccountability that Stephen warns against. At its center is a union of abstract benevolence, which takes mankind as a whole for its object, with rigid moralism. It is a toxic, misery-producing brew.

The Australian philosopher David Stove got to the heart of the problem when he pointed out that it is precisely this combination of universal benevolence fired by uncompromising moralism that underwrites the cult of political correctness. “Either element on its own,” Stove observed,

is almost always comparatively harmless. A person who is convinced that he has a moral obligation to be benevolent, but who in fact ranks morality below fame (say), or ease; or again, a person who puts morality first, but is also convinced that the supreme moral obligation is, not to be benevolent, but to be holy (say), or wise, or creative: either of these people might turn out to be a scourge of his fellow humans, though in most cases he will not. But even at the worst, the misery which such a person causes will fall incomparably short of the misery caused by Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Ho-Chi-Minh, or Kim-Il-Sung, or Pol Pot, or Castro: persons convinced both of the supremacy of benevolence among moral obligations, and of the supremacy of morality among all things. It is this combination which is infallibly and enormously destructive of human happiness.

Of course, as Stove goes on to note, this “lethal combination” is by no means peculiar to Communists. It provides the emotional fuel for utopians from Robespierre on down. That is the really sobering thing about Will Smith’s remark: not that he mentioned Hitler, but that the capacity for evil so easily cohabits and feeds upon the emotion of virtue.

In The Social Contract, Rousseau warned that “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable . . . of changing human nature, . . . of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” Robespierre & Co. thought themselves just the chaps for the job. The fact that they measured the extent of their success by the frequency that the guillotines around Paris operated highlights the connection between the imperatives of political correctness and tyranny–between what Robespierre candidly described as “virtue and its emanation, terror.”

That is the conjunction that should give us pause, especially when we contemplate the good intentions of the politically correct bureaucrats who preside over more and more of life in Western societies today. They mean well. They seek to boost all mankind up to their own plane of enlightenment. Inequality outrages their sense of justice. They regard conventional habits of behavior as so many obstacles to be overcome on the path to perfection. They see tradition as the enemy of innovation, which they embrace as a lifeline to moral progress. They cannot encounter a wrong without seeking to right it. The idea that some evils may be ineradicable is anathema to them. Likewise the traditional notion that the best is the enemy of the good, that many choices we face are to some extent choices among evils–such proverbial wisdom outrages their sense of moral perfectibility.

Alas, the result is not paradise but a campaign to legislate virtue, to curtail eccentricity, to smother individuality, to barter truth for the current moral or political enthusiasm. For centuries, political philosophers have understood that the lust for equality is the enemy of freedom. That species of benevolence underwrote the tragedy of Communist tyranny. The rise of political correctness has redistributed that lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” gay rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia.

It looks, in Marx’s famous mot, like history repeating itself not as tragedy but as farce.

It would be a rash man, however, who made no provision for a reprise of tragedy.

The Italian footoball team Inter Milan has a stylish uniform, white jerseys with a bold red cross.

Well, I think it is stylish. Baris Kaska, a Turkish lawyer, doesn’t like it. Indeed, according to the London Times, Mr. Kaska has initiated legal action against the team, alleging that the “Crusader-style” uniforms are “offensive to Muslim sensibilities.” Yes, really.

Baris Kaska, a lawyer in Izmir who specialises in European law, said that he had lodged a complaint in a local court against Inter Milan, which last month played the Istanbul team Fenerbahce in a Champions League match at the San Siro stadium in Milan. The Inter players wore a new strip - a white shirt with a giant red cross on it - marking the club’s centenary.

Mr Kaska said he was not only seeking damages but was also appealing to Uefa to annul the match, which Inter won 3-0. “That cross only brings one thing to mind - the symbol of the Templar Knights,” he said. “It made me think immediately of the bloody days of the past. While I was watching the game I felt profound grief in my soul.” Mr Kaska told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that the cross symbolised “Western racist superiority over Islam”.

I used to think these “offensive-to-Muslim-sensibilities” stories were half comical–I saw that they had an edge, but really, I thought, they were local eruptions of politically correct nonsense: a nuisance, no more. I have corrected that opinion. A English school teacher in Sudan allows her students to name a Teddy bear “Muhammad” and she is jailed for “insulting the prophet.” Maclean’s magazine publishes a chapter from Mark Steyn’s best-selling book America Alone and a London lawyer files a “human rights” complaint in Canada against Mr. Steyn and the magazine for fostering “contempt and hatred” of Canadian Muslims. Everyone knows what happened when a Danish newspaper published some satirical cartoons of Muhammad. A very long list of such incidents could be compiled. Now a Turkish lawyer arrogates to himself the power to tell an Italian football team what they can wear. And Turkey wants to join the EU? Think about that.

Muslims have mastered the Western system of litigation and forged a powerful weapon out of it. When will they manage to adopt the Western system of free speech and respect for individual freedom? When will they learn that the luxury being offensive and offended is part of what it means to be a grown up? While we wait for an answer, I suggest that every Western sports team adopt a uniform that features a large cross as a sign of solidarity.

The answer is “no,” but don’t tell that to Terry Eagleton, formerly Warton Professor of English at Oxford, currently John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at Manchester.

According to a story in The Guardian, Professor Eagleton’s new book, Jesus Christ: The Gospels (”out in time for Christmas,” you’ll be happy to hear) “asks the question, ‘Was Christ a revolutionary?’ and answers it mostly in the affirmative. It is a typical Eagleton stocking-filler: short, iconoclastic, fiercely clever; it places Jesus on the fringe of Palestinian insurgents against Rome, in the political wing of the anti-imperialist Zealots.” Not “Ho, Ho, Ho,” I’m afraid, but “Ho hum.”

Eagleton has been up to such tricks for decades. There have always been elements of ironic comedy about the spectacle of Marxist academics fervently proclaiming their revolutionary message while safely ensconced in Western institutions of higher education. As the years have passed and another generation of young radicals has settled into middle age, tenure, and pension calculations, one might have hoped that these freethinkers would have had manners enough to mute their demands for the destruction of the middle class, the bourgeoisie, “the repressive state apparatus of late capitalism,” etc. After all, blue jeans or no blue jeans, what these middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism have unwittingly been clamoring for is nothing less than their own destruction. But no, they continue nattering on about “the contradictions of capitalism,” obviously having missed the vastly more palpable contradiction inherent in their own position as tenured radicals.

The comedy took a new turn when history has caved in on the Marxist vision of the world. Though it is still touted by its adherents as the first really “scientific” view of society, we’ve had plenty of time to become inured to the dismal failure of Marxism to predict anything, even its own fatuousness. But the precipitous collapse of Communist regimes the world over would seem to present an unusually large embarrassment for the faithful. Wasn’t it Marxism’s largest boast to have dispensed–at last, finally–with all the illusions of idealism and to have presented us with an understanding of human life based on the nuts and bolts of historical necessity? A lot of good it does to subscribe to a materialist philosophy if it is consistently so glaringly wrong about the material world.

Yet no one acquainted with the intellectual habits of academic Marxists will be surprised to discover that they are as unfazed by contemporary world events as they always have been by their own tartuffian buffonery. Though Marxism has largely evaporated as a political force, it shows no signs of waning as an intellectual pastime in the academy. Predictably, the combination of academic egotism and Marxist self-righteousness has proved to be a potent talisman for keeping reality at bay. And, indeed, a further index of academic Marxism’s passion for unreality is its recently acquired penchant for the obscurantist jargon of deconstruction, post-structuralism, multiculturalism, neo-Freudian feminism, and sundry other ists and isms. In the face of defeats in the real world, such intellectual gobbledygook has allowed Marxists to maintain their posture of chic radicalism. No longer confining themselves to jeremiads against the middle class and capitalism (though there are still plenty of those), they now often join their feminist, deconstructionist comrades in demanding the subversion of (say) the “white Eurocentric heterosexual phallocracy.”

It would be lovely if we had the luxury of dismissing all this–deconstruction, multi-culturalism, and so on, no less than academic Marxism–as bizarre self-canceling phenomena. We might then be tempted to construct a kind of menagerie where some of the more florid intellectual curiosities invented by the human race could be preserved, living cautionary tales for the citizenry at large. A necromancer, a follower of Paracelsus, a Freudian could be recruited to sport with the Lacanian feminist, the disciple of Jacques Derrida, the unreconstructed Marxist. To the objection that this sounds like nothing so much as the English faculty currently in place at any number of premier academic institutions, we can only concede the point. And there, of course, is the rub. For while academic Marxism may be a fertile source of unintended comedy, in its overall influence it is anything but funny. Together with the radical movements with which it has allied itself, it is responsible for transforming the humanities departments of many colleges and universities into the wastelands they are: bastions of intellectual conformity in which a ritual rejection of the social and spiritual achievements of Western civilization is de rigueur.

Terry Eagleton is an energetic specimen of the breed, always nattering on about oppression here, imperialism them, the struggle against capitalism in some third venue. In a typical gesture, he dedicated his book on the Brontes, Myths of Power (1975; second edition 1988), to “Dominic and Daniel and the working-class movement of West Yorkshire.”

What the working-class movement of West Yorkshire (or anywhere else, for that matter) would have to say about a book that emphasizes the “notion of ‘categorial structures’ as key mediations between literary form, textual ideology and social relations” is amusing to contemplate. Professor Eagleton is capable of writing just as barbarously as the next academic, but he is also capable of writing poems like “The Ballad of English Literature,” which furnishes our epigraph and which–we learn in the preface to Against the Grain, his 1986 collection of essays–is “a fragment” from his “other life” as “an occasional writer and performer of political songs.”

Born in 1943, Professor Eagleton was educated at Cambridge University, where he studied with the Marxist critic Raymond Williams and where he taught briefly before going to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1969. If we strip away the accretions of fashionable academic rhetoric–an increasingly prominent feature of his work since the mid-Seventies–we see the origins of Professor Eagleton’s criticism in a compound of Williams’s socialist organicism, F. R. Leavis’s meticulously autocratic practical criticism, and left-wing, liberationist Catholicism. His early work, especially, was written under Williams’s shadow. Shakespeare and Society (1967) is dedicated to Williams, “without whose friendship and influence this book would not have been written.” In its main theme–the relation of the individual and society as it emerges in Shakespeare’s late plays–it rehearses in smaller compass the kind of analysis Williams undertook in Culture and Society (1958). As is the case with Williams, Professor Eagleton apparently cannot write a work on any subject without an exhibition of his political bona fides. At the end of this book on Shakespeare, we are confronted with the suggestion that “spontaneous living is crippled by industrial capitalism,” just as Williams concludes Culture and Society with a plea for the achievement of a socialist-based “common culture” because “we shall not survive without it.”

Professor Eagleton subsequently learned that organic models of society are politically suspect and went out of his way to distance himself–respectfully, it must be said–from Williams. In Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (1976), he criticizes Williams for his “political gradualism” and “populism,” even his “humanism” and “idealism,” while also praising his work as “one of the most significant sources from which a materialist aesthetics might be derived.” What is remarkable, though, is not Professor Eagleton’s criticism of his mentor but how much the very things he criticizes continue, despite protestations to the contrary, to inform his own work.

The same cannot be said for the influence of Leavis or of Catholicism. Indeed, religion in general persists in Professor Eagleton’s work mostly in the form of certain rhetorical tics and occasional recourse to millenarian imagery. Sample: “Lenin was in exile, but would come again on clouds of glory with the future bulging in his pockets to judge the quick and the dead.” By the mid-Seventies Professor Eagleton is arguing from the “‘taken-for-granted’ post-atheism of Marx.” In that piece in The Guardian , Eagleton describes himself as “a lapsed Catholic; the Church is cunning in that you can never really leave it. I have deep objections to the way it has screwed up people’s lives, though I have gone to Mass occasionally right through my life. It’s like keeping a foot in a culture that I value.” Whether such a position differs significantly from the left-wing, activist Catholicism of his youth is a question we can leave to one side.

The sobering influence of Leavis’s practical criticism had approximately the same fate in Professor Eagleton’s criticism as did religion: it is gradually forgotten as he moves away from being a mere literary critic to assume the fashionable mantle of Marxist “critical theorist.” The main difference is that for the literary critic, literature–actual, specific works of literature–remains the chief focus of his endeavors, whereas for the critical theorist literature takes a back seat to quasi-philosophical speculations about epistemology, sex, society, politics: anything but literature. Individual literary works come into the picture, in so far as they do come into the picture, only as illustrations of the theory being advanced. In Shakespeare and Society, Professor Eagleton insists that his discussion of the relation between the individual and society “needs to be above all a work of practical criticism, where the general assertion can be sustained by actual reference.” By 1976, he is complaining that “bourgeois criticism,” content with its role as “handmaiden” to literature, does not stand up to “the inexhaustible godhead of the text itself.” And by the time he came to write The Ideology of the Aesthetic, a sort of magnum opus from 1990, he explicitly rejects the idea that “theory” should refer to particular works and boasts straightway that his study will not include “any examination of actual works of art.”

At the center of Marxist thought is a vision of the world determined by economic imperatives: the economic “base” of society determines the cultural “superstructure” of politics, art, religion, and so on. Like most academic Marxists, Professor Eagleton knows that, put baldly, the doctrine of economic determinism is patently absurd. So he employs various gambits to soften or conceal the absurdity, without ever really denying the basic model of economic determinism. This is not to say that he is completely free of “vulgar Marxist” rhetoric; indeed, he sometimes sounds like nothing so much as a soapbox Marxist, railing (for example) against “a petty bourgeois liberal humanism, academically dispossessed and subordinated yet in intellectual terms increasingly hegemonic, [which] occupied the bastions of reactionary criticism from within as a dissentient bloc.”

Yet Professor Eagleton also takes great pains to distance himself from “vulgar Marxism”–the phrase occurs often in his works, always in his beloved scare quotes. The vulgar Marxist is a frank economic determinist and holds that the “superstructure” is a more or less direct reflection of economic processes. The sophisticated Marxist, well schooled in the writings of the Frankfurt School Marxists, allows that the superstructure is “relatively autonomous”–except when he wants to claim economic determination for some phenomenon of his own choosing. The “vulgar Marxist” is frankly utopian and looks forward to the revolution and the establishment of a workers’ paradise; a sophisticated Marxist like Professor Eagleton dandifies his utopianism with lots of high-flown rhetoric. “Once emancipated from material scarcity, liberated from labour,” he writes in a typically starry-eyed passage, “[men] will live in the play of the mutual significations, move in the ceaseless ‘excess’ of freedom.”

Professor Eagleton’s primary weapons against the charge of vulgar Marxism are words like “hegemony,” “ideology,” and “aesthetic,” all of which in his hands have the wonderful property of meaning any of about six different and conflicting things. He is especially slippery in his use of the term ideology, an old Marxist standby that was given new life by the French Marxist Louis Althusser. When he defines “ideology,” he is usually careful to cast his definition in fairly neutral terms. In Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), for example, he writes that ” by ‘ideology’ I mean, roughly, what the ways in which what we say and believe connects with the power-structure and power-relations of the society we live in.” In at least one place, he even tells us that “there is no reason to suppose… that ‘ideology’ need always be a pejorative term.” But of course he uses it as a pejorative term, as this somewhat franker description of the function of ideology hints at: “the function of ideology is to legitimate the power of the ruling class in society.”

To appreciate the corrosive nature of Professor Eagleton’s use of the notion of ideology, consider his explanation of how a Marxist might use the term to analyze The Waste Land. Predictably, the poem appears as a reflection of a “crisis” of bourgeois imperialism (everything bourgeois is always in crisis for the Marxist), but “as a poem, it does not of course know itself as a product of a particular ideological crisis, for if it did it would cease to exist.… In this sense The Waste Land is ideological: it shows a man making sense of his experience in ways that prohibit a true understanding of his society, ways that are consequently false.” How, one might ask, does Professor Eagleton know they are false? What puts him in a position superior to poor T.S. Eliot, blinded as he was by ideology? Why, the magic key, of course: Marxist doctrine. Ideology may simply be “the ideas, values and feelings by which men experience their societies at various times,” but the Marxist is in the uniquely happy position of being exempt from the blinders of ideology. As Professor Eagleton explains, “historical materialism”–that is, Marxism–”stands or falls by the claim that it is not only not an ideology, but that it contains a scientific theory of the genesis, structure and decline of ideologies.”

Professor Eagleton expatiates further on the notion of ideology in Literary Theory: An Introduction. He spends his introductory chapter attempting to convince readers that the idea of literature is so indeterminate that, when you come right down to it, “literature” (the scare quotes are his) doesn’t exist. What we have are the products of various “social ideologies.” Perhaps you thought that George Eliot was the author of Middlemarch. No: according to Professor Eagleton,

The phrase “George Eliot” signifies nothing more than the insertion of certain specific ideological determinations–Evangelical Christianity, rural organicism, incipient feminism, petty-bourgeois moralism–into a hegemonic ideological formation which is partly supported, partly embarrassed by their presence.

Similarly, he tells us that Henry James, like Joseph Conrad, “is . . . no more than a particular name for . . . an aspect of the crisis of nineteenth-century realism.” The idea is to downgrade the notion of individual genius, as if George Eliot’s personal contribution to the writing of Middlemarch were somehow accidental, the more important thing being the “specific ideological determinations” she embodied. The main point of all this is that nothing is what it seems; or, as Professor Eagleton puts it in Criticism and Ideology, “there is no ‘immanent’ value”: everything in the realm of culture is determined by something outside culture–namely (catch that whiff of vulgarity?) the oppressive economic relations of capitalism.

In Literary Theory, Professor Eagleton argues that the “point” of studying literature “is not itself, in the end, a literary one.” Now there is a sense in which “bourgeois criticism,” as he likes to call it, would agree. And in this context it is worth noting that when we insist on the basic autonomy of art, we do not suggest that art exists in a vacuum, apart from any human values or concerns; we mean, rather, that art should not be pursued as a species of propaganda but as realm of experience that possesses its own criteria of validity. Finally, “in the end,” the “point” of studying literature is “outside” literature, just as the point of reading–and understanding what is read–is outside the act of reading. This is what we mean when, for example, we say that studying literature is enriching, that it broadens our horizons, that it deepens our understanding.

Professor Eagleton scoffs at the “liberal humanist” idea that literature “makes you a better person” because such formulations are too vague, too idealistic, too “abstract” (this latter being a favorite Marxist criticism). What he wants is a program. But there are times when vagueness and abstractness are virtues. When Rilke ends his famous sonnet on the archaic bust of Apollo with the admonition Du musst dein Leben ändern–”You must change your life”–we are in fact as grateful for its vagueness as we are for its enspiriting challenge. We know perfectly well what the demand to change one’s life means. Yet for Professor Eagleton, as for all professing Marxists, the experience of art is incomplete when it is “only” about beauty or “only” involves a moment of self-recognition. They want art to issue specific instructions: contemplating that antique fragment of sculpture we should realize that its message is “You must overthrow the ruling class” or at least “You must realize that the social order that gave birth to this sculpture was oppressive.”

In the end, Professor Eagleton is in the uncomfortable position of being a literary critic who doesn’t care much for literature except in so far as it is an instrument for social change. He begins Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976)–a brief, hagiographic primer written to accompany the far more abstruse speculations contained in Criticism and Ideology–with the requisite paean to Marx’s general brilliance and profound grasp of culture: Marx wrote poetry, “his acquaintance with literature… was staggering in scope,” and so on. It all might have come from the Soviet Encyclopedia circa 1930. But Professor Eagleton goes on immediately to note that one shouldn’t expect a full-fledged theory of art from Marxism because, after all, “Marx and Engels had rather more important tasks on their hands than the formulation of a complete aesthetic theory.”

In many respects, The Ideology of the Aesthetic wais a summary and update of Professor Eagleton’s views on the relation between aesthetic experience and ideology. (In this sense, it might just as well have been titled The Aesthetics of Ideology.) But it is also something of an historical overview of philosophical thinking about aesthetics from the eighteenth century down to the present. Despite Professor Eagleton’s disclaimer that he was not attempting to provide a history of aesthetics, that is largely what the book amounts to, and we can be sure that it will be adopted as such by many colleges and universities. It gives special emphasis to Marxist critics like Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and it includes provocative chapter titles like “Schiller and Hegemony” and “The Marxist Sublime”; but otherwise it provides a fairly predictable trip through the literature. Beginning with the work of Alexander Baumgarten–who coined the term “aesthetic” in 1750–Professor Eagleton takes fourteen chapters to rehearse the aesthetic theories of Burke, Shaftsbury, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others. Mostly, the names are as familiar as the opinions Professor Eagleton expresses. Indeed, by the time one comes to “From the Polis to Postmodernism,” the longest and most original chapter, one has the distinct impression of having just sat through Professor Eagleton’s latest batch of homework assignments to himself.

As usual, the sheer bulk of the assignments is formidable. Professor Eagleton has read a great deal and has clearly devoted much effort to the book. Yet considered as an introduction to aesthetic theory, The Ideology of the Aesthetic is a dismal failure. For one thing, notwithstanding his prodigious reading, Professor Eagleton is often not up to the task of explaining the philosophy he discusses–largely, one suspects, because of his ideological commitments. For example, Baumgarten’s aesthetic theory, growing out of the work of philosophers like Leibniz and Christian Wolff, was essentially an effort to supplement the rationalism of Cartesian thought by providing a fuller account of the “sensuous perfection” that was embodied in art. As logic was to the faculty of reason, so aesthetics was to the faculty of taste. But for Professor Eagleton, “the call for an aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany is among other things a response to the problem of political absolutism.” His discussion of Baumgarten’s aesthetics transforms a philosophical innovation into a dramatic example of class warfare with reason cast as the tyrant and aesthetics as a kind of proletarian lackey. “Reason,” he writes, “must find some way of penetrating the world of perception, but in doing so must not put at risk its own absolute power”–as if reason were a feudal lord oppressing the “serfs” of sensation.

Then, too, in his eagerness to uphold the universality of class warfare, Professor Eagleton often drastically misreads the philosophers he discusses. About Schopenhauer’s extreme pessimism, for example, he writes that it is “a fact that throughout class history the fate of the great majority of men and women has been one of suffering and fruitless toil. . . . The dominant tale of history to date has indeed been one of carnage, misery and woe.” But this is totally to misunderstand Schopenhauer, for whom suffering and woe were essential, irremediable aspects of existence, not the products of “class history.” Sometimes, indeed, Professor Eagleton’s explanations take on a positively surreal quality, especially when he ventures into modish literary theorizing. Consider this piece of gibberish: “Kant’s Oedipal protectiveness towards the maternal body places the real reverently out of bounds, prohibiting that impious coupling of subject and object for which Hegel’s dialectical programme will clamour.”

To all this Professor Eagleton might reply that, first, he was not attempting to present a standard history of aesthetics and, second, that his real interest is in the way the aesthetic embodies the contradictions of the middle class under capitalism. This brings us to one of Professor Eagleton’s central claims in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, namely, the whole idea of the aesthetic is based on or embodies a “contradiction.” One must always be suspicious when a Marxist uses the term “contradiction,” because it usually means that some aspect of reality is not conforming to his vision of things. Thus the contradictions of capitalism: they are contradictions only so long as you measure capitalism by a Marxist model of historical necessity. Minus that, capitalism is merely a complex economic process that, like everything else in the real world, refuses to accommodate itself to the predictions of philosophers.

Professor Eagleton holds that the aesthetic is “contradictory” because aesthetic experience gestures toward a freedom usually denied to man while at the same time it embodies the ideological imperatives of the ruling class. Hence the aesthetic is both “the ideal paradigm of material production” and “the very paradigm of the ideological”–indeed, he tells us that “aesthetic judgement is every bit as coercive as the most barbarous law” though “this is not the way it feels.” Now, at least since the time of the Greeks, art has been held up as a source of great spiritual refreshment, so it is no surprise that Marxists, too, should single it out as a model for “unalienated labor.” But why should we grant that the aesthetic is fundamentally ideological? If nothing in our experience suggests that it is–and nothing does–why should we cede art and aesthetic experience to Marxist theory? he Ideology of the Aesthetic is a deeply confused work that tells us almost nothing about art or aesthetic experience. It is more revealing on the subject of ideology, but mostly an example of ideology in action, not as an explanation or analysis of the phenomenon. Yet it must be admitted that there is an unusually perceptive critic lurking in the interstices of this book. Professor Eagleton is not very good as an expositor of philosophy, and his ruling passions–to be politically correct and to be intellectually fashionable–regularly lead him into any number of silly statements.

But his last chapter, especially, shows him to be capable of trenchant and perceptive criticism. True, this chapter contains the usual quota of Marxist hooey. Yet it also contains a some perceptive criticism of a subject that is clearly dear to Professor Eagleton’s heart: Marxist criticism. For one thing, Professor Eagleton makes what he rightly calls the “vital distinction” between liberal capitalistic society and totalitarian regimes: This in itself is a welcome change from the typical academic Marxist tactic of pretending that the United States is a recapitulation of Hitler’s Reich. But even more to the point, he even ventures to criticize several chic left-wing theories and their proponents. Thus he warns his fellow academics against the deconstructionist attack on the notion of truth, noting that it is not the case that “ambiguity, indeterminability, undecidability are always subversive strikes against an arrogantly monological certitude.” You might think this could be taken for granted; but in the prevailing climate in the academy, to challenge the triumph of undecidability and ambiguity is to risk the charge of heresy.

Professor Eagleton also dares to characterize thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida as “libertarian pessimists,” and to suggest that Foucault underestimated the Enlightenment’s “vital civilising achievements.” He makes similar observations about other left-wing academic saints, from Jürgen Habermas to the exalted Fredric Jameson. Perhaps it is this side of Professor Eagleton that the historian Maurice Cowling had in mind when he spoke of his “intellectual brutality.” In any event, though it is rarely on view in his work, such critical independence is to be encouraged. The real treat, of course, would be to have this Terry Eagleton give us an analysis of the Terry Eagleton who writes “Milton Blake and Shelley/ Will smash the ruling class yet.”

A friend sent me this illuminating seasonal message:

To My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wish.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Forgive me, then, for wishing everyone Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The ongoing saga of the US Justice Department’s attack on Conrad Black, former proprietor of the London Telegraph, The Spectator, and other plum media properties (at one time, he presided over the world’s third largest newspaper empire), is an object lesson in judicial arrogance and overreach. To do justice to this complex tale of gross injustice would take a very long essay if not a book. I do not propose to undertake either. But because the case seems to me to compass not only a private tragedy but also a dangerous public judicial trend, I thought I would offer a few brief remarks, occasioned by the closing of an important chapter in the story last week: the sentencing of Black to 6 1/2 years in prison for obstruction of justice and fraud.

Black is appealing the sentence, and I wish him success. If the commentators are to be believed, however, he and his attorneys have their work cut out for themselves: only a very small percentage of appeals are successful.

It could have been worse. At one point in the trial, prosecutors had assembled charges that, cumulatively, could have brought a sentence in excess of 100 years. In recent months, they spoke ominously of seeking “24 to 30 years.” Black is 63 now, so the idea was to be sure that he would die in prison.

What had he done to occasion the unbridled wrath of the U.S. Justice Department, or at least its representative, Patrick Fitzgerald? You might as well ask what Scooter Libby, another conspicuous object of Mr. Fitzgerald’s attention, had done to merit his conviction. (Let’s see, exactly what had Libby done? Take your time . . .)

I do not mean, by the way, Patrik Fitzgerald the British singer-songwriter but Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Special Counsel. If there were a Louis de Saint-Just Award for perverting justice in the name of misplaced self-righteousness, Mr. Fitzgerald would be a strong contender for the title. Like his pal Maximilien Robespierre, Saint-Just was a man with a mission. (Not for nothing did Camus, describing Saint-Just’s harangues, settle on the phrase “style guillotine”.)

Saint-Just saw himself as the embodiment, or at least one of the prime guardians, of Virtue. Everywhere he looked, people were betraying the ideals of the French Revolution. It was up to him to bring them all back into line. If examples had to be made by beheading a few thousand members of the nobility, so much the better. That cathartic ritual not only served the malefactors right, it also, in the eyes of Saint-Just (himself eventually a victim of the Revolution: it is ever thus) served The Cause. It was an “example,” as Mr. Fitzgerald might put it, to other potential wrongdoers.

I believe that the analogy between Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Saint-Just might be developed in illuminating (not to say admonitory) ways. I leave that task for another moment. For now, let me return to Conrad Black and that 6 1/2-year prison sentence. Black was convicted on 1 count of obstruction of justice and 3 counts of fraud. Many people convicted of far more heinous crimes are handed lesser sentences. (The same day Black was sentenced, Michael Vick, the dog-baiting ex-football star was sentenced to 23 months for organizing a lethal dogfighting ring and for lying about the extent of his involvement.)

The obstruction of justice charge against Black provided the one Perry-Mason moment in the trial. The prosecution gleefully played a security video tape of Black and his chauffeur removing boxes from his Toronto office. How’s that for “Gotcha!”? I’ve seen the episode reported in the most lurid way.

It was a dark and stormy night . . . Out of the mist, a limo [a black limo, naturally] glides noiselessly to a stop in a lonely ally outside the Canadian headquarters of Hollinger, Inc. . . . The car door opens, and out steps Lord Black of Crossharbour, attired in black hat, black cape, and black rubber-soled shoes . . . Accompanied by his trusty chauffeur and Peter Lorre, Black strides furtively across the rain-spattered macadam towards a door marked “Corporate Records”. . .

OK, I paraphrase. But what was described as a nighttime assault actually took place in broad daylight. Black’s secretary was packing up because Black had been evicted from the premises. Two attorneys hired to deal with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into Hollinger’s affairs testified that they hadn’t notified Black of the SEC’s interest in the documents he removed. When ordered to return them, he did so tout de suite and right speedily. So where, pray tell, is the obstruction?

As for the fraud charges, well, you need a legal hermeneutician to untangle them. The gist of the case seems to revolve around some “non-compete” agreements Black and his colleagues had entered into with a company called CanWest. He and his associates pocketed the money from these agreements rather than turning it over to the company. “So what?,” you might ask, beating me to the punch. So what, indeed. As far as I have been able to determine, there is nothing illegal about that. “But what about the shareholders?” comes the objection. “Why didn’t they get the dough?” Why should they? CanWest wasn’t worried about competing against Hollinger. They were worried about competing against Conrad Black.

The fate of the Hollinger shareholders was a central leitmotif in the Black trial. Judge Amy St. Eve, in sentencing Black last week, sternly told him: “Mr. Black, you have violated your duty to Hollinger International and its shareholders.” But wait a minute, if the issue is the fate of the Hollinger shareholders, shouldn’t the judge order Black back to the helm of the company? When Black was booted, the company’s stock was trading in the $16 range. Now it hovers at about 90 cents. How’s that for looking after shareholder interests?

Conrad Black’s lack of contrition was made much of during the course of his trial. But in his statement to the court last week when he was sentenced, Black did express sorrow over one thing. “I have very profound regret and sadness,” he said, “about the serious damage inflicted on all the shareholders [of Hollinger International], including employees, by the $1.8 billion-dollar loss of shareholder value under my successors.” If not looking after shareholder interests is a crime, Patrick J. Fitzgerald should be thinking about calling his lawyer.

By far the best account of the trial and its fallout was Mark Steyn’s near-daily blog posts for Maclean’s, the distinguished Canadian weekly. As Steyn shows, the case has implications far beyond the fate of Conrad Black. At its core are disturbing questions about recent perversions of U.S. judicial procedure. In an important reflection from July 22, 2007, Steyn enumerates 6 areas where the U.S. justice system would benefit from reform:

1) An end to the near universal reliance on plea bargains, a feature unknown to most other countries in the Common Law tradition. This assures that a convicted man is doubly penalized, first for the crime and second for insisting on his right to trial by jury. The principal casualty of this plea-coppers’ parade is justice itself: for when two men commit the same act but the first is jailed for the rest of his life and dies in prison while the second does six months of golf therapy and community theatre on a British Columbia farm and then resumes his business career, the one thing that can be said with certainty is that such an outcome is unjust.

2) An end to the reliance on technical charges such as “mail fraud” and “wire fraud”, whereby you’re convicted not for the crime itself but for sending a letter or authorizing a bank transfer in the course of said crime. This gives a peculiar dynamic to the presentation of the evidence: the jury spends months hearing about vast schemes and elaborate conspiracies but in the end is asked to rule only on one narrow UPS delivery or faxed letter, the sending of which is not in dispute, only the characterization thereof. If the non-competes are fraudulent, prosecute the fraud, not the mailing of a memo to Jim Thompson while he’s on vacation at Claridge’s in London.

3) An end to the [legal] process advantages American prosecutors have accumulated over the years—such as the ability to seize a defendant’s funds and assets and deprive him of the means to hire good lawyers and rebut the charges. Or to take another example: Unlike the Crown in Commonwealth countries, in closing arguments to the jury the US government gets to go first and–after a response from the defence—last. This is an offence against the presumptions of English law: The prosecutor makes his accusation, the accused answers them. Every civilized legal system allows the defendant the last word.

4) An end to countless counts. In this case, Conrad Black was charged originally with 14 crimes. That tends, through sheer weight of numbers, to favour a conviction on some counts and acquittal on others as being a kind of “moderate” “considered” “judicious” “compromise” that reasonable persons can all agree on. In other words, piling up the counts hands a huge advantage to the government. In this case, one of the 14 counts was dropped halfway through the trial, and another nine the jury acquitted Conrad on. But the four of the original 14 on which he was convicted are enough. One alone would be sufficient to ruin his life. This is the very definition of prosecutorial excess. Why not bring 20 charges or 30 or 45? After all, the odds of being acquitted of all 45 are much lower than those of being acquitted of 30 or 40.

5) An end to statute creep. One of the ugliest features of American justice is the way that laws designed to address very particular situations are allowed to metastasize and be applied to anything a prosecutor fancies. The RICO statute [i.e., the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] was supposed to be for mobsters and racketeers. Conrad Black is not a racketeer but he was nevertheless charged with racketeering. And, while the prosecutorial abuse of RICO is nothing new, the abuse of the “obstruction of justice” statutes in this case are unprecedented. Hitherto, the only obstruction charges that could be brought in regards to extra-territorial actions involved witness-tampering. In that security video at 10 Toronto Street, Conrad Black may be doing all manner of things, but he’s not tampering with any witnesses. Nevertheless, a hitherto narrowly defined statute has now been massively expanded to enable prosecutors to characterize actions by foreign nationals on foreign soil in a way never contemplated by the relevant legislation. Statute creep is repugnant and should be stopped.

6) An end to de facto double jeopardy. Conrad Black is likely to wind up back in court to go through all the stuff he’s been acquitted of one mo’ time, this time in a Securities and Exchange Commission case. That would be a civil case, not a criminal one, and the US Attorney insists that the SEC is an entirely separate body. Oh, come on. The US Attorney and the SEC are both agencies of the US Government. They work in synchronicity. It’s not the same as Nicole Brown’s family suing OJ after the state’s murder case flopped. In this instance, two arms of the same organization are bringing separate cases on exactly the same matters. That’s double jeopardy—or, in fact, given the zealousness of the SEC, triple and quadruple jeopardy.

As Steyn observes, Conrad Black would have benefitted from such reforms, but then so would your run-of-the-mill alleged malefactor—“which is,” Steyn notes, “as it should be: Justice is supposed to be blind. But this system is blind drunk on its own power.” That’s where the example of chaps like Saint-Just come in: want to know what happens when the judiciary waxes moralistic and arrogates to itself ever increasing prerogatives? Take a look at the career of Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just. What Conrad Black got was not justice but Revolutionary justice.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the patriotic song “Rule Britannia,” partly because of the catchy tune, partly because of the bracing atmosphere of freedom the song presupposes and evokes:

Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!

Runnymede. The defeat of the Spanish Armada. The defeat of Napoleon. The defiance and defeat of Hitler. The tradition of common law and economic freedom . . .

Say goodbye to all that. Last week, Gordon Brown’s government joined 26 other European countries in signing the Lisbon Treaty, i.e., a cynical reprise of the preposterous European Constitution that was roundly defeated by voters last year. It was one of Prime Minster Brown’s campaign promises to hold a referendum on the matter. What happened? Bureaucratic hauteur happened. It was quite clear that the voters in Britain would have rejected the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore, the voters must be ignored.

It is a sad moment for Britain. The lumbering machinery of the state has ridden roughshod over the people. But they no longer seem to mind. The journalist Rosemary Righter got it exactly right in tart leader for The Times:

Pass the hemlock. And the sick bag. The “European ideal” consists, it is now evident, of imposing on voters far-reaching changes to the way they are to be governed, without allowing them a look-in, or a voice. The “path of hope” beckons only to Europe’s most messianic federalists: it consists of a treaty clause that says that governments may in future cede powers to Brussels without consulting their parliaments, let alone their cussed voters.

History will indeed have a word for this: perfidy. Every single one of the 27 signatories of the Lisbon treaty is guilty of a breach of the democratic compact, monumental in its arrogance. Every one of them knows that, shorn of a few preambular paragraphs, chopped up and reassembled in a deliberately unreadable jumble of “amendments”, it resurrects the EU constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters.

And what, Sherlock, of the dog barking in the night? There was no dog barking: no protest, no objection, just mute, supine acquiescence in England as on the Continent. The handover of freedom and self-government to a smug, self-perpetuating, unelected bureaucratic elite is now virtually complete, awaiting only ratification by the parliaments of the member countries. Will there be an eleventh-hour burst of sanity and self-assertion? I hope so. I like to think so. I am not banking on it. It’s no longer “Rule Britannia,” alas, but “Ruled Britannia.”