The Weathermen and their legacy: they won academia

My two posts on the Weathermen, the terrorist wing of the American student radical movement in the era of Richard Nixon, weren't intended as political polemic, although polemic is my strong suit. 

My purpose was twofold. First to bring to people's attention the speech by Bernardine Dohrn about the Manson murders and second to show part of the background to the anti-racist, progressive ideas that have influenced and continue to influence the world so much. 

To recap, Bernardine Dohrn told a Students for a Democratic Society meeting shortly after the Manson murders:

“Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, and then eating a meal in the same room, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson.”

Her audience “instantly adopted” “four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly,” according to Mark Rudd, another leader of the group.

1960s student radicalism, the Weathermen and the origins of political correctness

The SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was an important American student organisation in the 1960s known for its activism against the Vietnam War. It split after 1968 over whether to use violence to overthrow the government. This article is in the public domain and sheds light on the origins of the modern left in the USA.

It was at this meeting that Bernadine Dohrn, celebrated the fork stuck into the heavily-pregnant Sharon Tate's belly.

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

I draw your attention to this passage:

The logic of that view was expressed in a statement by Ted Gold, a top Weatherman, who said that “an agency of the people of the world” would be set up to run the U.S. economy and society after the defeat of the U.S. imperialism abroad.

A critic spoke up: “In short, if the people of the world succeed in liberating themselves before American radicals have made the American revolution, then the Vietnamese and Africans and the Chinese are gonna move in and run things for white America. It sounds like a John Bircher’s worst dream. There will have to be more repression than ever against white people, but by refusing to organize people, Weatherman isn’t even giving them half a chance.”

“Well,” replied Gold, “if it will take fascism, we’ll have to have fascism.”

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

“The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

An unnamed “SDS radical” quoted by David Horowitz - I wonder which radical if any said this. I remember hearing this expression back in my 1970s childhood. 

This brings to mind the recent emergence of transgender rights as a political issue.

It is interesting to be reminded of the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s, which later transmogrified into the identity politics of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, both disciples of Saul Alinsky. Alinsky's book “Rules for Radicals” was originally entitled “Rules for Revolution”.

Calling the gendarmes slaves is against the law

Last month a Romanian, posting on Facebook, called the gendarmes guarding the National Anticorruption Department (DNA) "slaves", reports News.ro. He has been ordered to pay a fine of RON 900 (about EUR 195) for offensive language.

Calling the gendarmes slaves is against the law.

Eastern Europe is starting to become as authoritarian as Western Europe: in the 1980s I could not have imagined writing this sentence.

Things are even worse in England where a demonstrator was fine for calling his MP a coward. that only made the local paper.

Freedom is a concept that people increasingly no longer even understand.

Bernardine Dohrn: "They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

I wrote about the murderer Charles Manson  when he died two weeks ago. He was one of the increasingly few people who was before my time. 

At his death, the liberal press incredibly tried to suggest that the murderous Manson - a counter culture hero if ever there was one - was a forerunner of Donald Trump. 

I mentioned the debate in the SDS about whether killing white babies was a revolutionary act and quoted Bernadine Dohrn, the SDS and Weather Underground leader, who celebrated the fork stuck into the heavily-pregnant Sharon Tate's belly.

“Dig it! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!”

This was at a meeting held just after the Manson murders to decide a strategy for using violence to take over America in the name of Vietnamese and Africans. One of the SDS leaders announced that fascism, his word for a Communist dictatorship, would be necessary to wrest control of America from white Americans. 

The SDS talked a lot about 'white skin privilege'.

The Weather Underground or Weathermen were angry about U.S. imperialism, the Vietnam War and racism in general. Whites, they thought, stole the resources of non-whites and all whites were culpable, including the working classes.

The Weathermen were extremists and terrorists and numbered about 800 people but these attitudes were general on the left during the Vietnam war. At first opposition to the war was confined to a small minority of Americans but the anti-war left won. This was a very important moment in the history of anti racism, an ideology which has transformed America and the world.

Here we see why, forty years later, the far left sympathised with Islamists and Muslim reactionaries.


And also why many immigrants in Western Europe harbour some degree of anger and resentment towards the countries in which they live.


Weathermen were responsible for the bombing of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon and several police stations.


Bernadine Dohrn after years on the run and a short spell in gaol, was hired by Northwestern University School of Law, as Clinical Associate Professor of Law. She was one of the founders of the Children and Family Justice Center.

Her husband and accomplice Bill Ayers later became a university professor, but in the 1970s he told his followers:

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents. That's where it's really at."

The couple know the young Barack Obama, though he is at pains to deny that they are friends. His political career in Chicago was launched at a meeting held in their sitting room. 

Another former member of the terrorist group is also a university lecturer. 

In November 4, 2010, in an interview with Newsclick India, Dohrn said of the American right,

"It's racist; it's armed; it’s hostile; it’s unspeakable."

And:

"The real terrorist is the American government, state terrorism unleashed against the world."

If you want to friend Bernardine Dohrn on Facebook she is here.

However evil or misguided people on the left are, it doesn't seem to affect their future careers. This is true of some of the key organisers of the 1968 Paris riots. 

Do you imagine Dohrn would have got a lecturership had she been on the far right?

In this wicked woman's demonic speech about the murder of Sharon Tate and her unborn baby we see the reason why academia has been taken over by an evil secular religion as well as by white self-hatred. 

The smoke of Satan, said Pope Paul VI in the 1960s, is in the Church. It was not just in the Church but everywhere in the 1960s and it still is.

Sir Edward du Cann was a crook

I blogged about the death of Sir Edward du Cann here. I wanted to add this, which I just read in The Spectator by Charles Moore.

Sir Edward’s longevity proved a problem for me when I was preparing my first volume for the publishers. A paragraph about him (incredibly, he came quite close to being chosen over Mrs Thatcher to challenge Ted Heath in 1974) had to have two versions, one if he were still alive, the other if he weren’t. He lived, so my quotation from William Waldegrave said that Heath’s supporters hoped that Du Cann would challenge because they ‘all knew that he had such a dubious financial record as to make him an easy target’. In the ‘dead’ version, Waldegrave said: ‘all knew that he was a crook’. Those who romanticise the probity of politics in the old days would do well to study Sir Edward’s career.

The King is dead

O good old man, how well in thee appears the constant service of the antique world.

I have been very busy and had simply no time to blog about the death of the King which, even though he was 96 and had been very sick for two years, was a huge sadness to me and almost everyone in Romania. 

The Guardian obituary is here.

When I first came to live in Romania almost twenty years ago I was told that all nice Romanians are monarchists. It is true. The monarchy in 1990 was the rallying cry of the people who rejected the National Salvation Front and the (ex-)Communist structure of power. 

For many years until this century the words Monarhia Salveaza Romania ('The monarchy will save Romania') remained painted on a wall in Piata 21 Decembrie, a remnant from the days in the summer of 1990 when the golani ('hooligans')occupied the square before being expelled with violence and murder by the miners called into Bucharest by the ex-Communist government. 

The monarchy and the King represented conservatism, the nation, freedom, the antithesis of the 'structure of power' that ruled Romania since the Communist takeover till today.

It made Romania a better country knowing the King, who bravely dismissed and arrested Marshal Antonescu in 1944, was alive. 

He represented another, better Romania and an elite which was destroyed by socialism. Though dethroned kings are very sad, their faces like worn coins.

Which head of state in the world today can compare with him for bravery, patriotism and principle?

Romanian politics surely prove the advantages of a hereditary monarch and a head of state who is, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

Is ISIS part of the Muslim reformation?

'I find it odd that people often call for a Reformation in Islam, because no one seems more Salafist and bloodthirsty than the men (mostly men) who brought in Europe's Reformation.'

(Christopher Howse, reviewing Eamon Duffy's new book in the Spectator.)

It is possible that ISIS is part of the Muslim reformation.

 

Guernica

When Colin Powell stood outside the Security Council meeting room to discuss the forthcoming invasion of Iraq a curtain was tactfully or disgracefully drawn to hide the tapestry version of Picasso's Guernica.

How the brown bear became public enemy number one in rural Romania

A year ago the technocrat environmental minister, Cristiana Pașca Palmer, brought in a law to make hunting bears illegal in Romania. She said that under European law “hunting for money was already illegal”, which seems to me undemocratic - why should countries not decide for themselves? The idea that hunting was acting to protect citizens from bears was, she claimed, just a cover for money making. 

Foreign conservationists across the world applauded. Romanians who lived in the countryside did not. A lot of Romanians have been killed or maimed by bears.

As a result a movement have sprung up, centring on the Szecklerland, the ethnic Hungarian region in the Carpathians, to make killing bears legal again. This article in the Guardian has the story (seen from the NGO, not the peasant, point of view).

In the 12 months since the ban, a movement calling for the widespread culling of bears has grown and gathered momentum, tipping the bear question over

Why do people applaud mass murderers (sometimes)?

Charles Manson has died in gaol. He was a cult leader who, in 1971, was found guilty of nine first-degree murders including the murder of actress Sharon Tate, murders which were carried out at his instruction by members of his cult.

Paul Berman writes interestingly about Manson here.

"'There were crazy discussions at Flint over whether killing white babies was inherently revolutionary, since all white people are the enemy. Out of this bizarre thinking came Bernardine’s infamous speech praising Charles Manson and his gang’s murder of actress Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and the LaBiancas. “Dig it!” she exclaimed. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach. Wild!” We instantly adopted as Weather’s salute four fingers held up in the air, invoking the fork left in Sharon Tate’s belly. The message was that we shit on all your conventional values, you murderers of black revolutionaries and Vietnamese babies. There were no limits now to our politics of transgression.'

Quotations

Friendship, “the wine of life,” should, like a well-stocked cellar, be continually renewed; and it is consolatory to think, that although we can seldom add what will equal the generous first growths of our youth, yet friendship becomes insensibly old in much less time than is commonly imagined, and not many years are required to make it mellow and pleasant.

James Boswell's Life of Johnson

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

Sleeping Beauty ‘fuels culture of sexual assault’

Inspired by the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment, Mrs Sarah Hall, a 40 year-old British PR consultant, was reading a version of Sleeping Beauty to her six-year-old son and decided that it promoted unacceptable non-consensual kissing, reports The Times. She is reported to have said: 

“I think it’s a specific issue in the Sleeping Beauty story about sexual behaviour and consent. It’s about saying, is this still relevant, is it appropriate? In today’s society, it isn’t appropriate — my son is only six, he absorbs everything he sees, and it isn’t as if I can turn it into a constructive conversation."

In the original version of the story the Prince awakened the Sleeping Beauty with something much stronger than a kiss. He impregnated her and she woke during childbirth. The brothers Grimm bowdlerised the story. 

The Prince was committing several crimes at once, in fact. He was a white man, in a position of unfair power in an utterly unjust, unmeritocratic, undemocratic, patriarchal system, first objectifying and then sexually assaulting a woman in a coma.

Today is the Queen's and the Duke of Edinburgh's 70th wedding anniversary

H.M. Queen Elizabeth II's and the Duke of Edinburgh's 70th wedding anniversary. King Michael of Romania attended the wedding, met his future Queen there and surprised the Communists by bravely returning to Bucharest. He was forced to abdicated a few weeks later.

The Queen, the King and the Duke are all with us today but the the King's life is moving peacefully towards its close, in the words that Lord Dawson of Penn, his doctor, used of King George V in 1936. Princess Elizabeth, his granddaughter, was ten then and had no idea that she would one day be queen.

Many things will die out with my generation

Many things will die out with my generation, which is to say people born in the 1960s. European ethnic states, Christendom, or at least the idea that Europe is Christian, cash, cheque books, land lines and telephone kiosks, much of the English countryside, high streets, masculine dominance. Free speech is already restricted, except in the USA and Eastern Europe. Mothers who cook each evening. Lard. Smoking, I hope. Newspapers made of paper. Privacy. 

Gordon Brown's memoirs sound unpickupable

From Lord Mandelson's review of Gordon Brown's memoirs. 

Modernisation is too often caricatured as privatisation in this book, and fails to grasp that New Labour’s reform agenda was not in opposition to social justice, but the only way in a changing world to achieve it.

I agree with his lordship on this . This is what the people who think Mr Blair was not left-wing fail to understand. He was hugely successful at transforming Britain in a left wing direction because he presided over economic growth and won three landslide election victories. His two great mistakes, from a Labour point of view, were announcing that he

Cardinal Newman explains why law and business should not be taught at university

‘…When I speak of Knowledge, I mean something intellectual, something which grasps what it perceives through the senses; something which takes a view of things; which sees more than the senses convey; which reasons upon what it sees, and while it sees; which invests it with an idea. It expresses itself, not in a mere enunciation, but by an enthymeme: it is of the nature of science from the first, and in this consists its dignity. The principle of real dignity in Knowledge, its worth, its desirableness, considered irrespectively of its results, is this germ within it of a scientific or a philosophical process. This is how it comes to be an end in itself; this is why it admits of being called Liberal. Not to know the relative disposition of things is the state of slaves or children; to have mapped out the Universe is the boast, or at least the ambition, of Philosophy.

Eastern Europe is more civilised than Western Europe

Battle Beagle‏ @HarmlessYardDog 21 hours ago

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Knife Crimes in 2016 London : 21,365 All of Poland: 3,474

Cișmigiu after a downpour yesterday

Quotations

'One cannot love lumps of flesh, and little infants are nothing more.' Dr. Johnson

'If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.' Aristotle Onassis

'Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.' Voltaire

Dr. Silenus talks about life in Waugh's Decline and Fall

“Life is like the big wheel at Luna Park. You pay five francs and go into a room with tiers of seats all around, and in the centre the floor is made of a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh too. It's great fun.

A Tory of the old school, the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson

Ruskin said he was a Tory of the old school, the school of Homer and Sir Walter Scott. Homer I agree on. I don't care much for the overrated Scott and I am a romantic Jacobite anyway. I'd say I am a Tory of the school of Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson. But I admire some liberals very much, including Chesterton (GK not AK) and Hilaire Belloc. 

Sir William Harcourt too, who said 

"Liberty does not consist in making others do what you think right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this—that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must."

Universities, islands of totalitarianism

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s described universities as islands of totalitarianism in a sea of freedom.

The origins and history of the Freedom Party in Austria

If Wikipedia is to be trusted the Austrian Freedom Party is not far right at all. SInce being founded in 1955 it seems to have combined belief in free market classical liberalism (Thatcherism) with a desire for Austria to unite with Germany. Sounds a respectable old fashioned tradition, stretching back to 1848.

The FPÖ is a descendant of the pan-German and national liberal camp (Lager) dating back to the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas. During the interwar era, the national liberal camp (gathered

in the Greater German People's Party) fought against the mutually-hostile Christian Social and Marxist camps in their

A big bagful of good quotations that will be new to you

“For me dying is a lot like going camping. I don’t want to do it.” Phil Wang 

“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.” Charles Baudelaire 

“Everything must be learned, from reading to dying.” Gustave Flaubert

Sabrina has died

I suspect Sir Oswald Mosley had Sabrina in mind when he said 'In or around 1955 the British discovered sex and instantly made it ridiculous'.

Philip Larkin thought we discovered sex later. 

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three 

(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

In or around 1963  the world and England began to change out of recognition. From 1963 it was a few steps to joining the Common Market, out of town shopping centres, same sex

"The souls that never go to confession are like rooms with closed windows, which never get any fresh air in."

"The souls that never go to confession are like rooms with closed windows, which never get any fresh air in." (Octavian Goga)


"'I know of no joy,' she airily began, 'greater than a cool white dress after the sweetness of confession.'" (Ronald Firbank)

Why do some people stay in the confessional so long? I am thinking of a very old lady ahead of me who took at least 15 minutes, which is a very long time. What had she done?

'Today everybody's identity is his or her iPhone. There is no national identity as such.'

In this article from the BBC site a famous Catalan writer is prosing on about the crisis when he suddenly says

Do we have an identity? I don't know. I think today everybody's identity is his or her iPhone. There is no national identity as such.

A Romanian academic economist when I asked him what the future of Romania would be in fifty years time thought it wouldn't exist and be no loss.

Surely there'll still be people speaking Romanian?

Malcolm Muggeridge said sex is the mysticism of materialism

"The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour." William James

Sex is the mysticism of materialism. Malcolm Muggeridge

“Drink wine. This is life eternal. This is all that youth will give you. It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends. Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
Omar Khayyám

Today is a palindrome

7 10 2017

David Laws's diary for 4 December 2012: Cameron and Osborne humiliate Theresa May

We very easily imagine Theresa May squirming, as she squirmed in her interview with Andrew Marr on Sunday.

She is not nearly as clever as Messrs. Cameron and Osborne, was a hopeless Home

Groucho Marx danced on Hitler's grave

I just learnt that Groucho Marx climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two-minute Charleston.

Eastern Europe, the last hope for Europe and the world

You might be interested by this article, Why the West Can’t Unite Against Terrorism, written by Richard Storey, who thinks Eastern Europe the last hope for Europe. 

I assumed Eastern Europe was the best part of Europe before I got here in 1990 and I have never doubted Romania's superiority to the West, in innumerable, intangible ways, since I came to live in Romania in 1998. But when asked 'In what ways?' I always have difficulty in answering - apart from saying they still believe in God here.

But, as I type this, I think of many strong reasons. They also still believe in the nation, their tradition, in freedom, hierarchy, the divine order in the universe that makes men men and women women. I could think of many more reasons if pressed.

Mr. Storey says, rather gushingly:

"How else are we to explain Europe’s indomitable civilization, despite being beset by barbarians at the gates and the plutocratic pursuit of political power? The answer is apparent to much of Eastern Europe; they have seen where the unstable forces of leftism lead them and have returned to the Church as that common transcendent system of higher cultural values which bound Europe together into a network of communities. This is why they stand strong and terror-free, boldly declaring their Christian identity and closed borders in the face of the EU taking Poland, Czech and Hungary to court."

Neagu Djuvara and Dan Hodges on Trump

Dan Hodges today: Donald Trump is a lunatic. A big lunatic. An ocean going lunatic.

Neagu Djuvara to me last year: Trump is a bull and a bull is what we need now.

Famous Last Words

“I see that you have made three spelling mistakes,” remarked the Marquis de Favras when he read his death warrant.

Coming across that quotation reminded me of that I once collected last words and must find and publish online my collection. Here are one or two.

These are the last words of King Frederick William I of Prussia, the father of Frederick the Great. A Lutheran clergyman was giving him the last rites and said

John Stuart Mill and the decline of the West

I bought a leather bound copy of Mill's On Liberty for 50p when I was 16 and haven't read it. I assumed I knew what it said and that J.S. Mill was an arch libertarian, a Thathcherite avant la lettre. I should have read it and shall do so now, followed by Maurice Cowling's arch-conservative demolition. How I wish I'd gone to Peterhouse and Cowling had taught me.

Only today I was wondering yet again whether my personal philosophy of finding an authentic life by relating to people openly, regardless of their nationality or class (or sex for that matter) and keeping a distance from conventional or fashionable ideas, was really my own or was one I had taken from elsewhere. I see now that it is J.S. Mill, mediated through John Fowles, whose novels and philosophy greatly appealed to me when I was 18. It is an admirable but somewhat adolescent philosophy.

A poem for National Poetry Day

For National Poetry Day I post this, one of my favourite poems. It's not a favourite because it's an elegy for the demise of Catholic folk religion at the Reformation, but because I simply love it. It is comparable with, though not as good as, Shakespeare's 'When icicles hang by the wall' from Love's Labour's Lost.

FAREWELL, rewards and fairies, 

Good housewives now may say, 

For now foul sluts in dairies 

Do fare as well as they. 

And though they sweep their hearths no less 

Than maids were wont to do, 

Yet who of late for cleanness 

Finds sixpence in her shoe? 

Islam, Europe and Christianity

“It is true that the idea of conquest is inherent in the soul of Islam. However, it is also possible to interpret the objective in Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus sends his disciples to all nations, in terms of the same idea of conquest.”
Pope Francis, May 2016

Top ten enclaves

Here is an interesting list of enclaves made by John Rentoul, maker of fascinating lists. I had only known about one of them, Llívia, in Spain but surrounded by France. 

When the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659 gave all villages north of the Pyrenees to France the Llívians adduced evidence that Llivia had been accorded the status of city by a Roman Emperor. It therefore remained in Spain. It is Catalan, as are the villages given to France.

This is interesting:

Since the rationalisation of the India-Bangladesh border last year abolished Dahala Khagrabari, the world’s only third-order enclave (a piece of India inside a piece of Bangladesh inside a piece of India inside Bangladesh), Baarle’s second-order enclaves are as complicated as it gets – there are pockets of the Netherlands inside some of the Belgian enclaves. The border is so complicated, said Robert Kaye, “they operate a front-door rule where the country of your front door determines which law applies”.

Hillary Clinton is “not very bright” - something she has in common with Theresa May

During his Sunday night interview on the US television show 60 Minutes, Steve Bannon said something I already knew, that Hillary Clinton is “not very bright.”

This is one of the things she has in common with Theresa May. They are also both introverted and (not the same thing) shy. Both are boring speakers, partly because they never have much to say that's interesting (though I except Theresa May's remark that a

The decline of the West and the loss of Homeric virtue

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice."
G. K. Chesterton

People are too apt to think war is a great evil and no cause worth dying and killing for, and yet the West has launched a number of disastrous and foolish wars recently, not from self interest but for liberal values. The older I get I see how few wars were worth fighting. Worth fighting by England at any rate, which has almost never been endangered since 1066.

On the other hand men (how I dislike inclusive language) are very frightened of moral corruption which they identify with being racist, sexist, ageist, Islamophobic or Eurocentric.

Edward Luttwak has written a fine essay about Europe's loss of heroic, Homeric virtues.

Four quotations from Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

It’s Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s 187th birthday. She was an Austrian and a major German language novelist. Here are four of her aphorisms.

In misfortune we usually regain the peace that we were robbed of through fear of that very misfortune.

It’s 258 years today since Wolfe took Quebec

Churchill was asked how to make children proud to be British and replied 'Tell them Wolfe took Quebec'. Are they still told this and if so do they think it was an unjust, colonial war?

It’s 258 years today since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

I read about it when I was four in the book that most influenced me in my life The Royal Portrait Gallery, published in the early 1890s. Here is how the battle is recounted in another, much more famous book. Our Island Story: A Child's History of England is a book by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, first published in 1905.

The sanctity of the revelation of Mahomet

"Since 1989 the texts, ideas and even images of Islam have become so heavily policed and self-policed even in Western Europe that it would be understandable if a young person becoming politically and religiously aware in the last few decades might have arrived at the conclusion that the one thing our societies really do hold sacred and impervious to ridicule or criticism are the claims and teachings of Mohammed."
Douglas Murray - 'The Strange Death of Europe'


[Had Charles Tours not defeated the Muslims in 704] "perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet."
Edward Gibbon - 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'



“I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”
Richard Dawkins, the scientist and proselytising atheist, 2010

Since 1989 the world has been remade by nihilists, intellectual nihilists and ones who kill

I was at Cambridge in my second term when Colin McCabe was denied tenure because he was a structuralist.

No one had any idea what a structuralist was, not even people reading English. Certainly not the people who wrote for the papers, who descended on Cambridge in a scramble. I tried to understand it and read a book by Roland Barthes but failed. Then I started work and forgot it.

Today, this very day, I see I have understood almost nothing about the story of my own lifetime. It was French Marxist intellectuals like Derrida who made the Sargasso Sea in which we are becalmed. He taught that categorisation is a form of exclusion, serving the interests of maintaining power, discriminating against excluded groups. Words are oppressive. It is morally necessary that language has to be remade to avoid victimising oppressed groups. Political correctness, a new kind of Stalinism.

The Strange Death of Western Europe and why is Eastern Europe different?

I am currently reading, am deeply depressed and alarmed by and am lost in wonder at Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Please read it people, if you read only one book this year.

The opening sentence is:

Europe is committing suicide.

and he continues

By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place we had to call home.

He deals with Eastern European attitudes to migrants in a couple of pages and says this, under the rubric "Why is Eastern Europe so different?"

"....In January 2016, when the Swedish authorities, the European Commission and others began publicly to acknowledge that the majority of people they had taken in the previous year had no right to claim asylum in Europe, Jean Claude Juncker continued to insist on the Commission's proposed quota system to share out the migrants between each country. Slovakia refused to have any part in what its government described as a 'nonsense' and 'complete fiasco'. The left-wing Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, said in despair, 'I feel that we in the EU are now committing ritual suicide and we're just looking on'. The other Visegrad countries held the same view as Fico.


"....Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our question -- the divergence between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'. That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East. And nowhere have the consequences of this been more clearly displayed than in the attitudes of Eastern European leaders, with the support of their publics, to the migration crisis." 'The divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'."

To understand why Eastern European attitudes towards migrants and Islam are different from ones that obtain (at least at an official level) in the West, you have to look at Western, not Eastern, Europe. Eastern Europeans (those who have not been educated in the pieties of Western universities) retain the common sense ideas to which everyone in Western Europe subscribed in 1945.

Eastern Europeans love their countries the way they are, homogeneous and cohesive ethnic states with long and beautiful traditions, as everyone in Western Europe did until a moment ago.

But there are other reasons too. Eastern European countries have all been oppressed by empires (Ottoman, Russian, Hapsburg). They rightly see themselves as victims of imperialism, most recently by that imposed in the name of the proletariat by the Soviet Union. They do not feel post-colonial guilt, because they had no colonies. They were colonised. 

And they are much poorer than the West, though nowadays quite a lot richer than the Third World. They are emigrant countries, not immigrant societies.

Most Romanians I know think mass immigration from Africa and Asis to Western Europe has been a disaster, but all, without exception, think it is a just punishment for colonialism. 

A young, left-wing Romanian friend who won a scholarship to Yale told me that she hopes in her lifetime (she is about 30 now) that Italy will have an African majority. This, she says, will be a fitting punishment for Italy's short-lived and small colonial empire in Africa.

Mr. Murray swats away this argument effortlessly.

I’ve particularly never heard, for instance, that the country of Turkey should have a large infusion of Yorkshiremen or people from Wales, Dublin, in order to not only diversify that country but to make some kind of reparation for the Ottoman Empire.

In Eastern Europe, patriotism and the martial, masculine virtues are considered virtues. Eastern Europeans have not rethought their values to be as unlike Nazi values as possible. Communists blamed Nazism on capitalism and the recent horrors of Communist rule have in most countries (not in Poland or Serbia) displaced from folk memory what the Germans did. 

Most Eastern European countries were allied with Hitler, in any case, and many Eastern Europeans, if they are not Jews, gypsies or Slavs, think that they would have been better off had he not Stalin won the war.

Eastern Europe used always to be an ethnic mosaic and Eastern Europeans know, as a cursory reading of history, especially the history of 1939-45, or simple common sense teaches, that ethnic minorities living side by side do so unhappily and often violent conflicts arise. 

Ethnic minorities lived side by side in Eastern Europe for a long time when Eastern European societies were essentially mediaeval. With the coming (imposition would be a better word) of modernity, that changed. 

Conflict between Muslims and Christians led to the forced migrations of millions of Greeks and Turks before and after the First World War. In 1945 and 1946 a Procrustean reordering of East Europe's ethnic minorities took place across the region. An ethnic war was fought between Ukrainians and Poles which the world ignored. Ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians were expelled from the places across Central and Eastern Europe in which their families had lived for many centuries. The whole story of displaced persons - the so-called DPs- is calamitous. Coming after the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, by 1950 a terrible simplicity had been imposed on Eastern European countries which had hitherto been ethnic mixtures. 

Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered these vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939, stipulating that they should be "humane and orderly". They were, of course, neither. 

At almost the same time as Attlee agreed this, oddly enough, ethnically homogeneous Britain began to become rapidly multi-ethnic. 

In his last chapter Douglas Murray concludes

By the middle of this century, while China will probably still look like China, India will probably still look like India, Russia like Russia, and Eastern Europe like Eastern Europe, Western Europe will at best resemble a large-scale version of the United Nations. ...This place where international cities develop into something resembling international countries will be many things. But it will not be Europe anymore.

I shall blog more about the ideas with which this very readable and well-written book fizzes. But much as I love interesting, original, perceptive ideas, this is desperately sad work. The saddest story ever told. 



A pedant writes: I wish he knew what disinterested meant and did not split infinitives. I do not necessarily expect good grammar from Oxford men, but I do from Etonians (Douglas Murray won a scholarship there).

Quotations

"Even today, I think one’s relation to one’s alma mater is fraught with haute-bourgeois peril. In descending order of coolness are:



1. Dropped out of prestigious college;


2. Graduated from prestigious school, never bring it up unless asked—then as joke;


3. Graduated from prestigious school with honors, bring up quickly, no irony;


4. Graduated, have become garish, cheerful head of alumni booster committee."


Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Edward du Cann has died

Sir Edward du Cann, bounder, smoother than silk, once the seemingly perpetual Chairman of the 1922 Committee (the Tory backbenchers' trade union), has died. Simon Hoggart in Punch said that, asked the time, he replied: 

What time do you want it to be, dear boy?

Alan Watkins, whose Observer column brightened my Sunday mornings, said

Talking to Edward du Cann was rather like walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted.

I remember the Private Eye headline, over a story of an Edward Du Cann City scandal, was:

Diana and the politics of emotion

Diana, Princess of Wales changed the monarchy and changed Britain in a way that is still very evident today.

Diana's famous sad-eyed TV interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, in which she said there were three persons in her marriage, was a cleverly stage managed display of fake emotion. There were, in fact, several other people in the marriage too. She made displays of emotion mandatory, especially when she died, which is why Theresa May lost a lot of what support she still had (not much) by not crying at the Grenfell Tower and why Corbyn wept at the mosque where a British Muslim was murdered by a white man (but not at the locations where the reverse happened). Even H.M the Queen now emotes though she found the Diana epoch hard to adjust to. I remember that Diana was said to have tried having a heart to heart with the Queen and to have said, 'I need space'. A mystified HMQ replied, 

'Well, Kensington Palace is not exactly bijou'.

5 quotations

One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.
Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George in 1919.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

Cardinal Mazarin could not suffer unhappy people around him. When he considered employing someone, his first question was, "Is he happy?" This really meant: "Is he lucky?" By means of this, the wise and superstitious Mazarin surrounded himself with the best people in the government.
Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans, Princess Palatine (so it wasn't Napoleon)

Diana – Queen of Tarts

Diana has now incredibly been dead for twenty years. The world rotates on its axis and we go about our lives but Diana is no longer here. 

The quality press sneered at coverage of her and the Royal Family but the history of royal families is the history of Europe. When I visited the Taj Mahal it was the famous photograph of her alone there (apart from hundreds of pressmen out of shot) and Diana's cynical bid for sympathy from the public that was in the forefront of my mind. Certainly not the visit by the King-Emperor George V in 1912.


Alex Woodcock-Clarke has kindly given me permission to reproduce his brilliant little essay about Diana, Princess of Wales. I do so not just because Alex is an absolutely brilliant comic writer, but because I agree with every word and did so back in the time when 85% of England was for Diana and a handful of gnostics sympathised with the Prince. May she rest in peace.


DIANA – QUEEN OF TARTS

Why the People’s Princess was actually the Queen of Mean who invented a new cult of self-serving, self-inflating victimhood – and got the world’s poor to worship at it.

Ted Kennedy tried to get the Russians to help him win presidential election

How Ted Kennedy tried to get the help of the Soviet leader to help him win the 1984 presidential election. Andropov seems not to have taken up the offer.

Quotations

The past is a beautiful sunset.

Calistrat Hogas


Whether you believe you can or can't - you are always right. 

Rocsana Borda

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.


Queen Victoria, 1870

Enid Blyton's England still exists

Jenni Russell wrote in The Times on Thursday about how danger and novelty make time slow down. We all know this and it has been investigated in a book called The Brain, by scientist David Eagleman. 

He has proved, she said,

that we don’t actually slow down our perception of time in a crisis because he tested that by giving volunteers digital wrist displays and inducing terror by dropping them backwards into a net down a 150 ft shaft. If they could slow time they could have read the rapidly changing displays. That proved impossible.

So it just seems that time slows down or speeds up. And the best way to make time seem to slow down, short of feeling in danger, is by new experiences, such as new places. 

Graham Greene wrote a short story about a dying man who moved his bed in his large house from room to room to make his remaining time seem longer.

I always knew that contrast is the stuff of life. This has a large bearing on the question of whether to relax on holiday in the same place, not doing much, or to cram in a lot. I do the latter and today I feel, after three weeks away, that I've had about ten holidays.

And zig-zagging around Southern England by train from far west to far east I saw that England is the loveliest of all countries (Italy and Romania perhaps excepted). Outside a few tourist traps it has almost as few foreign tourists as Albania and is delightfully cool in

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese

In every alliance there is a horse and there is a rider.

Bismarck, quoted in Nagy Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others





Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G.K. Chesterton




Giving someone your full attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil


Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another.


Hilaire Belloc

Is Trebizond the most beautiful place name of all?

Talking about places that should be visited simply for the beauty of their names, Trebizond now comes to mind. I remember using the word to an Englishman in Constantinople who said it sounded better in my mouth than Trabzon. We had only an hour earlier but he had me down as a Victorian.

That evening is memorable for a last look inside one of my favourite hotels, the Pera

"40,000 civilians died in Mosul"

40,000 civilians died in Mosul, either bombed or killed in house to house fighting, according to a Kurdish commander quoted by Patrick Cockburn. Note the difference between press accounts of the fall of Mosul and East Aleppo.

There’s been no emergency debate in the House of Commons and the Eiffel Tower hasn’t

The power of names

His Eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern Fame, the Seat
Of mightiest Empire, from the destind Walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can
And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's Throne,
To Paquin of Sinæan Kings, and thence
To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul
Down to the golden Chersonese...
And so on and on and on. Paradise Lost, Book 10

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Coleridge

Some places should be visited because of the beauty of their names. So says Marzena Pogorzaly, who herself has a very beautiful name, and gave as an example Odessa.

Catholic priest prosecuted for saying homosexuality is a sin

Hate speech laws are a way of silencing opinion. As measures are taken to prevent Islamists using the net for their purposes, this will become more and more the case.

In Barcelona a priest has been unsuccessfully prosecuted for saying "Homosexuality is a sin against nature". He was prosecuted for enunciating Catholic doctrine, in (formerly?) Catholic Spain.

Quotations

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.
William Boyd

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

Oswald Spengler

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you. ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy.
Alison Lurie

Women love the State, they see it as a protector to keep things safe, and always vote for more Big Government.
Suzanne Hill


I am obliged to you for sending me your petition, but I am returning it without signature. I confess I am attached to the current forms of words, and I also I am what you have often heard of but perhaps not often seen, a real conservative, who thinks change an evil in itself.
A.E. Housman
(acknowledgements, Laudator Temporis Acti)

Calibri may leave Pakistan sans Sharif

I had been following, out of the corner of my eye, the story of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. His government might fall because his daughter Maryam submitted documents to the Supreme Court dated before January 31, 2007 and typed in Calibri, a font which only became available on that date. This is interesting, but more memorably it is the occasion for possibly the best headline I ever saw.

Quotations about childhood

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. 
Louise Glück

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think this is equally true of us all. 
Graham Greene

"I've Worked with Refugees for Decades. Europe's Afghan Crime Wave Is Mind-Boggling"

I hadn't heard about problems caused by Afghan refugees in Europe until I read this interesting and very dismaying article in the very respectable American magazine 'National Interest' by Cheryl Benard, who has worked for many years in refugee programmes and says she found it very hard to write. She details a dismaying history of rapes and sexual assaults and tries to find explanations.

The following explanation is very worrying. It was offered by an experienced Afghan court translator in Austria whom she quotes. 

The myth of Britain’s decline

Robert Tombs, who supervised me at university, has written a timely piece on Brexit and declinism entitled

The myth of Britain’s decline

 with the encouraging sub-headline

Our glory days are not over – they’re in full swing

I quote him.

Who would deny that Britain is no longer the great power it once was? Well, speaking as a historian, I would. Declinism is at best a distortion of reality, and