Eurovisions

In the course of the Competition's history, Belgium has given us more points than any other country, as befits historically our principal ally and trading partner on the Continent, an entity very like the United Kingdom, with a social democracy founded on Christian principles, even headed by a monarch of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and for the sake of which we once fought a World War. Tonight, Belgium gave us nothing. Ponder these things.

The band singing for Cyprus was actually from Wales. But then, one in six Greek Cypriots in the world lives in the United Kingdom, and Cyprus is one of the three Commonwealth countries in the European Union. As with Belgium, how many people here really know anything about our genuine ties to the Continent, which long predated the EU and which, now that the monetary and thus political union that was always its fully declared end is falling apart, are perfectly capable of outliving it? If, that is, we can be bothered to ensure that they do.

Romania voted for Moldova, but Moldova, although she gave 12 points to Romania, gave 10 to Russia. The cut-and-shunt union of Moldavia and Transnistria is moving inexorably towards dissolution. Moldavia will be reincorporated into Romania, while Transnistria will become, even if not formally part of Russia, as good as that for most or all practical purposes. Who will mind when that happens? Who will even notice? And as in certain other places, why should Stalin, of all people, be given the last word?

One such other place in Nagorno-Karabakh. What is Azerbaijan doing in the Eurovision Song Contest? If Europe is a culture rather than a place, then that culture certainly does not include an existential threat to the first entire people ever to accept its very foundation, namely the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire.

No wonder that there was so much evident good will between Azerbaijan and Turkey. Their similar flags are of course no coincidence, the Azeris being a Turkic people. They may be Shi'ite while most Turks are Sunni, but their attitude to Armenians, and to everything of which that people is the outpost and the living sign, is exactly that of our dear NATO, and putatively EU, brother, the Land of the Two Far Rights, in which the only viable political options are secular ultranationalism and militant Islam.

Speaking of the oppressors of indigenous Middle Eastern Christianity, note the hefty Israeli vote for Russia. Think of those Russians who refuse to eat kosher food, and who are imported as part of the attempt to maintain a non-Arab majority, an attempt so successful that Muhammad is now the single most common name for newborn boys within the pre-1967 borders. Consider that many of those Russians insist on taking their IDF oaths on the New Testament alone, a position having nothing to do with Russian Orthodoxy, which keeps Old Testament figures as saints and venerates icons of them, but can only be attributed to simple anti-Semitism. And ask yourself what they know of the Latin Catholics, Melkite Catholics, Maronite Catholics, Syrian Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Armenians, Anglicans and Lutherans in whose midst they live. Then, there are Israel's Russian Nazis. Rather unsurprisingly, all things considered.