A Political Refugee From the Global Village - an Englishman in Bucharest

Defining right and left

2012-02-08T17:32:00.005+02:00

Hadley Freeman in the Guardian is having a shot at defining left and right:
'Having helmet-like hair: rightwing. Eating vegetables: leftwing. Religion: rightwing. Science: leftwing. But really, the possibilities here are endless! Flowers: rightwing (so decorative, so expensive); trees: leftwing (so climate change-y, so environmental). Dresses: rightwing (so ladylike); trousers (on women): leftwing (so Hillary Clinton-y).'

Lentils are left wing but I love them. All vegetables are left wing except asparagus.

Beautiful women are right wing especially but by no means only blondes. Mrs Basescu and the late Mrs Brezhnev are left wing. Tight skirts are right wing. Comfortable shoes left wing.

Left wing is not sexy, nor are any vegetables except asparagus.

Chocolate is right wing. Fruit left wing.

Beaches are very right wing except in England/UK. Mountains too of course.

Mobile telephones are very right wing and have contributed to the deaths of perhaps millions of Congolese.

Romania is right wing, especially the PSD. England is left wing including the Conservative Party.

Scotland and rain are left wing. So are gerbils.

Oxford is right-wing, Cambridge left-wing.

The Black Sea at Constanza

2012-02-04T14:21:00.000+02:00

2012-02-04T12:44:00.002+02:00

The freezing cold has killed hundreds of people in Eastern Europe. On Tuesday night it was said on the net to have been -22° in Bucharest but yesterday for the first time I was cold at home though it was only -12. yet I could still hear the shouting of the gallant protesters in Piata Universiatii.

The placard pithily says it all:

The same play
The same actors
But we no longer wish
To be spectators.

But to pose the question thus is to answer it. Where are new actors to be found? There are none. Yes restore the monarchy but that will not create public spirited and competent politicians or a ruling class which takes its obligations seriously. The King of Bulgaria when he became Prime Minister filled his government with clever Bulgarian émigrés from the City of London or Wall St. and, so I am told, in six months they were as corrupt as the government they replaced. And so it goes.

How Romania might have avoided Communism; Herbert Hoover speaks from the grave

2012-02-04T11:29:00.007+02:00

Herbert Hoover speaks from the grave to argue in a scholarly work of history that American involvement in the Second World War was a disastrous blunder for which his successor Franklin Roosevelt is to be blamed and that Britain should also have avoided war. Romanians who without exception blame FDR and Churchill (completely unfairly) for Yalta will take Hoover's side.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/283064

This is incredibly interesting but it has hardly been reviewed. A 100 page fragment of Macaulay’s projected History of France got far more attention in the papers when it was published in 1974. One of the very few reviews of Hoover’s book is here:

http://spectator.org/archives/2011/11/18/revisionist-history-that-matte

Had France and England not gone to war far fewer people are likely to have died, although I suspect that Russia (whom all well informed people expected to fall in a couple of months) might still have defeated Germany. I loathe and despise Oswald Mosley but I think he may have been right on one single thing, that going to war to preserve the balance of power in Europe was a mistake all along - in the Napoleonic Wars, in 1914 and in 1939.

I have always suspected that Franklin Delano Roosevelt is not the hero he is portrayed as being but a Bad Thing but I have never studied his Administration in any detail. I would like to know more about Hoover who was a progressive Republican not at all like Calvin Coolidge (but Coolidge also deserves rehabilitation I imagine - after all a leader who does nothing is always to be admired).

I more and more begin to think that the Anglo-French guarantees to Poland and Romania in 1939 were a mistake and Britain and France should have formed an alliance to defend themselves and let Eastern Europe go. But a very hard one to judge indeed. If FDR deliberately provoked Pearl Harbor he was the greatest villain unhanged and yet without Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the USA Europe would have been either dominated by Stalin or Hitler. Counter-factual speculation is frowned on but Romanians who bitterly blame Roosevelt and Churchill for Yalta will probably side with Hoover. In any case as AJP Taylor said:

In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?

(A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), xxxvii.)

It is completely wrong of Romanians to blame Churchill and Roosevelt for Yalta, as if anything we agreed at Yalta would have helped Romania. After all Stalin and Churchill split Hungary 50%-50% and Hungary became a Russian satellite. Unless we specifically blame Churchill and Roosevelt for the disastrous decision to invade Sicily not Greece. It would make more sense for Romanians to blame Britain and France for going to war in 1939. But Romania wanted that worthless guarantee from us.

Victors write history and Russia Britain and America won. This is why Marxism is still respectable and fascism (no longer a threat) is purest evil. We in the West lived in a bipolar world and however much we knew Communism was evil we could not be absolutely certain, while the USSR was a superpower, that history would 'prove' us right. The USSR was a vast power and historians deeply respect power. Had Hitler won the historians would write very differently about him.

We went to war to protect the power and independence of the British Empire and save Eastern Europe and we failed completely, at hideous cost.

On V.E. Day the diarist (and MP for my unglamorous home town) Sir Henry (‘Chips’) Channon threw a very grand party in his house, 5 Belgrave Square. The guests included exiled royalty and the cream of Society and he said to a young heiress whom he had invited, ‘This is what be were fighting for’. To which she replied, ‘Oh, are all these people Poles?’

Poland was crucified for fifty years and the England of Chips Channon, hierarchical, imperial, self-confident, decent, vaguely Christian, male dominated, sans welfare state, hideously white, is now one with Nineveh and Babylon. Perhaps it was the best outcome possible, perhaps not.

How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

2012-02-04T09:52:00.000+02:00

How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?

That's NOT funny.

I suspect that that joke is no longer so funny (it was a scream in the 80s) perhaps because feminists have now taken over completely.

I have been told by two close women friends that I am the most feminist man they have ever met and I was very flattered but I am only a feminist in the sense of wanting what is best for women. Instead women are forced to work as well as bring up children and forced to do many other things like have casual affairs. What I hate most is the compulsion used to enforce the feminist rules. But I absolutely hate the misogyny, born of fear of women, that you meet so often in Romania. I always prefer and take the side of women against men and find they have much more interesting minds than men.

Does this make sense? I strongly want to stop (completely if possible) immigration from the Third to First World but don't like racism and the kind of people who after disagreeing with me about immigration then go on to tell me that they don't like blacks or Jews or whatever. THAT IS NOT WHAT I MEANT! I also don't care for the kind of people who wouldn't want their sister to marry a black man.

I made a table of Scandinavians roar with laughter in 1992 when I said I thought the only people in Norway who got married were homosexuals. That would no longer be even remotely funny. (Meanwhile as homosexual marriage has become a fact, Norway was taking in a sizeable Muslim community who hate homosexuality.)

How many secret policemen and historians does it take to change a light bulb?

2012-02-04T09:41:00.000+02:00

Q: How many secret policemen does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There never *was* any light bulb.

Q: How many secret policemen does it take to break a light bulb?

A: None. The light bulb fell down the stairs.

Q: How many historians does it take to change a light bulb?

A (by Dr. L): There is a great deal of debate on this issue. Up until the mid-20th century, the accepted answer was ‘one’: and this Whiggish narrative underpinned a number of works that celebrated electrification and the march of progress in light-bulb changing. Beginning in the 1960s, however, social historians increasingly rejected the ‘Great Man’ school and produced revisionist narratives that stressed the contributions of research assistants and custodial staff. This new consensus was challenged, in turn, by women’s historians, who criticized the social interpretation for marginalizing women, and who argued that light bulbs are actually changed by department secretaries. Since the 1980s, however, postmodernist scholars have deconstructed what they characterize as a repressive hegemonic discourse of light-bulb changing, with its implicit binary opposition between ‘light’ and ‘darkness,’ and its phallogocentric privileging of the bulb over the socket, which they see as colonialist, sexist, and racist. Finally, a new generation of neo-conservative historians have concluded that the light never needed changing in the first place, and have praised political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for bringing back the old bulb. Clearly, much additional research remains to be done.

And the one that runs through my head all he time, conceivably for Freudian reasons:

Q: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: None. You young people go out and enjoy yourselves. I'll sit here at home in the dark.

WHAT have Winnie the Pooh and Catherine the Great got in common?

2012-02-04T09:02:00.000+02:00

I just remembered, after many years, what is still my favourite joke of all time.

WHAT have Winnie the Pooh and Catherine the Great got in common?

The same middle name.

The second funniest joke is:

How many surrealist painters does it take to change a light bulb?

Fish.

Just one more ancient, early 80s, lightbulb joke:

How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to be changed

2012-01-29T16:43:00.000+02:00

Have you heard the news? Ruxandra asked me last night. One of our friends is dating Jacqueline Bissett!

This is news indeed and I am impressed even though Wikipedia tells me she was born shortly after D –Day.

I was born in the Harold Macmillan era after all. Towards the end, he added.

I am a 50 year-old teenager.

2012-01-29T16:41:00.001+02:00

I love St Paul's Cathedral (as everything by Wren) but it has no spirituality. The mediaeval cathedrals do if only slightly because they were once Catholic. though now low-key polite and full of military insignia and gift shops. Religion in England is a peculiarly depressing thing thanks to Anglicanism – even English Catholicism is tinged with it. Catholicism in Romanai had a distinctly Orthodox tinge with much invocation of the saints. Priests behave like the Catholic priests of my boyhood in England – are deferred to automatically. And what is surprising they are all right-wing. In Romania in fact even poets are right-wing.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it

2012-01-29T16:20:00.000+02:00

‎"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it (George Bernard Shaw). I posted this on my wall in Facebook and a flurry of Romanians clicked like.

I guessed Romanians would like this. It is only half-true, though. Cynics do not observe everything.

But Romanian are a very religious people who strongly believe in original sin and Man’s fallen nature. Which after all is the only Christian dogma which is empirically verifiable. Though Romanians lack the infinite regret in condemning sin which is the mark of the perfect Christian. On the contrary they have a relish for condemning it. Even sometimes when they commit the same sins themselves. In fact especially when they commit the same sins themselves.

For a long time I thought when Romanians told me about how X was stealing and Y got his money through connections and Z slept her way to a position of power I thought this meant they disapproved and found out later they did not at all. Rather naïf of me.

Romanians are always terrified of lua teapa (being skewered or conned, to be impaled or literally to receive a stake) and so always believe the worst and are often right.

Syria on the eve of the horror.

2012-01-29T13:00:00.000+02:00

I should like the unspeakable Assad to win decisively in Syria, faute de mieux, but it is not possible. What comes next will be much worse. For the Christians especially but for everyone.

The brave rebels are the majority Sunnis fighting for their democratic right to take over the state and to oppress the minorities. It took me a while to realise this but not so long as the BBC.

No one is going to introduce a Scandinavian type system of government in Syria. Quite the contrary the Baathists in Syria as in Iraq are secular and believe in women's rights.

And the new Libyan situation is worse than under Gadaffi and a hundred thousand Christians have left Egypt since Mubarak fell.

I feel like it is August 1914 or the first weeks of 1861 in the USA and things are moving inevitably to an unthinkable disaster, people see it but do not stop it. Much better to have let the Southern states secede or Austria to take Serbia than what happened.

Is this also true of the German invasion of Poland in 1939?

Very good news

2012-01-27T12:19:00.000+02:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-curious-case-of-the-vanishing-killer-6294626.html

For the last 70 years we have been in the grip of a heart disease epidemic that began in the 1940s, rose to a peak in the 1970s and then began to fall. All Western countries were affected and all followed broadly the same pattern. Now it is suddenly falling. No one knows why deaths from heart attacks rose or why they are falling around the world. A good reminder not to believe researchers when they say they do know why things happen. Experts do not know much and are usually pretty incurious. "Les savants ne sont pas curieux."

How odd that no-one noticed the close connection between lung cancer and smoking until the 60s. One day climate scientists will I hope explode the current climate warning panic and genetics will explode many idées reçues about sex and race too.

Many of the world's problems are caused by second and third rate academics. The rest are caused by second and third rate teachers.

Of Prime Ministers and pubs and Catherine of Aragon

2012-01-27T12:07:00.000+02:00

John Major talked of warm beer — along with cricket, green suburbs and dog lovers — in a much-mocked 1993 speech on the characteristics that defined Britain. How odd that he omitted pubs from the list.

So why are pubs called the Cat & Fiddle? A new book taps into the intriguing history of British pubs

www.dailymail.co.uk

Caterine la Fidele, or Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII, gave her name to every pub called the Cat & Fiddle. I didn't know this - a charming relic of Catholic England -or about the Marquess of Granby. Though the books on my father’s shelves would have told me. I did know that the Goat and Compasses – where is that pub? – was a corruption of the Cromwellian pub name ‘God encompasseth us’. Even if they did not love cakes and ale the puritans were not teetotallers. That came much later.

Were John Major or any of our Prime Ministers pub-lovers? I can't imagine it. Maybe Wellington but I doubt it.

David Cameron was pictured unconvincingly in a pub during the elction – looking as uncomfortable as Margaret Thatcher holding that lamb in 1979 or Harold Macmillan sitting in a new built council house when he was Minister of Housing.Tony Blair was a regular at The Dun Cow in Sedgefield, County Durham. He took French PM Lionel Jospin there in 1998, and US President George Bush in 2003. Can you imagine Salisbury or Heath in the pub? John Wilkes or Boris yes but Boris will not be PM nor was Wilkes. Ditto Charles James Fox and George Brown.

Be in the moment where God is

2012-01-27T11:58:00.001+02:00

Be in the moment where God is. I thought this again this evening in the falling snow in Str. Blanari.

The inclement weather has made me decide to stay in my hole today like hobbit or other children’s character. They often had holes for some reason I reflect. Alice, Ratty, even Pooh got stuck on one.

Last night I could hear the shouts of the protestors who withstood the snow to stand in Piata Universitatii. Irina has made herself sick standing in the square each night, she told me. I asked Vasile as he was selling me a bottle of Riesling de Jidvei what he thought and he said he sympathised with the protesters but what alternative do they have to this government which will be any better? exactly. this is a protest against all Romanian politicians - the whole 'political class' the corrupt pays legal which runs Romania. Amen except there is no alternative. Except I suppose education, spiritual renewal, such glorious empty words.

Last night I sought refuge in Bellini which is between the metro and my flat and read Raymond Chandler on my kindle eating comfort food not on ‘my diet. ’ I tell myself freezing weather and diets don’t go. I am the picture of a bourgeois bachelor.

I remember some eighteenth century bachelor whose entire social life consisted in going each evening to the same restaurant eating the same dinner alone and reading his newspaper for twenty years. An heroic life.

Listening to Hutch in snow-bound Bucharest before bed. What an innocent life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLCHkgs_hds

“He nibbles at a petit beurre/ And gives his ovaltine a stir/ And satisfying fleshly wants/ He settles down to Norman fonts.” It was ever thus, it feels.

''We had the best of educations"

2012-01-27T11:51:00.001+02:00

''We had the best of educations — in fact, we went to school every day — ' 'I've been to a day-school, too,' said Alice; 'you needn't be so proud as all that.' 'With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously. Yes,' said Alice, 'we learned French and music.' 'And washing?' said the Mock Turtle. 'Certainly not!' said Alice indignantly. 'Ah! then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock Turtle in a tone of great relief.

Sir John Gielgud was sublime as the Mock Turtle in Jonathan Miller’s druggy-seeming Alice, which does not preserve any of the spirit of Carrol but is a great and very English work of art. And infinitely better than the Johnny Depp version. I saw 3 minutes of the Depp version, all special effects instead of imagination or acting, and told my niece the Miller version was way superior but though I bought it for her as a present several years ago she vehemently and I thought rather rudely disagreed. She is 12..

In the 60s - I can actually remember this just - the Victorian Age seemed close and you feel this watching the Miller Alice. By the mid-70s it seemed infinitely distant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcbDvn62fHo

Porsche

2012-01-25T11:06:00.001+02:00

A recklessly extravagant friend of mine (now penniless and this is not a coincidence) loves Porsches. He used to own one. For me Porsche embodies everthing that's boring and idiotic about modern llife. For him they represent an escape from his childhood on a council estate where his school dinners were paid for by the state. This is still is no excuse for materialism in my opinion.

He said in self-defence he doesn’t like the people who drive Porsche SUVs which he regards with the scorn of a belted marquess for a counterjumper. But it's not the owners I object to - it's the people who think Porsches are interesting that make me feel sad.

The only car that ever appealed to me for a moment was a Morris Minor. But walking is best and the metro or bus or taxi is much less bother than a car. And one does not have to park a bus or worry lest the metro is broken into. And in Bucharest a man who drives his own car must be insane – taxis are cheap and plentiful and the town is gridlocked and there is almost no parking.

I remember how I despised the boys in the playground when we were 5 who were fascinated by cars and motorbikes and swore I would never be like them - that is my tragedy. Dr Johnson said there was no joy so intense as a carriage ride at a gallop alongside a beautiful woman so it is all sexual. On the other hand Charles Lamb said only those who have gone mad know what true happiness means.

Still whizzing around London in Porsche must have been fun if that is the kind of thing you like - I admit a set in Albany appeals to me if i really rack my brain to think of presents I would like (which I did as an exercise while reading The Four Hour Week – I found it very difficult. And a Saville Row suits too which I could afford but never get round to ordering. but I rarely buy myself presents although I was extravagant in Jermyn St in the pre- Christmas sales. A good club in London would also make me happy. My friend wants to be James Bond, I wanted to be Lord Macaulay.

I have always had a horror of materialism but there are worse sins.

Herr Porsche said something good: When a problem has no solution it ceases to be a problem and becomes a fact.

Women and children first! (2)

2012-01-24T23:23:00.000+02:00

I have not followed the Costa Concordia sinking except the very funny transcripts of the conversations between the captain and his superiors. He sounds like Chico Marx without the skill at playing the violin. Mark Steyn laments that they failed to observe the rule of women and children first.

"There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship's entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life."

And really after having been forced to believe in sex (I hate the word gender, used except as a grammatical term) equality as a principle of overwhelming importance for forty years why expect men to surrender their lives for a principle – patriarchy, chivalry – which has become almost a crime to defend in public?

Even in the mid- nineteenth century A.H. Clough was not sure: "Am I prepared to lay down my life for the British female?/ Really, who knows?"

He had in mind saving the British female from a fate worse than death but nowadays it is agreed that there is no fate worse than death.

2012-01-24T21:35:00.000+02:00

Perhaps a future historian of the decline and fall of Western civilisation will start in 1989 as Gibbon started with Marcus Aurelius which he considered the most civilised moment in history.

Though one could easily argue civilisation came to an end in August 1914. Thanks I suppose to the Emperor Francis Joseph.

But the apparent defeat of Marxism in 1989 might be seen as the turning point when paradoxically Frankfurt School Marxist ideas at last triumphed silently while the declining birth rate and mass immigration swept aside thousands of years of history in a matter of three or four generations. Women wanting to be men not mothers, sexual licence, decline in religious belief, loss of self-confidence in civilisation.

A theme to develop. All the research I did so far took moments and yielded this gem from Gibbon whom I now intend to read:

‎"Although the progress of civilisation has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favourable to the virtue of chastity, whose most dangerous enemy is the softness of the mind. The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes. The gross appetite of love becomes most dangerous when it is elevated, or rather, indeed, disguised by sentimental passion. The elegance of dress, of motion, and of manners gives a lustre to beauty, and inflames the senses through the imagination. Luxurious entertainments, midnight dances, and licentious spectacles, present at once temptation and opportunity to female frailty. From such dangers the unpolished wives of the barbarians were secured by poverty, solitude, and the painful cares of a domestic life."

2012-01-24T21:31:00.001+02:00

Louche afternoon with Adam in O'Hara. The blizzard in the (new) old town seen from the windows of the dark bar. Was the scene Hopper or Norman Rockwell? Rockwell outside and not Hopper inside really – just Bucharest Old Town Disneyland.

Well louche 50 minutes. I drank coffee and then went off - when I was 25 drinking all afternoon would have seemed charming and bohemian. With Alan maybe, my best buddy in the VIth Form and after, now still strikingly handsome, cool, irresistible to women, unhappy in dead-end jobs in Stoke Newington. Adam resembles Alan though Adam is less cool, less squalid and less brilliant

2012-01-24T21:20:00.000+02:00

I wish Britain was one tenth as democratic or as free as the U.S.A. Paul is the first republican with a small or big r in 50 years. I don't like Mitt, very much less Newt, but all are infinitely better than Bush. Well except Herman Cain or perhaps Sarah Palin.

Rick Santorum would have been a much better man for conservatives to group around than the appalling, corrupt, adulterous Newt. Not only does he say that marriage is for men and women and that homosexual acts are not very Christian but he even said this which might get him cautioned by the Bill in the UK:

Look at Europe. Europe is on the way to losing. The most popular male name in Belgium -- Mohammad. It’s the fifth most popular name in France among boys. They are losing because they are not having children, they have no faith, they have nothing to counteract it. They are balkanizing Islam, but that’s exactly what they want. And they’re creating an opportunity for the creation of Eurabia, or Euristan in the future...Europe will not be in this battle with us. Because there will be no Europe left to fight."

http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.com/2012/01/rick-santorum-on-islam-muslims-and.html

Dear octopus

2012-01-24T21:10:00.002+02:00

Sir Winston Churchill died forty-seven years ago today

2012-01-24T21:10:00.000+02:00

Sir Winston Churchill, who passed away forty-seven years ago today, bows to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, C.R. Attlee and Herbert Morrison standing behind him.

The royal family made fun of Margaret Thatcher's deep curtsies but this bow seems pretty deep.

In January 1955 Churchill, as recorded in Harold Macmillan’s diary, suggested to his cabinet 'Keep England White. That would be a good election slogan.' How unimaginably long ago.

King George VI meant something but is Prince William of Wales merely a celebrity who wears a morning coat as fancy dress and watches the same television programmes as his future subjects? Mind you, King George VI loved music halls and Harry Lauder. And Lady Mountbatten we know loved Hutch. And the Prince Regent and his Princess of Wales were celebrities avant la lettre.

But the class system though it certainly still exists has changed very much since the days of Harold Nicolson, when we ruled the world and the middle classes were ridiculous and all Americans except Douglas Fairbanks Jr.were vulgar.

2012-01-24T21:05:00.001+02:00

America has no conservatives. They were defeated by 1783. (Or maybe the only true conservatives were the Red Indians.)"

Newt, Mitt and Paul

2012-01-22T16:17:00.000+02:00

So Newt beats Mitt in N.C. – this really is another of those nail biting American miniseries except that I suspect it will be Mitt whatever Newt does.

I think American elections bring out the best in our cousins and I wish Britain was one tenth as democratic or as free. Paul is the first republican with a small or big r in 50 years. I don't like Newt or Mitt at all but all the contenders are infinitely better than Bush except possibly Herman Cain. However, I should guess Obama will win. Obama excites his people and Mitt will excite no-one.

I saw this in the Telegraph: ‎' “No, Newt’s infidelities do not concern me,” said one Southern gentleman. “On the contrary, I take heart that someone older and fatter than me can still have an affair.” ' To which the Telegraph journalist added the words "Amen to that", which twenty years ago would have been considered unacceptably racy by the Telegraph.

Maybe 4 more years of Obama is better than Newt. In Terry-Thomas's words what an absolute shower (Paul excepted).

They may not frighten their enemy but by God ..

Story of my Life

2012-01-22T16:07:00.000+02:00

By the age of 11, I had read and reread many many times the collected verse of Hilaire Belloc, which was on my father’s shelves and I had memorised much of the Cautionary Tales (in long sessions in the bath I recall). I decided to start the Hilaire Belloc Society aged 22 and got many famous people to agree to be Vice-president. I see now that it would have done wonders for my social life though this thought was not in my head then. But alas I gave up, telling myself I would drop the idea at some point so as well to give up now. Lady Diana Cooper who had agreed to be President kept writing me postcards in pencil. Oh my friends be warned by me....

Great stuff to have running through your head all the time. This verse for example:

Heretics all, whoever you may be,
In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea,
You never shall have good words from me.
Caritas non conturbat me.

But Catholic men that live upon wine
Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine;
Wherever I travel I find it so,
Benedicamus Domino.

On childing women that are forelorn,
And men that sweat in nothing but scorn:
That is on all that ever were born,
Miserere Domine.

To my poor self on my deathbed,
And all my dear companions dead,
Because of the love that I bore them,
Dona Eis Requiem.

Hilaire Belloc

Religion prevents the poor massacring the rich

2012-01-19T13:11:00.000+02:00

Napoleon said:

"I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation but the mystery of social order: it links the idea of inequality to heaven which prevents the rich person from being murdered by the poor. How can there be order in the state without religion? Society cannot exist without inequality of fortunes and the inequality of fortunes could not subsist without religion. Whenever a half-starved person is near anothers who is glutted, it is impossible to reconcile the difference if there is not an authority to say to him: "God wills it so, it is necessary that there be rich and poor in the world, but afterwards in eternity there will be a different distribution."

The priests no longer justify inequality but inequality is just and necessary and must be seen to be just. We can justify inequality because of the huge groth in living standards in the developed world and by arguments from freedom and conservatism but these are out of fashion. Instead people argue in favour of equality of opportunity and utilitarianism and this leads to the monstrous regiment of political correctness and the moral right is implicitly conceded for the state to reorder society on rational lines. This is the central weakness of modern civilisation and from this springs post - colonial guilt and the idea that our traditions are oppressive, and from these spring most of the evils of modern politics.

He also said:

I hope the time is not far off when I shall be able to unite all the wise and educated men of all the countries and establish a uniform regime based on the principles of the Quran which alone are true and which alone can lead men to happiness.

Napoleon in a etter to Sheikh El-Messiri, (28 August 1798); published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol.4, No. 3148, p. 42

I just got tear gassed (just a little) two hundred yards from my flat and feel this is life!

2012-01-17T22:02:00.001+02:00

I just got tear gassed yards from my flat and feel this is life!

I felt like Paul Pennyfeather in Chapter1 of Decline and Fall. Which at my age is ridiculous. No rioting where I was and few people except police though Andy's wife said they had made a bloackade of tyres in front of Cocor and set it ablaze. These disturbances began last night, publicised on Facebook and probably Twitter. I am told a section of the secret services is behind them seeking to undermine President Basescu. They usually are behind things. People refer to it not entirely in jest as a revolution and like the 1989 revolution it is being orchestrated for the benefit of people inside the 'political structure' meaning the formerly Communist structure of power.

Though nothing in Romania is really organised. Not even organised crime. I remember ten years ago telling an exuberantly rapacious lawyer (Patricia Osmani, now Patricia Kovacevic) who was intimate friends with several leading members of the PSD government that the PSD was simply an organised crime racket to which she said, 'No it's not - they are not organised at all.' So it is with everything here.

I wish to record that I was wearing my new covert coat with the velvet collar and I would like to say I behaved like an Englishman and battled my way through but I was lazy, the gas was a bore and actually I just turned back and went home. Andy Taylor with whom I had been drinking lived in the other direction and went through the scrum, tear gas, police charges and all.

Andy later told me:

"It was insane around Hanul Manuc, with fires burning, constant cack of tear gas being fired, people running everywhere. the police using tear gas, but having no masks themselves! As I entered the metro a large group of young men ran in, chased by police snatch squads and the tunnels stung with tear gas. By the time I boarded the train my mouth felt like I had chewed serval chillie peppers, my nose had swelled vastly and my eyelids stung."

Later loud confused noises from my window, shouting and the sounds of shots.

This is nothing compared to when Romania defeated England in 2000 with a late penalty. The delirious crowds made the streets impassable and the revolution look like a tea party.

I remember a scene from the 1830 French revolution. The pealing bells signalled the end of riots. Talleyrand said “Ah, the bells, we are winning.” “Who are we, mon prince?” “Shhh! I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

Women and children first!

2012-01-17T21:35:00.000+02:00

A woman friend of mine posted this comment on Facebook on the Costa Concordia the Italian cruise ship which sank with loss of several lives :

"Women and children first? Why? After all aren't we all "equal?" Sisters doing it for themselves and all that. If only it didn't take a sinking ship to show most people the folly of feminism."

As Lord Curzon said in 1912:

"What is the good of talking about the equality of the sexes? The first whiz of the bullet, the first boom of the cannon and where is the equality of the sexes then?"

Lord Macaulay, my only friend through teenage years

2012-01-17T21:28:00.001+02:00

I often hate Allan Massie's opinions but here he and Lord Macaulay are right. Why don't we have Liberals like Macaulay any more?

One by one, Lord Macaulay's predictions are coming true. The government will soon choose our wives –

Gladstone in those days was what Macaulay called the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories - when he became a Liberal he called the Confederate States a nation rightly struggling to be free - he was correct- and Bourbon Sicily the rule of Satan made manifest - probably wrong but I wasnt there.

Nowadays right-wing conservatives are liberals and liberals are socialists and socialists are ...I'm not sure what they are anymore but pretty awful. And are there any conservative left? If so they are called extremists.

On the other hand if the Lord Chancellor told people whom to marry there would probably be fewer divorces and more happy marriages.

If you haven't read Lord Macaulay on Robert Montgomery do so with haste. At any rate it reduced me to hysterics aged 13. Lytton Strachey called Macaulay's humour elephantine which I suppose it is.

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=362&chapter=50385&layout=html&Itemid=27

Second Hungarian uprising is as inspirational as the first

2012-01-17T21:25:00.000+02:00

"The Hungarian constitution reflects an awakening of cultural and moral sensibilities, a revolt against Brussels-directed integration and PC impositions. It is the product of a highly civilised nation reclaiming its heritage and autonomy." Bill Jamieson in the Scotsman. What would have happened if they had not included sexual equality in the constitution and had made abortion illegal? The EU reaction is a black joke. After removing Berlusconi and Papandreou will Hungary be treated like Austria was when the Freedom Party entered government?

http://www.scotsman.com/news/cartoon/second_hungarian_uprising_is_as_inspirational_as_the_first_1_2056970

If only Hungarians and Poles would refuse to accept PC and statism - but I doubt it will happen. And Romania will not do it. Her historical destiny is to mimic the EU, as previous generations of Romanian opinion-formers mimicked Stalinism, Belle Epoque France or the Sublime Porte.

God

2012-01-17T21:17:00.000+02:00

The misfortune is that mysticism is true, as Walter Bagehot said.

People always put a spin on things and recreate God in their image. Once He supported absolute monarchies and auto da fe, now he is pro-homosexual and feminist. I am a Catholic with a Protestant mind always suspicious of the spirit of the age which tricks people in every age into mistaking it for timeless truth. For me mysticism is religion and I love Pascal's words in his memoranadum jotting down his incoherent record of his great mystical experience towards the end of his life - 'Not the God of the philosophers but the god of Abraham and Isaac and Joseph.'' In my mystical experiences for which I thank God I had exactly the same impression and very strongly.

I came to believe a long ago in the supreme force which created the world, the First Cause, but took no interest in Him/it. Later thanks to various experiences I became aware of a very personal God who intervenes in all our lives constantly. Jesus and the Bible are much harder to believe in but I do despite all the evidence believe in the Catholic (and Orthodox) Church/es. Why? Because I know God reveals himself because he has done so to me and to many others and therefore must have made a general revelation and because of reasons which pointed inescapably (the only word) towards the Catholic Church as the Truth. Despite the external banalities of modern Catholic worship, despite the fact that the Catholic Church feels like it came into existence in the 1960s, despite very many things.

Five quotations - aknowledgements Cyril W. Koob

2012-01-13T12:28:00.000+02:00

I hate the 20th Century.

-George S. Patton

People said we was scared to fight but that was a bunch of BS. The only thing I was scared of was coming home to your mother.

-L.Lopez [USMC World War II, Philippines, Infantry]

God is the author of the evil that punishes, but not the evil that defiles. Summa Theologiae, Part I, Q. 49, Art 2.

-St. Thomas Aquinas

"In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die."

-Dorothy Sayers

Urged by faith, we are obliged to believe and to maintain that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and also apostolic. We believe in her firmly and we confess with simplicity that outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, as the Spouse in the Canticles [Sgs 6:8] proclaims: 'One is my dove, my perfect one. She is the only one, the chosen of her who bore her,' and she represents one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God [1 Cor 11:3]. In her then is one Lord, one faith, one baptism [Eph 4:5]. There had been at the time of the deluge only one ark of Noah, prefiguring the one Church, which ark, having been finished to a single cubit, had only one pilot and guide, i.e., Noah, and we read that, outside of this ark, all that subsisted on the earth was destroyed.

Unam Sanctum, Boniface VIII

Quotations

2011-12-16T09:22:00.001+02:00

‎"The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life."
Marc Chagall

Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
-- Walter Bagehot

"I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him."
- Napoleon

Racism is simply an ugly form of collectivism, the mindset that views humans strictly as members of groups rather than individuals. Racists believe that all individuals who share superficial physical characteristics are alike: as collectivists, racists think only in terms of groups. By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality, the advocates of so-called "diversity" actually perpetuate racism. Their obsession with racial group identity is inherently racist.

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity.

More importantly, in a free society every citizen gains a sense of himself as an individual, rather than developing a group or victim mentality. This leads to a sense of individual responsibility and personal pride, making skin color irrelevant. Rather than looking to government to correct our sins, we should understand that racism will endure until we stop thinking in terms of groups and begin thinking in terms of individual liberty.

Ron Paul

I am not a racist at all. I love black people, provided they are rich and powerful black people. It's only black people who are not rich and powerful that I hate.

Patricia Kovacevic Osmani

What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going in to but coming out of – the Bankers' Age, the decade of footling technology, globalised junk, celebrity, stuffing our faces, a Lost Decade of human incuriosity in which we haven't cared "how people walk" or what their eyes and hands look like, in which art has been the lackey of advertising and imagination has declined into mere fantasy? I don't minimise material hardship, but we don't have to be supine before the system. The world is interesting beyond money; there is infinitely more to us than is dreamt of in the materialists' philosophy.'

Howard Jacobson

‎

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

-Wordsworth

‎"It is the great achievement of Christianity in all times and places to have raised the condition of women"

W.E. Gladstone

'I am an out and out inegalitarian.' - W.E. Gladstone

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

Ideas

2011-12-13T23:00:00.000+02:00

I wrote this in April 2009 and now I wonder if I still hold these trenchently worded ideas.

· Because of the Holocaust the masculine virtues are discredited and society has been feminized. Hence welfare state, health and safety, feminism, multiculturalism, sexual revolution, pop culture, breakdown in class system, questioning of tradition, the 1960s social revolution.

· As a result of this sex is seen as a construct not something utterly fundamental to each one of us and male and female roles are mixed up

· Sexual intercourse has become trivialized, consumerised, instead of being sacred.

Homosexuality is seen as being as normal as heterosexuality instead of as an unfortunate psychological problem

· Since artificial birth control is the norm the white Christian world is failing to reproduce itself and the Battle of Tours is being revisited

· The nanny state in return for protecting us from real life (which in fact it cannot do) requires like a possessive mother obedience – hence we men are emasculated, heterodox opinions on this matriarchy are punished severely

· We are a culture of Peter Pans irresponsible and improvident

· Peer groups are more important than taking on your father’s or mother’s role.

· The baby boomers have led us into the crisis through hedonism and self-indulgence and many other crises will follow

The Maramures: The Last Peasants

2011-12-12T20:14:00.000+02:00

The Last Peasants
"The country is holding its breath today," read The Times. “Tension and nerves will be felt by millions who know that the bombers have chosen Thursday as a day of atrocity.”

The world has been rewritten by the writers of cheap thrillers. And not necessarily present day thrillers. We feel as if we are in the neurotic pre-1914 landscape of William Le Queux or early Edgar Wallace.

While Londoners were waiting pensively in the tube I was in another kind of pre-1914 landscape, driving through villages in the Maramures, the northern edge of Transylvania bordering on Ukraine. Here life hasn’t changed very much in centuries but it will soon change utterly. Here in the most conservative part of Romania, Europe’s least modern country, peasants have not completely given up traditional costumes, for example. Such tractors as were to be found here under Communism were long ago sold off and horse-drawn ploughs are universal. Old women in black scatter seed in the fields. This is subsistence farming of a kind which had disappeared elsewhere and must soon disappear here too.

It took me fifteen years to get to Maramures. In 1990 when everyone in the Transylvanian countryside wore traditional costume to Mass and cars were scarcely seen, I asked my Romanian companion, ‘Is this the poorest part of Romania?’ It was my first day here. ‘No, it’s the richest. Can’t you tell?” A disconcerting reply. ‘If you want to see somewhere poor and old fashioned you should go to Maramures. In Maramures they’re still living in the Stone Age.’

In those fifteen years Maramures has changed like the rest of Romania. Gloucestershire has been bought up by stockbrokers wanting weekend cottages and Maramures I had read was full of villas built by customs officers and police colonels. And there are plenty of big new houses around. A lot fewer people wear costume every day than did when I missed my first chance to visit. Tourism is bigger business now than it was then and there is a steady stream of foreign visitors but the area still feels pretty undiscovered, well protected by its inaccessibility. You can’t get there easily from anywhere by car, train or plane.

In Maramures villages men in hats and women with scarves, aged from thirty upwards, spend a lot of time sitting on roadside benches. They look attentively at each car or pedestrian that passes and conversation languishes. Tranquil is I suppose the word. The bomb explosions in London seemed unreal to Londoners but less real in Maramures.

Agrotourism, putting up with peasants, is the joy of travelling in Romania. This is tourism on a human scale, bespoke. You are a lodger but treated as a friend. Catch it before its innocence has been lost and before Romania enters the E.U. in 2007. Your hosts who are subsistence farmers provide milk for your coffee fresh from the cow at the end of the garden. How much will be lost when EU health regulations bring all this to an end.

The priest’s wife in the village of Botiza, Mrs Victoria Berdecaru, has revived the carpet making industry in the village, organised a very neat crafts museum and organises accommodation for visitors. I stayed with Vasile the handsome 40 year-old local carpenter and handyman who built the museum and who told me ‘I do everything except dig graves. I won’t dig graves.’

I came on a chance impulse to see the 38^th edition of the Hora La Prislop festival. Horas are traditional Romanian dances and every village has its dances. Hora La Prislop is held on a mountainside and participants from villages throughout the Maramures compete for prizes. It attracts a big well-mannered audience who sit on the grass watching the stage neither eating, drinking nor talking. I also noticed three or four foreigners, one bestrewn with two large and expensive cameras. The festival is great fun on a sunny Sunday afternoon if you repress the adage about trying everything once except incest or Morris dancing.

The date of the first festival, 1968, is telling. Nicolae Ceausescu was just beginning to wrap himself in the flag and emphasise the traditions of the Romanian peasantry, twenty years before he began to knock down villages to make way for agro-industrial complexes. We were back in the 1970s and you expected to see local party dignitaries in crimplene suits make speeches praising agricultural output.

This was the eve of Assumption Day. In Romania as in much of Southern Europe the Assumption of the Virgin is one of the most important days of the year. It is treated in the countryside as an unofficial holiday. The roads were full of processions, adults in full costume, and angelic girls in white as for a first Holy Communion.

People from all over the area and the two biggest processions converged on the Monastery of Moisei where Mass in the open lasted from early evening till midday. Until 1989 these processions were forbidden by the police and had to be held under cover of night but today every ex-Communist politician wants to be photographed on the Assumption at some famous monastery. Moisei was crowded with visitors and stalls selling refreshments. Long before the first procession was near the narrow road to the monastery was blocked and impassible by car.

Wooden churches are what Maramures is renowned for, with spires, steep roofs and wall paintings. I attended Mass the next morning in a Greek Catholic church in Iaud or rather in the graveyard amid hollyhocks and brightly painted crucifixes with most of the congregation. The women stood together in the front, the men together at the rear. Most of the women wore scarves and traditional blouses and skirts but there were a few in blue jeans and loose hair. Each year the numbers of the latter increase.

The priest at the close read out the names and size of the contributions made by parishioners to the cost of building the new church. (“€100 on the part of Mrs Ionela Ghica, €100 on the part of Vlad Dumitriu…”) Everywhere you go in Maramures new churches have been or are being built alongside the houses of incomers. A few miles away an impressive Orthodox monastery complex has been built on the site of one suppressed in the eighteenth century.

Iaud is a village where half the population is Greek Catholic. The Greek Catholic rite resembles that of the Orthodox but the Greek Catholics, also known as ‘Uniates’, recognise the authority of Rome. Iaud boasts several fine wooden churches and a reputation for large families. It seems that the inhabitants observe the Church’s teaching better than in richer parts of Europe. According to Vasile: ‘If you have three children here people think you’re impotent.’

Sighet, a pleasant Austro-Hungarian town a mile from the Ukrainian border, houses the infamous prison where after the Communist takeover the leading politicians and opinion-formers were incarcerated, tortured and in many cases killed. Today the prison is a well-designed museum that explains the Stalin era. When I visited the museum had plenty of customers. Children ran around noisily. I got a slight sense in the exercise yard of the horrors of the recent past, I stood in the little cell in which democrat Iuliu Maniu had died and I went out. I was pleased that President Ion Iliescu, a leading member of the Communist Party’s youth wing during the years when the prison was busiest, had not been to see it.

Vasile told me that the secret of a happy life is preserving tradition. ‘You have to change but you should keep the traditions.’ I thought of life in London where traditions have been dissolved by affluence, technology, pop culture and multiculturalism. In the Maramures past and present are seamless, the existence of God is assumed rather like the sun rising each morning, neighbours know everything about each other and no man is an island.

But the numbers of cars we saw everywhere with Italian driving licenses testify to the exodus of Moreseni to work abroad. In the locality where I was staying everyone went to Northern Italy, where the discipline of Italian life was irksome but the money was very good. In other parts of the Maramures I am told everyone goes to Spain. Maramures is beautiful but desperately poor and an economic impossibility. As Vasile said to me ‘When you say agriculture you say poverty.’ Europe no longer has room for subsistence farmers and even if people like Vasile would never swap their lives for anyone else’s, his three daughters will go to college and not return to live their mother’s way of life. Vasile has no regrets. ‘They must fulfill their destiny. I hope they will return here when they are old.’

Raising the condition of women

2011-12-11T21:29:00.000+02:00

‎"It is the great achievement of Christianity in all times and places to have raised the condition of women" (W.E. Gladstone). But this can go too far? I once asked a young public school educated English Catholic priest. He smiled broadly and said : It can go much too far. But can it? All I know is that theists and unbelievers necessarily have an opposed attitude to these matters. Nowadays the conventional agnostic attitude is that sexual differences are produced by oppressive social structures - this is the Marxist claptrap that almost all conservatives, soi dixant, believe these days in England. The Christian attitude is closer to Freud's belief that biology is destiny because for us biology is God's Holy Will. Women's condition cannot be raised too far but modern feminism degrades rather than raises them.

The Fairies' Farewell

2011-12-11T19:35:00.001+02:00

The Fairies' Farewell

One of my very favourite poems and also a lament for Catholic England. I thought this was a widely known anthology piece but even Amanda Craig did not know it. Nothing is well known anymore he humphed.

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?

Lament, lament, old Abbeys,

The Fairies’ lost command!

They did but change Priests’ babies,

But some have changed your land.

And all your children, sprung from thence,

Are now grown Puritans,

Who live as Changelings ever since

For love of your demains.

At morning and at evening both

You merry were and glad,

So little care of sleep or sloth

These pretty ladies had;

When Tom came home from labour,

Or Cis to milking rose,

Then merrily went their tabor,

And nimbly went their toes.

Witness those rings and roundelays

Of theirs, which yet remain,

Were footed in Queen Mary’s days

On many a grassy plain;

But since of late, Elizabeth,

And later, James came in,

They never danced on any heath

As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies

Were of the old Profession.

Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’,

Their dances were Procession.

But now, alas, they all are dead;

Or gone beyond the seas;

Or farther for Religion fled;

Or else they take their ease.

A tell-tale in their company

They never could endure!

And whoso kept not secretly

Their mirth, was punished, sure;

It was a just and Christian deed

To pinch such black and blue.

Oh how the commonwealth doth want

Such Justices as you!

One of my very favourite poems and in

Richard Corbet

http://www.poemhunter.com/

The Jane Elliott Study

2011-12-11T19:34:00.000+02:00

The Jane Elliott Study

A classic study which very clearly illustrates the cumulative impact

of wrongful social definitions upon people was conducted in 1968 through

1971, by Jane Elliott. Ms. Elliott was a rather unlikely candidate for the

authoring of one of social science's most creative and important studies.

She worked as a third grade teacher in the small northeastern Iowa town

of Riceville. Up until the time of her experiment she had been a very

motherly, highly respected teacher who had been well liked by all.

However, upon the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in March

1968, she became very distressed and upset. She wanted to teach her

eight and nine year old pupils the evils of racial discrimination, but did

not know how to approach the problem in a way that would prove

incisive and thoroughly convincing. Eight year olds cannot be lectured

to in the way that university students and adults are commonly dealt

with in educational settings. And aggravating the problem was the fact

that most of her young pupils had never even seen a black person apart

from on television or in the movies. The children were all living in a

very rural part of a state which has very few black residents. Of our

fifty states, only Wyoming has a smaller fraction of black residents than

does Iowa.

She finally hit upon a plan which she decided to pursue with

enthusiasm and conviction. She entered her classroom one morning with

a large book which she claimed had been written by a very famous

scientist who is extremely wise and knowledgeable. She proceeded to

tell her young pupils that this scientist had determined that brown-eyed

people are naturally dirty, unkempt, uncooperative, incapable of learning

at a satisfactory speed, incapable of retaining knowledge, discourteous,

unlikely to go far in life, etc. She proceeded to enumerate quite

systematically a whole host of ways whereby brown-eyed people were

alleged by the scientist to be inferior to blue-eyed people. And since her

class was composed of nine brown-eyed children and nine blue-eyed

children (and she herself was green-eyed), she had rather fertile soil for

her experiment.

Again, Ms. Elliott had been well-liked, and there was a very strong

tendency for these impressionable young minds to believe everything

that she said. And as she proceeded through her twenty minute sermon

about the evils of brown-eyed people and the virtues of those with blue

eyes, she could see the brown-eyed children begin to slouch and to

travel off into a world of daydreams. In fact, throughout the experimental

day the disparaged brown-eyed children reacted primarily in one of four

different ways—depending upon their individual temperaments:

(1) withdrawing and going off into a world of fantasy, daydreams, or

sleep; (2) crying and sulking; (3) clowning and goofing off behavior; and

(4) hostile, obstreperous, inconsiderate and/or bullying behavior.

Meanwhile, as Ms. Elliott made her way through the same initial

spiel, the blue-eyed children began to sit up more and more erect. They

began to pay attention to what was going on in class more closely and

intensely than many of them had ever done before. In essence, right

from the very outset of the experiment the disparaged group (browneyed

children) and the exalted group (blue-eyed youngsters) began to

behave in dramatically and very conspicuously different ways.

After Ms. Elliott completed her twenty minute lecture she

announced that since brown-eyed children are not likely to go very far

in life anyway, and since they do not learn as well as other youngsters,

are dirtier, less cooperative, etc., it makes good sense to accord them

fewer classroom privileges than the "naturally superior" blue-eyed children

should be accorded. And with that she ran down a prepared list

of new rules and restrictions that would impact the brown-eyed children

from that moment on. And just so that each child in the classroom could

tell every other child apart on the basis of the criterion of eye color, she

placed large black collars around the necks of each of the brown-eyed

youngsters. Once this was accomplished everyone could easily tell

whether any particular pupil had brown eyes or blue eyes.

Then she began to involve the children in their daily reading lesson.

As usual each child was required to read aloud a passage from a third

grade reader. When a blue-eyed child made a mistake or stumbled through

a passage, Ms. Elliott helped him/her along in a kindly manner, and

then praised him/her. If a blue-eyed student read a passage well, lavish

praise was heaped upon him/her. And she would say: "See, that just

goes to show that everything I said is really true. Blue-eyed people really

are smarter; and they learn their reading lessons much better than browneyed

children do."

On the other hand, if a brown-eyed child read his/her passage

without error, Ms. Elliott rather abruptly asked the child to stop, and

she immediately moved on to the next child without according the browneyed

youngster a word of praise or recognition. If a brown-eyed youngster

stumbled through a passage, she reacted with a statement similar

to this: "See, that just goes to show how brown-eyed children just won't

learn."

In essence, positive or disparaging remarks were systematically

applied to the children throughout the day strictly on the basis of eye

color. Positive behavior was ignored in the brown-eyed youngsters

whereas negative behavior was always noticed and punished with a

rather coldly phrased comment such as: "I guess this is what can naturally

be expected from brown-eyed youngsters."

By the end of the school day quite remarkable changes had occurred

in Ms. Elliott's classroom. For example, the brown-eyed third graders

had regressed to first grade reading level, whereas the blue-eyed third

graders were reading at or beyond the fifth grade level. Arithmetic scores,

vocabulary scores, spelling scores, and all other academic criteria

employed to assess change in young children showed that the blue-eyed

pupils were all performing (1) far beyond what would normally be

expected for third graders, and (2) far beyond where they (these very

same children) had performed just one week prior to the experiment.

These same test scores similarly revealed the brown-eyed children to be

functioning at a level that was (1) far below what would ordinarily be

expected for third grade youngsters, and (2) far below the level of performance

that they had displayed just one week prior to the experiment.

Academic performance was hardly the only thing to be affected by

the experimental design that Ms. Elliott had imposed upon her pupils.

After a mere six hours of their new experiences in Ms. Elliott's classroom

the brown-eyed children had all suffered serious blows to their selfimages.

None of these children liked themselves anymore, and they

displayed these self-disparaging attitudes in a whole host of ways. Some

of the children cried and sulked. Many began to behave in a sullen and

disrespectful manner. Several of the nine brown-eyed children spoke of

how they didn't want to come to school anymore, and about how they

would find ways to play hookey. All began to look increasingly dirty

and unkempt. None revealed any interest in learning or in open, friendly

socializing with their classmates.

Contrariwise, by the end of the school day the blue-eyed children

had begun behaving far more maturely towards their teacher and visa-

vis each other than they had ever behaved before. Each child displayed

a conspicuously strong enthusiasm for learning and asserted himself/

herself in a friendly, courteous matter, except vis-a-vis their disparaged

brown-eyed classmates. And this was as true for children who just one

day prior had been the class clowns, the "slow learners", and the allround

"bad boys", as it had been for the blue-eyed children who had

always performed well. The posture, grooming, and attitudes towards

self that were manifested by these blue-eyed children were nothing short

of amazing.

It is not necessary to summarize here all of the many interesting

facets of Ms. Elliott's experiment. Interested readers will find a good

coverage of the study in her book entitled A CLASS DIVIDED which I

have listed in the bibliography at the end of this volume. Suffice it to

say that she ran the study on four different third grade classes: 1968

through 1971. And each year she reversed things on the second day of

the experiment. In other words, on the second day she advised the

children that she had made a mistake, and that it was really brown-eyed

people who are "superior", and that blue-eyed people are actually the

inferior ones.

It should be stressed that Ms. Elliott's findings proved equally

strong each time she ran the experiment. Similarly, immediately after

she turned the tables she found that the academic performance and the

mental attitudes of the blue-eyed children slid downhill in an extremely

dramatic and precipitous fashion; whereas the performance and the

mental attitudes of the brown-eyed children shot upward quite drastically

after only a very short period of time in the exalted role.

Human 'Rights' are far more authoritarian that I ever imagined.

2011-12-11T19:31:00.000+02:00

A Facebook conversation whcih makes me see how very deeply we in the West are in trouble.

Stefanie Ricarda Roos

First day of teaching Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at European University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder (Master Program in International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law): Great crowd of students from all over the world.

18 people like this.

Paul Wood so much of so called Human Rights are in fact restrictions on Human Rights. Cultural economic and social rights sound like restrictions on freedom to me. Anti-discrimination legislation might be a good thing for example but it restricts freedom.

Stefanie Ricarda Roos Why do you consider them to be restrictions on HRs? Only with the basic ESC rights are fulfilled, can one enjoy his or her civil and political rights. "Freedom from want" is at the root of ESC rights (see Speech by Franklin D. Roosevelt held in 1941, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948).

Paul Wood Exactly the sophistry I had in mind. On the continent there is no real tradition of freedom. Freedom from want - coined because we were allied to Stalin - is like freedom from ill health, another use of freedom. It may be good but it is not freedom. Likewise freedom means freedom not to employ people I don't like. Etc etc

Paul Wood I am bitterly sorry I did not become an academic so that I could have dedicated my life to fighting "Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. " -And you are on the Right. I read somewhere of German Christian Democrat politicians warning Muslim immigrants that acceptance of homosexuality as normal was necessary if they wanted to live in a democracy - which does not sound like Catholicism to me or freedom or democracy.

Stefanie Ricarda Roos Paul, you do not need to be an academic in order to dedicate your life to fighting ESC-Rights. Lawyers, in particular, shall devote their lifes to this end. Have a look at the following video for inspiration: http://vimeo.com/11870370

Out of the Shadows

Paul Wood You misunderstood. I wish - but am too old - that I had dedicated my life to fighting against these so called rights.

Stefanie Ricarda Roos No, no, I truly understand: back to the old categorization of freedom rights (negative rights) and claim-rights (positive rights), to distinguishing two sets of rights, and claiming that the latter (i.e. ESC-rights) are not justiciable, and are only restricting liberalism. Back to a world in which a few can live a dignified life "in freedom" whereas the majority of people do not even have the minimum needed to live a life which you can call "dignified". That has nothing to do with Marxism, communism or mis-understood socialism, but with what is at the heart of it all: human dignity.

Paul Wood By the way many of these 'rights' - really infringements on other people's freedom - originated with cultural Marxism. This might interest you. http://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/

Sonya Winterberg Congrats and enjoy! The Viadrina is such a great place. We should have coffee some time... :)

Monday at 22:38 · Like

Paul Wood I am not arguing that the state should not help the poor by public spending but saying that such public spending paid for from taxes is an infringement of (taxpayers' ) freedom - freedom is not the only good but it is very important and we should call things by their names. Your use of the word freedom is duplicitous and in fact Orwellian. Like lumping in freedom from worry with freedom of expression. The word freedom means now what it meant in 1800.

Gregory Fabian Mr. Wood you seem to forget that what you cynically call "sophistry" are actually international human rights treaty obligations to which states have legally bound themselves when signing and ratifying such treaties as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter revised. Violations of these rights with impunity, if you need to be reminded, resulted, in the worst case, in the death of and personal injury to millions of persons, damage and destruction of personal property, and the displacement of millions more in the 20th century alone. One only has to witness the exhumation of a mass grave in the Balkans, or watch a video of the aftermath of the Markale massacres in Sarajevo to realize what happens when governments do not respect, protect and fulfill human rights, and how important they are to one realizing one's full potential as a human being. These rights were enshrined to provide all persons in the state with a checklist of the minimum level of each right to which they are entitled so that all persons may know demand and defend their rights no matter who that person is and no matter what government is in power. And Mr Wood, I have dedicated my life to the implementation of those rights i.e. all human rights including civil, economic, political, social, or cultural rights. They are inseparably intertwined.

Paul Wood Nonsense not entwined at all - how can you equate forcing me not to discriminate against women or Buddhists with my freedom of speech or property rights? Alas, in fact if I argued against rights for minorities I might find myself arrested under human rights legislation. The sooner the UK resiles from the ECHR the better. International law is the great threat in our days to democracy by the way. Why shouldn’t each country decide about human rights - and everything else?

Paul Wood Whether or not it is socialism I don't pretend to know - and giving the poor decent life certainly makes the world a better place - but it is not freedom. It is restricting freedom - just be honest and clear minded that's all. Public spending on social issues is fine. All anti discrimination laws should be repealed

Sonya Winterberg Dear Mr Wood, With all due respect what you write is ideological rubbish. On the eve of WWI similar statements were made with the known consequences of the humanitarian tragedies of the 20th century. Having myself worked in places as the ones described by Gregory above, I am grateful and humbled by everyone who is working to foster and/or protect said rights.

Paul Wood All the rights we need to protect assiduously are enshrined in English Common Law or the US Constitution - what sort of right is the right to privacy or family life ?? It is you madam who are the Bismarckian. I met an English schoolmistress who was teaching Romanian children about 'human rights' - I discovered she was telling them homosexual acts were fine - a perfectly acceptable point of view but in contradiction to orthodox and catholic teaching - and she was paid by the EU! What about the rights of the children's parents who I doubt held the same views? Or of the taxpayers in Germany and UK paying for this? I believe passionately in human rights by the way - for me it is almost the most important political issue (no 2 probably) - i.e. the rights of individuals not to be bullied by the state including by ECHR judges inventing law

Gregory Fabian Mr. Wood re: "your" rights and the rights of all, two quotes and a passage. "When the rights of a few are abused, the rights of all are abused" "Injustice to anyone is injustice to everyone." ML King. Also, a passage from a fiercely nationalistic German Lutheran Minister who was a WWI war hero, on coming to his senses and realizing what was happening in his country during WWII: First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, I was not a Jew, then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, I was not a Communist, then they came for the trade unions, and I did not not speak out, I was not a trade unionist, then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out, I was not a Catholic. Then they came for the homosexuals, Gypsies, disabled, etc. and I did not speak out, I was none of those. And then they came for me, and by that time, there was no one left to speak out for me.

Gregory Fabian And another quote from a man on the street in Zimbabwe when asked by a BBC reporter if he was going to vote in the elections that day. He said Yes I will try, but first I must find water for my family. Thus the exercise of the right to vote, for example, can depend on the ability to exercise another right, such as the right to water which is an integral part of the rights to health and an adequate standard of living.

Paul Wood Mr Fabian you are mixing things up. I am against all dictatorship including the dictatorship of the human rights industry , of international law and international QUANGOs. People have a right to speak, to organise politically, to be annoying, to argue that homosexual acts are wicked or that women should not go out to work or that Chinese people are inferior, to spy on their neighbours, to refuse to hire women or men or Protestants if they so choose, not to be arrested without good cause. No one has a ‘right’ to an adequate standard of living or to health (I think you mean health care) though if we are Christians we have a duty of charity to help the poor. Bismarck's Germany created the first national health service - a good thing I am sure - only because Germany did not and does not have a strong tradition of freedom. A welfare state - I believed in a limited welfare state by the way - is a good thing in small doses but a great infringement on freedom which is why when Europe was much freer - in 1900 - the idea seemed outrageous in England and the Anglo-Saxon world. The rights you talk about include both vitally important ones and the ephemeral fashions of our statist collectivist post-Christian ruling class. You are mixing freedom and equality which are always opposite poles. By the way Martin Luther King was not such an admirable figure - as well as being a very bad man in his private life he was a leftist and his legacy is this whole anti discrimination culture which we have today which so damages European traditional values and self confidence and is so opposed to freedom and traditional legal rights

Gregory Fabian Well that s a very interesting viewpoint Mr. Wood but a minority view to be sure. How does that square with the fact that the governments of approximately 160 members states of the UN out of 192 have recognized the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to health as human rights and have committed themselves to ensuring a minimum core obligation of those rights to all the people of their state and not just citizens, by signing and ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Further another 70 member states are signatories. Respect for human rights is an integral concept within the rule of law. Shall we advocate to disregard one of the most important tenets of the rule of law? Please Mr. Wood I have more than enough work with governments who deny rights.

Paul Wood We shall not agree. Very few members of the UN if any really respect rights or freedoms any more. I feel Europe which in the 19th century was free is much less so now. Lawyers by the way are not good at arguing from first principles. I do not share your respect for the UN run by dreadful governments, crooks and despots. You convince me that the human rights industry is much more authoritarian than I had feared. I hope the UK gets out of the dreadfully authoritarian ECHR which we should never have signed. There was talk in 2005 that we would had the Conservatives won the election.

Paul Wood The UN would like to make 'reproductive rights' human rights - abortion. So much for Christianity Judaism and Islam.

Gregory Fabian And re: your opinion on discrimination. I have seen discrimination left unchecked for generations tear apart the very fabric of society in Kosovo, and Bosnia and Herzegovina where I lived and worked for a combination of nine years from 200 to 2009. To deny the importance of proactively combating discrimination is to allow conditions to exist which promote conflict, because discrimination is a root cause of conflict. Thus the quality of life for us all is proportionate to how we treat those who are different, and how we recognize the dignity and worth of the human person. And while discrimination occurs in all societies certain countries deny its existence. Others, instead of denying it, admit that they have it, and they take proactive measures to eliminate it as they are also required to do under the UN Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination among other international documents. That is why Europe is so far ahead of other regions in the world in the advancement of its anti discrimination laws and standards. I am now living permanently in Slovakia again where I previously worked from 93 to 2000, and I am trying to get the non Roma community to understand that discrimination against the Roma community is one of the most serious social and economic problems they have, and that if it is not addressed, it can become a security issue for all, and not just the Roma community, as the lessons of the Balkan Wars of the 90s teach us. And while there may not be a tradition of inter ethnic wars in central Europe, there certainly is always the threat of civil unrest, leading to violence and even terrorist acts. That is why it is vitally important to deal with the problems that Roma face, as opposed to the Roma problem as it is so often characterized. In the US the anti slavery clause was eliminated at the last minute from the Declaration of Independence to appease the Southern States but John Adams the Declaration s chief proponent very reluctantly consented with the warning that the US will have problems one hundred years hence and his prophesy was sadly correct. The US had a civil war that almost destroyed the country. And finally, 100 years after that War the US enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which actually began to address the root causes of discrimination and gave persons remedies against it. It is an example of what happens when discrimination is not addressed in the first instance.

Gregory Fabian And finally, on authoritarianism, my experience working in human rights against Vladimir Meciar, an authoritarian strongman in Slovakia from 93 to 98 is that it is characteristic of authoritarians to accuse their perceived enemies of the sins that they are the most guilty of. Good day.

Paul Wood there may not be a tradition of inter ethnic wars in central Europe? What about in the 20th century? I do not like discrimination against people on the grounds of race at all but discrimination in other areas is first unobjectionable (or sometimes desirable) and second none of the state's business. And what is discrimination but another word for hierarchy? I am sure you mean well but the current anti discrimination ideology which along with welfare has taken the place of religion in the West reduces freedom, disrupts tradition and has led to unhappy social changes in the role of women, in family life, sexual morality even. Slavery is not good but the North was not justified in going to war over it but this is a footnote. The Civil Rights Act has led to dreadful restrictions on freedom and the current nervous breakdown Americans have over race. The result is that we in the West no longer have faith in our traditions - which children are taught are oppressive rather than glorious - and that is fatal. Gypsies must save themselves with help from churches and NGOs not from the state. Maybe Slovakia's problem is it is being corrupted by PC ideas feminism consumerism and atheistic modern pop culture. You see why I feel sad that I did not become an academic and argue for these ideas which I consider basic to civilization? I respect your views but strongly think you are mistaken.

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation

2011-12-11T19:28:00.000+02:00

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation. Robert Frost.

Or else the translation is a poem in its own right. E.g., Horace - Odes, Book 3, Ode 29: Happy the Man - trans. Dryden

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

O tempora , o mores: what would Juvenal have made of Sally Bercow's sex toy?

2011-12-11T19:25:00.000+02:00

I am having the experience people said they had when Diana died and the English went wild with grief, that they no longer recognised their country. This is worthy of Juvenal.

Quentin Letts today in the Daily Mail:

Asked by 'Total Politics' magazine to name her favourite gadget, she did not, as some might have done, mention the Corby trouser press or the Teasmade.
She opted for a certain type of battery-operated sex toy. Classy.

Michael Wharton could not have invented it (and anyway would have considered it much too rude for a family newspaper). Selwyn Lloyd and George Thomas, unmarried men, are spinning in their graves.

Rod Liddle and the Stephen Laurence case

2011-12-11T19:21:00.000+02:00

I very much hope justice is done in the Stephen Laurence case but am not sure it will be. I am disturbed too by the abolition of the double jeopardy rule. Generally no-one seems to care about ancient freedoms - they even held a murder trial in secret a while back - using anti-terrorist legislation. And it wasn’t even a terrorist case. People nowadays seem very exercised about the welfare state, schools (that's a laugh), hospitals, discrimination and equality but not about freedom at all.

The Rod Liddle wrote two paragraphs about the case that are possibly in contempt of court so even though I am in Romania I shall not post them. They are all over the net though. But I came across two quotations from Liddle that I hadn't seen and thought worth putting up.

The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

And:

I’m not sure why it puzzles people, although I assume it’s something to do with what the Labour Party has become. I am pretty much of the left, but loathe the censoriousness, arrogance, self-righteousness and political correctness of the left, or London faux-left, as I would describe it. I sign up to most of the stuff which used to be considered left – decent minimum wage, redistributive tax policy, social ownership of those things which as a society we need but which the market struggles to provide (trains, utilities, council housing and the like). My worries about immigration, meanwhile, are twofold; that as a country we have become too crowded, and that the free movement of labour has made it harder for indigenous working class people to earn a decent wage, rent a decent house, get their kids educated in schools where the other kids speak the same language and so on and so on. My dislike of multiculturalism stems not simply from the belief that competing cultures undermine a sense of national identity and shared aspiration, but that some of the cultures we have encouraged, or made allowances for, are profoundly illiberal and penalize the most vulnerable sectors of society. And when that happens – either with the more rigorous strictures of Islam, or the low educational achievement and predilection towards crime of young African Caribbean men (© Diane Abbott), we should say so, and say so forcefully. I suppose on these latter points it has largely been the right-wing doing most of the running – but I do not see why it is right wing per se to object to the authoritarianism of Islam, or a culture which leads black kids towards crime. Quite the reverse, I would have thought. But there we are. I hope this has helped.

I am culpably liberal and optimistic in many ways and was unaware until fairly recently about the problems caused by young blacks but even I have noticed the number of terrible gang killings committed by black men in the press. Yet no one discusses this except the sainted Liddle. I wonder why we collect statistics about ethnicity for all sorts of things but not for crime. I wonder why the state in every developed country seems to be trying to change rather than bolster the established order and established hierarchies. Why did this happen around the developed world in the 50s and 60s? An important and urgent question for historians. But most historians also seem to think tradition and hierarchy are oppressive.

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

2011-12-11T19:14:00.000+02:00

‎1. Have the courage to live a life true to yourself, not the life others expected of you
2. Don't work so hard
3. Express your feelings
4. Stay in touch with your friends
5. Let yourself be happier

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3AQBj9fD1vwLcJ%3Abeyondtheopposites.com%2F%3Fp%3D94+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

The new religion and Romania

2011-12-11T19:10:00.000+02:00

Nowadays state schools in Great Britain and in many other countries in the West no longer teach religion as truth but indoctrinate children in anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-colonialism, relativism etc rather than as always used to be the case teaching them the traditions into which they are born. I met an English schoolmistress going around Romanian schools teaching 'human rights' (humph) including that homosexuality was not immoral in flat contradiction of the Orthodox church's teaching (almost everyone is religious here). Being paid in other words by EU to tell innocent minds the Orthodox Church was fallible and bigoted. Not what I imagine their parents would approve of either. What is clear that we have qa new state religion based on welfare non-discrimination and equal opportunities and the state in developed countries is even replacing the electorates to ensure the continuity of the state religion and its triumph over any earlier ideas about politics or religion.

Romanian women, a very broad subject

2011-12-11T19:00:00.000+02:00

This is an article I published in 2004 that got be roundly criticised by all my Romanian women friends. It was probably glib then and things have changed beyond recognition, no doubt, since.

Romanian women, a very broad subject

Schopenhauer in one of his deplorably misogynistic aphorisms said that ‘Any two men in the same trade feel an antagonism born of professional rivalry. All women feel an antagonism for all other women because all women belong to the same trade.’

I remember one morning at the age of twelve laughing loudly when a schoolfriend surreptitiously read this out to me from a penguin Schopenhauer stolen from his elder brother. I think that only once in the years between that moment in the mid-1970s and leaving England to live in Romania did I have the courage to repeat the remark to a woman friend. She was a close friend, Cambridge-educated but no bluestocking and the diametrical opposite of a feminist. She received it in a tolerant but disapproving way, much more frown than smile. But in the six years I have lived in Bucharest I have quoted this line to quite a few Romanian women of different social classes, political opinions and worldviews and never failed to obtain a gleeful laugh, more often than not followed by the comment ‘It’s true.’ In fact I have come slowly, because I am rather naïf, to see that it is true. At least it is somewhat true in Romania and in most of the world, excepting the richest countries, and it was somewhat true there, even in cold, damp England, until at most a generation or so ago.

The differences between the sexual politics of Romania and the Anglo-Saxon nations provide a great amount of fairly innocent pleasure for watchers of the Romanian expat scene. It is odd that they have not yet provided the backdrop for comic novels and film scripts. The source of material seems inextinguishable but the dangers of embarking on an analysis of the subject are formidable.

The most fundamental reason for the differences is linguistic of course. All profound issues, it seems nowadays, derive from semantics. Having no gender helps make English the easiest language in the world to learn but it fails to instil in the adolescent Anglophone the existentially different natures of men and women. Perhaps this is much of the reason for the sexlessness of the English-speaking world about which Europeans sometimes complain. And what hope do we have of breaking this pattern when we think that it dates back to some prehistoric psychological-linguistic national trauma in the fifth century when Old English became cast adrift from Old Friesian and Old Gothic. From this we reach to the state of affairs where it has become orthodoxy to believe that the differences between men and women are more the products of social conditioning than innate, where men and women are considered by opinion-formers to be different in the way that say the English and the French are different rather than in the way that Martians and earthlings are different. This is the narrative which is taught in North America. On the other hand, what hope has modern American feminism of making inroads in a country like Romania where demonstrative pronouns have eight different feminine cases?

The American journalist Countess Waldeck, who was in Bucharest in 1940 and 1941 and was fascinated by Romanian women, said that, after centuries of Ottoman rule, ‘They still have something of the harem about them.’ The Countess’s history is a little out because, as Romanians insistently point out, most of present-day Romania was never directly ruled by the Sublime Porte, but she had a good eye. Romania is, as it has always been, a country where the men have the power. Women usually exercise power through influencing men rather than directly. The exceptions to this rule are the multinational companies where women and men advance on merit but even in multinational companies, in Romania as in every country, political power struggles are as important as ability in advancing ones career.

The view among foreign businessmen is that Romanian women, as a broad generalisation, make better employees, are harder working, more flexible and quicker to adapt to the new post-December mentality than their male contemporaries. In some sectors (the Big Four accountancy firms are an example) women greatly outnumber men and often advance further. Successful women have told me that even in these companies a glass ceiling exists preventing them reaching the top but the truth is that it is too early to tell. There are many examples of women who have reached the top of international firms in Romania. As the cohort of Romanian males recruited in the 1990s when the multinationals first set up shop makes way for a generation reared in the multinational environment the numbers of women at the top will increase. In Romanian companies it is otherwise and in politics women are often expected to perform a secondary and decorative role. One reason amongst many for this is, I am told, that Romanian men do not like to accept bribes from women.

Successful career women will advance in this country, as in France or Italy, without sacrificing their femininity. On the other hand, in some sectors more than others, especially in advertising, journalism and television but also in banks and law firms, most of all in politics, flirtations and pragmatic office affairs are also for some a means of career development. Sexual harassment is a fact of life in this country but like all swords it is a double-edged one. By no means are women only harassed, never harassing. There are one or two career women who have also been grandes horizontales, products of an upbringing in the 1980s when all survival required innumerable barter arrangements and in which bribery, a perennial feature of life in Romania, flourished as never before. It is essential to understand the importance in a very poor country with an ubiquitous secret police of spying, prostitution, bribery and blackmail. When the Romanian history of our days comes to be written (I have sometimes played with the idea of writing it myself) the wise historian will choose as his title, shall we say, ‘Romania in Transition : 1978 -2010’ (from the defection Ion Mihai Pacepa, Head of the Securitate, to the date of accession to the EU). The continuities between the 1980s and now are as interesting as the changes. Neither can be understood except in relation to the other.

The way in which the international sexual revolution percolated the Iron Curtain, even under Ceausescu’s sexually puritanical version of Marxism- Leninism, with abortion and contraception illegal, would also make an interesting theme for a Ph.D. thesis. But it was only after 1989 that the revolution became public and it was a very different kind of sexual revolution from the one that took place in the West in the 60s and 70s. Women were now allowed openly to have as many love affairs as they chose before marriage but sexual relations remained as they always had been power relations and power remained with men.

Whatever happens in the boardroom, at home Romanian women’s role is a traditional one although the difficulties of combining a twenty-first century career pattern with a 1930s domestic life are made easier because, as in the 1930s, servants are plentiful and cheap. Perhaps we should not sympathise too much with the travails of the successful professional woman. More deserving of sympathy are the able young women trying to find their first job. If they want to be journalists for example they may well be propositioned at every interview. Or let us sympathise with the young women who leave school at eighteen and take dead-end jobs on starvation wages. Or the ones who prefer to exchange the poverty of Romania for the poverty that awaits them abroad amongst the hundreds of thousands of Romanians who struggle abroad to make ends meet in menial, often illegal, work, finding the means to survive and to send money home to their families. Their remittances are the main source of direct foreign investment in Romania in the Age of Transition.

My age is just starting to sink in - as is my face.

2011-12-11T18:50:00.000+02:00

Two things that make me feel young: Jerry Brown is Governor of California and Nana Mouskouri, my father's favourite, sang in Bucharest at the weekend looking from the posters unchanged.

Here are some thoughts on middle age.

50 years: here's a time when you have to separate yourself from what other people expect of you, and do what you love. Because if you find yourself 50 years old and you aren't doing what you love, then what's the point? ~ Jim Carrey

		“Except ye become as little children, except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, "ye cannot enter the kingdom of God." One must not only die daily, but every day we must be born again.” ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you. ~ Agatha Christie

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
Samuel Johnson

By the time we are 50, we are definitely in the suburbs of mortality.

Alain de Botton.

The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits. ~ Hervey Allen

Getting older only matters if you don't feel good in yourself.
Matthew Bourne, choreographer, born 13 January 1960

Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
~ William Feather

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.
~ Benjamin Haydon

She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
~ Anita Brookner

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
~ Virginia Woolf

Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.
~ Edward Young

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.
~ Victor Hugo

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
~ T. S. Eliot

I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
~ Wendy Cope

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep.
~ Alexander Herzen

Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
~ Edward Hoagland

Nature gives you the face you have at twenty, but it's up to you to merit the face you have at fifty.
~ Coco Chanel

You take all the experience and judgement of men over fifty out of the world and there wouldn't be enough left to run it.
~ Henry Ford

Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life. ~ Daniel Francois Esprit Auber

By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves. ~ Marie Dressler

		I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent. ~ Wendy Cope
Nature gives you the face you have at twenty; it is up to you to merit the face you have at fifty. ~ Coco Chanel

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down. ~T.S. Eliot

• You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they get older.
-Anouk Aimee

• The surest sign of age is loneliness.
-Amos Bronson Alcott

• To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
-Thomas B. Aldrich

• The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty. The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits.
-Hervey Allen

• To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
-Henri Frederic Amiel

• I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
-Elizabeth Arden

• Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
-Thomas Arnold

• Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
Fred Astaire

• Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
-Francis Bacon

• I will never be an old man. To me, old age is always 15 years older than I am.
-Bernard M. Baruch

• We grow neither better or worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.
-May L. Becker

• To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
-Samuel Beckett

• I hope I never get so old I get religious.
-Ingmar Bergman

• Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. [2 Corinthians 4:16]

• In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.
- Josh Billings

• I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.
- Alan Bleasdale

• To resist the frigidity of old age, one must combine the body, the mind, and the heart. And to keep these in parallel vigor one must exercise, study, and love.
-Bonstettin

• The tendency of old age to the body, say the physiologists, is to form bone. It is as rare as it is pleasant to meet with an old man whose opinions are not ossified.
- J. F. Boyse

• She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
-Anita Brookner

• Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
-Captain J. Brown

• You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
-Les Brown

• I believe the true function of age is memory. I'm recording as fast as I can.
-Rita Mae Brown

• A woman's always younger than a man at equal years.
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• Grow old with me the best is yet to come.
-Robert Browning

• We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
-Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

• In the name of Hypocrites, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.
-Luis Bunuel

• Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese
-Billie Burke

• By the time you're eighty years old you've learned everything. You only have to remember it.
-George Burns

• How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.
-John Burroughs

• It was one of the deadliest and heaviest feelings of my life to feel that I was no longer a boy. From that moment I began to grow old in my own esteem --and in my esteem age is not estimable.

-Lord Byron

• Of all the barbarous middle ages, that which is most barbarous is the middle age of man! it is -- I really scarce know what; but when we hover between fool and sage, and don't know justly what we would be at -- a period something like a printed page, black letter upon foolscap, while our hair grows grizzled, and we are not what we were.
- Lord Byron

• A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.
- Joyce Carey

• It is not all bad, this getting old, ripening. After the fruit has got its growth it should juice up and mellow. God forbid I should live long enough to ferment and rot and fall to the ground in a squash.
- Emily Carr

• Every time I think that I'm getting old, and gradually going to the grave, something else happens.
- Lillian Carter

• Middle age is when a guy keeps turning off lights for economical rather than romantic reasons.
- Eli Cass

• Old age has deformities enough of its own. It should never add to them the deformity of vice.
- Cato The Elder

• Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternatives.
- Maurice Chevalier

• A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world.
- Lydia M. Child

• Most people think that aging is irreversible and we know that there are mechanisms even in the human machinery that allow for the reversal of aging, through correction of diet, through anti-oxidants, through removal of toxins from the body, through exercise, through yoga and breathing techniques, and through meditation.
- Deepak Chopra

• No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.
Cicero

• You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.
Cicero

• There are three classes into which all the women past seventy that ever I knew were to be divided:
1. That dear old soul;
2. That old woman;
3. That old witch.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
- Mortimer Collins

• The excess of our youth are checks written against our age and they are payable with interest thirty years later. -Charles Caleb Colton

• I'm aiming by the time I'm fifty to stop being an adolescent.
- Wendy Cope

• Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.
- George William Curtis

• He is so old that his blood type was discontinued.
- Bill Dana

• I'm at the age where food has taken the place of sex in my life. In fact, I've just had a mirror put over my kitchen table.
- Rodney Dangerfield

• At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he is seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he know he can't.
- Clarence Darrow

• The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out of it!"
- Doris Day

• Middle age is youth without levity, and age without decay.
- Daniel Defoe

• Keep on raging -- to stop the aging.
- The Delltones

• At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths --your abilities and your failings.
- Gerard Depardieu

• I am thirty-three -- the age of the good Sans-culotte Jesus; an age fatal to revolutionists.
- Camille Desmoulins

• Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. [Reflecting on his former status as a teen idol]
- Matt Dillon

• For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.
- Dorothy Dix

• Who soweth good seed shall surely reap; The year grows rich as it groweth old, And life's latest sands are its sands of gold!
- Julia C. R. Dorr

• It is not how old you are, but how you are old.
- Marie Dressler

• Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
- Lawrence Durrell

• I'm saving that rocker for the day when I feel as old as I really am.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

• Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
- George Eliot

• The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
- T. S. Eliot

• We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

• The age of a woman doesn't mean a thing. The best tunes are played on the oldest fiddles.
- Sigmund Z. Engel

• If youth knew; if age could.
- Henri Estienne

• Life begins at 40 -- but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
- William Feather

• One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young. -Dorothy Canfield Fisher

• Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
- Benjamin Franklin

• I guess I don't so much mind being old, as I mind being fat and old.
- Peter Gabriel

• An important antidote to American democracy is American gerontocracy. The positions of eminence and authority in Congress are allotted in accordance with length of service, regardless of quality. Superficial observers have long criticized the United States for making a fetish of youth. This is unfair. Uniquely among modern organs of public and private administration, its national legislature rewards senility.
- John Kenneth Galbraith

• If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
- James A. Garfield

• Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

• Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
- William Golding

• Women over fifty already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the western world. As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. In order to like themselves they must reject trivialization by others of who and what they are. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.
- Germaine Greer

• You're only young once, but you can be immature forever.
- John Greier

• It really costs me a lot emotionally to watch myself on-screen. I think of myself, and feel like I'm quite young, and then I look at this old man with the baggy chins and the tired eyes and the receding hairline and all that.
- Gene Hackman

• The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.
- Thomas Hardy

• A woman would rather visit her own grave than the place where she has been young and beautiful after she is aged and ugly.
- Corra May Harris

• Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front stall as spectator.
- Jane Harrison

• There are only three ages for women in Hollywood--Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
- Goldie Hawn

• Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.
- Benjamin Haydon

• I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.
- Harry Hershfield

• Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of a time long dead appear more and more often on his way, calling up series of shades and pictures kept somewhere, "just in case," in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep. -Alexander Herzen

• Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
- Edward Hoagland

• The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
- Eric Hoffer

• To be 70 years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be 40 years old.
- Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr.

• Age, like distance lends a double charm.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

• I don't generally feel anything until noon, then it's time for my nap.
- Bob Hope

• Those who search beyond the natural limits will retain good hearing and clear vision, their bodies will remain light and strong, and although they grow old in years they will remain able-bodied and flourishing; and those who are able-bodied can govern to
- Huang Ti

• Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.
- Victor Hugo

• Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
- Washington Irving

• My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
- Thomas Jefferson

• At last now you can be what the old cannot recall and the young long for in dreams, yet still include them all. -Elizabeth Jennings

• Wrecked on the lee shore of age.
- Sarah Orne Jewett

• When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
- Samuel Johnson

• From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life.
- Carl Jung

• How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
- (Decimus Junius Juvenalis) Juvenal

• In my twenties, my pleasures tended to be physical. In my thirties, my pleasures tended to be intellectual. I can't say which was more exquisite.
- Steve Kangas

• Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
- Garson Kanin

• A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried.
- Dorothea Kent

• For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.
- KäThe Kollwitz

• The trouble with our age is that it is all signpost and no destination.
- Louis Kronenberger

• Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week. -Maggie Kuhn

• Few people know how to be old.
- Francois De La Rochefoucauld

• Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name.
- Philip Larkin

• The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.
- Doug Larson

• It is a sobering thought, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.
- Tom Lehrer

• When you get to fifty-two food becomes more important than sex.
- Prue Leith

• The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
- Doris Lessing

• I have found it to be true that the older I've become the better my life has become.
- Rush Limbaugh

• Like spring, but it is too young. I like summer, but it is too proud. So I like best of all autumn, because its tone is mellower, its colors are richer, and it is tinged with a little sorrow. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring, nor the power of summer, but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and its content.
- Lin Yü-tang

• To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.
- Don Marquis

• Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
- Groucho Marx

• When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch's statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
- W. Somerset Maugham

• No gray hairs streak my soul, no grandfatherly fondness there! I shake the world with the might of my voice, and walk --handsome, twenty-two year old.
- Vladimir Mayakovsky

• Men of my age live in a state of continual desperation.
- Trevor Mcdonald

• If you associate enough with older people who do enjoy their lives, who are not stored away in any golden ghettos, you will gain a sense of continuity and of the possibility for a full life.
- Margaret Mead

• Old age is like flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's nothing you can do.
- Golda Meir

• Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!
- George Meredith

• Don't just count your years, make your years count.
- Ernest Meyers

• How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth, stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
- John Milton

• We are not limited by our old ages; we are liberate by it.
- Stu Mittleman

• Minds ripen at very different ages.
- Elizabeth Montagu

• Nature should have been pleased to have made this age miserable, without making it also ridiculous.
- Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

• Someday you will read in the papers that Moody is dead. Don't you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I was born of the flesh in 1837, I was born of the spirit in 1855. That which is born of the flesh may die. That which is born of the Spirit shall live forever.
- Dwight L. Moody

• Preparation for old age should begin not later than one's teens. A life which is empty of purpose until 65 will not suddenly become filled on retirement.
- Arthur E. Morgan

• When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.
- John Mortimer

• I think in twenty years I'll be looked at like Bob Hope. Doing those president jokes and golf shit. It scares me. -Eddie Murphy

• In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don't know, but they do.
- Patricia Neal

• The older you get the stronger the wind gets -- and it's always in your face.
- Jack Nicklaus

• How people keep correcting us when we are young! There is always some bad habit or other they tell us we ought to get over. Yet most bad habits are tools to help us through life.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

• My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.
- Peggy Noonan

•You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea.
- John Nuveen

• Here, with whitened hair, desires failing, strength ebbing out of him, with the sun gone down and with only the serenity and the calm warning of the evening star left to him, he drank to Life, to all it had been, to what it was, to what it would be. Hurrah!
- Sean O'Casey

• The old -- like children -- talk to themselves, for they have reached that hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secrets are one's own!
- Eugene O'Neill

• When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.
- Joyce Carol Oates

• Study until twenty five, investigate until forty, profession until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance.
- Sir William Osler

• One of the most important phases of maturing is that of growth from self-centering to an understanding relationship to others. A person is not mature until he has both an ability and a willingness to see himself as one among others and to do unto those others as he would have them do to him.
- Harry A. Overstreet

• You know you're getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.
- Arnold Palmer

• It is a rare and difficult attainment to grow old gracefully and happily.
- R. Palmer

• In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.
- Nikita Ivanovich Panin

• The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
- Jean Paul

• Live your life and forget your age.
- Norman Vincent Peale

• Age-based retirement arbitrarily severs productive persons from their livelihood, squanders their talents, scars their health, strains an already overburdened Social Security system, and drives many elderly people into poverty and despair. Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.
- Claude D. Pepper

• Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.
- Ralph B. Perry

• Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue, speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.
- Philo

• A graceful and honorable old age is the childhood of immortality.
- Pindar

• Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
- Anthony Powell

• One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going.
-J. B. Priestley

• We pay when old for the excesses of youth.
- Proverb

• The older the fiddler, the sweeter the tune.
- English Proverb

• Old age comes on suddenly, and not gradually as is thought.
- Rahel

• Age considers; youth ventures.
- Raupach

• Getting old is a fascination thing. The older you get, the older you want to get.
- Keith Richards

• Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear. What has puzzled us before seems less mysterious, and the crooked paths look straighter as we approach the end.
- Jean Paul Richter

• Age does not matter if the matter does not age.
- Carlos Pena Romulo

• I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
- Helena Rubinstein

• There are people whose watch stops at a certain hour and who remain permanently at that age.
- Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

• The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
- Arthur Schopenhauer

• Just remember, once you're over the hill you begin to pick up speed.
- Charles M. Schultz

• I'd like to grow very old as slowly as possible.
- Irene Mayer Selznick

• Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.
- J. P. Senn

• Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek, a white beard, a decreasing leg, an increasing belly? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, your chin double, your wit single, and every part about you blasted with antiquity?
- William Shakespeare

• With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. [Merchant Of Venice]
- William Shakespeare

• The golden age is before us, not behind us.
- St. Simon

• Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.
- Muriel Spark

• When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
- Germaine De Stael

• A healthy old fellow, who is not a fool, is the happiest creature living.
- Sir Richard Steele

• The trick is growing up without growing old.
- Casey Stengel

• When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
- I. F. Stone

• Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
- Tom Stoppard

• If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older.
- Abraham Sutzkever

•Every one desires to live long, but no one would be old.
- Jonathan Swift

• No man was ever so completely skilled in the conduct of life, as not to receive new information from age and experience.
- Terence

• There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
Tholuck
None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm
-Henry David Thoreau

• I'm 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I'd only be 48. That's the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
- James Thurber

• Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.
- Leon Trotsky

• I will never give in to old age until I become old. And I'm not old yet!
- Tina Turner

• For the first fourteen years for a rod they do while for the next as a pearl in the world they do shine. For the next trim beauty beginneth to swerve. For the next matrons or drudges they serve. For the next doth crave a staff for a stay. For the next a bier to fetch them away.
- Thomas Tusser

• Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
- Mark Twain

• Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being's heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what's next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long are you young.
- Samuel Ullman

• Maturity is the ability to think, speak and act your feelings within the bounds of dignity. The measure of your maturity is how spiritual you become during the midst of your frustrations.
- Source Unknown

• Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about it.
- Source Unknown

• They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.
- Henry Vaughan

• But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.
- Judith Viorst

• You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.
- Fay Weldon

• There's no such thing as old age, there is only sorrow.
- Edith Wharton

• Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.
- Walt Whitman

• No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.
- Oscar Wilde

• At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
- Virginia Woolf

• An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick
- William Butler Yeats

• The person of wisdom is the person of years.
-Young

Be wise with speed; a fool at forty is a fool indeed.
-Edward Young

Pariah status

2011-12-11T18:46:00.000+02:00

Why was South Africa under apartheid a pariah but Saudi Arabia our friend and ally? Saudi Arabia which stones people. Why is North Korea not hated in North London as P.W. Botha was? The problem in South Africa was not about ethics. It was about colonial guilt and the recoil from the horrors inflicted by Nazi Germany. The whole of history since 1945 in the West has been a meditation on Auschwitz. And as always the wrong lessons are learnt from history. The apartheid regime (I do not admire it or apartheid, by the way, though white rule had much to recommend it) had better ethics than most African regimes - it was because the National Party were Christians and even in a way democrats that they did not suppress the blacks brutally as the Chinese Communists did their dissidents - or the Alawis in Syria did and are trying to do again.

By the way I disliked the apartheid regime and am glad it went though I suspect what will follow will be worse. People confused apartheid which was very bad with white rule but neither could have lasted. Shame Vorster did not make a good deal. But he was a good anti-Communist. And abortion was illegal under the old regime which was a major plus.

'What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going into but coming out of?'

2011-12-11T18:38:00.000+02:00

Great quote from Howard Jacobson in The Independent with which I think history may agree:

'What if the Lost Decade is not what we are going in to but coming out of – the Bankers' Age, the decade of footling technology, globalised junk, celebrity, stuffing our faces, a Lost Decade of human incuriosity in which we haven't cared "how people walk" or what their eyes and hands look like, in which art has been the lackey of advertising and imagination has declined into mere fantasy? I don't minimise material hardship, but we don't have to be supine before the system. The world is interesting beyond money; there is infinitely more to us than is dreamt of in the materialists' philosophy.'

Very well then, alone!

2011-12-11T18:36:00.000+02:00

‎"From the concept of habeas corpus to the BBC, to Elizabethan poetry to John Le Carre, from rock to the invention of the Sixties, from London springtime concerts to Wimbledon, via Liverpool FC. So many things do we hold dear from across the Channel... But Germany, France and the majority of the other EU member states were right, at daybreak on Friday 9 December, to say No to London." (Le Monde). The 1960s was not one of our better ideas. Using the veto on Friday was.

A hundred years hence

2011-11-27T15:30:00.000+02:00

This macabre song often runs through my head written at a time when "The year of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three" was a hundred years in the future. It seems appropriate on the eve of my birthday. The hot girls in 1703 were just as painfully attractive as the ones today, although their breath was less sweet.

1703 is such an interesting moment when modern England is inchoate. The King has been exiled, what Disraeli called Dutch finance has been brought in, the United Kingdom is about to be created and yet we still have the very last Cavalier Poets and the faint traces of the Elizabethan lyrical tradition.

Let us drink and be merry, dance joke and rejoice,

With claret and sherry, the oboe and voice,

This wicked old world, to our joy is unjust,

All treasures uncertain, then down with your dust.

In frolic dispence your pounds, shillings and pence,

For we shall be nothing an hundred years hence.

We will sport and be free with Fran, Betty and Dolly,

Take lobsters and oysters to cure melancholy.

Each dinner we'll take them and spring like a flea

Dame Venus, thus maybe, was born of the sea.

With her an with Bacchus, we'll tickle the sense

For we shall be passed it an hundred years hence.

Your beautiful piece, who has all eyes upon her

Who, her honesty sells, for an hogo of honour,

Whose lightness and brightness doth cause such a splendour

That none are thought fit, but the stars, to attend her.

Although she seems pleasant and sweet to the sense,

She'll be damnably mouldy an hundred years hence.

Your plush coated quack who, his fees to enlarge,

Kills people with licence and at their own charge,

Who builds a vast structure of ill-gotten wealth

from the dregs of a piss-pot and ruins of health.

'Though treasures of life, he pretends to dispense,

He'll be turned into mummy an hundred years hence.

Your usurer who, in one hundred, takes twenty,

Who mourns in his wealth and who pines in his plenty

Saves up for a season he never shall see

The year of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three

When he'll turn all his bags, all his houses and rents

For a worm eaten coffin an hundred years hence.

Aye, the poet himself, who so loftily sings

That he scorns any subject but Heroes and Kings,

Must to the capricios of Fortune submit

And oft times be thought a fool for his wit.

Thus Beauty, Wit, Wealth, Law, Learning and Sense

Must all come to nothing an hundred years hence.

Thomas Jordan

The purpose of this blog about Bucharest and Romania - when I remember

2011-11-26T11:52:00.000+02:00

‎'All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love -- and to sing; if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love.' Thoreau

Dr Johnson I love more than any other man I never met.

2011-11-26T11:50:00.000+02:00

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. 'If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.'

Inequality gets too bad a press

2011-11-26T11:48:00.000+02:00

Interesting point from a note I was sent by Plamen Monovski, CIO of Renaissance Asset Managers

The richer the society, the more its citizens seem to be affected by inequality. Every day, the pulpiteers in the press produce irate editorials about the gargantuan pay discrepancies between management and workers of western corporations. Research has shown time and again that human beings are much more stirred not so much by their absolute standard of living, but by how much it differs from their immediate peers. Positioning in the social order seems to be the major determinant of happiness. Huge differences in wealth then are offensive, as they relegate the majority to lower strata of society. Like in the animal kingdom, low social status is an evolutionary dead end. Hence, it is of paramount importance to present oneself credibly in society without the shame and stigma of apparent poverty. Advertisers and consumer goods companies play on that insecurity and ballyhoo conspicuous consumption as proof of self-worth. Thus purchases say more about the identity of the individual than the good itself; second-rate goods reflect second-rate people.
The rise of anxiety and its associated depression are at the same time accompanied with levels of self-promotion unseen in history. According to an influential study on the subject, in 1950 10% of teenagers agreed with the statement “I am an important person”. These days that number had risen to more than 80%. The meteoric rise of reality shows, with their the promise of instant fame and where judgments on one’s abilities are passed swiftly, are laying bare the character of a generation of narcissistic nervous wrecks. This “cortisol”-laden tribe reports extreme stress levels driven by low social status and loneliness (aka. lack of friends).
Perhaps this loneliness results from the collapse of communities where an individual used to pass his or her life surrounded by the same people, to an altogether different mode of existence. The rapid rise of urbanisation, the uprooting of communities, means that one’s life is spent in the company of strangers who need to be impressed on the spot.

Does inequality make people unhappy? Or the combination of advertising, celebrity gossip, affluence and an official ideology of meritocracy and equal opportunities. these things make people who do not get on feel either like failures or victims. I wonder if more deferential, hierarchical societies are not happier.

He goes onto talk about the loneliness and alientaion of modern life - this can be explained by social fluidity, the decline of religion, mass immigration and in many other ways. But egalitarianism is the ruling ideology of our age.

But perhaps my backward looking nostalgia like all political stances is an expression of my psychological state.

Actually I think there is a great deal of happiness around in England and Romania - and probably most places. Obviously except Hungary.

Spectator cartoon in 1989 of the Prince of Wales

2011-11-24T23:08:00.000+02:00

I periodically remember a Spectator cartoon in 1989 of the Prince of Wales (who had admitted he talked to his plants) with hands behind his back bending over a dahlia and saying, 'And how long have you been a dahlia?'

Primoridial slime somehow turned into Bertrand Russell?

2011-11-24T23:06:00.000+02:00

Malcom Muggeridge once asked "Wouldn't it be a dreary story if all there was to existence was that primoridial slime somehow turned into Bertrand Russell?"

The modern equivalent would be to substitute Richard Dawkins for Bertrand Russell.

Bertrand Russell of course inherited the earldom bestowed on his grandfather, Lord John Russell, the Liberal Prime Minister, who met Napoleon en route to St. Helena and presided unperturbed over the Irish Famine. I remember passing Bertrand Russell's son each morning sleeping on the red leather benches of the House of Lords behind the throne when I made my way carrier bag in hand to my first job in the Victoria Tower, when my life was just beginning and, in a sense, certainly as I thought, ending. The fourth Earl Russell attended daily and slept in the House of Lords but only once spoke in the House, an occasion on which he suggested inter alia that the peers leave London for the south seas and take hallucinogenic drugs. The speech lasted for several hours till the Lords, which has, or had in those days, no speaker and no closure, finally got him to sit down by barracking. This had been in the 1960s and the speech had been published by a hippy publishing house and enjoyed some success.

The fourth Earl, whose beard reached to his torso and who dressed like a tramp (but was I was told a man of some means), lived in a squalid caravan in, I think, St. Austell. What a terrible shame the Labour Party reformed the Lords.

Tempora non mutantur

2011-11-24T22:53:00.000+02:00

A thought-provoking quote from Livy's "History of Rome": "I would have [the reader] trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them. The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid."

It could have been written this year. When I read these lines aged 13 they did not seem topical but surely they do now or have I grown old?

(I wish I did not have the misfortune to study the Cambridge Latin course - I got grade A in A Level but cannot read a word because I was not taught to write it.)

Imperialism

2011-11-24T22:51:00.000+02:00

I started writing a book called Imperialism when I was 7. I still have it complete with many maps. It did not win the prize which went to a project on motorbikes which won because, the headmaster said frowning at me, it was not taken out of books. He was a red. What a great conservative polemicist was lost in me.

St. Edmund King and Martyr, pray for us

2011-11-22T12:38:00.000+02:00

I learnt today that Sunday was St Edmund's Day. My patron saint and I did not know. I had forgotten that he was patron saint of England before St. Edward the Confessor and then latterly St. George. I have sometimes wondered - although I chose him at my confirmation - how saintly those warrior saints really were. St Stephen the Great, recently canonised by the Romanian Orthodox Church, is said to have fathered a child in every town he conquered or laid siege to. But St. Edmund was a great hero certainly. I am not convinced of the Confessor's sanctity either which seems to be based on his not having children, thus allowing William I to invade and conquer England. . And I am not sure who St George was but am old enough to remember him being decanonised much to the indignation of patriotic Anglican Englishmen. That really was Papal Aggression.

Congolese independence 50 years later: an idea whose time has come and gone

2011-11-22T10:25:00.000+02:00

A Congolese telling the BBC this morning how much better things were under colonialism. He brushed aside the BBC man's objection that the Belgians were self-interested. 'The people who made Britain rich were not acting in the interests of the workers.'

The BBC does allow pro-colonial views, it seems, if expressed by Africans.

Books Read This Year of Grace 2011

2011-11-20T13:58:00.004+02:00

The Fry Chronicles Stephen Fry

When the Lights Went Out Andy Beckett

Any Souvenirs?* George Mikes

How to Make Friends and Influence People Dale Carnegie

Origins of the Cold War (1983 ed.) Martin McCauley

Precarious Living Dr. Martin Israel

The Crisis of Islam Bernard Lewis
Yezidism in Europe Philip G. Kreyenbroek

With Friends Like These Larry L. Watts

Ataturk Andrew Mango

Snow Orhan Pamuk

The Balkans* Mark Mazower

The Yezidis Eszter Spat

Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor

Black Mischief* Evelyn Waugh

The Transformation of British Life 1950-2000 Andrew Rosen

The Comedians Graham Greene

Reflections on the Impact of the French Revolution Alexandru Zub

The Spy who Came in from the Cold John Le Carre

From the Holy Mountain William Dalrymple

The Lady in the Lake* Raymond Chandler

The Catholic Church And Nazi Germany Guenter Lewy

Farewell, My Lovely* Raymond Chandler

* = reread

bold = I loved it

I am proud I read five novels (one recent) instead of the usual one a year. All the books were worth reading except for the Stephen Fry book which interested me a lot for personal reasons. Two I read on-line. Dale Carnegie and Martin israel are the ones I most recommend but I haven't nearly finished either. I wonder why I only liked From the Holy Mountain a great deal rather than loving it. Larry Watts' magnum opus is very good. Black Mischief is a book to read in your teens or early 20s. At 13 I wept copiously. With The Comedians you can hear the wheels turning. Raymond Chandler never fails to exhilarate even on a fourth reading. Like a great ballet dancer doing pirouettes.Eszter Spat's slim book was the one I liked best, partly because she writes well, partly because of the subject matter, partly as an aide memoire of an afternoon spent in Lalish in March

I also - an unusual achievement for me - manged to see two films, both dire, both set in Paris: To Catch a Thief and the new Woody Allen.

The Kray twins were always good to their mum

2011-11-19T19:11:00.000+02:00

Himmler's postcards to his mother were auctioned this week and reveal him to be a mother's boy.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, of Mullock's auctioneers in Ludlow, Shropshire, which is selling the postcards, said: "Himmler was a devout Catholic and his mother had a big influence over him in his upbringing.

"He kept in regular contact with his elderly mother during the war and judging by these postcards he was a bit of a mummy's boy. The messages are quite short and don't go into a lot of detail but the postcards clearly show Himmler was very thoughtful towards his mother."

No surprise here- very many of the Nazis were mothers' boys. Mothers' boys typically become torturers and extremists.

Marie Louise von Frank the leading authority on mothers' boys says most SS stormtroopers were complexed and fixated on mothers, not tough at all and would almost always be reduced by British interrogators to tears by being asked - with quaver in voice - 'When did you last see your .. mother?' Homosexuals also have mother problems or complexes and it is well documented that many Nazis were homosexual.

‎"The role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true."

2011-11-19T18:33:00.000+02:00

Roger Scruton said this speaking to the teenage Daniel Hannan. But Scruton does not seem to me a true conservative. He opposes immigration citing defends the principle of self-determination, an idea of the French Revolution. I am not comfortable with this. There are so many better arguments from Burke and de Maistre.

Martin and the Women

2011-11-19T18:30:00.000+02:00

Amanda Craig reviews Martin Amis: The Biography, By Richard Bradford and discovers Amis minor is to be pitied.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford-6261274.html

Novelists tend to be forged by the experience of anguish, but the "endless cocktail party" in which the three Amis children were brought up would, in a lesser writer, fill a misery memoir. His father, the near-alcoholic Kingsley Amis had, as Richard Bradford puts it, a "limitless taste for adultery" and if his naive young wife Hilly provided their children with love, then the chaos evinced by these pages explains much about his son's fiction. Certainly by the end of this first biography, the old joke about "Mein Kampf by Martin Amis" being the least likely combination of author and title looks a bitter one.

She writes about Amis's lack of literary prizes as if this is evidence of anything which for the literary set it probably is. As if the Booker prize winners will be remembered in a century. 'Boozy male braggadocio' gives away that it is Amis's masculinity and un-feminist attitude to women that are much of the problem though they have nothing to do with whether he is a good writer anymore than Larkin's racism. Amis Minor is equally dismissive of people who vote Conservative or believe in God by the way. He is a great writer, much better than almost any of his male or female contemporaries, to their annoyance, but I never finished London Fields and haven't felt tempted to try him again. ( I bought Money the morning it came out.) But he is probably the sexiest writer since Laclos.

Amanda Craig and all the other women writers dislike Amis because they are feminists and he makes remarks like (unwisely, in an interview with Lynne Barber) 'Look at the tits on that!'

Feminism is now a very dangerous ideology. (I think all ideologies are about justifying smallish groups of of people getting power, in this case clever university educated women who are allowed to do so under the guise of victims.) I just read a disgraceful article by Mary Beard from five years ago in LRB in which she describes Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor as blokish. A war hero, chevalier sans raproche, polyglot, polymath and sublime prose stylist but blokish.

Thank God I live in Romania where feminism has not arrived but it will. Unless some miracle happens like the Angels of Ypres to turn the cultural tide flowing from the West.

Period drama

2011-11-19T18:14:00.000+02:00

In the 80s I deplored the loss of traditional England but now it seems indistinguishable from the Edwardian age. Pretty Tory secretaries disapproved of too many women in Parliament, politicians did not live in sin, a great deal of freedom of speech still existed, habeas corpus, double jeopardy rule, nobs in the Commons, vicars were men....

How priggish not to live in ones age. The typical trick of Peter Pan or Puer Aeternus, who does not want to be bound to time or place but to float free.

Elena Udrea wears rubber dress, kinky boots and wants to kill puppies. Gosh.

2011-11-19T18:11:00.002+02:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/obsesie/4564623753/

Pueri aeterni lack staying power. So do ENFPs.

2011-11-19T18:11:00.000+02:00

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

Style

2011-11-19T18:09:00.000+02:00

Style? " When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun, that was style. Or sometimes people give you style Joan of Arc had style John the Baptist Jesus Socrates Caesar García Lorca. I have met men in jail with style. I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail. Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done. " C. Bukowski

Who has style? I suddenly realise I do!

Who else?

Raymond Chandler.

Err...that's it?

Two in three Britons cannot speak a SINGLE foreign word

2011-11-19T18:07:00.000+02:00

Headline in the Daily Mail:

Non, we no speak your lingo: Two in three Britons cannot speak a SINGLE foreign word
A fifth don't even know what 'bonjour' means
Revealingly, of those that can speak languages almost half knew ‘una cerveza por favor’ meant ‘a beer please’ in Spanish

I think insularity is a beautiful thing. Unfortunately we are not insular vis a vis American culture.

It would be much better to teach German to English people - we could pronounce it, the biggest stumbling block with French. But since even street cleaners in Zurich can speak English...
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2062982/Two-Britons-speak-SINGLE-foreign-word.html#ixzz1eATTavgo

Save Britain's public libraries - cut overseas aid and Trident and a hundred other things instead

2011-11-19T18:04:00.000+02:00

Local Councils should just do the things they did in 1950, including good (silent) public libraries presided over by gorgons (not cultural Marxists educated at ex-polytechnics who stock them with PC propaganda), but not including lesbian outreach officers or hundred of other non-jobs.

(Perhaps we all should just do the things they did in 1950, but with central heating and modern dentistry.)

Where are the terrifying parkies, librarians and Catholic priests of old? Where are the snows of winter, where are they?

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation

2011-11-19T17:50:00.000+02:00

‎

Dr. Johnson said, "You may translate books of science exactly. You may also translate history, in so far as it is not embellished with oratory, which is poetical. Poetry, indeed, cannot be translated; and, therefore, it is the poets that preserve languages; for we would not be at the trouble to learn a language, if we could have all that is written in it just as well in a translation. but as the beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written, we learn the language."

Poetry is what gets lost in the translation is how Robert Frost put it.

Many verse translations are good poems but none are great translations.

But until a few years ago few read poems like Chapman's Homer because they are translations. Reading them always puts me in mind of walking round fine Victorian churches which no-one visits because they are not old (Victorian churches too are now given more attention than twenty years ago). The very good Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation edited by Adrian Poole is the place to start.

One of my favourites is Horace - Odes, Book 3, Verse 29: Happy the Man - translated by Dryden but the poem is all Dryden.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,

He who can call today his own:

He who, secure within, can say,

Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.

Be fair or foul or rain or shine

The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.

Not Heav'n itself upon the past has power,

But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

O tempora! O mores! Juvenal would have had fun with Sally Bercow's sex toy

2011-11-19T17:43:00.000+02:00

I am having the experience people said they had when Diana died and the English went wild with grief, that they no longer recognised their country.

Quentin Letts today in the Daily Mail:

Asked by 'Total Politics' magazine to name her favourite gadget, she did not, as some might have done, mention the Corby trouser press or the Teasmade.
She opted for a certain type of battery-operated sex toy. Classy.

Michael Wharton could not have invented it (and anyway would have considered it very much too rude for a family newspaper). That whirring sound is Selwyn Lloyd and George Thomas, unmarried men, spinning in their graves.

The Society for the Prevention of Progress

2011-11-19T17:41:00.000+02:00

The Society for the Prevention of Progress would now be considered racist, sexist and homophobic (although not Islamophobic). Fiscal conservatism though no doubt wicked can be discussed in public but social conservatism is no longer acceptable and possibly a hate crime.

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. II: Books, Broadcasts, and the War, 1931-1949, ed. Walter Hooper (HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), pp. 613-614, with the editor's introductory note (in italics) and footnotes:

In his unpublished 'biography' of his brother, which later became the 'Memoir' to Letters of C.S. Lewis, Warnie wrote:

In May 1944 Jack received an amusing letter from the Society for the Prevention of Progress, of Walnut Creek, California, inviting him to become a member and requesting him to forward his credentials. The signature on his reply was instigated by one of the Society's rules to which his attention had been called:—Membership and the privileges of the Society are denied to such individuals as Henry A. Wallace³⁰and this fellow Beveridge.³¹

TO THE SOCIETY FOR THE PREVENTION OF PROGRESS (L):

[Magdalen College
May 1944]

Dear Sir,

While feeling that I was born a member of your Society, I am nevertheless honoured to receive the outward seal of membership. I shall hope by continued orthodoxy and the unremitting practice of Reaction, Obstruction, and Stagnation to give you no reason for repenting your favour.

I humbly submit that in my Riddell Lectures entitled The Abolition of Man you will find another work not at all unworthy of consideration for admission to the canon.

Yours regressively,
C.S. Lewis

Beverages not Beveridges
(my motto)

There is a tide in the affairs of men

2011-11-19T17:37:00.000+02:00

Matthew Parris behind the paywall in the Times makes a good point which I have read him make several times over the y ears about how one act can decided a government's fate. Leaving the ERM did for Major,the Winter of Discontent for Callaghan, Falklands War made Mrs. Thatcher. Brown was tumbled as a ditherer when he did not go to the country in 2007. His Gestalt analogy reminded me of what John Biffen said about fall of Mrs. T.: “You know those maps on the Paris Metro that light up when you press a button to go from A to B? Well, it was like that. Someone pressed a button, and all the connections lit up.”'

Groan now as I return yet again to Gestalt psychology, a theory whose best everyday illustration is provided by the children’s game of joining up the dots. From the philosopher David Hume onwards, thinkers and psychologists have noted the human brain’s predilection for finding — in apparently random or even contradictory data — pattern, form and explanation; a predilection for reading a sharper picture from a scatter of data than the scatter may seem to insist.

Political news is composed of such a scatter. Are we to draw a lion or a crab in that night-sky miscellany of points of light? We journalists want to make stories out of news points as astrologers make zodiac signs out of stars. So do politicians. So do you. Humans want to interpret. We’ll link things, brush aside the contrary evidence, invest significance in what confirms our pattern, ignore the rest. Sometimes there really are trends, overarching themes, underlying tides; and sometimes the construction is fanciful. And we do this not only with politics and economics, but with personality as well.
With Cameron & Co (for some of this applies to Mr Osborne too) there are some dots we’ve joined together already. Let me throw a word cloud at you that’s already suggestive of part of a possible picture. Breezy, smooth, imperious, confidence, command, sleek, superior, genial, unflappable, cool, relaxed, calm. These (many would say) are kingly qualities: the attributes of a natural leader.
But now let me throw another word cloud at you: vague, waffly, dismissive, windy, inactive, unclear, “don’t know what he stands for”, equivocal, bland, blank-seeming: some of these are potentially weakness words, others more suggestive of genuine bafflement as to a leader’s intentions. All (like the kingly attributes) may be read from the existing data by those who wish to do so.
Joining together these dots in the firmament, I suggest, two quite contrasting constellations can be drawn. One is of a prince, the other of what Shakespeare would call a pantaloon. Aloof because commanding, or aloof because out of touch? Calm or just paralysed? Low-key or just lazy? Unhurried or just directionless? Unforthcoming because quietly confident, or unforthcoming because clueless? Unflustered or just dilatory? Which picture are Britain and its news media going to lock into place? On which picture will we close the book or begin the movie?
It may happen quite soon. We’re teetering. People await a nudge, one way or the other. The coalition’s leadership urgently needs to signal something strong and something big.

Freedom in Syria and England

2011-11-19T17:30:00.000+02:00

We have far far too much international law which is a great threat to democracy and to freedom (two separate things). I was reading an account of the Assad regime in Syria and came across this: ‎"The Assad regime, like most Arab dictatorships, also quashed any religious or cultural identities, primarily to establish tight control over society." This sounded very familiar and I was reminded of and given a very telling insight into the way the EU and the governments of the EU member states work against the people of Europe. No doubt the Europhiles are convinced they act from the highest motives.

Daniel Hannan blogged a few days ago:

The past twenty years have witnessed a revolution. It has been carried out quietly and bloodlessly, but it is, in its way, as far-reaching a revolution as those of 1789, 1917 or 1979. The rule that had governed relations between states since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 – the principle that each government was responsible for its internal affairs, and that crimes were the responsibility of the state on whose territory they were committed – has been overturned. A new legal order has been established, outside and above the nations.The new order does not take its authority from a single treaty or charter. It is protean, residing in the hundreds of international accords, conventions and declarations that national courts treat as precedent. Nor is it limited in scope. Far from restricting itself to international questions, it presumes to regulate all manner of internal matters: the rights of refugees, the status of children, employment law, religious freedom and so on.
A corpus of law has been created without debate, without ratification by national legislatures, without democratic approval. Its motive force has been the activism of judges and the intimidating fervour of the human rights professionals.
So far, supra-nationalists have had it almost all their own way. In plush conference venues around the world, out from under the public eye, they have enlarged and developed their jurisdiction. Funded by the global NGOs and by UN agencies, they have had time and resources, motive and opportunity. Hardly anyone, by contrast, has much incentive to speak up for the majority.

That’s what makes John Fonte’s book, Sovereignty or Submission, so valuable. Here, for the first time, is a comprehensive case for souverainisme in a single volume. Fonte traces the intellectual origins of trans-nationalism. He looks in detail at the way in which NGOs, unable to get their agenda through national parliaments, turn instead to international conventions. They are, indeed, quite overt about this. The UN's conference on racism at Durban was held at the initiative of a number of Leftist pressure groups which called openly on the UN to implement policies that had been rejected at the ballot box.

Hannan makes a very important point: the true engine of integration has been the European Court of Justice. I hope people begin to see judicial activism in Britain and in the EU as a threat to democracy and to freedom.

Ill fares the land to hast'ning ills a prey

2011-11-06T20:56:00.000+02:00

A report named UN World Population Prospects came out last month. It showed that Romania's birth rate already very low has fallen very steeply in the last year. UN researchers calculated at what rate nations risk disappearing, which includes Romania along with Russia in the first 10 countries to disappear, if birth rates do not increase.

I am no mathematician but I do not believe any population will diminish to zero. Not so long as men and women continue to find each other attractive.

Norway and the USA will be among the last to disappear according to the UN figures. They I suppose continue to reproduce because of immigrants.

Romania is already replacing her missing generation with immigrants from China, Africa etc. I think this is sad. Russia and Japan will not - which will be survivable for Japan as people there do not rely on the state for support in old age. Perhaps in Russia and Romania too people do not rely on the state, have a subsistence economy in the countryside, look after their parents. But Romania's missing workers now sitting out the crisis further West will be replaced by immigrants.

By 2050 Egypt and Russia are expected to have the same population but the Russian government does not like immigration. April saw the sacking of Konstantin Poltoranin, the spokesman for the Russian Federal Migration Service, after the BBC Russian Service posted an interview in which he said: "We want to make sure the mixing of blood happens in the right way here, and not the way it has happened in Western Europe where the results have not been good." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said "I would like to use this opportunity to commend the authorities of the Russian Federation for the dismissal of the former spokesperson of the Federal Migration Service for his racist remarks."

"What is now at stake is the survival of the white race. We feel this in Russia," Mr. Poltoranin told the BBC. After he was fired he said he stood by every word he said. I doubt if his former colleagues or Mr. Putin feel very differently. But all the immigration controls in the world cannot ensure the survival of the white race if white mothers and fathers do not have more children.

Donald Dunham on the Romanians

2011-11-06T17:52:00.000+02:00

(Donald Dunham an American diplomat stationed in Bucharest submitted his doctoral dissertation Rumanian Profile: A Study of National Character as Reflected in the Visual Arts, on May 20th, 1948, in the midst of the Communist takeover. It begins magnificently. I wish I could find a copy of the book whcih someone once lent me.)

The Romanians are a social phenomenon. As a nation among nations, they are westerners evolved in the East. They are Latins surrounded by Slavs. They are Romans two thousand years away from Rome. They are contemporaries re-produced on Trajan’s Column.

They are peasants with the utmost in sophistication. They farm instinctively, but are suspicious of machinery. They speak a language like Italian but the majority of their words are Slavonic. They are superstitious but religious at the same time. They are astutely intelligent, but refuse to be intellectual. They submit to invasion but preserve their identity. They support great wealth and extreme poverty. They produce striking beauty yet can live in filth.

As a collective personality, the Romanians are Oriental in their souls although Latin on the surface. Their patience is almost unending but they are quick to explode in argument; they are peace-loving yet would disintegrate without controversy. They are passive but strong in their resistance; spontaneously adaptable, still difficult t influence. They are romantic but never escape from reality.

They are charming yet cruel in their ridicule, warmly emotional but calculating, generous yet concentrate on the ‘main chance.’ They are opportunistic but lose interest after they have gained the advantage; they seize the moment, still adopt the long view.

The Romanians are a people of colorful contrasts and extreme extremes, born in classic times, ravaged by barbarians, indentured to the Turks, dominated by the Byzantines, the Greeks, dictated to by the Hungarians, Poles, Austrians and others, seduced by the French and not recognized as a country until 1878. Yet they emerge with a character that defies this confusion, that is definitely, emphatically, unmistakably Romanian. This character was born of a Dacian shepherd and a Roman lass, whose progeny became dwellers with nature itself, epicureans with earthy values and a tough constitution.

It developed in composition and grew in strength under the invasions of waves of barbarians. Slavs were added to the original Dacians and the Roman colonizers. Christianization was extended in Wallachia and Moldavia by the Byzantine Church and intrigue was introduced as a science by the Greek ruling emissaries of the Sublime Porte. With the intrigue came the Greek culture of the mind – the analytical clarity of the Mediterraneans – which evaporated as Greek, as it was quickly absorbed as Romanian. Following this permeation came the magnetic seduction by Paris and the synthetic adoption of French-Western artistic values, by those classes who would afford to visit the “Rive Gauche” and return.

Today you find the cult of the mind imbedded as an element of character in all classes second only to emotional spontaneity as a national characteristic. The Greeks were more successful than the French because they came to Romania and did not make Romanians come to them, and because their main influence was middle class and thereby could infect those classes both above and below them. The French appealed to aristocracy; the upper and wealthy classes of Romania went to Paris yearning to prove themselves by Gallic standards, perhaps eventually to return to the country of their birth to demonstrate their cultural acquisitions.

At my age I know this is profoundly true

2011-11-06T17:39:00.000+02:00

"HERE are two things in which all men are manifestly and unmistakably equal. They are not equally clever or equally muscular or equally fat, as the sages of the modern reaction (with piercing insight) perceive. But this is a spiritual certainty, that all men are tragic. And this again is an equally sublime spiritual certainty that all men are comic." G.K. Chesterton

"Britain's oldest family business opened when Henry VIII ruled"

2011-11-06T17:37:00.000+02:00

RJ Balson and Sons, a butchers based in Bridport, Dorset, boasts an astonishing history that is almost 500 years old.

Experts have traced the businesses roots back through 25 generations to when founder John Balson opened a stall in the town's market on South Street in 1535.

Since then dozens of family members have worked as butchers in the market town, passing their skills down the generations.

This is the England I love. Not the out of town shopping centres and fitness centres and DIY centres and motorways and flyovers and and and..

I suppose Lord Mandelson would decry the fact that generations of butchers were not given the opportunity to be High Court judges or investment bankers.

Europe is the faith

2011-11-06T17:33:00.001+02:00

‎'An individual European may not even believe that the Christian Faith is true, but what he says and makes and does will all spring out of this history of European culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Nietzsche or a Voltaire. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology.' T.S. Eliot

Genosuicide is that a word?

2011-11-06T16:13:00.000+02:00

Ill fares the land to hast'ning ills a prey

I am no mathematician but I do not believe any population will diminish to zero. Not so long as men and women continue to find each other attractive.

Norway and the USA will be among the last to disappear continue to reproduce because of immigrants.

Romania is already replacing her missing generation with immigrants from China, Africa etc. I think this is sad. Russia and Japan will not - which will be survivable for Japan as people there do not rely on the state for support in old age. By 2050 Egypt and Russia are expected to have
the same population. Perhaps in Russia and Romania too people do not rely on the state, have a subsistence economy in the countryside, look after their parents.

The Greek crisis of November 2011

2011-11-06T16:03:00.000+02:00

It seems to have been one miniseries after another for the last fifteen years since O.J. Simpson (why did anyone outside the US follow that one?) and Monica Lewinsky (the innocent news stories of the peaceful 1990s) to the horrors of September 11th and, much more frightening, Lehmann Bros. This year brought us the murders of Osama and Gaddafi. And now the Greek crisis and the Greek referendum that never was but which might have destroyed the world. No novelist would dare invent any of it.

When I was growing up I priggishly thought my era boring. It wasn't (the Iranian revolution, the invasion of Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher boring, not to mention further back Idi Amin?) and it is far too exciting nowadays, even without the Cold War. Especially without the Cold War which was not very exciting, even for those suffering under Communism. Truly our age deserves the name Hobsbawm called the Cold War era: The Age of Anxiety. (How very much less anxious everyone was in the 1970s, oblivious to health and safety risks, not worried about getting on, able to think about child molesters without blind panic, unpanicked by the hydrogen bomb.)

If the Greeks stay in the Euro the result is deep depression for Greece for years caused by debt and an overvalued currency. If they left the Euro their new drachma would mean a huge devaluation, the collapse of the Greek banking system and great social unrest. What a terrible hubristic mistake the Euro was. The EU can never compete with the US as a global power and can never be democratic - these are two a priori design faults, but these can be tolerated by electorates more interested in money than individual or national freedom. The Euro was a completely unnecessary mistake.

The typo in the RBS note Thursday on the Greek referendum seemed prescient - "We thus view this as a major negative for Greece and the rest of the momentary union".

Stephanie Flanders of the usually Europhile BBC is always very good. She is also the daughter of the great Michael Flanders of blessed memory. She said on Friday:

"It's a bit rich for France and Germany to talk about Greece holding the rest of Europe to ransom, when the eurozone is in the process of doing the same to the global economy. And with the rest of the G20 not in a position to play the kind of hard ball with France and Germany that Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Nicolas Sarkozy played with the Greek prime minister on Wednesday night."

Quite. That meeting no doubt was what in the language of diplomacy is called a free and frank discussion.

But does anyone have a solution to the Euro crisis - the Eurosceptics or the federalists or the ones who just want to keep the show on the road? I think the UK should probably leave the EU and possibly (though this will not happen) Greece be expelled but what solution is there for the rest of the EU? The break up of the EU would be bad and the success of the European project would be worse. Neither of these outcomes looks particularly likely but years of relative economic decline, falling birthrates and mass immigration will mean very soon the world of European cultural hegemony will seem a distant quaint memory like pre-1914 Europe does now.

Interesting to read what Matthew Parris wrote a couple of days ago:

"Our Tory euro-rebel MPs are wide of the mark: Brussels is not the cause of our economic woes. Brussels, too, is wide of the mark: the irrationality of the international money markets is not the cause of those woes either.

"As our strange times unfold, more and more do I believe that the story of the politics and economics of the Western world has become the story of evasion. We in the West are looking for escape routes from the obvious, looking for someone to blame, something to postpone the unavoidable. We look away from what stares us in the face: the imperium of the West is over, never to return. Our predominance is gone. Our inheritance is diminished. We are being humbled, and will not be raised up again."

Europe's problems are we are spending too much money and not having enough children, no longer believe in our religion or our civilisation and that our continent will soon be ruled by strangers.

The true believers in the Euro project believe that without the euro the EU will fall apart and without the EU Europe will be embroilled in wars. Noether is remotely likely and they proceed from the premise that the EU kept the peace in Europe since 1945 which is not true. The Cold War and NATO kept the peace in Europe, as I always knew at the time, and so did prosperity and free trade agreements. No developed countries around the world have been involved in wars with one another since 1945. Japan and Taiwan have not gone to war.

The EU is a great achievement but it has two insoluble and probably fatal problems: the Euro, which might have been a good idea confined to France, Germany and Benelux, and the democratic deficit.

In many ways the European project was a top down Leninist project and like Leninism it possibly sounded good in theory (or not) but took no account of human realities or the importance of nations. The USSR fell apart in the end not because of economic failure - the Belarus regime presides successfully over economic failure - but because the subject peoples wanted to leave. Communism ignored the importance of nations and ethnic groups and this was perhaps its biggest mistake. Which is why working class patriots in East Germany Hungary Azerbaijan etc died fighting the worker's state. Romania with her national communism a slightly different case of course. Ceausescu was not considered a Russian stooge.

(Had Stalin's constitution not asserted that republics were free to leave the USSR might still be there, albeit probably reduced to its Slav core. Is he a patriot for me asked Francis Joseph when someone was described to him as a patriot. The citizens of the republics were patriotic for their republics rather than the USSR and no one was interested in the international working class.)

There is and can be nothing democratic about the EU except that democratically elected national legislatures rubber stamp what is agreed by groups of civil servants or ministers and ministers are ultimately responsible to their electorates but electorates have very little freedom now. There is nothing democratic because Europe does not have a demos.

Democracy is only possible if you have a sense of community, a demos, and this can happen with a new country but not with a group of ancient countries. It just cannot - even if it were desirable. A shame that we do not have a democratic Austria Hungary but that is gone and its going was almost inevitable in an age of mass democracy and newspapers. A federal Europe would considerably less democratic than late Hapsburg Austria (which had universal suffrage unlike Hungary and started the First World War).

The solution for the democratic deficit in the EU is more democracy, more referendums, more subsidiarity, more diversity and less international law. That would mean a common market not a federation, not the EU.

Instead very corrupt recently Communist countries are sending ex-Communist commissioners (I almost accidentally wrote Commissars but that would be a cheap joke) to make laws for Western Europe.

John Stuart Mill - no conservative - said something true which applies to the EU as well as to the multiracial societies of Western Europe:

"Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist."

There are many arguments in favour of the EU but those who make them should recognise that it can never be democratic. Until we have a single European country - at the Greek calends.

P.S. There are more Porsche Cayennes registered in Greece than taxpayers declaring an income of EUR 50,000 euros or more, according to research by Professor Herakles Polemarchakis, former head of the Greek prime minister’s economic department. It would be funny were it not very unfunny indeed.

Had the referendum been called there is no reason to suppose the Greeks would have voted for austerity and by implication the euro. That’s the trouble with referendums. Electorates often get the answers wrong. Had the Greeks voted for austerity it would have been in order to remain in the EU which gave them the subsidies and cheap credit which have been fatal to them. But had they voted against, maybe they would have not have bene wrong at that, either for Greece or for Europe. We shan’t know.

Macmillanana

2011-11-06T15:43:00.000+02:00

Lord Kilmuir, who heard about his dismissal on the wireless: You have given me less notice than I would a housekeeper. Harold Macmillan: But good housekeepers are so hard to find.

My mind is chock full of anecdotes and sometimes one has to repeat one. Neither Kilmuir nor Harold Macmillan was terribly nice. Macmillan when asked why his son Maurice whom I knew and loved did not get further in politics said because he was not a shit.

My favourite of my scores and scores of Macmillan stories is of when the Queen, Mrs. Thatcher and the five living former ‘Prime Ministers had dinner at No. 10 to celebrate 300 years since it was built. As the famous photograph was being taken James Callaghan said: I wonder what is the collective noun of Prime Ministers. To which Lord Stockton who was 91 instantly replied: a lack of principals.

Oh and the Maharajah school friend of Macmillan who came to tea at No. 10 on one of his rare visits to the UK. Maurice told me: They overran their time and Papa’s private secretary came in and said I’m sorry to disturb you, Prime Minister, but you are due to meet the Finnish Ambassador in five minutes. To which the Maharajah looked at my father and said ‘But Harold, dear boy, you never told me you’d gone into politics.’

God loves to see us happy

2011-11-06T15:32:00.000+02:00

“Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.” -- Benjamin Franklin. C.S. Lewis thought God does not wish us to be happy (happiness is beside the point according to Lewis), but sex suggests He does.