Unkempt

Rumour has it that the more or less illiterate Colonel Richard Kemp has once again been amusing the better-educated users of Twitter and enthusing those who, like him, burn books, not on principle, but because they sincerely have no idea what books are. 

This time, it is about Winston Churchill, and the curious belief among the exceptionally hard of thinking that had it not been for him, then German would now be the language of daily life in Britain. Is English, or Russian, the language of daily life in Germany?

There are those who have to maintain the myth of the War, for which the War generation itself had no time whatever, in order to justify endless supposed repetitions of it, to "liberate" here or there, this or that. But Kemp is nowhere near that sophisticated.

Richard Kemp is practically a Nazi himself. That is not an exaggeration. His presence in public life at all is a sign of just how mainstream the Far Right has become in the present decade. 

Furthermore, he will go to prison when there is a proper reckoning for the war in Afghanistan. He is a war criminal. Something else that has become perfectly respectable in Britain in the present century.

Although Kemp cannot possibly know this, such is neoconservatism's debt to Carl Schmitt, "the crown jurist of the Third Reich", the friend and collaborator of Leo Strauss, and the originator of the view among Strauss's elite that the rules of war simply did not apply to them.