We the people

I was the Rev Giles Fraser's Facebook friend till I couldn't stand his crazy leftism and that of his friends. He has always been loony left, a huge admirer of Tony Benn and originally of Corbyn, but he voted Tory this time. He said

"It wasn’t the referendum debate that changed me. It was the establishment’s reaction upon losing it."

I was interested to learn that he voted Tory in 1983 because he thought a victory by Mrs Thatcher would enable a left-wing victory afterwards. This is the mirror image of the view of Paul Gottfried that voting Democrat, for example for Mayor De Blasio of New York, hastens a palao-conservative backlash. Giles Fraser and his left wing chums were wrong in 1983. Paul Gottfried is wrong now?

If women ruled the world

BBC report: 'If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren't perfect, but are "indisputably better" than men.'

Madeline Albright, whom Bill Clinton appointed Secretary of State because she was a woman, disagrees. She said people who think the world would be better if it were run by women have forgotten what it was like at school.

Every nation has the government she deserves and England deserves Boris

'Every nation has the government she deserves.' 

Joseph de Maistre's famous aphorism applies to the UK today, as it does to Romania and the United States and Russia and every country in the world.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the 109 new Tory MPs at a party on the chilly Commons terrace Monday evening. The 1922 Committee had to send out for an extra 50 bottles of wine. Victory is sweet and sweeter because of the lamentations from the left.

I liked this truth uttered by Graeme Archer.

Corbyn's party finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class.

The last word belongs to Dan Hodge

(((Dan Hodges)))@DPJHodges

We’ve spent about a billion hours debating Brexit. But in the end it all boils down to one simple fact. If you offer people a choice in a referendum, you then have to do what they say. That’s it.

Bloodlines

I see more and more, what non Europeans always see, that we are each of us not individuals so much as bloodlines.

Thank God

Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

The exit poll shows the British Tories winning an 86 seat majority and Labour doing worse than under Michael Foot in 1983.


Blyth Valley, Eddie Milne's old seat, solid Labour mining seat, has a Tory MP. He thanked 'Boris' in his acceptance speech.


A constituency-by-constituency exit poll suggests Jo Swinson has lost her seat but Dominic Raab has held his. Trill it!

I wonder what Theresa May is thinking now.

Waiting for the British election result

'When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool.' (Ed Miliband) 

So it will be with Boris and Corbyn after tonight. Nothing is inevitable until it happens but once it happens people think it inevitable. We need a philosopher to explain how causation works.

Now, with an hour to go before the British polls close and we know the result of the exit poll, I want to say that Boris let the country down by not getting Brexit through Parliament before calling his election. I think he could have done and he should have tried.

In 2015 and 2017 the exit poll results astonished everyone and turned out to be pretty accurate. What will they say this time?

It's a bit like the scenes with the witches in Macbeth.

I have been compared to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham!

This is a nice compliment from Kathy Gyngell,the Editor of Conservative Woman, a good website where I have started sending some of my articles. 

She has awarded me her weekly prize, for my account of last weekend in Paris, in preference to other writers including James Delingpole.

'The prize goes to Paul Wood for his quite wonderfully written essay on France’s migrant revolution, which in my opinion had its way paved by those earlier soixante-huitards student revolutionaries. His evocative comparison of the past Paris with the Paris he has just revisited in its new Muslim incarnation took me back to those past geniuses, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, that so few today have the education, let alone the ability, to reproduce. Do read and appreciate.'

There is not much diversity in British academia

This week's Times Higher Education survey of the voting preferences of British university lecturers: 

54% Labour 

23% Lib Dem 

8% Conservative

Over half want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister and they are forming the more intelligent half of the British people of the future. This is the Jeremy Corbyn who backed Sinn Fein IRA and who responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by running an article in the newsletter he edited headlined 

'No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany'.

Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope

A recent article in the Catholic Herald explains the large part Pope Pius XII played in saving the lives of Jews in the Second World War.

The untrue idea that he ignored their plight is the fault of The Deputy, a play produced in 1963 by a previously unknown German, Rolf Hochhuth, which blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. 

We know from the memoirs of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the Romanian Securitate general who defected in 1978, that the KGB had supplied Hochhuth with false information and his play was rewritten by Erwin Piscator, a famous producer and communist agent of influence. 

The Soviets’ aim was to derail the improving relations, after the Second Vatican Council, between the Church and Judaism.

Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?

Several people sent me this Spectator article recently about how much more intellectual freedom there is here in Romania than at my university, Cambridge. The writer, a Romanian student at Cambridge, tells how he wanted to speak to a political society about 

‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ –and was asked not to do so.

‘The problem is… we’re looking for something a bit more mainstream.’ Mainstream? But this is broadly the view of 52 per cent of the UK population! ‘Right. It’s just that we had a pro-Brexit speaker once and it all got a bit uncomfortable, a bit… controversial.’ Controversial ideas? At a university? Whatever next?

Hitler, the new human rights religion and the fall of the West

The history of the Western world after 1945 is essentially a meditation on Nazism and Hitler.

The history of Eastern Europe is not. It is a meditation on the nation, freedom, Marxism, Christianity, what Unamuno called the tragic sense of life, on many things but not on Nazism or Hitler.

This is why a highly intelligent Romanian woman from an old boyar family recently complained to me, "I am tired of hearing about the Holocaust. It was 70 years ago."

The reaction against Nazism after 1945 is the theme of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West by R.R. Reno, Editor of the wonderful First Things Magazine. I have so many books I must read and this is another for my list.

He writes,

"The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives define the postwar era."

The book talks about an Open Society orthodoxy. It views what is now called neo-liberalism and the free market reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as part of the same 'restless utopianism' as the current movement to give transgender people rights.

Values now define Western countries, not blood, religion, or history. Freedom of contract, by the way, is not a value that is respected. Anti-racism, anti-discrimination and diversity rule.

Some people conclude, according to Mr. Reno, that

“after Auschwitz, the West does not deserve to endure. They welcome the mass immigration that will fundamentally change the society that produced so many decades off catastrophe. The change should be welcomed as a blessed deliverance from a cursed inheritance. He cites President George H.W. Bush, speaking to the United Nations on October 1,1990:

“I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.”
You see, gentle reader, where Brexit and Donald Trump come from, even though Brexit is about returning from protectionism to free trade. By ‘return of the strong gods’ is meant not Thor or Odin but love of one's people.



Mr Reno shows that the elites in the West seek to dissolve the the strong beliefs and powerful loyalties they think fueled the conflicts that convulsed the twentieth century. In fact mass immigration and the ethnic mosaics it has created are what will fuel war. The Islamist atrocities are a start.


Mr Reno talks about the social benefits of religion but the churches are abasing themselves before non-Christian idols and replacing metaphysics with materialistic projects like ameliorating climate change and engineering more mass migration.


Christianity in Western Europe by 1945 was strongly coloured by liberalism and found Auschwitz a tremendous stumbling block to faith. How could an omnipotent God have permitted the murder of the Jews? This is one of the reasons for the retreat from traditional Christianity to the 'Christianity and water' preached in churches nowadays and the loss of belief everywhere.

A new secular religion of human rights is being born to replace traditional Christianity, with Auschwitz at its centre. It is, oddly enough, the force behind Extinction Rebellion as well as, more obviously, the transgender movement, single sex marriage, third wave feminism, mass immigration and the diversity ideology.

'World’s Finest Byzantine Icons At Risk After Erdogan Court Win'

Since a friend first took me to the Chorea Church/Museum I visit it every time I visit Constantinople. I stay next door, in the very charming Kuriye Hotel, and love to walk from there through the working class Fatih district. There I stumble across beautiful but largely forgotten mosques, completely forgotten churches and Roman pillars which stand ignored in busy streets. This is how travel should be, free of tourist kitsch, free of people from Idaho. 

I didn't know until I read a post on the blog of a Greek-American that the Chorea mosaics were the best Byzantine mosaics in the world. Nor did I know that Turkey’s highest administrative court ruled last month that the 1945 cabinet decision that made the mosque into a museum was unlawful because a mosque “cannot be used except for its essential function”. President Erdogan is expected to implement the court’s decision.

Will the Hagia Sofia be next?

In the nineteenth century Russians expected one day that High Mass would be celebrated in the Hagia Sofia. After the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War it seemed possible one day, but it never happened. Now it is easy to imagine that it might become a mosque again.

The old landmarks are disappearing, or perhaps I should say they are re-emerging..

Evelyn Waugh might have invented mass murder at a conference on “reducing reoffending”

I was in Paris and busy when another Islamist atrocity partly on London Bridge took place in the middle of a British election, as happened in the last election. I am pleased that the parties did not suspend campaigning for a day or the BBC suspend political programmes,
as absurdly happened in 2017.

A young Cambridge man, Jack Merritt, was murdered foully, stabbed to death, and I offer my condolences to his loved ones. The killer, Khan, whom he had mentored, had hours earlier given a talk about reforming prisoners at an event Jack Merritt helped organise. He bravely tried to disarm him and died doing so.

He worked at the University of Cambridge’s criminology department. The event held at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London was called Learning Together and an attempt at “bringing students in Higher Education and Criminal Justice institutions together in transformative learning communities”.

The aim was to form connections that “make society more inclusive and safer by reducing reoffending”. Khan, however, wanted to reoffend. With the mirthless sense of humour of a psychopath he used the occasion to go on what the tabloids call a killing spree. He stabbed to death another Cambridge graduate, Saskia Jones, and injured more people.
Mr Merritt’s grieving father David described his son, a Labour supporter, as “a beautiful spirit who always took the side of the underdog” and who believed deeply in the concept of prisoner rehabilitation.

On Twitter he said: ‘My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.” 

A savage indictment of Pope Francis by recent editor of the Catholic Herald

The decline (and fall?) of the Church concerns not just Catholics or even Christians. It involves the decline of Western civilisation, as economic and political analyst David Goldman recently said. He is an observant Orthodox Jew. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. 

For many years I was annoyed if people spoke of Catholic priests as child abusers and pederasts, wrongly thinking the numbers of guilty men were tiny. Most priests are good, selfless men, of course, but the numbers who are wicked are not tiny at all. 7% of priests in Australia, a Royal Commission was told, allegedly abused children between 1950 and 2010.

The Church is in as gravely corrupt a state as in the early 16th century, before Luther nailed his theses to the wall. The hierarchy and the College of Cardinals are riddled with depraved men and with men who protect the guilty. Damian Thompson, who was Editor of the Catholic Herald in London until he resigned recently, says the Pope has repeatedly protected guilty men and names lots of names. 

Meanwhile, he asks us to confess to 'ecological sins'.

Paris in the wintertime

“For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.” — Donald Trump, May 2017

I spent this weekend in Paris to celebrate my birthday with some friends. I hardly know the city and saw the Leonardo exhibition, walked around St Germain in the beautiful, very cold sunshine, ate four wonderful meals in exactly the kind of good, characterful restaurants you imagine, enjoyed the late 19th century Parisian atmosphere and succeeded in navigating the baffling Châtelet–Les Halles overland and underground railway hub to find the train to take me the ten minutes to Saint-Denis. Everything in French stations is endlessly difficult and I think this helps explain why England voted to leave the European Union.

In Saint-Denis stands the basilica where most of the French kings and queens are buried, from King Clovis I (481-511) and the Merovingian rois fainéants to King Louis XVIII, the last French king not to be deposed, who died in 1824.

A necropolis is an odd place to visit on one's birthday. I suppose, a sort of momento mori. 

Remember you must die, as a Roman celebrating a triumph was reminded by a slave sitting beside him. Not that I consider my life so far exactly a triumph. Still, as the Abbé Sièyes said when asked what he did during the French Revolution, I have survived.

But countries die, as well as men. 

Christianity and the Decline of the West

Catholic Mass attendance in Great Britain overtook Anglican attendance around the turn of the century. A bigger proportion of the population in Great Britain attends Catholic Mass than in France. 

But Catholicism in Great Britain is also in steep decline and many Mass goers in England are Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and other foreigners, of course. Damian Thompson, until he recently resigned editor of the Catholic Herald, says that by mid-century mosque attendance will overtake church attendance in the UK.

Meanwhile, stranger and stranger things happen in Catholic churches. Catholicism, which, until the present Pope ascended the throne, seemed rock-like and unchanging now seems to change. 

Here is a quotation from a letter that Archbishop Vigano wrote yesterday to Alexander Tschugguel. He is the young man, 26, who, during the Amazon Synod, seized several “Pachamama” statues from a church in Rome and threw them into the Tiber. On Saturday

Quotations

Les Murray

'God is in the world as the poetry is in the poem.' 


St. Pius X in his motu proprio Fin Dalla Prima Nostra, articles I and III:

“Human society, as established by God, is composed of unequal elements, just as the different parts of the human body are unequal; to make them all equal is impossible, and would mean the destruction of human society” and, further, that “it follows that there are, according to the ordinance of God, in human society princes and subjects, masters and proletariat, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians, all of whom, united in the bonds of love, are to help one another to attain their last end in heaven, and their material and moral welfare here on earth.”

News item in The Tacoma News Tribune, April 11, 1953.

There'll Be No Escape in Future from Telephones

Mark R. Sullivan, San Francisco president and director of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., said in an address Thursday night:

The decline of Christianity is closely linked to the decline of the West

"Whenever I try to raise the topic of persecuted Christians in EU minister's meetings everybody says: 'Peter, better say 'religious minorities'. Well I WANT to say 'persecuted Christians'.." Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Sziijártó at the International Conference on Christian Persecution that took place recently in Budapest and was ignored by the press. 

"Finally, on hearing about the persecution of Christians, the greatest mistake Europeans can ever make is to say that this could never happen to them in their own country. Many
people share this delusion, even though Europe has been repeatedly struck by terrorism.