In London, hundreds of thousands of these useful idiots demonstrated in favour of the terrorist organisation Hamas. They would not put it like that, of course; they would say rather that they are campaigning for a halt to the killing of innocent civilians including children and babes-in-arms by the Israeli army in Gaza. I have made a mistake: many of today’s marchers do support Hamas’ demand for the destruction of the state of Israel… No other meaning can be attached to their slogan, ‘From the river to the sea!’ And their other cry, ‘Jihad!’ is an echo of that of the Hamas thugs as they stabbed, decapitated, and otherwise murdered Israelis, including children and babes-in-arms, on that October Sabbath.

The demonstrators are not the only useful idiots around. Their ‘respectable’ representatives are leaders of the nations, most of the mass media, stars of TV and film, bishops, archbishops and other incarnations of fatuity. I characterised these people as ‘idiots’. I must clarify this appellation. Their idiocy is in the form of ignorance, sentimentality, hatred, and nihilism. They are ignorant of history, sentimental about terrorists, and filled with hatred for what was – until comparatively recently – our way of life in the West.

Of course, the remedy for ignorance is education. So here goes…

In the West we have become our own enemies because we have come to prefer the hideous death cult of Islam over the European Christian civilisation against which Islam has waged imperialistic wars for 1,400 years. Islam, the famous religion of peace and love, has got a CV. Here is a summary of its imperialistic incursions and attempted conquests over the last millennium and beyond.

In AD 732 an invading Muslim army of as many as 200,000 men were defeated by the Christian Charles Martel at Tours. If that battle had been lost, all of Europe would have fallen to militant Islam. In 1565, the relief of the Siege of Malta, by a Christian alliance, ensured that the Mediterranean did not fall into Muslim hands and so gave them a toehold in southern Europe.

Following the defeat of the Muslim Turks by the Knights of St John at Malta in 1565, there came the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571, when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Spain (including its territories of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia), the Republic of Venice, the Papacy, the Republic of Genoa, the Duchy of Savoy, the Knights Hospitaller, and others, decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire.

Then there was that other September 11, 1683, when Christian armies under Jan Sobieski arrived at the gates of Vienna and defeated the last substantial Muslim aggression: the last, that is, before the one that we face at present.

What was intended by the French Revolution of 1789, and then only partially accomplished – the extermination of Christian values and practice throughout the continent – has been completed by our Wokery which is the final phase – actually the death-throes – in the secularisation of our society. And secular values are not the same as Christian values, but precisely their opposite. In the 18th Century, Chateaubriand wrote:

‘The unbelief of the Enlightenment philosophers has brought abstract definitions, a scientific style and neologisms: all fatal to taste and eloquence.’

And fatal to Christianity too. For the taste of such as La Fontaine, Pascal, Moliere, Racine, and Bossuet – and Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert – was created by the Christian faith. Even Nietzsche could only say, ‘God is dead!’ because Jewish prophets and Christian saints had proclaimed, ‘God is alive!’

Western civilisation, which was created by Christianity, has committed suicide. In his Essay on Metaphysics, R.G. Collingwood describes exactly how this has come about:

‘Civilisations sometimes perish because they are broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within, but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to the end which it sets before itself, the form of life that it tries to realise, is worth achieving. On the other hand, this doubt is quite capable of destroying a civilisation without any help whatever. If the people who share a civilisation are no longer, on the whole, convinced that the form of life which it tries to realise is worth realising, nothing can save it.’

And so today, the Christian heroes who saved Europe from barbarous Islam – Charles Martel, Richard the Lionheart, and Jan Sobieski – are denounced for their Islamophobia and cancelled. And here we see the complete inversion, the thorough revolution, that has taken place. Criticise Islam, however gently and politely and you too will be charged with hate crime and with being Islamophobic. You will be arraigned, fined, and even imprisoned and you will certainly be deprived of your status and very likely your job. But when Christians are reviled and persecuted on a grand scale and on four continents, there is no condemnation of the perpetrators.

There is no such word as Christianophobia. Western society has lost confidence in its institutions and we are left hating ourselves.

It is easy to understand the ‘idiot’ part of ‘useful idiots’, but what about the other part? To whom are our idiots useful? That too is easy to answer: they are useful to the imperialistic barbarism of extremist and radical branches of Islam. This, as I reminded readers, is the same barbarism that has waged war against Christian civilisation for 1,400 years. To take just one contemporary example: of the idiots’ ‘usefulness’, a ceasefire in Gaza would be useful only to the enemy – because while Israel would hold to its provisions, Hamas would use it as an opportunity to regroup and rearm.

There is one aspect of this corporate idiocy to which I have not yet made mention. I will end by making good this omission. The idiots are nihilists. That is, they believe in nothing. They have renounced the necessarily absolute terms of any morality; that is, they no longer believe in good or right but only in what feels good or feels right for ‘me’. Public morality has thus been relativised. The individual together with his desires is the only god. There is no principle apart from the pleasure principle.

I wince and retreat from this psychopathic amorality and take refuge in the Collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in the Book of Common Prayer:

‘O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy.’