Cry the beloved country

The USA is quite unlike anywhere I've been.

I imagined it a dull copy of Europe without the good things like beautiful buildings, ancient peoples and social hierarchy, but isn't remotely like Europe. It has an enormous, strange energy and seems friendly, optimistic and fun. I am generalising from Miami and the staff on the plane. It's a huge culture like Russia or France is a huge culture.

It's where the men of 1848 won their revolution. It is the apogee of 19th century and modern liberalism.

I have always loved and hated America but lived and hated different things at different times. I passed up two chances to come here for free. I might find myself loving it now I finally am here. Let's see. I only arrived yesterday from somewhere I teally loved, the very humid old town in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

It's not very Anglo-Saxon or Protestant in Miami but then the Spanish are reconquering Florida.

Quotations

"May you be surrounded by friends and family, and if this is not your lot, may the blessings find you in your solitude.” Leonard Cohen

'Frommer believed that travel should be demanding, both physically and cerebrally. He saw it as one of the finest methods of self-education. Early on he realised the intrepid traveller’s essential truth: the less you spend, the more you enjoy. Dormitories, hostels and even a geriatric ward were his lodgings of choice. Luxury hotels were to be avoided. “They insulate you totally from the life and people of a country,” he said, while sightseeing was “inane”.' Daily Telegraph obituary for Arthur Frommer

"My ancestors were puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time." Garrison Keilor

“If you started measuring global temperatures from medieval times there's been a general cooling of about four degrees." Professor Ian Plimer, a geologist, in 2018

Popcorn

Knowing that war would break out in Ukraine President Iohannis put together a coalition of the centre right and left. The Romanian electorate has now rejected the government, the leaders of both the big parties and the whole less than mediocre existing political class including even the so-called far right party, AUR.

It is richly comic to watch all the establishment parties be smashed simultaneously. 

Both candidates who will compete in the final round are anti system idealists, in their very different ways, but Elena Lasconi is only opposed to the Romanian system which she wants to bring into line with Western Europe. She is the anti system and pro system candidate, the candidate of social and economic liberalism, business and the urban university graduates. She represents a European future, Calin Georgescu resembles Viktor Orban, Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Junior. The European Union will punish Romania very severely if he wins.

That was a surprise

Good lord! I had not even heard of Călin Georgescu until my very interesting and nice young waiter on Friday appealed eloquently to us to vote for him. 

A President who doesn't obey Washington or Berlin? Is it possible? 

No it is not.  

The media and the Americans will try very hard to prevent him winning but the majority of voters would certainly vote against him anyway. 

It's the economy, stupid.

Romanian politicians are happy to obey America and the European Union, which is very good for attracting foreign investors, but many Romanians are not. I knew this from talking to taxi drivers who blame America in part or wholly for the war in Ukraine. I risk sounding like Nancy Pelosi saying 'Donald Trump is - not- going to be President of the United States' but a man who says pre-war mystic fascist Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was a great Romanian will not be President of Romania.

It is not exactly democratic that he did so well because another sovereignist candidate was disqualified on dubious grounds and that he was in trouble with the law for praising Codreanu. What happened to free speech in Romania? 

I wonder if the politicians will listen to the opinions of the 30 percent of the population who back the sovereignists or (more likely) treat them with the contempt Romanians usually have for peasants and the working class.

It's a protest vote and just possibly people in the incoming administration in Washington will hear the protest and take it into account.

The news

My taxi driver blamed the Ukrainian war on Nato expansion (a majority of cab drivers do), blamed America for its intervention in Syria and Afghanistan and divided the blame between Israelis and Arabs. He thought Margaret Thatcher damaged British society enormously. We agreed on most things, especially on the need for women to have more children. I suppose, as Baudelaire said, love is a crime that requires an accomplice. Every regime, he said, has its good and bad points. He thought Biden the worst US President for thirty years but there I demured. Biden though absolutely terrible beyond words is not as bad as George W Bush.

The Daily Telegraph this morning disgusts me more utterly than normally

It's simply propaganda, whether about Ukraine or Israel, and probably reflects the MI6 line. Its fury at the ICC for issuing a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu contrasts with its enthusiasm for the one for Putin's arrest. I am trying to cancel my subscription. 

Yesterday I renewed my subscription to Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz to find much more objective news. 

Quotations

Democrat supporting US journalist Cenk Uygur:

'Sarah Palin was very nervous before her VP debate with Biden in 2008 and then she realized she just had to memorize the talking points on each issue and give that answer no matter what the specific question was. Are we sure that's not what Kamala Harris did this entire campaign?' 

Glenn Greenwald

@ggreenwald

The US and UK are now actively working on the missiles they provided Ukraine to launch inside Russia. Ukraine can't launch them on their own. They need US intelligence and military support to guide them. Putin knows this. Would the US be OK with that?

Absurdly the international deep state apparatchiks say Tulsi Gabbard might give classified information to the Kremlin

2022 

 

"Dear Presidents Putin, Zelensky, and Biden. It's time to put geopolitics aside and embrace the spirit of aloha, respect and love, for the Ukrainian people by coming to an agreement that Ukraine will be a neutral country-- no military alliance with NATO or Russia—and therefore alleviate the legitimate security concerns of both US and NATO countries as well as Russia, because there would be no Russian or NATO troops on each other's non-Baltic borders. This would allow the Ukrainian people to live in peace." 


October 

"Kamala Harris was in Europe a few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, speaking very clearly and loudly about how Ukraine should become a member of NATO. This was one of the main instigators, crossing the red line that Russia, during Putin's reign and before him, has held."For any objective-minded person, you can see why they wouldn't want NATO missiles sitting in Ukraine, the country with the biggest border with Russia. Kamala Harris has put us, the American people, in this position, where we are closer to the brink of World War III and nuclear war than we ever have been before. We are staring down the barrel of nuclear Armageddon because of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden." 

American revolution

The gallant British and the brave American Tories lost the war of 1776-83. The only American conservatives  were then deported.

We should have freed the slaves and won with their help, then executed the Founding Fathers. 

Our defeat led to the French Revolution and eventually to Marxism, girls in slacks and all the horrors of the modern world.

Since then all Americans have been liberals, except for the somewhat influential Marxists and the insignificant fascists.

Now England, of course, is an American colony.

Perhaps Mr Trump will be an isolationist and set us (and the rest of the world) free, but I know he won't.

Quotations

Ed Miliband, after losing the 2015 election (which meant David Cameron had to fulfil his promise to call a Brexit referendum), said: "When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool."


Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career."


Mario Vargas Llosa: "We live as many lives as we read books."

A. N. Wilson: “Being Russian, unless you are preternaturally stupid or wicked, produces violent inner tensions and conflicts, reflected in nearly all the great imaginative geniuses to emerge from Russia in the last two centuries. On the one hand, you know that you have been born into a ‘God-bearing’ nation, whose destiny is to keep burning the flame of truth while the other nations languish in decadence. (The truth may be Orthodox Christianity or the creeds of Marxist-Leninism, but the feeling is the same.) You know that the Russians are best at everything from poetry to gymnastics, and that they invented everything: ballet, bicycles, the internal combustion engine. You know that Russia has more soul than any other country – that its birch avenues, its snows, its ice, its summers are all the more glorious than the manifestations of nature in more benighted countries. There is only one drawback, which is that it is completely horrible to live there.” 

Is Trump America's De Gaulle?

Tom Gallagher once asked me this and Richard Vinen, a fine historian, explores the idea in Unherd.


I'd prefer to say he is the antithesis of Franklin D Roosevelt. That is a good thing, in case you were in doubt.

When I was 19 the joke was "Ronald Reagan's hero is Calvin Coolidge, Nancy Reagan's is Calvin Klein".

It is Ronald Reagan's achievement that the joke is no longer funny because liking Coolidge is respectable.

I have come to join his fan club.

Donald Trump has certain things in common with Silent Cal, when it comes to policy not personality. Perhaps he should bring tiger cubs into the Oval Office.

The BBC's Katty Kay said in 2016 that Trump was really a Democrat but he turned out to be one of the very few Republicans still standing, by which I mean Coolidge Republicans.

Trump is right-wing but left and right no longer mean very much and the parties in most countries no longer make sense. 

My favourite journalists are mostly leftists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Tahibbi, Max Blumenthal, Patrick Cockburn and Caitlin Johnstone, on foreign affairs. 

They are far more like my romantic Toryism than any British Conservative politician. 

Theresa May was to the left of Tony Blair. 

Boris Johnson was the most left-wing Prime Minister since Harold Wilson.

This is from Allister Heath in yesterdays' Telegraph. (He is usually very good, but not when he rejoiced at Liz Truss's budget.)

"America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media. The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.

"Donald Trump is 78, but he is a very modern politician with an intuitive grasp of how social fragmentation and the rise and fall of institutions can work for him. He has learnt to bypass network news and The New York Times. His brand of populist, multi-racial, working-class, highly online, Right-wing politics has captured the new centre-ground. It now looks as if 2016 was a mere dry run, derailed by Covid; 2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles, many excellent but some much more malign."

Another question is: is Putin Russia's De Gaulle? They do have certain things in common, though very much that separates the Christian gentleman from the ex-KGB thief.

A famous victory

They said I'm going to start wars – I'm going to end wars. 

Donald Trump in his victory address at Mar-a-Lago

Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said on Wednesday that Donald Trump will be tested on his statements that he can stop the war within hours.

Any objective observer could see Kamala was unqualified for the job. Even Kamala at times, behind the cackle laugh and the word salads and the baffling array of accents, seemed to know she wasn’t up to it.

But they pressed ahead with her anyway. In the end, it didn’t seem to matter to the virtue signalling Left that Kamala’s position had been achieved by chance to a greater extent than anyone since Lyndon Johnson. That, a diversity hire for VP, she was able to fall into the presidency slot because Joe Biden needed to be put out to pasture with no time for a contest.

Trump wins decisively

Trump has won Pennsylvania and Fox News has declared him the winner of the US presidential election. CNN says he needs 4 more electoral college votes, which inevitably he will obtain. The Biden-Harris administration deserves this. It's been almost as bad as the Bush-Cheney administration.

Quotations

“You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power—he's free again.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Israel in trouble

“The REAL enemy that we have is not Iran…is not Hezbollah….is not Hamas... it's from within, the messianic, crazy, extreme groups of Israelis that think that they can kick out the Palestinians and annex the territories. Netanyahu depends on them… he allows them to do things which are totally intolerable and unacceptable.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last night.

'Netanyahu, Gallant and Halevi are gambling with Israel’s very existence… they never think for a moment about the day after. They are disconnected from reality and exercise no judgment … When the catastrophe strikes, it will already be too late … These three megalomaniacs imagine that they are capable of destroying both Hamas and Hizbullah and ending the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran … They want to accomplish everything through military pressure, but in the end, they won’t accomplish anything. They have put Israel on the brink of two impossible situations [–] the outbreak of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, [and secondly] continuing the war of attrition. In either situation, Israel won’t be able to survive for long. Only a diplomatic agreement has the power to extricate us from the quagmire into which these three men have dragged us.' IDF (retired) Major General Itzhak Brik

'The consensus in the defense establishment over the progress of the war is surprisingly broad. All senior officials, from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on down, have been speaking in near-unison for a week. After a dizzying series of military and intelligence successes in the past three months, the war in the Gaza Strip and in Lebanon has just about exhausted itself, with only a few necessary measures remaining. Once these are completed, it would be best to try to reach agreements that will end the fighting in the north and south and include the release of all hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza.' Ha'aretz two days ago

“I met many [neocons] at the Hudson Institute, where [I] had worked for five years in the mid ‘70s; some of them, or their fathers, were Trotskyists. They picked up Trotsky’s idea of permanent revolution. That is, an unfolding revolution – whereas Trotsky said what began in Soviet Russia was going to spread around the world: The neocons adapted this and said, No, the permanent Revolution is the American Empire. It’s going to expand, and expand, and nothing can stop us – to the entire world”. Profesor Michael Hudson quoted by Alistair Crooke 

Hallowe'en

Hallowe'en does not have origins in paganism, Satanism, Samhain, Druidic festivals, or the occult. It's purely Catholic, just like Christmas, and like Christmas was commercialised by American big business.The Feast of All Saints was originally only a local feast day in Rome. Pope Gregory III transferred the Feast of All Saints from May 13th to November 1st. Pope Gregory IV then extended this feast to the Universal Church. This was before the Great Schism, when the Orthodox recognised the primacy of the Pope. The Americans received Hallowe'en originally from England. The English Halloween tradition was apple dunking but I never came across it.