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In the Turkish holiday village of Dalyan I'm having dinner with a Turkish bar owner in his 30s. Predictably, he loathes Erdogan, a would-be dictator.
'What do you think of the war in Ukraine?'
'I support the Russians, actually.'
'Why?'
'Because they are being attacked by America.'
'Do many Turks think this?'
'Some do. Some don't.'
According to the Gospels Jesus ate fish.
We would know if Jesus had been a vegetarian and if he was not no Christian need be.
A similar point can be made about other things. If Jesus had been the only first century rabbi to approve of homosexual acts this certainly would have been recorded in the Gospels and known to the apostles. Norman Tebbit, a very clever debater, made that point.
The same goes for pacifism, capital punishment, revolutionary socialism and countless other things.
Vegetarianism and veganism are supererogatory mercies. Not required. Like giving away all your property.
Even as recently as the 1960s England was a free and Christian country. Abortion was illegal. Now a Catholic woman is arrested for PRAYING silently outside an abortion clinic.
As you probably noticed, the fact checkers are often or even usually the enemies of truth. Here is a good example. The Cambridge Dictionary (something I had never heard of till today but which dates back, apparently, to the remote era of 1995) changed the definition of woman to include transgender man.
Or rather, not.
This was not, say the fact checkers, a change of the definition, only the addition of a subsidiary definition.
So that is cleared up.
"People who say that 'you cannot turn back the clock' obviously don't know very much about clocks." G.K. Chesterton"I belong to a generation which, in the space of precisely one generation, has seen a religion, a culture, and a country all but disappear." Alain de Benoist“Europe is committing suicide… 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 in the world we had to call home.” Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe.
Evelyn Waugh: 'Yes, I was determined to have a happy
Christmas'
'Did you?'
'I think so. I don't remember it much, and that's always a good sign, isn't
it?'
Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to
have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer....
Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality
would mix so harmoniously?
Calvin and Hobbes
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled mirth.
One of Shakespeare’s three references to Christmas, in Love’s Labour’s Lost
He was created of a mother whom He created. He was carried
by hands that He formed. He cried in the manger in wordless infancy, He the
Word, without whom all human eloquence is mute.
St. Augustine
I find that people who are knee-deep in emotion and physical commitment with human beings, I find they're often totally empty of any real passion ... I mean, if we look back on the history of literature, it's always these really creased, repressed hysterics, if you like, who are enchained in these squalor-ridden rooms, who say the most poetic things about the human race.
'In Bush's Useful Idiots he took apart the soi-disant liberals who had supported Bush's catastrophic foreign policy. He derided those members of the liberal intelligentsia who had supported the Iraq war but changed their minds after incompetent execution led to disaster. "Like Stalin's western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev's revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism," the liberal hawks were now "irritated with Bush for giving 'preventive war' a bad name".'Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing Judt's obituary in the Guardian. I so disliked Judt's politics, but agree with and respect leftists of his sort when they condemn neo-cons and unjust wars. I came across last night Andrew Roberts praising Tong Blair for eschewing popularity to invade Iraq. My old friend Andrew and I are very different sorts of Tories indeed and disagree on so much, from Churchill and Margaret Thatcher to George W. Bush and Donald Trump (he likened him to Mussolini, when Trump is more a libertarian than anything).
An interesting insight into the Holocaust is provided here by Lawrence Rees, who became a historian of the Holocaust after he made the remarkable TV series The Nazis: A Warning from History. He was asked if those involved in the Holocaust still felt many years later when he interviewed them that they could justify it morally?
'Yes, and this is one of the reasons I’ve carried on with this subject for 25 years. You dig and dig and dig and you can’t get to the bottom of it, because often you don’t expect the responses you get. If you talk, for example, to former members of the NKVD (Stalin’s secret police), who were involved in the horrendous deportations of Kalmyks or Chechens or Crimean Tatars, in the most part what they’ll say is: “If I didn’t do it I would have been shot.” And it’s very hard to go somewhere in an interview after that. But what was extraordinary about all these former Nazis is that I don’t think we ever heard that answer in all the years we were doing this. What we tended to hear was at the time they felt it was the right thing to do.'
'Does this not make Holocaust denial even more ridiculous, when the perpetrators themselves don’t deny it?'
The wildest hope of a healthy person is to get back to his first Christmas party, and be shy enough to be happy.G.K Chesterton
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.C.S. Lewis
I had been reading Tales from the Iliad. Now, in boyish fancy, I watched the likes of Achilles, Ajax and Ulysses pass in triumph with aged Priam, proud even in defeat. I believe that day implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.
Sir Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice (1987), p. 56
'The invasion also took the military by surprise: this was a war that was not planned by the professionals in the general staff, but brainstormed by Putin’s circle of spooks and yes-men, and foisted on the soldiers at the last minute. Decades of thinking about how to wage a modern war, libraries of dense theoretical literature, the hard-won lessons of past conflicts and massive exercises were all ignored. So too were all the indications that Ukraine was not the frail fake-state of Putin’s imagination governed by a drug-addicted clown and ready to welcome invaders as liberators.
My laptop is full of open tabs. I've posted quotations here on my blog from a few articles, to serve me as an index. This article is here.
'Now that we have restricted freedom of movement from the EU, what is happening? Wages are rising rapidly. Average earnings are going up 8 per cent annually, and in trades such as transport or construction by 20 per cent. While this has much to do with the effect of workers returning from furlough, these are still astonishing figures.
'The Labour Party, the main architect of unrestricted immigration, ties itself up in knots over whether to back a £15 minimum wage, deaf to the irony that most companies would kill to find someone willing to work for less than twenty quid an hour right now. If this was a lab experiment, and to some degree it is, the conclusion would be clear. Turning off the flow of workers increases salaries.
[The lecture is here. I completely agree with most of what Peter Hitchens says here (and elsewhere). I especially agree that Margaret Thatcher was not a conservative (unlike him I thought so in her time), excepting for the famous Section 28 which prohibited the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities and which was a dead letter. And, a small thing, creating three hereditary peerages, two of which she awarded to men without heirs. Tony Blair was a modern liberal rather than a socialist, but though socialism is a terrible, authoritarian and misguided ideology, that has been shown not to work, the worst thing about socialists is that they are also liberals.]
'The great institutional buildings of London and Oxford are still standing after many decades of turmoil. In many cases they are in better condition than they have ever enjoyed.
'But they lie. Here in Oxford, the kingdom of thought and learning which used to lie in the small damp triangle between the Cherwell and the Thames, is not at all the same place as it once was. The commercial imperative roars ever more loudly for its money. The Egalitarian siege tightens, more total and inevitable than anything the Cromwellians ever managed. And as these things happen, Oxford’s role as a home for independent thought will shrivel.
Putin is entirely to blame, legally and morally, for the invasion of Ukraine. It is worse than a crime, it's a blunder.
I don't necessarily think America wanted to humiliate him and I don't think (some do) that the State Department wanted to provoke a war, but this was what they did.
I think, as with the outbreak of the two world wars, it was bad diplomacy on all sides that led us here.
As AJP Taylor said of Hitler, Putin is a rational, though no doubt a wicked statesman.
'Author James Patterson said in a statement, "I apologize for saying white male writers having trouble finding work is a form of racism."'
I can't stop wasting time on Facebook. Reviewing my reviews, I see I gave Samuel Beckett's 'Malone Dies' one star and Enid Blyton's 'Castle of Adventure' five. I suppose this is probably right.
My recipe for happiness: trust in God; good health; a sense of beauty; a passion for books; friends; enjoying your own company; not caring about material things; a good sense of humour; a quick mind; a sense of history; being in Romania; glorious spring weather.
'What seems obvious to the general public — that prehistory was a bloody mess of invasions, migrations, battles and conflict — is not always a commonplace view among researchers. Worse, the idea that ancient peoples organised themselves among clear ethnic and tribal lines is also taboo. Obvious statements of common sense, such as the existence of patriarchy in the past, are constantly challenged and the general tone of academia is one of refutation: both of established theories and thinkers and of disagreeable parts of the past itself.
'Added to this is the ever-present fear that studies and results are being used by the wrong kind of people. In a 2019 journal article, entitled “Genetics, archaeology and the far-Right: An unholy trinity”, Susanne Hakenbeck expresses grave concern that recent genetics work on the early Bronze Age invasions of the Indo-European steppe are needlessly giving oxygen to dangerous ideas — namely that young men from one ethnic group might have migrated from the Pontic-Caspian grasslands and violently subdued their neighbours, passing on their paternal DNA at the expense of the native males. This narrative, fairly well-supported in the genetics literature, is for Hakenbeck deeply unpleasant and wrong:
Writer Mary McCarthy said of writer Lillian Hellman ...'Every word she utters is a lie. Including 'and' and 'the.' Was reminded of this having just binge watched Meghan and Harry's 'truth'. Feel I am about to go into a diabetic coma. I won't go on...only to say her next book should be 'The Ladybird Book Of Re Writing History', My favourite bit was when Harry gave her an adoring look as she explained; 'I said....'Walk about? What on earth is a walk about?' It was very well done, fantastic PR and stomach churning.
'Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the US and Europe at the Brookings Institution, has said Germany is a case study of a western state that made a “strategic bet” on globalisation and interdependence — and was now suffering the consequences.
'“It outsourced its security to the US, its export-led growth to China, and its energy needs to Russia,” she wrote in June. “It is now finding itself excruciatingly vulnerable in an early 21st century characterised by great power competition and an increasing weaponisation of interdependence by allies and adversaries alike.”
Dr. Johnson also said that there are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in making money. Christopher Hollis said this was the most un-Christian remark imaginable (Hollis was the kind of Conservative politician I like) but I am coming round to siding with Dr Johnson. He was being deliberately paradoxical but he was usually right. And a great saint.
'The Irish are a very fair people, sir. They never speak well of one another.' Dr Johnson's joke is true and applies to Romanians too.' Is it to do with being a peasant nation or were the Irish whom Johnson met Anglo-Irish like his friends Burke and Goldsmith?
'Hitler in the Wolfsschanze used to gaze at the operations map showing the huge areas notionally controlled by his forces. For a visionary who had achieved total power in a country possessing the best-trained army in the world, the sight induced a sense of invincibility. This armchair strategist never possessed the qualities for true generalship, because he ignored practical problems. During the brief campaigns in Poland, Scandinavia, France and the Balkans, resupply had at times been difficult, but never an insuperable problem. In Russia, however, logistics would be as decisive a factor as firepower, manpower, mobility and morale. Hitler's fundamental irresponsibility - a psychologically interesting defiance of fate - had been to launch the most ambitious invasion in history while refusing to gear the German economy and industry for all-out war. In hindsight, it seems more like the act of a compulsive gambler, subconsciously striving to increase the odds. The horrific consequences for millions of people seemed only to strength his megalomania.'
I have just read for the third time AJP Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War and I highly recommend it. It was, however, published in 1961 and so is very out of date. We know much more now.
He wrote:
"Danzig was the most justified of German grievances: a city of an exclusively German population which manifestly wished to return to the Reich and which Hitler himself restrained only with difficulty. The solution too seemed peculiarly easy. Halifax never wearied of suggesting that Danzig should return to German sovereignty, with safeguards for Polish trade.
"Hitler wanted this also. The destruction of Poland had been no part of his original project. On the contrary, he had wished to solve the question of Danzig so that Germany and Poland could remain on good terms. Was Polish obstinacy then the only thing, which stood between Europe and a peaceful outcome? By no means. Previously Danzig might have been settled without implying any upheaval in international relations. Now it had become a symbol of Polish independence and, with the Anglo-Polish alliance, of British independence as well. Hitler no longer wished merely to fulfill German national aspirations or to satisfy the inhabitants of Danzig. He aimed to show that he had imposed his will on the British and on the Poles. All parties aimed at a settlement by negotiations, but only after victory in a war of nerves.
"...Many however believe that Hitler was a modern Attila, loving destruction for its own sake and therefore bent on war without thought of policy. There is no arguing with such dogmas. Hitler was an extraordinary man; and they may well be true. But his policy is capable of rational explanations; and it is on this policy is built. The escape into irrationality is no doubt easier. The blame for war can be put on Hitler's Nihilism instead of on the faults and failures of European statesmen - faults and failures which their public shared. However, human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness."
The view of Hitler as a nihilist bent on war is now the standard view, as it was when Taylor wrote his very shocking book. It may be accurate, but war against whom?
A good place to see a summary of recent historical judgements is the site of Lawrence Rees, who made the really wonderful TV programme
The Nazis: A Warning from History.
He interviewed many famous historians about the war and on this page discusses why it broke out.
He quotes Sir Richard Evans
“We know now through documentation that has become available over the last few years that he intended there to be a general European war really absolutely from the outset. He’s telling people in private in 1932, 1933, when he’s coming to power, that he’s going to have a general war.”
Sir Ian Kershaw and Adam Tooze agree.
Hitler did want a big war, but he certainly didn’t want war with England. Every historian accepts that.
He wanted a war with the USSR.
A greater historian than Evans, Maurice Cowling, said the clever thing to have done was to have arranged things so that the British Empire stayed out of his war with Stalin. Had France done the same very much suffering could have been saved.
Instead England and France fumbled their way into the war that
Baldwin and Chamberlain had intended to avoid.
Lawrence Rees quotes Adam Tooze saying Hitler went to war
“because he’s convinced, in my view, that the world Jewish conspiracy has taken on a whole new ominous character, and this starts in the summer of 1938, I think, fundamentally with the Evian Conference in which America becomes involved in European affairs around the issue of the organised emigration of eastern European Jews”.
So by 1939 Hitler had come to believe that “the real centre of the world Jewish conspiracy is Washington and Wall Street and Hollywood, and that, of course, fundamentally shifts your assessment of the strategic picture, because behind Britain and France, as in the First World War, ultimately stands the force, the full force, of the American armaments economy.”
This is very interesting. It ties in with what Chamberlain said to the US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, according to what he told James Forrestal, US Secretary of the Navy on December 27th, 1945 as recorded in Forrestal's diary. The two played golf that day.
'I asked him [Kennedy] about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain's position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy's view: that Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt's [William C. Bullitt, then ambassador to France] urging Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a case of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn't fight, Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversation with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain's backside. Kennedy's response always was that putting iron up his backside did no good unless the British had some iron with which to fight, and they did not. . . .'Yet it still seems clear to me that clever diplomacy by Poland and England could have meant Germany going to war with Soviet Russia and not with Poland, England and France.
Poland, in fact, had the chance to go to war with Communist Russia as Germany’s ally. Poland declined, not from sympathy for Russia but from refusal to make the small concessions for which Hitler asked over Danzig and the Polish Corridor.
The Polish Foreign Minister Beck thought that Poland was powerful enough to defy Germany and Russia. This is an incomprehensible delusion, as Taylor points out.
England then gave her guarantee to Poland and Germany prepared for war against Poland, a war in which Hitler did not expect England and France to join.
Had Germany and Russia fought it out, while England armed
to the teeth and stayed out, as Lloyd George wanted, and had France done the same,
would Germany or the Russians have won?
Nobody can say. It depends on how the two sides fought. It depends on the decisions of Stalin and Hitler.
It might well have been the Russians.
But either way would have been better than what did happen. The British Empire might have survived for decades. Japan would not have attacked it. France might not have fallen. Half of Europe might have remained at peace.
"Right now if you’re a respectable writer and you want to write in the main journals, you talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you have to call it ‘the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine'. It’s a very interesting phrase; it was never used before. You look back, you look at Iraq, which was totally unprovoked, nobody ever called it ‘the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.’ In fact I don’t know if the term was ever used — if it was it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked. Top US diplomats have been talking about this for 30 years, even the head of the CIA."Noam Chomsky. (I absolutely hate to agree with a crazily left-wing figure who once praised Pol Pot's 'noble experiment', but here he is right.)
Viorel Tilea came from an old noble family in Turda in
Transylvania, was a cousin of Ion Ratiu, and in 1919 attended the
Paris Peace Conference as private secretary to Iuliu
Maniu.
From 1938 to 1940 he was the Romanian Minister in London, was close to the Focus Group (previously the Anti-Nazi Council) of which Churchill was the leading figure, and
changed the course of world history.
On March 16 and 17 1939, two days after the Germans marched
into Prague he told the British Foreign Office and the Foreign Secretary Lord
Halifax that Germany had issued an ‘ultimatum’ to his government.
Bucharest was astonished and denied there had been an ultimatum, but Tilea stuck to his story.
Robert Boothby, who had been Churchill’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, boasted a few days later over lunch with his mistress Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of Harold, that he had ‘entirely invented’ the story.
Boothby said he had called on the Romanian legation to obtain a visa, met Tilea who had had mentioned that Germany was asking Romania to concentrate more on agriculture, and he had persuaded Tilea to tell the Foreign Office that this was an ‘ultimatum.’
Boothby had then sold the story to the newspapers.
“According to a German intercept, Tilea admitted to another Balkan diplomat that his instructions had only been to talk of an ‘economic ultimatum’; he had ‘made the utmost possible use of his instructions.’ Whatever the background, he shortly retired a wealthy man; he purchased a farm and maintained a monastic silence until his death. The Foreign Office took note that among Tilea’s effects in January 1941 was a pound of solid gold.” (From David Irving's Churchill's War - please bear in mind that Irving is a very gifted researcher but an admirer of Hitler and not to be trusted very far without checking him. I have not been able to check him.)
The consequence was that Chamberlain decided to give guarantees to Romania and Poland.
This meant that British foreign policy was in effect outsourced to the triumvirate-dictatorship in Warsaw.
Because
Poland would not accept an alliance with Bolshevik Russia, Britain had chosen
Poland over Russia. Indeed Lord Halifax told the cabinet that Poland was
stronger militarily than the USSR.
How differently things might have been had Poland accepted Hitler’s offer of an alliance. In return for the free city of Danzig being incorporated in the Reich and allowing an extraterritorial railway and road across the Polish Corridor, Germany held out the lure of territorial gains in the Ukraine and Belorussia, something very attractive to Poland, even though around 17% of Poland's population were Ukrainian or Belarussian already.
Hitler seemingly was prepared to forget the grievances of Germans in Poland for the sake of a useful ally, as he was those of Germans in the South Tyrol for the sake of Mussolini.
Footnote. Boothby was a curious, flamboyant and not an admirable figure. In the 1960s the notorious East End gangsters the Kray Twins forced
boys to let him bugger them.
"I am not going to get this country into a war with anybody for the League of Nations or anybody else or for anything else. There is one danger, of course, which has probably been in all your minds—supposing the Russians and Germans got fighting and the French went in as the allies of Russia owing to that appalling pact they made; you would not feel you were obliged to go and help France, would you? If there is any fighting in Europe to be done, I should like to see the Bolshies and the Nazis doing it.”
"a domination of the Continent in comparison with which the ambitions of Napoleon were feeble..... Today, it is the turn of Czechoslovakia. Tomorrow, it will be of Poland and Roumania. When Germany has obtained the oil and wheat she needs, she will turn on the West. Certainly we must multiply our efforts to avoid war. But that will not be obtained unless Great Britain and France stick together, intervening in Prague for new concessions [to the Sudeten Germans] but declaring at the same time that they will safeguard the independence of Czechoslovakia. If, on the contrary, the Western Powers capitulate again, they will only precipitate the war they wish to avoid."
http://paulgraham.com/think.html
White British people in several cities are in the minority.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data show that in 2011 the white British population of Birmingham was 581,000, or 52 per cent of the city. By 2021, 43 per cent, 491,000 people.People grow up when they get married. It is probably better to get married when you are young because then you grow up. And then what else matures people? I have met very few people who have fully matured who do not have children. I think there is a reason for that, a real technical reason. You are not mature until someone else matters more than you — period. Maybe that will be your wife or your husband, but probably not. They might matter as much as you, and maybe that is the right amount. But when you have children, they matter more than you, unless there is something seriously wrong with you. Very few parents, if push came to shove, would not die for their children. As soon as someone else matters more than you do in some fundamental sense, you have taken another step toward a true, mature responsibility. I do not see that you can do that without necessity, and there is nothing that screams necessity more than an infant. Jordan Peterson
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Schopenhauer
"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence." Orwell
"An idea is always a generalisation, and generalisation is a property of thinking. To generalise means to think." Hegel
Rumours say there were real manhunts in South America in the 19th century but it has never been proven. Big game hunters hunting and killing black men. I read this in an Edwardian travel book when I was a boy.
