Karl Marx writes about the Satanic urge to destroy the world

Karl Marx's apparent admiration for Satan in his juvenile poems (this link repays reading) seems revealing. Like Milton, he was of the devil's party without knowing it. Or rather perhaps, unlike Milton, he did know it very well.

Perhaps Marx was a psychopath. Someone on the net has argued the case interestingly here. Reading it one sees parallels with the young Hitler, another bohemian who also lacked the German work ethic, although Hitler was much more charming, which is another psychopathic trait. 

Lines from Marx's poems, which he puts into the mouths of demons, include:

Worlds I would destroy forever,

Since I can create no world;

Since my call they notice never …

Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,

Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.

Every word of mine is fire and action.My breast is equal to that of the Creator.

…Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,

Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,

Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,

So that there shall be something to ruin …

If there is a something which devours,

I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-

The world which bulks between me and the Abyss

I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality:

Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,

And then sink down to utter nothingness,

Perished, with no existence — that would be really living!

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Why Churchill allowed Romania to become Communist

This decision was disastrous, prolonged the war and indirectly led to Romania and Bulgaria becoming Communist. The decision to invade Italy, and not the Balkans, is to blame, not Yalta, as I never tire of explaining to Romanians, who never tire of disbelieving me.

Ion Mihai Pacepa on the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi

Ion Mihai Pacepa talks about the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, which we know, despite what Mrs. Clinton said, was not a spontaneous response to a film about Muslims: 

"My past experience at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community gives me solid ground to state that the Muslim attacks on U.S. embassies and the assassination of our ambassador to Libya, carried out with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails, were just as “spontaneous” as the May Day parades in Moscow – and that they have the same organisers".

He is certainly not very trustworthy but since he was working for the KGB (not the CIA)  this is probably true. 

America is no longer a Protestant country

Two enormously significant milestones in 24 hours for the U.S.A. 

First, America is no longer a Protestant country. The end of an old song. 




I am a Catholic, yet am sad, though I was expecting America, the only industrial country which is intensely religious, to become slowly secular. She will thereby be gravely weakened. The future for America looks European and this means wisdom, sophistication and decline. I am much more saddened by this than by the economic statistics showing America losing ground to China. Economics is in itself unimportant - economics reflects culture which reflects, in the broadest sense of the idea, religion (and genetics). In no country have religion, self-belief and sense of purpose always been as closely linked as in America, founded though she was by Deists, with church and state strictly separated. 

As Margaret Thatcher said: "Economics is just the method. I want to change people's souls."

It is a mistake, by the way, to confound American Protestants with the religious right.  There is also a smaller but still large and influential religious left and most American churchgoers are not in either camp. And religious conservatism is found in both parties. Black voters who mostly vote Democrat have voted down homosexual marriage in California. But there is an anti-religious strain in the Democrats and the American Left which is becoming more visible.

To Europeans, American religiosity seems odd. First because Americans, despite being proverbially rich and modern, take religion seriously, including those who do not believe. Second because, while few countries are more religious, none is less mystical. And few countries are more violent, more exuberantly keen on making money or more relaxed about divorce or sex generally. American Christianity is very Old Testament. Nevertheless, this very muscular, very individualistic Christianity is what gives America her self-belief. Victor Frankl learnt in Auschwitz that what gives an individual the strength to endure is the belief that his life has a meaning. This is true of societies too, which are made up of individuals.

The second milestone is a new Gallup poll today that finds that, for the first time, most Americans believe that the government should "not favor any set of values" rather than promoting traditional ones. Until 2004, a majority favoured the promotion of traditional values, and since then, the numbers have been in flux. A slim 52 percent majority now say that "the government should be values-neutral".

Most of that 52% do not in fact want government to be values-neutral. They want government to enforce all sorts of values like sexual and racial equality, just not traditional ones. I should add that I am not sure what traditional values are, and perhaps it is not important to know, though marriage between two people of the same sex is certainly not one of them.

Many of the 52% are 'Millenials'. I was interested to read an American demographer the same day saying that: 

"Millennials say the role of government is to be our parent. Parents set rules. " 

An interesting analogy that suggests that young Americans have been infantilised by the state like West Europeans.


The small-town Protestant America which elected Ronald Reagan is losing ground rather fast. This, rather than economic statistics, makes me think that America is starting to decline. It might be a nicer, fairer and more interesting place in decline, like Canada, which is in a much worse state. We shall see.

In twenty or thirty years, the USA will also no longer be a white majority country. Many Americans I learned recently, from the BBC, do not speak English. Everything flows and this tide is flowing quickly. 

Harar is the real thing

"Before either had spoken the General sized William up; in any other department he would have been recognized as a sucker; here, amid the trappings of high adventure, he was, more gallantly, a greenhorn. "Your first visit to Ishmaelia, eh? Then perhaps I can be of some help to you. As no doubt you know, I was there in '97 with poor `Sprat' Larkin." "I want some cleft sticks, please," said William firmly. Miss Barton was easier to deal with. "We can have some cloven for you," she said brightly."

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

I fly - after Ethiopean Airline's invariable long delay - to Dire Dawa which by contrast to Lalibela is hot, tropical and feels Caribbean. I only drive through it on my way from and to the airport but the buzz Is very palpable. Then a crowded minibus through wonderful scenery and gathering dusk to Harar. 

As in Dervla Murphy's day, there is always a schoolmaster to speak to you in English though now very many other people also speak English. Damn the English language, that dissolvent of parochialism. I sat next to a P.E teacher who told me, 'Every Ethiopian hates Ethiopia.' I understood this unpatriotic sentiment perfectly. Every Ethiopian is now aware that he is poor when within living memory Ethiopians felt superior to the rest of mankind. 

The schoolmaster was interesting at first but he ran out of themes and I wanted to watch the villages and the landscape (beautiful, dark green). I suggested this, I hope politely. He replied, 'What are the staple foods of Britain?'  'Oh, please.' He later got off the bus without a word to me.

I chose Harar on instinct, without any research, but it is the perfect choice, though no longer a mostly Muslim city. It is full of people drinking beer and easy girls, unlike in Evelyn Waugh's time, but the old city promises to be different. The Tana Hotel where I alight seems a series of very noisy bars and possibly a bordello but I later hear it is the best hotel in town. I move on to an Italian built hotel, the Ras Hotel, which had been recommended to me by a Mexican Jew in Addis, as cheap and pleasant. It feels like a gaol and costs $10. I saw a cockroach in the bathroom but the bed was clean. It does have a good restaurant and an internet cafe and there I befriend a nice guide called Hailu. I ate a very good Yemeni dish called Monday or something similar. I stayed the next night too from force of inertia but upgraded to the wonderful suite which runs along the front of the building and costs $20. One can imagine a young Fascist colonel holding parties in it.

August 6

Harar is the real thing. The Ethiopian highlands and its churches and castles I vaguely knew about but waking here in this Stalinist prison (Mussolini era actually) for which they charge you $10 (with excellent breakfast) I feel transfigured.

The strangest, but delicious, breakfast today with a completely unpronounceable name containing spicy meat. The only element I recognised was injera.

Harar is said to be the fourth holiest city in Islam but I do not know why nor who decides these things. When I was in Kairouan in Tunisia it claimed to be the fourth holiest city in Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

Dervla Murphy is my companion after Steve left and I am unable to resist internet cafes and broadcasting to my 1,056 Facebook friends who are my other companions. In the internet cafe in the hotel I read this by Dervla and feel I did not score highly. I only obeyed rules 1, 3 and 4 - am ashamed I neglected 2.

I am enjoying Dervla's account of her journey across Ethiopia by mule - she deplores the very outset of tourism and I am with her but it has not got very far - certainly not here in Harar. But travel with Facebook and email is wrong. I wonder if Hararis have heard of Paris Hilton.

I asked. They had not. 

Nor Madonna. 

No point in going to Zanzibar after Harar but I have to honour the ticket.

Hailu took me round.

This man makes shoes from worn out car tyres. Customers call them 'thousand-milers'. 

19th century house in the walled Muslim city where I shall stay if I go back next year en route to Somaliland.

The old mosque to which kaffirs are forbidden access - the exterior is modern and uninteresting alas.

The Egyptian Mosque - late 19th Century, pretty but closed. 

A shrine to a Muslim holy man.

The exquisitely lovely mosques of Constantinople make Islam seem very beautiful. Muslim piety is attractive and moving but here, though it is exotic to white travellers, Islam struck me as a utilitarian and man made creed. It is spiritual yet seems to lack a dimension. For some reason, on this journey Islam reminded me of Communism.

Sir Richard Burton was the first white man to enter Harar, where an ancient tradition said that the city would decline should a Christian ever set foot there. He and his companions risked death or a ghastly imprisonment by doing so. He described Harar as 

'the ancient metropolis of a once mighty race, the only permanent settlement in Eastern Africa, the reported seat of Muslim learning, a walled city of stone houses ... the emporium of the coffee trade, the head-quarters of slavery.'

Burton stayed with the Emir for ten days, officially as a guest but really his prisoner, and was soon bored. After leaving Harar, things became much less dull and he came close to dying of thirst. Englishmen are better and worse, but much smaller, than in his day. (I am also struck that people wrote better about Africa then than now, because they knew there was such a thing as the psychology of nations).


Burton gives an account of chewing quat - the mildly narcotic herb favoured by Muslims because their religion forbids drinking alcohol though Hailu told me the Muslims of Harar mostly disregard this rule and that forbidding sex before marriage. A beauty salon ('Beutiy salon) I partook in the coffee ceremony and rank the best coffee I ever tasted. A young man gave me much quat and i chewed manfully without any discernible effect. It tastes ghastly and gives some a stomach ache but did nothing to or for me.

In Burton's day and in mine, Harar had over eighty mosques but I only saw two and and wonder where the rest were.

It was only when I got to Harar that people told me that here Arthur Rimbaud spent his last years, as an arms dealer and respected pillar of the community. I didn't go to see the museum in his supposed house, since the books told me he never lived there and in fact it was built years after his death. General Gordon, when he was still Colonel Gordon, was also in Harar. Sylvia Pankurst's account of Gordon's time in Harar is here. 

Later, when Harar was a couple of hours by car from the nearest station, someone who means more to me than these great men, Evelyn Waugh, visited twice. In his day, before the Italians came, the old town built from mud was still the whole of Harar. Waugh's friend, Patrick Balfour, who was also there in 1935, wrote:

Here, for the first time in Abyssinia was a town, not a mere conglomeration of native hovels and European shacks. Here were streets: a bewildering network of them, high and narrow, but well-built and on a coherent plan.

Feeding hyenas at the edge of town at sunset is supposedly an old tradition to bring good luck to the city but this daily event dates back about fifty years. It felt thoroughly touristy, even though Harar has few tourists - there were six the evening I went, five of us in Hailu's party. I was very disdainful at the time (we tourists are the biggest snobs) but I was too superior. I realise now that it is the way two local eccentrics make a little money and keep a sort of tradition alive. Read more here.

Dinner with Hailu. He is a Christian who, oddly enough, was born in the Old Town. He has as many Muslim friends as Christian. There are no problems between the two communities in Harar he says. He takes his religion seriously, I presume, or at least is about to embark on one of the Ethiopian Church's severe fasts the next day. He tells me ten years ago Muslim girls were supposed to be chaste before marriage but no longer. 'Now we are living in the modern world.' Sir Richard Burton would have approved.

Dervla says the Ethiopians drink a lot and I saw a girl drunk in the street at ten in the morning in predominantly Muslim Harar. The place is full of bars where people are drinking beer and Ramadan seems ignored.

Hailu seems to like Mengistu, who was born in Harar. This is no excuse as so was Haile Selassie.

. 
I am horrified to see across the road a billboard proclaiming a hotel called ' 5 Star Hotel.' I hoped this was a wooden lie but Hailu tells me it is true. Who will stay there? 'UN people.' 

August  7

Country and Western playing  in the internet cafe at my hotel. Globalisation is bloody.

Walk with Hailu round the old town and we see the Egyptian mosque and buy some coffee in the market and fail to buy me a  t shirt – I am fatter than the fattest people in Harar perhaps I should have bought an I Love Ethiopia one but I couldn’t bring myself to.

From Harar to Addis – heavenly ride seated thanks to Hailu in the front of the minibus and as comfortable as if I had my own driver – heavenly scenery- villages – life. I am seeing life but I never take part. The best part of my holiday so far. Cost, 100 birr = EUR 4.

At the airport I am told the plane to Addis has been cancelled and I must wait till tomorrow but after some discussion it appears that the departure of my plane has been brought forward two hours and is on the point of leaving. 'You were not informed?' 'No!' I am given a seat in business class and arrive in Addis early where it is cool and raining and I am safe in the hotel. 

I consider luxury hotels immoral and deeply corrupt and usually avoid them but I seem to need things done for me much more than most people and I think I need good hotels more than most people. I am getting far more than my money's worth from the Hotel Jupiter Cazanchis in Addis. It has become a surrogate mother to whose teat I cling.

My bedroom is on the first floor and overlooks the front of the hotel. Slightly to the left is scrubland, in which stand tiny houses made of corrugated iron, beside a large heap of broken tiles. Two boys in front of one of the shacks are cleaning a pair of jeans with a bar of soap.