Quotations

'The English name for the capital of Ukraine is Kiev.' Peter Hitchens


As Quentin Crisp reminded us, a bejewelled Eva Peron went on to the presidential balcony in Buenos Aires, and raised her arms, diamond bracelets slipping down to the elbow, and began her speech to the crowd below 'We the downtrodden!'

'How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.'

A very famous quotation from Winston Churchill's The River War 

What would Gladstone have said about Netanyahu?

Reading what Mr Gladstone wrote in 1876 about the so called Bulgarian Atrocities, I am put in mind of what the Israeli army is doing now.

"...We now know in detail that there have been perpetrated, under the immediate authority of a Government to which all the time we have been giving the strongest moral, and for part of the time even material support, crimes and outrages, so vast in scale as to exceed all modern example, and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character, that it passes the power of heart to conceive, and of tongue and pen adequately to describe them."

The lost town of Hasankeyf

I had the good luck to meet John Wreford in Istanbul years ago through a common friend. A fascinating man who lived and worked as a photographer in Damascus for years, before and in the early years of the war. He remembered the start of the war in the same way that it was recounted in the Western press. 

Here he is photographing the lost town of Hasankeyf, flooded to make way for a reservoir.

Ilona Schong has been named People Photographer of the Year in the non-professional category at this year's International Photography Awards for her series documenting life inside traditional Romanian homes.

 

Brezhnev offered Transylvania to Hungary

Hungarian Communist leader Janos Kádár's aeroplane pilot told him in 1971 that Leonid Brezhnev had suggested Hungary take back Transylvania. 

"The plan ultimately unravelled because Hungarian leadership feared the dire economic conditions in the region would be too heavy a burden."

In 1968 Brezhnev considered invading Romania after conquering Czechoslovakia and Harold Wilson's cabinet may have gone to war with Communist Russia if this happened. 

(By the way, England previously might have gone to war with Russia over what is now Romania shortly before we went to war with her over control of the holy sites in Jerusalem.)

Madness

"Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad!" Charles Lamb

"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." Robin Williams

“Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”
Hamlet. Putin is not mad (he might be a psychopath but they are abnormally sane). Nor, so far, is Trump.

Quotations

"Are we, then, insane because we have not gone mad?"
Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

“If you’re very, very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very, very stupid?”
John Cleese

Please people use the word bigot correctly

Progressives are as often bigoted as the far right. 

Dr Johnson's dictionary defines a bigot as "a person whose opinions are blindly attached to a party or creed". The definition adds that they are "ignorant of other men's opinions, and obstinately prejudiced against them".

In the early 17th century English adopted the word from French to mean a religious hypocrite. The meaning expanded to include anyone who is closed minded and stubbornly attached to a particular system of beliefs, often mistaken ones, like Disraeli's Mr Kremlin, who had only one idea and that was wrong. 

The definition has recently been widened by progressives to provide backing for the anti-discrimination obsession of our age. It is useful for them because people can sue you if you call them a racist or antisemite and you can't prove it, but bigot implies those sort of things while in a vague way.  The new meaning of bigot is a neologism and to be avoided. 

“One who is unreasonably and blindly attached to a particular creed, church, or party: one who is intolerant of opinions which differ from his own” (Webster’s New Peerless Dictionary, 1954). 

“A person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices, especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (such as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online, 2024). 

Quotations

Interviewer: "When you were in the trenches, was there one thing you missed the most?" Robert Graves: "Kippers, since you ask!"

“The insides of most Protestant churches resemble courthouses or town halls, and the focal point of their services is a serious exhortation from a man in a black gown. No golden light, no bells, incense, and candles. No mystery upon an altar or behind an iconostasis. But people brought up in this atmosphere seem to love it. It feels warm and folksy, and leads, on the one hand, to hospitals, prison reform, and votes for all, and, on the other, to sheer genius for drabness, plain cooking ungraced with wine, and constipation of the bright emotions—all of which are considered virtues.

“If I try to set aside the innate prejudices which I feel against this religion, I begin to marvel at the depth of its commitment to earnestness and ugliness.” Alan Watts, Beyond Theology

Colin Powell's chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson: the Americans got rid of Calin Georgescu

Retired U.S Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson in this interview with Glenn Diesen explains that he was told by someone in the US government that the Americans were going to get rid of Calin Georgescu, who won the first round of the Romanian presidential election in November 2024.

"As I said in Georgia we just messed up. In Romania we didn't mess up we [I] don't know exactly how we did it but I know we did it because someone called me and told me they were going to do it and we did it."

I assumed when the election was cancelled that America had ordered it but some people I spoke to think it was the Romanian deep state acting spontaneously. 

If any country has a deep state, Romania does.


Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson says America has been using dirty tricks to spread Nato to every country in Europe west of Russia. This is the background to the Kiev revolutions in 2004 and 2014 and the present war in Ukraine.

Journalist Pelle Nethrop Taylor and a number of other Swedes say that Nato is the international deep state and used dirty tricks to persuade Sweden and Finland to join NATO. 

The phrase deep state comes from Turkey (and dates back decades (to the 1970s?)

Nato and the Turkish deep state were entwined from the start.

Swedish academic Ola Tunander borrowed the expression for Sweden. (It was then adopted by Americans in 2017.)

A number of incidents involving Russian submarines entering Swedish waters occurred in the 1980s. 

Ola Tunander says most of these incursions were NATO hoaxes.

Classified documents support the theory and Royal Navy submarine captains have admitted to carrying out top-secret operations in Swedish waters.

With the Russian invasion of the Ukraine the Anglo-Americans finally got what they wanted when Sweden and Finland joined Nato.

Pelle Taylor was told by a retired South African spy that MI6 was responsible for the murder of Olaf Palme. 

This sounds extremely unlikely to me.

Still I have read so much about assassinations and coups carried out by the CIA and MI6 that my head spins. 

A source I cannot name but whose authority is absolutely unquestionable told me that the Americans used bribery to put in their man Sali Berisha as president and later in 1997 organised the collapse of pyramid schemes that wrecked the economy, causing vast hardship, so that they could get rid of him.

$1.2 billion was lost by Albanians as a result of this American scam.

I was in Serbia until Tuesday and spoke to some people about President Aleksandar Vukic. He has been masterful about being friends with Putin but also with Macron and other Western leaders.


The latest demonstrations against him started the day I left.


No doubt corruption and incompetence has kept the railway line from Belgrade to Subotica closed so long. 

I well understand why the death of 17 people when the roof collapsed at the new Novi Sad station has created a revolutionary situation.

Something similar happened in Bucharest when 64 people died in a nightclub which had not been checked for fire safety for many years. 

That brought about the fall of Victor Ponta's government and I am sure the Americans did not play any part in that.

But after what we know now from so many sources about CIA regime change operations, and remembering Biden saying Putin had to go, I would be rather surprised if the Americans are not involved to an extent in Serbia too. 

Although as USAID is gone perhaps not 

Postscript.

Wilkerson said in an interview on the BBC's Newsnight, on January 17, 2007, that an Iranian offer to help in stabilising Iraq, in return for lifting sanctions, was turned down by Donald Rumsfeld. Why?

In March 2009, Wilkerson wrote on The Washington Note blog that it was soon known by the Bush administration that some captives in Guantanamo were innocent but they were held anyway in case they had useful information.

He also suggested the Ghouta chemical attack was an Israeli false flag operation. 

I don't know about that but Peter Hitchens  thinks the chemical weapons story a fabrication.

Importantly, no word about Syrian chemical weapons has been heard since the fall of the House of Assad.

How much US policy to Ukraine changed in thirty years

"Freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred." 

President George H W Bush speaking to the Ukrainian parliament on 1 August 1991, trying to persuade Ukraine not to leave the Soviet Union. 

This is something I just read in John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War.

William Safire called it the Chicken Kiev speech.

I remember I was disgusted by it and thought the USA should want the Soviet Union to break up. 

Bush the Elder was a much smaller and duller man than Reagan.  

Had Kissinger not dissuaded Gerald Ford from accepting Reagan's invitation to be his running mate in 1980 Bush wouldn't have been president and we'd have almost certainly been spared his disastrous son  as President. 

How much better that would have been for everybody.

Another Yugoslav parallel

A British journalist friend living in Belgrade  was told by his taxi driver that Yugoslavia was an EU before the EU. He is a very keen believer in the EU and didn't  find this parallel made him cheerful. 

It does me. 

I thought back at the time of the Brexit referendum that the EU was fine for Europe, just not for the UK. I now see that it is bad for every country except the Eastern European member states which get a lot of money from it and markets.

"Like the old Austro-Hungarian empire, the EU continues because it cannot be either reformed or replaced" as Professor Robert Tombs has said. 

A couple of intellectuals  I spoke to in Serbia think the same. 

Perhaps it will take a war to do, far in the future I hope.

Yugoslavia was the embodiment of a post-national state, as was the USSR. The USSR was called Russia by foreigners but it was not the Russian empire renamed. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a greater Serbia but Communist Yugoslavia was not.

Multi-ethnic states only work if they are federal and power is very diffused, as in Switzerland. Even then Yugoslavia didn't - and Belgium is a mess. 

Great Britain has worked very well but now has separatists, happily ones who are losing influence and hope of secession.

Yugoslav parallels

I am just back from Serbia and lots of parallels spring to mind thinking about Yugoslav history.

King Alexander instituted a royal dictatorship in Yugoslavia in 1929 that enjoyed the full support of Yugoslavia's ally France as did the Polish dictatorship (three joint dictators after Pilsudski died) and King Carol II's royal dictatorship in Romania. 

The Anglo-Americans similarly support autocratic regimes in the Persian Gulf today. The stuff about democracies versus autocracies is all my eye.

Slobodan Milosevic, I was told by a historian friend while in Serbia, planned in 1999 on pushing the Albanians out of Kosovo and replacing them with Serbs forced out of Croatia as the result of the war in Croatia that he had initiated. This is different from the story we were told at the time, that he intended to slaughter Albanians, but he would have killed them had they stayed.

This put me in mind of the behaviour of Netanyahu in Gaza and the West Bank today.

How differently the Americans and Nato responded to Milosevic and to Netanyahu.

Srebrenica was thirty years ago last month. Germany sponsored the UN General Assembly resolution designating July 11 the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.

I remember my horror listening to the BBC and realising thousands of Bosnian Muslim men were about to be murdered by the Bosnian Serbs on General Mladic's orders.

I was in Tuzla in Bosnia shortly after the war ended and was in tears hearing an account by a young woman of the Srebrenica massacre. 

I note that Germany is the ardent supporter of Netanyahu's actions in Gaza today. 

I also note that terrible though Srebrenica was it followed Bosnian Muslim massacres of Serbs. 

I cannot call the Srebrenica massacre genocide though. Mladic provided buses to remove women, children and old men. But the Germans and Americans do, while denying that genocide is what the IDF are committing at this moment.

All the killing was a result of Milosevic using national feeling in place of Communism to consolidate his power. 

Netanyahu did something somewhat comparable. He deftly built up Hamas as a guarantee that there would never be a Palestinian state, a project of the Labor Party establishment that he wanted to defeat. 

Hamas is his Frankenstein's monster as Osama bin Laden was the Americans' in the Afghan war before last.

The Communist partisans killed eight (?) thousand ethnic Hungarians in the Vojvodina when they took the region, simply for the crime of being Hungarian, which reminds me of the killing of maybe a hundred thousand Poles and many Jews in Ukraine by the supporters of Stepan Bandera. 

By the way, Bandera himself was in comfortable quarters in a German camp until shortly before the end of the German occupation of the Ukraine. He wanted to be a war criminal, I don't doubt, but wasn't given the chance.

This isnt a parallel but, dipping into John Lewis Gaddis's The Cold War (a book I recommend), I was reminded how in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev and Malenkov had a terrible journey in a 2 propeller plane through a thunderstorm and then a worse boat trip, in which they feared the boat would capsize, before reaching Tito on his holiday island to get his agreement to the invasion of Hungary.

It was otherwise in 1968. Tito and Ceausescu strongly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 by Soviet Russia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria and East Germany. Brezhnev considered invading Romania after Czechoslovakia. Zhivkov of Bulgaria told the plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party on March 29 1968 "There is no need for us to use the Stalinist methods of the past but we are obligated to take measures to introduce order in Czechoslovakia as well as in Romania. Afterwards we will introduce order in Yugoslavia, too."

Travel in August is not for weaklings

I reached Belgrade smoothly last night, sharing a car with the Secretary General of the liberal party who told me about the mafia involvement in Serbian politics and the way the President dominates the media. It sounds like the deep state in America. It was 38° here after dark last night and humid and I trudged for 38 minutes through ill lit empty streets looking for my hotel without any Internet. The ill lit run down area was in fact the centre of the city where the 19th century government buildings are, which is a bit odd.

Serbia is as corrupt and poor as Romania before she joined the European Union but in some ways much freer and more democratic than England or European Union states. People smoke blithely anywhere in restaurants. Caps on plastic bottles, as I said before, come off easily.

My companion rightly wants EU accession for Serbia, but says joining Nato is necessary too. I argue that Nato is a tax on the poor to enrich American companies. No Serbians see Russia as a threat and I wish Romanians were equally wise.

100 degrees in Subotica. The air feels thick with heat.

Mortal hot.

My Hungarian friend who comes from here says though he's sorry Szabadka is no longer in Hungary the Hungarians brought their fate on themselves by letting the Dual Monarchy grab Bosnia, which was obviously in Serbia's sphere of influence.  

Yes, good point. 

Spheres of influence are out of fashion except when the influence is American, but they are useful. 

Serbia is accused of falling short of being completely democratic. This may simply be because she has good relations with Russia and China and the US Nato deep state wants to regime  change her. 

In fact Serbia is more democratic than any European Union country and especially than Starmer's island prison island. 

A joyful reminder of this is my plastic bottle of water, the cap of which came off without the least resistance.

As if on cue two teenage boys just walk past speaking Serbian but using, clearly as a joke, the very rude English word for black person.

I finally on my fourth visit see the synagogue. Of the roughly 5,000 Jews who lived here when the Hungarians invaded most were murdered by the Germans. 1,000 came back.

This weekend is an enjoyable cultural festival. The folk dances remind me of the ones Michael Redgrave recorded in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. 

When I first came here the town was mostly Hungarian but now it's half Serb and the festival reflects this. Many Croats too live in the area. They seem to get on well.

Demographics (and theology) drive history.

My tour of the Banat reaches Subotica

I love Subotica/Szabadka. It's just as I remember it. The hot summer air seems solid with a Spanish lethargy. The dark streets where the trees completely shut out the sun and sky. It makes Hungarianness seem weird and tropical, quite unlike other (ex-) Hungarian towns. I came here first at the recommendation. of a very sinister but very well travelled American debauchee who lived in Budapest in the 1980s and owned a sado-masochistic nightclub in Vienna. He correctly predicted that I wouldn't like Belgrade. This is my fourth visit, all in August in the upper 90s.

And so farewell Băile Herculane

And so farewell, Baile Herculane, Baths of Hercules, Aqua Herculis, Herkulesbad, Herkulesfürdő, a beautiful Hapsburg thermal resort where the Empress Sissi met shepherds in fhe forest and rediscovered Heine. The baths as renovated in the 1850s are a symbol that the Empire had suppressed the Hungarians and their mad leader Kossuth. Actually Romanians, Slovaks and mostly the army of Tsar Nicholas I did so. The Austrian Chancellor Schwarzenberg said "We shall astonishing the world by our ingratitude" and so they did. Liberal opinion in England, Europe and America thought Kossuth a hero. 

Now the town is entirely Romanian except for one Hungarian family and in a state of dereliction I irresponsibly find attractive, though much has been renovated in the last few years.

Ion Iliescu has died

I missed the old swine's death tilll  yesterday afternoon. (I am travelling.) He won the "competition" to outlive Queen Elizabeth II, Gorbachev and Dr Kissinger. He also outlived King Michael, an infinitely better man. 

Only two people defeated the Securitate: Ion Iliescu and Doina Cornea. 

In Romanian fashion I plagiarised that remark.

Iliescu's forthcoming state funeral reminds me of Belloc's little squib:

Here richly, with ridiculous display,

The Politician's corpse was laid away.

While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged

I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

If you seek his monument, Romanians, look around you. 

My journey begins, upon the midnight

Gara Băneasa after midnight in darkness, the station shut, resembles a Scooby Doo episode. A dozen people in a splash of light on the platform are waiting for the 00.38 to Timișoara. Someone is playing manele, a musical genre I fortunately always enjoy. I have left my deracinated central Bucharest and find the Romania that made me love her. Now the train arrives and the search for my compartment.

Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity

Nicolae Bălcescu, the Romanian revolutionary of 1848: “For me, the question of ethnic solidarity is more important than the question of freedom. A people can use freedom only when it’s able to survive as a nation. Freedom can be easily regained, if it is lost, but not ethnic identity.”

In South-Eastern Europe the French revolution and Robespierre's revolutionary principle of Liberté was understood as national freedom or at least, for those Greek Phanariots like Alexander Ypsilantis who wanted to revive Byzantium with the Tsar's support, freedom from rule by infidels. Ypsilantis's revolt was defeated after failing to win the support that he expected from Romanians, who cared not a fig about Greeks. Thereafter Balkan history was about ethnic solidarity and identity.

Now a third of Romanians live abroad and immigrants from countries with lower wages are doing the manual work that need doing. Romania needs pizzas delivered and waiters who do not speak either Romanian or English.