Category: Andrei Navrozov

There is a historical episode to which time and again I turn as more news of the West’s strategic enfeeblement comes over the transom. The gentle reader may find the reference obscure, but I can assure him that to most Russians of my age and background it’s textbook stuff.  The episode is the June 1937 torture and execution, on Stalin’s orders, of Marshal “Red Napoleon” Tukhachevsky.  His confession of having been all along a German agent, which survives in the archives of the secret police, “is dappled with a brown spray that was later found to be blood-spattered by a...

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me” is, famously, the opening sentence of a 1941 essay by Orwell.  But Blitz or no Blitz, to our ears the phrase sounds a little hysterical. 

I have often wondered about the principle of disclosure, which is so easily taken to interesting lengths.  Of course like others I can applaud when a journalist doing a story on some Fortune500 company is criticized for not revealing that the CEO is his brother-in-law, or when a juror is prosecuted for concealing an intimate connection with the man on trial.  But beyond that?

Oscar Wilde, as the gentle reader may recall, was undone not by his own crime, which “love that dare not speak its name” was in those balmy days, but by the crime of libel, of which he had incautiously accused Lord Queensberry.

At first glance, abetting a healthy child with full connivance of the state to “change sex” seems to have nothing to do with Marx or socialism.  Considering the question more closely, however, we see that gender, like other human endowments, is a form of private property; that it is, in point of fact, a property; and that, along with money, land, and any other means of production, this property can and, a Marxist would argue, must be summarily expropriated.

The identity of the Aragonese noble family associated with mafia style poisonings in Renaissance Italy – as well as with incest, larceny, and simony, among other lesser crimes – is incidental to the story here.  I can easily replace the name of Cesare Borgia with that of Claudius of Denmark, likewise known, at least to readers of Shakespeare, for murdering his brother: “My father’s brother, but no more like my father/Than I to Hercules.”  Prince Hamlet, in fact, was very much on my mind when, a couple of weeks ago, I watched Alexei Navalny’s investigation into his own murder. “I...