British Muslims behead British soldier in London street

"Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood' ". 
Enoch Powell, 1968

That this isn't going to last,/ That before I snuff it, the whole/ Boiling will be bricked in/ Except for the tourist parts... And that will be England gone." Philip Larkin, "Going, going" (1972)

"To those offended by my describing the attacker as of "Muslim appearance" - I was directly quoting a Whitehall source quoting the police." Tweet by Nick Robinson of the BBC, last night

"Exclusive: A cub scout leader confronted terrorists just seconds after they had beheaded a soldier asking them to hand over their weapons and warning them: "It is only you versus many people, you are going to lose." " Daily Telegraph headline today

The black, Muslim men, British subjects, who beheaded and tried to disembowel a soldier on the streets of Woolwich, South London, were swivel-eyed loons. The murder makes one feel England is in terrible straits but this wonderful heroic story restores one's faith in England and human nature. 

Yet instead of being angry with the jihadists, very many English people are alarmed because the right-wing English Defence League were allowed a fifteen minute demonstration in the area, by the grace and favour of the Metropolitan police. How much the liberal middle class fears the lower orders.

People say we should understand Islamists, put it in the context of Afghanistan or drones but why does no-one want to understand the EDL or put them in context? They have not killed anyone. They, like football hooligans, are in fact the kind of rather dangerous men who fought at Agincourt or Waterloo. The kind of men of whom Wellington said, 'I do not know what they do to the enemy but by God they frighten me.' They are the kind of men who made the British Empire, though this does not commend them to the people who think they are not a lot better than Al Qaeda (and plenty of people do think that).

People say we should understand Islamists, put it in the context of Afghanistan or drones but why does no-one want to understand the EDL or put them in context? They have not killed anyone. They, like football hooligans, are in fact the kind of rather dangerous men who fought at Agincourt or Waterloo. The kind of men of whom Wellington said, 'I do not know what they do to the enemy but by God they frighten me.' They are the kind of men who made the British Empire, though this does not commend them to the people who think they are not a lot better than Al Qaeda (and plenty of people do think that).

My nicer Facebook friends seem more worried about an anti-Muslim backlash and the EDL than by jihadists. I hope this is a misunderstanding on my part. Unfortunately immigration is a subject on which the unpleasant people were right and the nice ones terribly wrong. I hate to quote with approval the repulsive Nick Griffin of the fascist BNP but he quite rightly said this was a consequence of mass immigration. Obviously enough, but when I said this on someone's Facebook wall I was howled down. One person pointed out that the alleged killer was born in the UK and was not an immigrant as if this disproved my point  

Someone else repeated the idea that England was always an immigrant nation and mentioned Saxons, Celts and the French. In fact we had remarkably few immigrants before 1950. if you do not believe me click here. 

Journalists and politicians hurry to say this had nothing to do with Islam or British foreign policy when clearly it had everything to do with these two things. Everyone hoped for calm but much as I believe in sang froid, a French phrase for an English thing, and much as I do not want any violence or law breaking or victimisation of Muslims I think complete calm would be worrying. People should be angry and some should demonstrate in the street. If no-one did that would be worrying. 

This and the Boston bombing are the new terrorism which has morphed yet again. The IRA did not explode bombs on trains because they feared how the British Government would respond  The way in which the US Government did respond to September 11 helped the terrorists. There is no way to respond to this new kind of terrorism, unfortunately, but the Guardian and the BBC think it can be done by preventing youths from being radicalised. They do not understand human nature at all and believe young men are basically peaceful and good.

Meanwhile Muslims riot in Stockholm for a third night. The British press does not report that they are Muslims and blames the riots on unemployment and racism.

"Immigration is the fulcrum by which England is to be overturned." How will history judge Enoch Powell?

On the day when two Muslim British subjects beheaded a British soldier in the streets of Woolwich, London, and tried to disembowel him, some thoughts on Enoch Powell and immigration.

Last month marked the 45th anniversary of Enoch Powell's famous Rivers of Blood speech in Birmingham. For those who do not know of this speech, the most momentous speech in British history since 1945, here are the two most famous passages.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Powell went on to quote the Sybilline prophesies in Book Six of the Aeneid.

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

This speech led Conservative leader Edward Heath to fire Powell from the Shadow Cabinet. (Margaret Thatcher we learnt last month, in Charles Moore's biography, advised Heath against doing so.) Powell went to the back benches where he remained for the rest of his Parliamentary career - from 1974 he was outside the Conservative Party. But, brooding, inscrutable and sitting for an Irish seat, he remained the most gifted Parliamentary speaker of his epoch. He dominated effortlessly the House that regarded his opinions on race with at least affected, and often genuine, revulsion. 

Despite reforms to the law under Mr. Heath's and Mrs Thatcher's administrations, roughly 50,000 immigrants a year continued to come into the UK till 1996. Then, under Labour, the number became many times bigger. A summary of the history of immigration by the very accurate Migrationwatch is here.

Michael Wharton wrote of Enoch Powell at his death:

"No "racist", he saw how the immigrants, however innocent in themselves, would be used as an instrument by those who wanted to change England for ever. "Immigration is the fulcrum," he told me at a meeting 30 years ago, intoning the word in that strange, intense, unforgettable West Midlands accent of his. "It is the fulcrum by which England is to be overturned."

"And from outside the hall,  as he spoke, came the sound of a regimented mob of hate-crazed  idealist  storm-troopers for One World and the Brotherhood of Man, a baying in rhythmic slogans for his patriot blood."Well, they have won. If  there really was a conspiracy, it has exceeded the hopes of any imaginable conspirators. It has been made virtually illegal to discuss the matter seriously and honestly. A paralysing neurotic disorder has seized on us, making us unable to speak easily, even in private, for fear of being thought "racist".

"Yet in the only sense in which Powell was "racist" — he actually thought there were recognisable differences between races! —  almost everybody was a "racist" before Hitler gave it a bad name, and most people are "racist" still.

"Had Powell been less scrupulous, less deeply in love with English history, its ancient, ordered continuity,  he might have seized that moment 30 years ago when he was at once the most acclaimed and the most execrated man in England. He might have become leader of the Conservative Party and in due course prime minister, with greater popular sup-port than any in our history.

"Perhaps fancifully, I imagine this eccentric, noble-hearted man putting that tremendous vision aside, not through  weakness but through virtue, determined not to risk bringing harm to his country through disruptive action even in a good cause. That is why he is a tragic hero and will become a legend."

Andrew Brown, an intelligent and always interesting journalist, thought these words:

a mixture of idealist sentimentality with racist nastiness and vague conspiracy theory that was the closest thing to real Nazism I hope ever to see in the British press.

I think the last two paragraphs of Wharton's eulogy were silly and sentimental (Wharton could not write well) but there was nothing remotely Nazi or fascist in what Wharton said. Brown's extraordinarily misjudged words do stand though as evidence of the hatred that Powell aroused, not among ordinary people, who liked him, but among opinion-formers, the pays legal. (Wharton, parenthetically,  was equally disgusted by modernity in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a born reactionary, but this is not shameful. During the Second World War he read the Encyclopaedia Brittania from start to finish, in the classic 1911 edition.)

I think Powell was right that immigration was the fulcrum by which England was changed by people who did not like her as she was before. I think this applies much more to the immigration policy - if they had a policy - of Labour after 1997. But multiracial England, like the British Empire, was created in a fit of absence of mind.

Peter Hitchens once shared the extreme left-wing opinions of his brother, Christopher. Peter Hitchens has written that he and other revolutionary socialists in the 1960s and 1970s wanted immigration not because they liked immigrants but because they did not like Britain. Britain as she then was. They succeeded in helping change the socially conservative, class-bound, sexually conservative place into something different, though outside London and the conurbations and industrial towns it is not so very different even now.

Peter Hitchens in this excellent article rightly says Enoch Powell 

'in a stupid and cynical speech in 1968, packed with alarmist language and sprinkled with derogatory expressions and inflammatory rumour, defined debate on the subject of immigration for 40 years.' 

Why did Powell inflame the debate rather than try to lead public opinion?

Could things have been different had he made his points about immigration in a way acceptable to the political elite? For him and his career, things would have been very different had he not thrown it all away. One is remnded of Michael Heseltine storming out of Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet over the Westland affair, but Hesletine did it in a fit of emotion whereas Powell's speech was carefully planned. And Heseltine came back to be Deputy Prime Minister whereas Powell was made a pariah and in death he still is one.

Dogs kill

Every year ten or more Americans die by being run over by cars driven by dogs. it is something to do with the way the gears work over there. Dogs jump on the gear and the car starts. Imagine your last sight....an Alsatian at the wheel of a SUV..

Happiness

“In the long history of mankind there have not been so very many democratic republics, yet people lived for centuries without them and were not always worse off. They even experienced that ‘happiness’ we are forever hearing about, which was sometimes called pastoral or patriarchal… They preserved the physical health of the nation… They preserved its moral health, too, which has left its imprint at least on folklore and proverbs—a level of moral health incomparably higher than that expressed today in simian radio music, pop songs and insulting advertisements. Could a listener from outer space imagine that our planet had already known and left behind it Bach, Rembrandt and Dante?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

'Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.'

Most political questions are really religious questions. As Mrs Thatcher said, 

'Economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.'

War in Syria, homosexual marriage... tax, public spending...

Nothing is inevitable until it happens but after it has happened it had to be that way.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens but after it has happened it had to be that way. 


Is this right? Or not?

Please is there a philosopher who can advise me?

Conservative party activists are loons. Well the men, anyway.

Lord Feldman denies calling Conservative party members 'swivel-eyed loons' but the papers who reported the remark, attributing it to a senior member of the party, stand by it. They cannot be accused of defamation because they never named their source. Hee hee.

The male activists in the Conservative Party are usually loons. So Matthew Parris said in his enjoyable memoirs, though he said the women in the party were wonderful. He should have excepted the younger ones who want to meet the opposite sex, too. The Wets looked down on the activists from Olympus and Julian Critchley complained that Mrs Thatcher reminded him of his local party chairwoman.  Churchill was considered a loon until 1939 and his local party wanted to deselect him. I am not sure if this means the local party were loons or not, but I think it means they were not loons. In any case, over time, from 1945 onwards, the loons probably, on the whole, have a much better track record of being right than the Members and candidates they worked unpaid for. They would not have brought in the measures Edward Heath did, from joining the EEC to abolishing ancient counties and the old coinage. In my home town, Southend-on-Sea, Conservative party activists kept the local grammar schools and enabled me and others to have a reasonably decent education. They saved my life.


It would be interesting to know, but of course impossible, how many members of the British Conservative Party (a small band anyway) resigned because of homosexual marriage. David Cameron's constituency party chairman did for one. So did half his constituency association's executive committee. So, with infinite sorrow, did a West Indian friend of mine. But the Prime Minister would not listen to anyone, not even to his mother who wasted much breath trying to change his mind.


Nobody wanted homosexual marriage - civil partnerships gave homosexuals all they wanted - and its sole purpose was to outrage the old guard and allow David Cameron to triangulate - to position himself equidistant from Labour and social conservatives. It was all to detoxify the Conservative brand but the brand became toxic by being associated by free market economics and then Black Wednesday, not social conservatism. There was nothing socially conservative about Margaret Thatcher's record, except one single thing, clause 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, banning local councils from 'promoting homosexuality'. It was prosperity not the Tory brand which kept Labour in power for thirteen years. And homosexual marriage shows contempt for ordinary conservative, with a small c, voters, many of whom will not forget this at the next general election. People forgive a lot, especially from politicians, but they do not forgive being despised.


My feeling is that I ought to join the Conservative Party and change it from within. Be an entryist, like the Trotskyites who infiltrated Labour in the 1970s and 1980s. Except that, for good conservative reasons, the Conservative Party is completely undemocratic. A.J. Balfour said, 'I would as soon accept advice from my valet as from the Conservative Party Conference.' If Mr. Cameron had a valet, he would no doubt advise against homosexual marriage, but I am sure it would be in vain. Well done, thou good and faithful putative servant, for trying.

Yes, Tory party activists are very often loons, but they are patriots who give their time unpaid to make the country a better place. Labour Party members are equally admirable and charming people even though their views are mostly wrong and often wickedly wrong. Liberal Democrat activists are silly people, best avoided.

Lord Carrington at 94, interviewed by Peter Oborne

"I see nothing but disaster in Syria. But I also think that almost everything that’s happened in the Middle East – I mean in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya – has been made worse by our interventions.” 

He is right. All our interventions did more harm than good, not least in Libya. It is certainly too late for us to intervene in Syria and would almost certainly have been another bad idea.

An American friend of mine who lives in Nazareth, and who is neither pro-Israel nor pro-Arab, says the Israelis are wise not to get involved in quarrels between Muslims. This is the mistake he says our countries made in Iraq. Perhaps he is right.

Read the interview with Peter Oborne here.


I love Lord Carrington though his Rhodesia settlement has turned out to be a disaster. He rightly says the Cold War kept the peace, as I always believed. Well done Oborne for knowing his peerage is spelt Carrington but his surname is Carington. Though I think if you call him Peter Carington you are showing off a bit.

It was Lord Carrington who pointed out that Mugabe was 'E ba gum' spelt backwards, as regular readers of my blog already know. For those readers who do not know what 'E ba gum' means, I cannot help you as I do not know what it means either but it is something Yorkshiremen are supposed to say, rather as the French are supposed to say 'Zut, alors.' 

Poacher turned gamekeeper

A Romanian cyber-criminal, Valentin Boanta, 33, is serving five years in gaol for making gadgets to let an organised crime gang skim, i.e. copy data from, a bank  card, so that a copy of the card can be made. He has now invented a gadget to prevent skimming. His invention won an award this year at the International Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva. Read the story here.

"Crime was like a drug for me. After I was caught, I was happy I escaped from this adrenaline addiction," he said. "So that the other part, in which I started to develop security solutions, started to emerge."

The strange death of Christian England

The latest figures from the 2011 census are very important, alarming, saddening, but not really such a very great surprise. 

The Russian news agency RT says Islam could be the dominant UK religion in 10 years.  

Damian Thompson in the Daily Telegraph says:

For the first time, the proportion of under-25s who don’t describe themselves as even nominal Christians has risen above 50 per cent. Also, the new breakdown shows that the rate of decline in British Christianity has been masked by the presence of 1.2 million foreign believers in this country. Take them out of the picture, and we can see that home-grown Christianity has shrunk by 15 per cent in just a decade. To quote the demographer Prof David Coleman of Oxford University, “It is difficult to see whether any other change in the census could have been remotely as big.”

A drop of 15% in just ten years... 

It is partly the combination of fear of Islam with fear of being 'Islamophobic' or thinking Christian Europe superior to non-Christian cultures. It is partly because of the horrible sex scandals involving a tiny minority but nevertheless a shockingly large number of Catholic priests. It is partly because Christianity in the UK is no longer rock-like and counter-cultural as Islam is and as, before the 1960s, Catholicism was. Instead Catholic bishops worry about climate change, women's rights and, bizarrely, homophobia, like all other authority figures. But there are much deeper reasons too.

Muslims attend Friday prayers on a rainy first day of Ramadan, at the courtyard of a housing estate next to a small BBC community centre and mosque in east London (Reuters/Chris Helgren)

From a conservative atheist's standpoint this development is disastrous, of course.

T.S. Eliot wrote in The Idea of a Christian Society:

‎'An individual European may not even believe that the Christian Faith is true, but what he says and makes and does will all spring out of this history of European culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology.' 

When Eliot wrote those words in 1948, which is pretty recently, he had in mind that Europe would lose belief in Christianity, but did not contemplate that Hinduism, Islam and other  religions would come to Western Europe or England. Nobody did.

He saw, rightly, paganism as the enemy. 

(Elsewhere in The Idea of a Christian Society he says:

The more highly industrialised the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be. Britain has been highly industrialised longer than any other country. And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women — of all classes — detached from tradition, alienated from religion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined. 

 But the age of Ford has passed. Mass suggestion is rather out of date in the internet age and we are de-industrialising. Is there still a mob?)

Romanian men have the smallest penises in Europe, according to survey

Romanians have the smallest penises in Europe, figures show. Please don't attack me about this. I just read it in the paper and am posting it for information. 

This is a very chaste blog, but since this was on the front page of the Independent it must be acceptable. It would not have been in the papers some years ago.

While on this subject, which I shall not revert to in this blog, in case anyone does not know this, during the war, Winston Churchill agreed to supply condoms to Soviet troops with the proviso that each box should be stamped with the words "EXTRA SMALL".

Eurovision

I thought the English stopped watching the Eurovision Song Contest in about 1978. It went out before Mr Callaghan left office, I'm pretty sure. Who was that lady with the nice speaking voice? And, always, 'Norvege, nul points'

But Eurovision, the Royal Variety Performance and Miss World were at one time special events everyone watched. Thoroughly uncool but popular. My grandmother enjoyed them all and my great-aunts.

That Eurovision was popular in Romania seemed a sign of how charmingly provincial and old-fashioned Romania was  but Eurovision seems, judging from my Facebook, a very mixed bag, to have made a comeback over in Britain, that semi mythical isle from which I come but rarely visit.

Here is the full length Eurovision Song Contest 1972 

Here is the full episode of Father Ted "A Song for Europe". It might be the funniest Father Ted episode of all, which is to say a great deal. Do watch it, people.

This song by Zdob and Zdub, representing the Republic of Moldova in 2011, is almost as bad as Father Ted's and Father Dougal's. It is I imagine possibly the worst entry of all time. 

I should get my television set to work one of these days, as i always say. I did not watch Eurovision last night or the Romanian entry but the reviews were not great. The Guardian said:

"Then there was Romania's Cezar. Dressed like a vampiric Elvis, Cezar sang in an alarming falsetto surrounded by men and women dancing in tight lycra."

Here it is. 

Oh dear. What an odd song from a country where old-fashioned masculinity is where it is at.

Here are Mark Steyn's thoughts on Eurovision and the dread Abba.

Getting on

Lee Marvin - One of the good things about getting older is that you find you're more interesting than most of the people you meet.

This is so true. Life has an increasingly thicker texture because you are more interesting and the people you spend time with are more interesting and you understand them better. 

Wisdom, I suppose.

Paradise lost

This place would be awful. It would be full of prosperous, American businessmen and their wives on holiday. A cove in Albania would be much better.

Genocide, slavery and colonial guilt

The fate of the Aborigines in Australia and the American Indians is desperately sad. (By the way, one of the many reasons for the rebellion in America is that the British did not allow the American colonists a free hand against the Indians.)  There are other instances of genocide and terrible persecutions by the colonial powers. Throughout history, such terrible things always went on, but we usually hear about them when white people are to blame. Just as we hear about slavery when whites enslaved black people, but not often about when black and brown people enslaved others or when, say, Europeans kept European serfs. Partly this is because there was no history of Africa until Arabs and white men arrived (Ethiopia is the exception that proves the rule) so we do not know about the cruel wars that took place there. Colonial guilt is not baseless, but is doing a lot of harm. Like all heresies, it is a truth taken out of proportion. It is possibly the most dangerous force in the world today.

I certainly do not want to justify slavery or downplay the sufferings of the slaves. I believe slavery in South America was less cruel than in North America and perhaps in Old Testament times it served a useful purpose. I do not know. Certainly it is taken for granted in both Old and New Testaments. I was however very struck by the former (black) Governor-General of Jamaica, Howard Cooke, who thinks slavery rescued Jamaicans from 'Africa's black night' and brought them to British civilisation. A very interesting point. Here is the link.

As I said, I do not seek to elide the horror of slavery and we should feel guilt for bad things our ancestors did but colonial guilt is what has created half the problems in the world. Some people are even outraged that people like Howard Cooke should think British civilisation superior to African civilisation. For them Western history is mostly oppression and exploitation of victims. In fact, the British Empire did a huge amount of good, far more good than harm and in any case the era of colonisation was a comparatively short one and colonisation was inevitable.

Slavery was an African institution and the slavers were Africans, not whites, though whites provided the demand. White indentured labourers went out from England to America where they lived in conditions not so very different from slaves. They were whipped, for example, but the very important differences were that they volunteered and after seven years they were free. Arabs controlled much of the slave trade but we hear little about them because they are not white. The British Empire stopped the slave trade worldwide against fierce resistance from Americans and Arabs.

Europeans have lost faith in their tradition and history and civilisation which they once knew to be superior to all others. This is because they do not know the true history and are fed propaganda. Until recently every society had a myth or propaganda designed to make her citizens feel proud of their country and history and culture but nowadays in Britain and Western Europe people are taught that their countries were in the past more bad than good, which is not normal and is not true. This fatally weakens our continent. Add to that contraception, abortion and feminism and you have a dying continent. 

War and Peace

Gandhi urged Britain to make peace with Germany in June 1940 and he might arguably have been right, Lord Halifax at any rate was of the same opinion, but Gandhi was not right when he said, 'Hitler is not a bad man'. 

Gandhi is over-rated. I blame him partly for the vast numbers who died in Partition when independence could have been delayed. Indian Sub-Continent like Ireland was only united under British rule. But after the Japanese destroyed the prestige of the British in Asia independence was inevitable. A reason perhaps for making peace with Germany in 1940?




George Washington and  his cronies were responsible for the War of independence. Whether or not you think it was treason, it clearly caused huge numbers of  unnecessary deaths. Why does anyone think this is justified? 

Because they won.

I also blame Lincoln for an unnecessary, unjust and terrible war. Nothing in my view can justify Lincoln's unnecessary and unjust war but certainly not either the aim of the war, preserving the Union or the abolition of slavery.  600,000 or 700,000 people are supposed to have died in the Civil War.

George W. Bush was the heir of Lincoln and of Woodrow Wilson and was more disastrous than either.

The Second Iraq War was of course worse then a blunder, a crime. I dislike the adulterous, crooked Jacques Chirac but Britain and the Americans should erect statues to him to commemorate his attempts to persuade them not to go to war against Saddam.

The older I get the clearer it is that very few wars (or revolutions) are just. The first Iraq War and the Falklands War were, though I blame Mrs. Thatcher for letting the Argentinians think we didn't care about the Falklands. Had the ex-sailor James Callaghan still had been in power, I do not think they would have invaded.

I did want the powers to intervene in the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Albania but I may have been wrong about Kosovo. I have not studied the subject. I was uncertain about but fairly well-disposed to intervention in Libya but this has been a disaster for the Libyans and everyone else. It is too late now to intervene in Syria and would probably have always been a big mistake. 

'Fascist scum': UKIP leader Nigel Farage hits back at hostile crowd in Edinburgh pub

Scores of people commented on this story on the Independent's Facebook page and almost all say they think UKIP are fascists. They really mean it. Why?

Because UKIP want to leave the EU or to limit immigration? The Nazis were very keen on European unity and specialised in invading countries not preventing invasions.

The discussion that many American conservatives like to have about whether Nazis were right-wing or socialists is infantile and boring. A lake is a body of water that people call a lake and a right-winger is someone who is considered and considers himself a right-winger. More important, the Nazis were progressives not reactionaries. They were the first people to talk about a European Economic Community, environmentalists, anti-smoking, very New Age, etc etc. Eugenics was progressive. Anti-Semitism was not progressive, but in Central and Eastern Europe it was pretty close to hatred of the bourgeoisie, which has always been progressive. 

Fascinating maps of the world’s most racially tolerant countries and the countries where people feel most loved

The World Values Survey have produced a fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries. Click here.

Interesting but probably thoroughly misleading. Greeks, for example, may know better than Bulgarians not to admit to racism when talking to pollsters.  Can Romania be as racist as Hungary? That France is full of racial antagonism is no surprise. England is, not surprisingly, at the least racist end of the scale. 

Here is a colour-coded map of the countries where people feel the most and least loved. Emotionality has a lot to do with it, yet Romania a very, almost operatically emotional country scores less highly than almost all European countries to her West, including Serbia, but more highly than the former USSR. Hungary, typified as reserved and prone to melancholy, seem to score higher than anyone else in Europe.

A very few yards from my flat

This house, just over a hundred yards from where I live in the old town, fell down yesterday afternoon. Of course I learnt about it from Facebook. Shamefully I forgot when I came home last night, entering from the other direction, to go and have a look nor did I remember this morning.

The foreman in charge of builders working on the building felt vibrations, called the Bucharest City Council, the men left and cars nearby were moved. When the building fell no damage was sustained by people or property, according to the papers, except for the shop next door. And I forgot to mention this last night in the terrace outside my building where I bought my wine.

 

I thought houses only fell down in Havana.It reminded me of Juvenal, complaining of

 'falling houses and the thousand perils of this terrible city.' 

Time for me to move before the earthquake, if I am quick.

A Churchill Reminder

This is a very interesting article by Richard Jencks from yesterday's Wall St journal. It is worth reading. I enjoyed it but do not agree with it.

There is a grotesque stereotype that he [Churchill] was a buoyant and bellicose man who had simply found his time. What really differentiated him from the pragmatic foreign secretary, from the hero-aviator, from the ambivalent philosopher, and from the Indian apostle of non-resistance, was that Churchill's moral judgment of evil was more acute and implacable than theirs.

Churchill was absolutely right to recognise, far better than the over-intelligent Halifax or many others, that Hitler and the Nazis were evil and could not be trusted. It was also true that 'the old bastard' as WH Auden called Churchill, the 'semi-American adventurer' as R A Butler called him, was bellicose, buoyant and a born war leader. But we did not go to war with Germany because her rulers were evil, though they were, or anti-Semites or fascists, but because they threatened the vital interests of the British Empire. Germany was defeated but the British Empire was defeated too and, unlike Germany, never recovered. The question is whether maintaining the balance of power in Europe, and Britain's export markets on the Continent, was as vital as rulers from Pitt the Elder onwards had believed. My answer? I am not sure. I tend to think not.


Should England have made peace with Germany in 1940? Alan Clarke thought we should have made peace after not before the Battle of Britain. Richard Jencks thinks Germany would have won her war with Russia had England stayed out but I think Russia would have probably done so.


Had England and France not gone to war in 1939 would Germany have attacked France or Russia?


I used to assume that the Jews would not have been sent to gas chambers had England and America been non-belligerents but on reflection there is no means of knowing.


It's impossible to guess what would have happened, but it is hard to imagine that the outcome of an alternative history could have been very much worse than what happened. Certainly the Second World War ended Britain's great power status and the British Empire, which we went to war to preserve. Britain, who in 1939 dominated the world, became a satellite of the USA. Eastern Europe suffered under Stalin. In total, between 50 and 70 million died. 

Between 50 and 70 million died. 

Bad news for Britain in Romanian papers, 1941

"People kept talking about restaurants"

Christopher Caldwell: 

"Bizarrely, as immigration began to change Europe at its economic and cultural core, the political vocabulary remained the same as when immigration had been a fringe phenomenon. People kept talking about restaurants." 

Caldwell's book Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West is exceptionally incisive as political analysis and a first draft of history. I urge you to read it. He writes for the Financial Times and worries about immigration changing Europe in a way which is taken for granted in the USA, but considered risqué in Europe itself.