And so farewell Băile Herculane

And so farewell, Baile Herculane, Baths of Hercules, Aqua Herculis, Herkulesbad, Herkulesfürdő, a beautiful Hapsburg thermal resort where the Empress Sissi met shepherds in fhe forest and rediscovered Heine. The baths as renovated in the 1850s are a symbol that the Empire had suppressed the Hungarians and their mad leader Kossuth. Actually Romanians, Slovaks and mostly the army of Tsar Nicholas I did so. The Austrian Chancellor Schwarzenberg said "We shall astonishing the world by our ingratitude" and so they did. Liberal opinion in England, Europe and America thought Kossuth a hero. 

Now the town is entirely Romanian except for one Hungarian family and in a state of dereliction I irresponsibly find attractive, though much has been renovated in the last few years.

Ion Iliescu has died

I missed the old swine's death tilll  yesterday afternoon. (I am travelling.) He won the "competition" to outlive Queen Elizabeth II, Gorbachev and Dr Kissinger. He also outlived King Michael, an infinitely better man. 

Only two people defeated the Securitate: Ion Iliescu and Doina Cornea. 

In Romanian fashion I plagiarised that remark.

Iliescu's forthcoming state funeral reminds me of Belloc's little squib:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,

The Politician's corpse was laid away.

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged

I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

If you seek his monument, Romanians, look around you. 

My journey begins, upon the midnight

Gara Băneasa after midnight in darkness, the station shut, resembles a Scooby Doo episode. A dozen people in a splash of light on the platform are waiting for the 00.38 to Timișoara. Someone is playing manele, a musical genre I fortunately always enjoy. I have left my deracinated central Bucharest and find the Romania that made me love her. Now the train arrives and the search for my compartment.

The Daily Telegraph is the voice of MI6

 Oh dear.

<Jewish passengers received kosher meals with “Free Palestine” graffiti on a Spanish airline.

The Delegación de Asociaciones Israelitas Argentinas (DAIA), Argentina’s umbrella Jewish organisation, said the incident happened on an Iberia flight from Buenos Aires to Madrid on Monday.>

The Daily Telegraph makes this a lead story, not Israeli soldiers admitting to killing civilians for fun. That they don't report at all. Nor very much that reflects badly on Israel. 

The paper is tightly controlled by the British defence establishment which backs Israel as it does Ukraine.

It wants us to fear China and Iran, though those two are much more provoked by the Anglo-Americans than provoking.

Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity

Nicolae Bălcescu, the Romanian revolutionary of 1848: “For me, the question of ethnic solidarity is more important than the question of freedom. A people can use freedom only when it’s able to survive as a nation. Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity.”

In South-Eastern Europe the French revolution and Robespierre's revolutionary principle of Liberté was understood as national freedom or at least, for those Greek Phanariots like Alexander Ypsilantis who wanted to revive Byzantium with the Tsar's support, freedom from rule by infidels. Ypsilantis's revolt was defeated after failing to win the support that he expected from Romanians, who cared not a fig about Greeks. Thereafter Balkan history was about ethnic solidarity and identity.

Now a third of Romanians live abroad and immigrants from countries with lower wages are doing the manual work that need doing. Romania needs pizzas delivered and waiters who do not speak either Romanian or English.

Quotations

The number of heinous acts by CIA/FBI is massive. But the two worst scandals involving manipulations of US elections was 2016 (Russiagate hoax) and 2020 (the Hunter laptop was "Russian disinformation" lie). I'm glad more evidence is emerging, but both were obvious at the time. Glenn Greenwald, who is obviously right as I too saw at the time.


Reason Ukraine is so dangerous even when it's settled, is because it's a defeat for the West, and we have been humiliated and lost a major war we were so deeply committed, and this will give people incentive to try to reverse the tide. John Mearsheimer. I am not sure why Russia managing to take 13% of Ukraine after 3 years of hard fighting is a defeat for the West.


The US punished India for trading with Russia, Iran, China, and for its BRICS membership. None of these countries ask India to stop trading with the US. The US ultimatum to India: 'choose us or the world'... Glenn Diesen


In the East, the memory of hardship remains. People know the state doesn’t always show up. Trust is local. Help comes from relatives, neighbours, friends. Responsibility is not abstract—it’s lived. You are expected to care, to intervene, to share, even when it's inconvenient. That instinct survived communism. It did not survive liberalism. One stripped people of power. The other stripped them of duty. In Eastern Europe, the link between freedom and obligation still exists. In the West, it has been replaced by rights with no anchor. Daniel Foubert. This is very true in Romania.


The CIA and MI6 exert their powerful influence in Western media in a number of ways, via political influence and via personal relationships with individual "journalists" and media oligarchs. They also use blackmail, threats, and the outright purchase of influence. Be aware. Chay Bowes, an Irish journalist who lives in Moscow and who, like Max Blumenthal, addressed the U.N. Security Council at Russia's invitation. The first of those two sentences is certainly true.


Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.  G.K. Chesterton. Milton Friedman also said that a free society was a traditional society, or something like that.

Quotations

"Washington has reportedly decided to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny, and the media diligently do their part with the preparations." Glenn Diesen

"The royal family are so powerless that Prince Andrew becomes just about the only person to attend an Epstein party that everyone knows about." Daniel Jupp

“The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live.” Carl Jung

"The [European] Commission awaits you like a spider in its web .... Gigantic sums will accumulate, and to whom will they be entrusted? To individuals appointed by governments but who immediately swear not to take any instructions from them, and who therefore are not even accountable to those governments. We’re about to create a completely arbitrary and technocratic power, with insane amounts of money; and to control it, we’ll have an institution as artificial as the Strasbourg assembly. What does that mean in practice? Basically, a club of parliamentarians who are accountable to no one. Before building an institution, national or otherwise, one must first know who is responsible for what, and to whom." Charles de Gaulle, Volume 2 of "C’était De Gaulle"

“The fact of the matter is the Palestinian cause is an evil one. The only end of the conflict [in Gaza] is complete and total surrender by those who support Muslim terror. In world war two, we did not negotiate a surrender with the Nazis. We did not negotiate a surrender with the Japanese. We nuked the Japanese twice in order to get unconditional surrender. That needs to be the same here. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this culture, and it needs to be defeated.” US Representative Randy Fine (Republican, Tallahassee, Florida) on Fox News in May, 2025

"Israel has become the embodiment of its own greatest fear. It has become the Germany of 1940." Richard Willard

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa & other Heads of the Christian Churches in Jerusalem today issued statement condemning what they call “yet another violent assault that targeted the West Bank Christian town of Taybeh,” a “peaceful and faithful community rooted in the land of Christ.” This “grievous incident,” they say, “forms part of an alarming pattern of settler violence against West Bank communities.” The Heads of the Christian Churches in Jerusalem “demand” that the Israeli government “hold accountable those responsible for these crimes,” protect vulnerable communities, and “uphold its obligations under international law.” Full statement here

Patrick Cockburn is the person I trust to explain Middle Eastern news

People on the left like him (he is the son of the Communist Claud Cockburn and pretty left-wing) are usually best on world politics because they do not follow the FCO line but think. 

They assume that the US, UK and Nato lines are self-interested, misleading and untruthful, which is a wise starting point.

By comparison Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph on Friday felt obliged to say "...the Russian economy is a long way from the abject collapse many Western commentators seem to imagine. I’m trying to be careful in expressing myself here, because commentary like this is open to misinterpretation, and I don’t want to come across as a Russian apologist."

Left-wingers (and dissident conservatives) don't worry about coming across as Russian apologists, though if they come across as Hamas apologists they can be imprisoned for up to 14 years in England. 

England is not a free country.

This is from Mr Cockburn's latest article in iNews.

Israel is today super-confident, not to say hubristic, in exercising its new sovereignty in the region. It has bombed Gaza, Damascus, Sanaa in Yemen, Beirut and Tehran with impunity. It forbids the Syrian army from advancing into south Syria. It has effectively annexed all of the Golan Heights. An Israeli minister has even threatened al-Sharaa with assassination and, without conscious hypocrisy, Israel has accused him of proposing to massacre and ethnically cleanse the Druze in Suweida.

Israel’s new-forged hegemony in the Middle East is real, but it has been forged by airpower alone and can only be maintained by its continual destructive use, which in turn requires unstinting US military supply and political backing.

Israel appears to have no other plan except war without end. In Syria, this will probably mean Israel offering military protection to minorities such as the Druze, Alawi and Kurds in order to ensure that no centralised Syrian state with a significant army is ever reborn. From Israel’s point of view, post-Assad Syria should be like a larger Lebanon with a patchwork of local powers loosely controlled from the centres.

As regards the Palestinians, Israel is visibly moving closer to penning survivors in Gaza into a smaller and smaller area with a view to expelling them in the not-too-distant future. And after Gaza, the West Bank will be next for Israeli resettlement and potential annexation.

On Ukraine he repeats an important piece of hearsay that he has told us about before:

A Ukraine expert told me that an Ukrainian official had sought to deposit $350m in an Italian bank, but the bank had rejected the money. The Italian government said privately to the bankers that they had done the right thing, but to keep quiet about it.

I knew this, but many blithely say Britain has always been an immigrant country, because this is what they are constantly told

"There has been more immigration into Britain every single year since 1997 than there was IN THE WHOLE PERIOD from the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries through to the Second World War” Paul Moreland

Quotations

"We are going to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing it off with Iran." An American general talking to General Wesley Clark "about 10 days after 9/11".

"According to the results, 82 percent of respondents supported the expulsion of Gaza's residents, while 56 percent favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. These figures mark a sharp rise from a 2003 survey, in which support for such expulsions stood at 45 percent and 31 percent, respectively. 

Religious interpretations play a key role in shaping these views. Nearly half (47 percent) of respondents agreed that "when conquering an enemy city, the Israel Defense Forces should act as the Israelites did in Jericho under Joshua's command – killing all its inhabitants." 

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, 28 May 2025


"All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer

"Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have." Daniel Defoe

"If any foreign minister begins to defend to the death a 'peace conference', you can be sure his government has already placed its orders for new battleships and airplanes." Joseph Stalin

Glenn Diesen makes a very good point

'It has been several months since Assad was removed from power by our proxy. Where is the chemical weapons stockpile? The political-media establishment seems to have lost all interest in the alleged chemical weapons as soon as Assad left the country.'

It sounds like the European Union and the US State Department want a Colour Revolution in Ukraine

The one in Georgia having failed, Pascal Lottaz and many others would add. 

I don't know enough and mistrust the information about Georgia that we are fed.

Clearly Trump wants Zelensky gone.

For some time the FT and Economist have been attacking him and despondent about Ukraine's chances - this is MI6 and the CIA talking.

Europe is more powerless than when the Turks besieged Vienna but the European Union seems to trying to build an empire eastwards. 

It was the EU not the USA which struck the match which led to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and to the war we have now.

Ukraine is being invaded by Russia but Europe is helping Ukraine. Europe is once again being invaded by Asians the EU does not help or try to stop the invasion - which would mean resiling collectively from the ECHR and stopping taking in refugees. 

Instead the EU worries about misinformation, hate speech, inequality and the climate. 

And Donald Trump.

Yasser Arafat did not turn down Barak's offer of a 2 state solution to the Palestinian question

I am ashamed to say I misremembered Arafat failing to grasp Ehud Barak's generous offer of a two state solution in Palestine. 

He did not. 

Sharon did.  

If you don't remember this believe Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's National Security Adviser.

Change and decay in all around I see in England

My university, Cambridge, in its press release (dread words) calls its new (retired left-wing politician) Chancellor Lord Chris Smith, as if he were the son of a duke or marquess.

The British police knelt for Black Lives Matter and looked on when a statue to a Bristol dignitary who was in the slave trade was thrown into the sea but a police car deliberately ran over someone protesting against asylum seekers.

Luxury hotels in the London Docklands, Margaret Thatcher's great but now dying monument, are now used to house young men without papers who illegally enter the country by boat.

In 2024, gross immigration to the UK was 948,000.

As I said a few days ago, 40% of new births in England are to couples where at least one of the parents is foreign born.

40%.

The right to trial by jury is being restricted. 

Trials are often in secret. 

The ancient double jeopardy rule was abolished to enable what Rod Liddle described as a political show trial to take place.

Abortion which was in effect legal is now completely legal up until nine months.

Euthanasia is likely to become legal.

The three most important things I found on the Middle Eastern crisis in the last year

1. This article by an anonymous British-born Jew who identifies with Israel and may be an Israeli is an interesting series of arguments in favour of genocide, when practiced by the IDF. 

His points are not to be dismissed. 

I have heard many of these arguments made by British people on social media, none of whom are Jewish.

Two thirds of Romanians think Ceausescu was a good leader

Two thirds of Romanians think Ceausescu was a good leader according to a poll this week.

56% of Russians thought Stalin a good leader in 2021 and this month 42% of Russians put him in the top ten figures in world history.

The news that many young people in England would like a dictatorship was misreporting by incompetent journalists.

How can we suppress the Neo-cons? I have no idea.

From today's Daily Telegraph:

The files show that in December 2002, Sir Christopher Meyer, then ambassador to Washington, wrote to the Cabinet Office with an “annual review” of the US, in which he noted that Mr Bush was keen to topple Saddam and felt it was his mission to rid the world of evil.
“More than anything else, he fears another catastrophic terrorist attack on the homeland, especially one with an Iraqi connection,” he sent in a diplomatic cable.
“His view of the world is Manichean. He sees his mission as ridding it of evil-doers. He believes American values should be universal values. He finds the Europeans’ differentiation between Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein self-serving.
“He is strongly allergic to Europeans collectively. Anyone who has sat round a dinner table with low-church Southerners will find these sentiments instantly recognisable.”

I always argued that Bush 2, though the worst president since the 1860s, was not stupid - but clearly he was and clearly his sort of stupidity is thriving, despite Donald Trump. Now instead of Saddam it's Putin, Xi, Hamas, Iran.


Protestantism is at the heart of the matter though American Catholic and Jewish neo-cons are also very culpable.

People should not take very much notice when anybody who supported the invasion of Iraq talks about foreign policy.


If only the Americans would give up their empire and let Asian nations from Jerusalem to the Yellow Sea look after themselves.

Two graphs I stumbled across today by chance on X

 

Restore Britain is a party led by Rupert Lowe, who was elected last year as a Reform UK MP but left the party.

Quotations

Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz:

"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucidydes, for Newton and Euclid, and I find myself much the happier." 

Thomas Jefferson writing to John Adams

"Putin chose war over peace this spring because his spies and generals told him that Ukraine is on the brink of collapse. Alarmingly, they may be right. Ukraine is running out of fighting men, its frontline soldiers are exhausted and US military support has narrowed to focus on air defence. The Kyiv government is racked by corruption scandals and purges, public faith in their future and in their leaders is tanking and pressure to make peace at almost any price is growing." 

Quotations

"Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises.” René Girard






"Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power.” René Girard

"If the mass of contemporary authors were really individualists, every one of them inspired Blakes, each with his separate vision, and if the mass of the contemporary public were really a mass of individuals there might be something to be said for this attitude. But this is not, and never has been, and never will be. It is not only that the reading individual today (or at any day) is not enough an individual to absorb all the ‘views of life’ of all the authors pressed upon us by the publishers’ advertisements and the reviewers, and to be able to arrive at wisdom by considering one against another. It is that the contemporary authors are not individuals enough either. It is not that the world of separate individuals of the liberal democrat is undesirable; it is simply that this world does not exist." T.S. Eliot, "Religion and Literature" 

Quotations

“In this world, you can search for everything, except Love and Death.
They find you when the time comes.”
Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide at the age of 30 (though it has been suggested that the OGPU murdered him)

“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.” Marcel Proust, “Seascape, with a Frieze of Girls"

“All the brains in the world are powerless against the sort of stupidity that is in fashion.” Jean de La Fontaine

“Civilisation – and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organisation of Europe – has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance." Evelyn Waugh

"In 1997 the British economy was bigger than that of China and India combined. Today, China’s economy alone is six times larger." Tom McTague

"Of course there are other multinational states [in addition to the USSR] where the core nationality exercises power through a civic rather than an ethnic identification. The English dominate their state as Britons even though they unconsciously conflate Britain with England, much to the irritation of the Scots, Welsh and Irish."
John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (1994)

7 July 2005 and the transformation of England

Twenty years ago on 7 July 2005 bombs in London killed 52 people and injured more than 770 on three Underground trains and a bus.

British media had told the public after 9 September 2011 attacks in New York that something of the sort was inevitable in Great Britain but not that the murderers would be British citizens, mostly second generation immigrants, trying to restore the Caliphate.