Thursday 25 April 2024
Hengist and Horsa arrived in Kent as mercenaries at the invitation of the British and became the first English kings - I am incredulous that not all English people know this
The American empire dates from just after the end of the Second World War
"The victors were the Soviet Union and the United States (also England, France and Nationalist China, but they were weak). Both these countries now went to work – without swastikas, goose-stepping, or officially declared racism, but under the cover of 'socialism' on the one side, and 'democracy' on the other, to carve out their own empires of influence. They proceeded to share and contest with one another the domination of the world, to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to. They also acted to control their own populations, each country with its own techniques – crude in the Soviet Union, sophisticated in the United States – to make their rule secure."
Quotations
Pete: 'They called Galileo a loony.'
Dud: 'They also called a lot of loonies loonies.'
What is so very depressing is that the EU vote - and the Scottish Referendum before it - has revealed how "patriotism" (my god, I feel old fashioned and archaic just typing that word) has not only been expunged as a virtue in the public consciousness and is now seen positively as a vice. This has been the relentless work of - in my opinion - left-wing politicians and academics since the war who have always recognised that by breaking up the unity of one community into smaller, sometimes artificial groupuscules ('working class', 'youth') they can then create political majorities which can be used to give them power. I mean who today can say, loudly, 'I am proud to be British' except old ladies in racist rants on buses or Sun columnists or madmen on the internet?
Wednesday 24 April 2024
Quotations
"If she measured her own feeling toward the world she must have been pretty well able to gauge those of the world to herself and perhaps she reflected that it is the ordinary lot of people to have no friends if they themselves care for nobody."
Miss Crawley in Vanity Fair by Thackeray, which I am rereading.Quotations from De Maistre and Burke in praise of prejudice
"Nothing is more vital to Man than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to Man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Individual reason is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions." Joseph De Maistre. I remember my supervisor Robert Tombs looking askance when I told him that I found De Maistre's ideas attractive, all those years ago at Cambridge before life began.
"Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through past prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature." Edmund Burke"In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows." Burke on liberal theorists in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). He meant this as an insult to them, while De Maistre said the hangman was the foundation on which society rests, a truism that shocked everybody.
Quotations from J.R.R. Tolkien
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.
'Military idiot and bar' was the Goon Show joke
It is tempting to think that retired army officers are stupid. The ones who become British Conservative MPs, for example, or the ones who write for the papers. The explanation for the things they say must be more nuanced, that they are trained to be soldiers not geopolitical analysts.
Colonel Richard Kemp was in charge of the British troops we sent to Afghanistan (why didn't we know better, after losing three Afghan wars?) and writes in the Daily Telegraph In February of last year he hoped that Ukraine could take back the territory lost to Russia the previous year and part of Crimea, 'but only with our support'.
A total Russian collapse is surprisingly close
Tuesday 23 April 2024
Will Zionism self destruct?
Alistair Crooke, formerly of MI6, in a talk he intends to give at the HSE University, Moscow, this month will say that Saudi Prince Bandar persuaded Donald Rumsfeld in 2006 to reduce Iranian power, increased by overthrowing their enemies the Taliban and Saddam, by overthrowing Assad. This is very interesting.
Now Israel is increasingly ruled by Middle Eastern Jews and is on the road to becoming another country in the region ruled by religious fanatics. The American evangelicals won't mind but liberal Democrat Jews will.
I wonder whether Israel will exist in 2100 but think it will not disappear without a world war. Seriously. I do not want it to cease to exist for several strong reasons, including wanting to avoid America launching a world war, but what a world of pain that languid dilettante Arthur James Balfour has caused.
Are these the end times, like the rustic American Evangelicals thought all along? And it's all England's fault.
"Sunak unveils biggest military spending increase in a generation"
Why is Rishi Sunak increasing defence spending massively when Great Britain is not threatened by any state actors? Why should we care what China does or what happens in the Middle East? Does no British politician understand anything about foreign affairs?
Will there always be an England? No.
For Saint George's Day a tweely expressed but devastating thought by Margaret Thatcher's official biographer, former Telegraph and Spectator editor (and former boss of Boris Johnson), Charles Moore. "Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years."
Monday 22 April 2024
Quotations
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Only press on : no feeling is final.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
"In a general way it's very difficult to become remarkable. People won't take sufficient notice of one, don't you know." Joseph Conrad, quoted by Anthony Powell as the epigraph to his memoirs.
Saturday 20 April 2024
Patrick Cockburn is always interesting
Patrick Cockburn on February 24 in the i newspaper, tweeted that day by Peter Hitchens.
"As an unforced political error, Biden’s mistake over Gaza vies with President George W Bush in invading Iraq in 2003 and President Vladimir Putin ordering Russian troops into Ukraine in 2022. As a military conflict, Gaza might be small, but it has an infinite capacity to destabilise the region and the US itself."Israel, helped by the US, has wrecked a status quo in the Middle East that favoured them both and whose destruction they may already rue."
My country right or wrong
Patriotism is always a good thing. The problem nowadays is that so many people are very patriotic for foreign countries. I am one of them in the sense of loving Romania passionately. But with one's own country the rule should be "my country right or wrong". With other countries this rule should never apply, but it does. Especially when the other country in question is Israel.
Americans' patriotism and lack of irony are two of their strengths but American patriotards are very annoying.
Equally annoying, and perhaps equally dangerous, are the people who think patriotism is all right in small doses, like an infection. Western Europe and England are full of them. These people are often globalists.
Patriotism is required by the Fourth Commandment. (Protestants call it the fifth.) Thou shalt honour thy father and mother.
'The least eventful war ever'
This is how wars generally begin, rather than because of plots by evil men.
Friday 12 April 2024
The Portuguese banknotes scandal of 1925 and the end of the first Portuguese Republic
This is the fascinating story of Alves Reis that could have been written by William Le Queux, Edgar Wallace or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Even Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crime, never dreamt of BUYING the Bank of Portugal with forged notes.
I am staying in the Hotel Metropole in Lisbon where Reis stayed until he had enough "money" for the Hotel Alvenida Palace.
In the story of Aladdin the Chinese empire is gripped by massive inflation because Aladdin was turning so many things into gold. Reis's forgeries created a boom and bust in Portugal which led to a coup against the First Republic and the benign despotism of Dr Salazar.
Reiss became converted to Protestantism in gaol and converted many other prisoners.
Sunday 7 April 2024
The pursuit of happiness
Five suggestions for how to be happy, based on replies to questionnaires by people who had completed the Bristol University 'science of happiness' course:
Talk to strangers
Quotations
“Everything about this [English] society is disagreeable to me – from its limited way of thinking to its indecent manner of cooking vegetables”. Portugal’s greatest novelist, José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900), was a Consul in Newcastle and Bristol. He was one of the fairly few famous men to have lived and died in Queen Victoria's 63 year reign: Oscar Wilde and Charles Stewart Parnell are two others that spring to mind.
Saturday 6 April 2024
Franklin Foer says the Golden Age of American Jews began in 1967 and is drawing to a close
Friday 5 April 2024
10 Commandments of Propaganda
A summary by Belgian historian Anne Morelli of Lord Ponsonby's 'Falsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War' (1928).
1. We don't want war, we are only defending ourselves!
2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!
3. Our adversary's leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil
4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!
5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention
6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons
7. We suffer few losses, the enemy's losses are considerable
8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause
9. Our cause is sacred
10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor
Quotations
Tuesday 2 April 2024
Before progressives were progressive about race
Monday 1 April 2024
Quotations
He spends his vacation visiting the wonders of what the old world built, yet hates the beliefs that inspired them to build it."
I,Hypocrite (Twitter/X)
Sunday 31 March 2024
Christ is risen!
Wednesday 27 March 2024
Western media do not invent the facts but they invent the news. They are the great threat to peace.
I allow myself only to skim the news each morning in a few minutes but I was very sad when a friend told me that the Princess of Wales (it is not polite to call Her Royal Highness Kate) has cancer. I wish her a swift recovery.
Friday 22 March 2024
Quotations
Ami Ayalon, former director of Israeli Security Agency Shin Bet: I would fight back, I would do everything in my power to secure my liberation. They know they’re the oppressors, they just don’t care.
An outside caterer preparing the nave of St Edmundsbury Cathedral for a Masonic fund-raising dinner tonight
This is normal now in Protestant cathedrals in England. A silent discotheque took place in Canterbury Cathedral recently, which was the shrine in Catholic times of St Thomas a Becket, and the nave of the ancient Rochester Cathedral was used for crazy golf in 2019.
Tuesday 19 March 2024
The World Crisis
'Not even a faint reservation was heard from the IDF's general staff in November, when the commander of the army's 36th Armored Division, Brig. Gen. David Bar Kalifa, issued a handwritten battle directive to his troops, calling on them to take revenge on the Palestinians.
'...Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram not only ordered his troops to open fire on Israeli civilians and blew up a Palestinian university in Gaza without permission, but also stated in an interview with journalist Ilana Dayan right as the war started that Israel's political leadership should refrain from any prospect of a political solution to the crisis. The IDF's chief of staff didn't say a word then either.'
Sunday 17 March 2024
'Israel Is on the Brink of the Abyss'
'The Shin Bet security service and Military Intelligence "completely failed" to detect what Yahya Sinwar, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, had planned, one defense official acknowledged. "It's also true that a few days before October 7, the consensus of all the intelligence agencies was that Hamas was growing only moderately stronger and hadn't found an alternative" to the cross-border attack tunnels Israel blocked.
'"Nevertheless, the defense establishment's expectation was that if the government continued the judicial overhaul, Bezalel Smotrich continued his life's work of erasing the Green Line [between Israel and the West Bank] and Itamar Ben-Gvir heated up the Temple Mount and the West Bank, it would end in rivers of blood," he added.'
Vladimir Putin at the Valdai International Discussion Club in September 2010
'But I would like to remind you that in the wake of Kosovo we did not recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. We stopped short of that. As I said in public quite recently, we "swallowed" it. The only thing that I did at the time was to sign a decree on the development of economic relations with these territories. By the way, that was in line with United Nations requirements, because the UN was against the economic isolation of these territories. That was all. In principle, we were prepared for further dialogue.
'And yet armed forces were used. Some quarters are so fond of shooting and bombing that they thought they would succeed here too. Why did they think that they would succeed here when they had no success elsewhere, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East? They failed here as well, and those who believe that it is the most effective instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again.
'...One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor.'
Thursday 14 March 2024
Quotations
Sunday 10 March 2024
“Six times in the past 12 years Netanyahu rejected plans to eliminate the Hamas leadership”
“Six times in the past 12 years [Benjamin Netanyahu] has rejected plans proposed by the heads of Israel’s secret security agency, known as Shabak, to eliminate the Hamas leadership.”
A tale of two rabbis: Eliyahu Mali and Elhanan Beck
From Anadolu Agency (AA), the Turkish state-owned news news agency.
1. Eliyahu Mali
An Israeli rabbi urged the killing of women and children in the Gaza Strip and said he considered it a response to the teachings of halakha, or Jewish law.
Saturday 9 March 2024
Wednesday 6 March 2024
Saudi Arabia's missing princes
I missed, in August 2017, these astonishing accounts on the BBC site - they read exactly like a thriller - of three Saudi princes kidnapped in Europe, taken back to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and probably executed.
They scarcely made the news and I don't remember them being mentioned when Adnan Khashoggi was murdered.
This is England and America's gallant ally, whom we armed to fight the Houthis.
That sometimes silly former British Ambassador Craig Murray wrote about the cases well.
As he says, Mohammed Bin Salman no doubt thought the death of Khashoggi, in a Saudi consulate in Turkey, would go equally unnoticed, but he wrote for the Washington Post and journalists do not like their colleagues being killed. Meanwhile Erdogan, unlike his European allies, was not prepared to tolerate Saudi political murder in his country.
The Yinon Plan is not important, but Israel wants to be surrounded by failed states and with US help has partly achieved this goal
Sunday 3 March 2024
A 'western military source' quoted by John Helmer, the senior Western journalist in Moscow
“I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery] Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public support, domestic stability); and also the military objective since Day One of the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”
1984
George Galloway and the Decline of the West
The British Labour party deselected its candidate in the Rochdale by-election for saying that Netanyahu knew beforehand about the Hamas attack on 7 October.
Thursday 29 February 2024
Today is February 29th
Today is February 29th, the day when in England by tradition women are permitted to propose marriage to men.
I intend to stay home and not answer the telephone or read messages until the danger period has passed.
Tuesday 27 February 2024
NY Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about Hamas rapes, was in Israeli military intelligence
Mondoweiss has published an article that everybody interested in the horrors in the Holy Land should read, regardless of which side they are on, if either.
New York Times reporter Anat Schwartz, who wrote articles about rapes by Hamas, is an Israeli who has served in military intelligence.
'There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”'
Saturday 24 February 2024
We have met the enemy and he is us
"The extent of the continuing mayhem resulting from CIA operations gone awry is astounding. In Afghanistan, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, Kosovo, Ukraine, and far beyond, the needless deaths, instability, and destruction unleashed by CIA subversion continues to this day. The mainstream media, academic institutions, and Congress should be investigating these operations to the best of their ability and demanding the release of documents to enable democratic accountability."
Jeffrey Sachs, a distinguished America economist. The whole article is
Tuesday 20 February 2024
Saturday 17 February 2024
Massacres in Palestine have continued since 1921, thanks to A.J. Balfour
The Jews lost 6,373 people, about 1% of the Jewish population of Palestine, in the 1948 war.
The massacre by Hamas of up to 600 or more civilians in October last year and the slaughter of at least 2,000 Arab civilians in Gaza since are part of a story that goes back to 1921.
One country is completely to blame - mine, England, and the all too languid, over-intelligent Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour.
Friday 16 February 2024
Israel-Hamas conflict quotations
Thursday 15 February 2024
The words of 102 year-old Franco-Jewish philosopher Edgar Morin, a distinguished French savant who fought in the Communist resistance
The film clip is here.
"I am both astonished and outraged by the fact that those who represent the descendants of a people who were persecuted for centuries for religious or racial reasons... That the descendants of this people who are today the decision-makers of the State of Israel, that they could not only colonize an entire people, partly drive them out of their land and seek to expel them for good... But also, after the massacre of October 7, engaged in a real massive slaughter on the populations of Gaza and continue, incessantly, hitting civilians, women, and children.
Sunday 11 February 2024
Quotations
"The war in Ukraine is just a diversion from the real war against us." Laura Ghisoni, last summer
"Every day is once in a lifetime." Ayesha. No, I don't know who she is. Also coined by Mac McAnally
“I think that Meghan must have been incredibly envious and then jealous of Kate. I heard Meghan actually thought she was going to be a princess and live in Windsor Castle. Instead, there’s William and Kate with this beautiful house, while they are stuck in Nottingham Cottage which Harry used to call ‘my hovel’.” Ingrid Seward, editress of Majesty magazine and royal biographer
Friday 9 February 2024
Quotations
"This world is concrete – it cannot be described in the abstract unhistorical language of the socialist or liberal theorist without removing the skin of significance that renders it perceivable" Sir Roger Scruton, How to Be a Non-Liberal, Anti-Socialist Conservative
America blew up the German pipeline last year, which is an act of war. The media is sublimely incurious.
For me Putin's stated opinion settles it. The cui bono principle limits it to the US and the Ukraine and the Ukraine does not have the means. YET NOBODY IN THE PRESS DISCUSSES THIS.
TUCKER: "Who blew up Nordstream?"
PUTIN: "You, for sure."
TUCKER: "I was busy that day."
PUTIN: "You personally may have an alibi, but the CIA has no such alibi."
TUCKER: "Wouldn't you present evidence and win a propaganda victory?"
PUTIN: "In the war of propaganda, it is very difficult to defeat the US, because the US controls all the world's media."
But then Kissinger thought that Ukraine did it.
Thursday 8 February 2024
This interview is hilarious and terribly shocking
Nobody is going to sanction Tucker Carlson for interviewing Putin - that is a non-story and he deserves congratulations on his scoop -but this interview is hilarious and terribly shocking. How very low US journalism has fallen.