It’s 258 years today since Wolfe took Quebec

Churchill was asked how to make children proud to be British and replied 'Tell them Wolfe took Quebec'. Are they still told this and if so do they think it was an unjust, colonial war?

It’s 258 years today since the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.

I read about it when I was four in the book that most influenced me in my life The Royal Portrait Gallery, published in the early 1890s. Here is how the battle is recounted in another, much more famous book. Our Island Story: A Child's History of England is a book by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, first published in 1905.

The sanctity of the revelation of Mahomet

"Since 1989 the texts, ideas and even images of Islam have become so heavily policed and self-policed even in Western Europe that it would be understandable if a young person becoming politically and religiously aware in the last few decades might have arrived at the conclusion that the one thing our societies really do hold sacred and impervious to ridicule or criticism are the claims and teachings of Mohammed."
Douglas Murray - 'The Strange Death of Europe'


[Had Charles Tours not defeated the Muslims in 704] "perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet."
Edward Gibbon - 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'



“I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”
Richard Dawkins, the scientist and proselytising atheist, 2010

Since 1989 the world has been remade by nihilists, intellectual nihilists and ones who kill

I was at Cambridge in my second term when Colin McCabe was denied tenure because he was a structuralist.

No one had any idea what a structuralist was, not even people reading English. Certainly not the people who wrote for the papers, who descended on Cambridge in a scramble. I tried to understand it and read a book by Roland Barthes but failed. Then I started work and forgot it.

Today, this very day, I see I have understood almost nothing about the story of my own lifetime. It was French Marxist intellectuals like Derrida who made the Sargasso Sea in which we are becalmed. He taught that categorisation is a form of exclusion, serving the interests of maintaining power, discriminating against excluded groups. Words are oppressive. It is morally necessary that language has to be remade to avoid victimising oppressed groups. Political correctness, a new kind of Stalinism.

The Strange Death of Western Europe and why is Eastern Europe different?

I am currently reading, am deeply depressed and alarmed by and am lost in wonder at Douglas Murray's new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. Please read it people, if you read only one book this year.

The opening sentence is:

Europe is committing suicide.

and he continues

By the end of the lifespans of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place we had to call home.

He deals with Eastern European attitudes to migrants in a couple of pages and says this, under the rubric "Why is Eastern Europe so different?"

"....In January 2016, when the Swedish authorities, the European Commission and others began publicly to acknowledge that the majority of people they had taken in the previous year had no right to claim asylum in Europe, Jean Claude Juncker continued to insist on the Commission's proposed quota system to share out the migrants between each country. Slovakia refused to have any part in what its government described as a 'nonsense' and 'complete fiasco'. The left-wing Slovakian Prime Minister, Robert Fico, said in despair, 'I feel that we in the EU are now committing ritual suicide and we're just looking on'. The other Visegrad countries held the same view as Fico.


"....Chantal Delsol noticed the seeds of this difference in the mid-1990s. Spending time in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, she saw that Eastern Europeans increasingly considered us as creatures from another planet, even while at a different level they dreamed of becoming like us. I later became convinced that it was in these eastern European societies that I should seek some answers to our question -- the divergence between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'. That tragic dimension of life had not been erased in the East. And nowhere have the consequences of this been more clearly displayed than in the attitudes of Eastern European leaders, with the support of their publics, to the migration crisis." 'The divergences between us and them led me to the belief that the last fifty years of good fortune had entirely erased our sense of the tragic dimension of life'."

To understand why Eastern European attitudes towards migrants and Islam are different from ones that obtain (at least at an official level) in the West, you have to look at Western, not Eastern, Europe. Eastern Europeans (those who have not been educated in the pieties of Western universities) retain the common sense ideas to which everyone in Western Europe subscribed in 1945.

Eastern Europeans love their countries the way they are, homogeneous and cohesive ethnic states with long and beautiful traditions, as everyone in Western Europe did until a moment ago.

But there are other reasons too. Eastern European countries have all been oppressed by empires (Ottoman, Russian, Hapsburg). They rightly see themselves as victims of imperialism, most recently by that imposed in the name of the proletariat by the Soviet Union. They do not feel post-colonial guilt, because they had no colonies. They were colonised. 

And they are much poorer than the West, though nowadays quite a lot richer than the Third World. They are emigrant countries, not immigrant societies.

Most Romanians I know think mass immigration from Africa and Asis to Western Europe has been a disaster, but all, without exception, think it is a just punishment for colonialism. 

A young, left-wing Romanian friend who won a scholarship to Yale told me that she hopes in her lifetime (she is about 30 now) that Italy will have an African majority. This, she says, will be a fitting punishment for Italy's short-lived and small colonial empire in Africa.

Mr. Murray swats away this argument effortlessly.

I’ve particularly never heard, for instance, that the country of Turkey should have a large infusion of Yorkshiremen or people from Wales, Dublin, in order to not only diversify that country but to make some kind of reparation for the Ottoman Empire.

In Eastern Europe, patriotism and the martial, masculine virtues are considered virtues. Eastern Europeans have not rethought their values to be as unlike Nazi values as possible. Communists blamed Nazism on capitalism and the recent horrors of Communist rule have in most countries (not in Poland or Serbia) displaced from folk memory what the Germans did. 

Most Eastern European countries were allied with Hitler, in any case, and many Eastern Europeans, if they are not Jews, gypsies or Slavs, think that they would have been better off had he not Stalin won the war.

Eastern Europe used always to be an ethnic mosaic and Eastern Europeans know, as a cursory reading of history, especially the history of 1939-45, or simple common sense teaches, that ethnic minorities living side by side do so unhappily and often violent conflicts arise. 

Ethnic minorities lived side by side in Eastern Europe for a long time when Eastern European societies were essentially mediaeval. With the coming (imposition would be a better word) of modernity, that changed. 

Conflict between Muslims and Christians led to the forced migrations of millions of Greeks and Turks before and after the First World War. In 1945 and 1946 a Procrustean reordering of East Europe's ethnic minorities took place across the region. An ethnic war was fought between Ukrainians and Poles which the world ignored. Ethnic Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs and Ukrainians were expelled from the places across Central and Eastern Europe in which their families had lived for many centuries. The whole story of displaced persons - the so-called DPs- is calamitous. Coming after the slaughter of the Jews by the Germans, by 1950 a terrible simplicity had been imposed on Eastern European countries which had hitherto been ethnic mixtures. 

Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered these vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939, stipulating that they should be "humane and orderly". They were, of course, neither. 

At almost the same time as Attlee agreed this, oddly enough, ethnically homogeneous Britain began to become rapidly multi-ethnic. 

In his last chapter Douglas Murray concludes

By the middle of this century, while China will probably still look like China, India will probably still look like India, Russia like Russia, and Eastern Europe like Eastern Europe, Western Europe will at best resemble a large-scale version of the United Nations. ...This place where international cities develop into something resembling international countries will be many things. But it will not be Europe anymore.

I shall blog more about the ideas with which this very readable and well-written book fizzes. But much as I love interesting, original, perceptive ideas, this is desperately sad work. The saddest story ever told. 



A pedant writes: I wish he knew what disinterested meant and did not split infinitives. I do not necessarily expect good grammar from Oxford men, but I do from Etonians (Douglas Murray won a scholarship there).

Quotations

"Even today, I think one’s relation to one’s alma mater is fraught with haute-bourgeois peril. In descending order of coolness are:



1. Dropped out of prestigious college;


2. Graduated from prestigious school, never bring it up unless asked—then as joke;


3. Graduated from prestigious school with honors, bring up quickly, no irony;


4. Graduated, have become garish, cheerful head of alumni booster committee."


Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System

Edward du Cann has died

Sir Edward du Cann, bounder, smoother than silk, once the seemingly perpetual Chairman of the 1922 Committee (the Tory backbenchers' trade union), has died. Simon Hoggart in Punch said that, asked the time, he replied: 

What time do you want it to be, dear boy?

Alan Watkins, whose Observer column brightened my Sunday mornings, said

Talking to Edward du Cann was rather like walking downstairs and somehow missing the last step. You were uninjured but remained disconcerted.

I remember the Private Eye headline, over a story of an Edward Du Cann City scandal, was:

Diana and the politics of emotion

Diana, Princess of Wales changed the monarchy and changed Britain in a way that is still very evident today.

Diana's famous sad-eyed TV interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, in which she said there were three persons in her marriage, was a cleverly stage managed display of fake emotion. There were, in fact, several other people in the marriage too. She made displays of emotion mandatory, especially when she died, which is why Theresa May lost a lot of what support she still had (not much) by not crying at the Grenfell Tower and why Corbyn wept at the mosque where a British Muslim was murdered by a white man (but not at the locations where the reverse happened). Even H.M the Queen now emotes though she found the Diana epoch hard to adjust to. I remember that Diana was said to have tried having a heart to heart with the Queen and to have said, 'I need space'. A mystified HMQ replied, 

'Well, Kensington Palace is not exactly bijou'.

5 quotations

One might as well legalise sodomy as recognise the Bolsheviks.
Winston Churchill to David Lloyd George in 1919.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

Cardinal Mazarin could not suffer unhappy people around him. When he considered employing someone, his first question was, "Is he happy?" This really meant: "Is he lucky?" By means of this, the wise and superstitious Mazarin surrounded himself with the best people in the government.
Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans, Princess Palatine (so it wasn't Napoleon)

Diana – Queen of Tarts

Diana has now incredibly been dead for twenty years. The world rotates on its axis and we go about our lives but Diana is no longer here. 

The quality press sneered at coverage of her and the Royal Family but the history of royal families is the history of Europe. When I visited the Taj Mahal it was the famous photograph of her alone there (apart from hundreds of pressmen out of shot) and Diana's cynical bid for sympathy from the public that was in the forefront of my mind. Certainly not the visit by the King-Emperor George V in 1912.


Alex Woodcock-Clarke has kindly given me permission to reproduce his brilliant little essay about Diana, Princess of Wales. I do so not just because Alex is an absolutely brilliant comic writer, but because I agree with every word and did so back in the time when 85% of England was for Diana and a handful of gnostics sympathised with the Prince. May she rest in peace.


DIANA – QUEEN OF TARTS

Why the People’s Princess was actually the Queen of Mean who invented a new cult of self-serving, self-inflating victimhood – and got the world’s poor to worship at it.

Ted Kennedy tried to get the Russians to help him win presidential election

How Ted Kennedy tried to get the help of the Soviet leader to help him win the 1984 presidential election. Andropov seems not to have taken up the offer.

Quotations

The past is a beautiful sunset.

Calistrat Hogas


Whether you believe you can or can't - you are always right. 

Rocsana Borda

I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.


Queen Victoria, 1870

Communist genocide in Ukraine?

Anne Applebaum has been my absolute bete noir for some years. She is ardently opposed to Brexit, seems to want Nato to wage a proxy war against Russia while wanting Europe to take as many refugees from the Middle East as possible, hates the immigration policies of Poland and Hungary and thinks abortion is a human right. 

But this post on Facebook just now is another thing. It sounds very interesting. 

She has written a book saying that the Ukrainian famine was genocide. This is much disputed, especially by left-wing historians who are happy to compare slavery in America with Auschwitz.

Enid Blyton's England still exists

Jenni Russell wrote in The Times on Thursday about how danger and novelty make time slow down. We all know this and it has been investigated in a book called The Brain, by scientist David Eagleman. 

He has proved, she said,

that we don’t actually slow down our perception of time in a crisis because he tested that by giving volunteers digital wrist displays and inducing terror by dropping them backwards into a net down a 150 ft shaft. If they could slow time they could have read the rapidly changing displays. That proved impossible.

So it just seems that time slows down or speeds up. And the best way to make time seem to slow down, short of feeling in danger, is by new experiences, such as new places. 

Graham Greene wrote a short story about a dying man who moved his bed in his large house from room to room to make his remaining time seem longer.

I always knew that contrast is the stuff of life. This has a large bearing on the question of whether to relax on holiday in the same place, not doing much, or to cram in a lot. I do the latter and today I feel, after three weeks away, that I've had about ten holidays.

And zig-zagging around Southern England by train from far west to far east I saw that England is the loveliest of all countries (Italy and Romania perhaps excepted). Outside a few tourist traps it has almost as few foreign tourists as Albania and is delightfully cool in

The House of the People, Bucharest

This wonderful picture of the House of the People, Bucharest, is by Octavian Draga.

The House of the People in Bucharest is the largest building in Europe and the second biggest building in the world (after the Pentagon) measured by floor space. It was built by Ceausescu but he never addressed the crowds from the balcony. Only two men have done that: Ion Iliescu, who had him shot, and Michael Jackson. 

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese

In every alliance there is a horse and there is a rider.

Bismarck, quoted in Nagy Talavera, The Green Shirts and the Others





Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

G.K. Chesterton




Giving someone your full attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Simone Weil


Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer—and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are in siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for this is only to suffer one another.


Hilaire Belloc

Is Trebizond the most beautiful place name of all?

Talking about places that should be visited simply for the beauty of their names, Trebizond now comes to mind. I remember using the word to an Englishman in Constantinople who said it sounded better in my mouth than Trabzon. We had only an hour earlier but he had me down as a Victorian.

That evening is memorable for a last look inside one of my favourite hotels, the Pera

"40,000 civilians died in Mosul"

40,000 civilians died in Mosul, either bombed or killed in house to house fighting, according to a Kurdish commander quoted by Patrick Cockburn. Note the difference between press accounts of the fall of Mosul and East Aleppo.

There’s been no emergency debate in the House of Commons and the Eiffel Tower hasn’t

The power of names

His Eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern Fame, the Seat
Of mightiest Empire, from the destind Walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can
And Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's Throne,
To Paquin of Sinæan Kings, and thence
To Agra and Lahor of great Mogul
Down to the golden Chersonese...
And so on and on and on. Paradise Lost, Book 10

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree. Coleridge

Some places should be visited because of the beauty of their names. So says Marzena Pogorzaly, who herself has a very beautiful name, and gave as an example Odessa.

Austria Hungary, an EU before the EU

'It is sometimes said that the Austrian Empire was a "natural unit;" this catch phrase only means that it was large and had existed for a long time. Many economic ties had grown up with the centuries; these were certainly not "natural." There was no geographic unity. ...... As for the Bukovyna, it was cut off from everywhere, a meaningless fragment of territory for which there could be no rational explanation.' (A.J.P. Taylor)

I love those lethargic places cut off from time, space and economics by borders. The Northern Bucovina, separated from its southern hinterland, which was in Austria and is now in Romania. The noble former Ottoman capital Adrianople (Edirne), a couple of miles from the very slow Greek and Bulgarian border crossings. The whole of Eastern Europe was such a place, until 1989. 

Even Transnistria, cut off from Moldova, Ukraine, Russia and its real home the USSR, has a boring charm. 

Catholic priest prosecuted for saying homosexuality is a sin

Hate speech laws are a way of silencing opinion. As measures are taken to prevent Islamists using the net for their purposes, this will become more and more the case.

In Barcelona a priest has been unsuccessfully prosecuted for saying "Homosexuality is a sin against nature". He was prosecuted for enunciating Catholic doctrine, in (formerly?) Catholic Spain.

Quotations

We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.
William Boyd

We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

Oswald Spengler

Attempts to limit female mobility by hampering locomotion are ancient and almost universal. The foot-binding of upper-class Chinese girls and the Nigerian custom of loading women's legs with pounds of heavy brass wire are extreme examples, but all over the world similar stratagems have been employed to make sure that once you have caught a woman she cannot run away, and even if she stays around she cannot keep up with you. ... Literally as well as figuratively modern women's shoes are what keeps Samantha from running as fast as Sammy.
Alison Lurie

Women love the State, they see it as a protector to keep things safe, and always vote for more Big Government.
Suzanne Hill


I am obliged to you for sending me your petition, but I am returning it without signature. I confess I am attached to the current forms of words, and I also I am what you have often heard of but perhaps not often seen, a real conservative, who thinks change an evil in itself.
A.E. Housman
(acknowledgements, Laudator Temporis Acti)

Calibri may leave Pakistan sans Sharif

I had been following, out of the corner of my eye, the story of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. His government might fall because his daughter Maryam submitted documents to the Supreme Court dated before January 31, 2007 and typed in Calibri, a font which only became available on that date. This is interesting, but more memorably it is the occasion for possibly the best headline I ever saw.

Quotations about childhood

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. 
Louise Glück

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think this is equally true of us all. 
Graham Greene

"I've Worked with Refugees for Decades. Europe's Afghan Crime Wave Is Mind-Boggling"

I hadn't heard about problems caused by Afghan refugees in Europe until I read this interesting and very dismaying article in the very respectable American magazine 'National Interest' by Cheryl Benard, who has worked for many years in refugee programmes and says she found it very hard to write. She details a dismaying history of rapes and sexual assaults and tries to find explanations.

The following explanation is very worrying. It was offered by an experienced Afghan court translator in Austria whom she quotes. 

The myth of Britain’s decline

Robert Tombs, who supervised me at university, has written a timely piece on Brexit and declinism entitled

The myth of Britain’s decline

 with the encouraging sub-headline

Our glory days are not over – they’re in full swing

I quote him.

Who would deny that Britain is no longer the great power it once was? Well, speaking as a historian, I would. Declinism is at best a distortion of reality, and

Quotations

They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking--
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.

A.H. Clough

White marble and white supremacy

In a recent article, Professor Sarah Bond, of the University of Iowa, reminds us that classical statues were painted in lifelike colour (they must have resemble Madame Tussaud's) and argues that "the equation of white marble with beauty" contributes to "white supremacist ideas today". 

“The assemblage of neon whiteness serves to create a false idea of homogeneity — everyone was very white! — across the Mediterranean region - [provides] further ammunition for white supremacists today, including groups like Identity Europa, who use classical statuary as a symbol of white male superiority.”

This is not just another crazy America story but an example of a very important trend in current thinking. It's connected to the reasons why many clever Americans thought Donald Trump, by extolling the West in his Warsaw speech, was racist.

Is the French revolution responsible for most of the world's problems today?

 

'For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.' Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

An academic called Dr Cliff Arnall has discovered that July 14 is the day when we English feel happiest each year. 

I love the balmy days of July in Bucharest, despite the merciless heat, but July 14th is Bastille Day and not a day on which a conservative can rejoice.

I have always been one of those who blames most of the world's problems on the 1914-18 War but I start to think Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn may be right. 

Quotations

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living pleasurably. Epicurus


The presence of oceans on much of the earth's surface makes it impossible for any state to achieve global hegemony. John Mearsheimer

Quotations

'The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible.' Camille Paglia

'A sexy woman can have almost any man she wants. And a rich guy can have almost any woman he wants.' Oliver Markus

'Every man dies, but not every man really lives.' William Wallace, according to the film Braveheart, but it sounds contemporary American rather than mediaeval Scottish.

'If we're so cruel to minorities, why do they keep coming here? Why aren't they sneaking across the Mexican border to make their way to the Taliban?' Ann Coulter

'No country can allow its safety to be wholly dependent on faithful observance by other states of rules to which they are obliged.' Arthur Balfour

'I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.' Stanley Baldwin

Posted on Facebook by the late Peter Risdon

How much I wish he were here to comment on the fall of Mosul on Facebook, even though I am sure I would completely disagree with him - as I always did on the Middle East.

The language of the 21st century

"Globally, people now spend nearly four times as much time accessing the Internet from mobile devices as they do from desktops. 'Computers' are on their way to becoming an anachronism rarely seen outside of the office. I’d argue that even the way we think is increasingly mobile in nature: for better or worse, small visual bites have replaced big chunks of text as the language of the 21st century."
Ryan Holmes

5 quotations

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge."
Daniel Boorstin

A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.
Sir Thomas Browne

Europe’s Last Battle

Here is a fascinating account of Georgians and Germans fighting in Holland, just before and after the Second World War ended. The Georgians were sent back to Stalin, despite their hopes of finding safety in the West by killing Germans.

More quotations from Lord Salisbury

                                                      

The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcass of dead policies.

Letter to Lord Lytton (25 May 1877), quoted in Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume II, p. 145

...the splitting up of mankind into a multitude of infinitesimal governments, in accordance with their actual differences of dialect or their presumed differences of race, would be to undo the work of civilisation and renounce all the benefits which the slow and painful process of consolidation has procured for mankind...It is the agglomeration and not the comminution of states to which civilisation is constantly tending; it is the fusion and not the isolation of races by which the physical and moral excellence of the species is advanced. There are races, as there are trees, which cannot stand erect by themselves, and which, if their growth is not hindered by artificial constraints, are all the healthier for twining round some robuster stem.

Bentley's Quarterly Review, 1, (1859), p. 22

Wherever democracy has prevailed, the power of the State has been used in some form or other to plunder the well-to-do classes for the benefit of the poor.

Quarterly Review, 110, 1861, p. 281

Quotations from Lord Salisbury

[For Salisbury's thoughts on Romania, click here.]

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Letter to Lord Lytton (15 June 1877)

After all, the great characteristic of this country is that it is a free country, and by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

Quotations

Bror Duktig‏ @nijinskyforever
Lefties want "Day of Rage" "Shut down London" "Bring down the Government" But when little girls are blown to pieces - it's love and flowers


How could people feel any affection for a system that created the gulag? Alexievich says this ignores the unique atmosphere of the late Soviet period, a time of equality, deep friendships and love of literature. “Despite the poverty, life was freer,” she says. “Friends

The revolution turned out, when it came, to be Islamist

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society." Antonio Gramsci

The revolution that Marxists expected for so long has turned out, when it came, to be Islamist. 

What Marxism and Islamism have in common, of course, is nihilism.

Just as God sublimely says 'I am Who am', meaning He is life itself, evil is essentially destruction. Evil is a very real thing but wholly negative, death not life. 

The best political quotes from the last three or four days

Mark Steyn:
The reality of what is happening in Britain and Europe is that this problem was imported and that, until you stop importing it, you're going to have more of it.

Mark Tapson:
European leaders on climate change: the world must act NOW.
European leaders on terrorism: Hey, that's life in the big city. Everybody carry on as before.

Eric Kraus:

Trump is a godsend in the most unexpected form imaginable. It matters not if he is right or wrong (sometimes one, sometimes the other) but that he disrupts the idiot consensus.

Falling birth rates mean the end of the West - Lord Sacks

“Europe is going to die because of this because Europe can only maintain its population by unprecedented levels of immigration.

“Now those could be integrated into Europe but they won’t be integrated into Europe because when a culture loses its memory it loses its identity and when a culture loses its identity there’s nothing left for people to integrate into."

Patriotism, the love that dare not speak its name

'Patriotism...is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity and increases his arrogance and conceit.' Emma Goldman. 

She was a Communist but I wonder how many British people nowadays who are not Communists (so excluding Jeremy Corbyn) also think patriotism a bad thing.

It shows you how the Communists have succeeded to a very large extent. Many, perhaps most, of their ideas have triumphed. Sexual equality; free love, including for homosexuals; contraception; abortion; internationalism; the end of colonialism; racial equality; confiscation of property from the rich; atheism; materialism; the general idea that tradition is oppressive. 

The fascists, by contrast, lost the battle of ideas comprehensively. 

De Gaulle would have opposed immigration and the modern EU

I have always been a Gaullist. The General wanted a "Europe des nations" and knew England would not be suitable to join the Common Market (E.E.C.) He strongly opposed Arab immigration into metropolitan France. I imagine if he were alive and politically active today his political causes would be dismantling the modern EU and opposing further immigration.

I wonder had he come to power a year or two sooner whether the EEC would ever have come into existence. Had it not this might have saved Europe a vast amount of pain and wasted energy.

De Gaulle, of course, began his memoirs with the very stirring words

The future of France is Lebanese

So it's President Macron - 65%-35%. Marine Le Pen, of course, was never going to win.

There was a very high turnout in the end, 75%, but nevertheless many thought: a plague on both your houses. 12% of the ballots cast were spoiled. This is a level never reached before in the history of the Republic.

Madame Le Pen in the French presidential debate probably got into the dictionary of quotations when she said, "France will be led by a woman. It will be either me or Mrs. Merkel." It will be Mrs. Merkel, of course, as everyone always knew.

That old reactionary Joseph de Maistre’s one famous aphorism comes to mind. Every country has the government it deserves. He’d have voted Le Pen, be sure. 

Most French electors, I am sure, do not care for Marine Le Pen and certainly don't like her pretty awful father, but she is the grenade that they found to hand, as President Trump was the grenade American voters found. One third of the French voters picked up the grenade, took out the pin and hurled it.

Historians, like women, are attracted to power

Namier once said something to the effect that there is a narrative that people respect an original thinker, but nothing could be further from the truth. They only wish to hear familiar thoughts. How right he was.
John Charmley

When I was reading history at university I looked down my nose at by no means all but the majority of historians I read. Since going down I forgot this and had a lot of respect for them as a breed. Only now, reading the nonsense so many of them write, especially about Donald Trump, do I see my arrogant 19 year old self was too soft on them. They are much more closed minded, dangerous and stupid than I had realised.

I don't mind in the least their not liking Mr. Trump - I fully respect that and they might be right. It's their reasons for not liking him that are silly, ridiculous or in some cases malign.

You see this most recently with the plethora of articles ridiculing or denouncing him for his perfectly reasonable remark that had Andrew Jackson been a major politician in 1860 he might have prevented the Civil War.

Historians instead respect Lincoln who waged an unnecessary war in which 700,000 died for a noble cause.

What historians respect, of course, is power. Lincoln won. Had he lost he would be regarded very differently.

Labour since 1900 has achieved nothing really

The British Labour Party is essentially a 20th century (wrong) answer to a 19th century problem.

Labour was always a mistake. The Liberals were much more radical, much more intelligent and would have fought the 1915 general election on land nationalisation. Labour, at least for a long time, didn't have many ideas, till the Webbs taught them nationalisation. They existed originally to get working class trade unionists into the House.

The first Labour government's one memorable achievement was adding the words 'patriotism is not enough' to the statue of Nurse Cavell. The second Labour government's big achievement was the Lido in Hyde Park. At least the latter was useful. Later Labour governments had only one important positive achievement. They raised the perception and self-perception of the working class.

But this would have happened anyway, without Labour.

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of fascism

A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre not of communism, as Marx proclaimed in 1848, but of fascism or the far right. 

Spectre is the right word, for spectres are imaginary and the threat of fascism is imaginary, just as the threat of communism was in 1848

But, as in 1848, it's a fear of the people by their rulers.

In case you hadn't noticed, the left is nowadays terrified of the workers. Needlessly, as the workers are brainwashed too.

I do not think it is especially useful to call Islamists fascists as they are different in quite a few ways from Mussolini's movement, but if they are fascists then they are a fascist threat that is certainly not imaginary.

Steve Bannon may have been right when he said,

I think we are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism.

Bernard Lewis: Will the future see an Islamised Europe or a European Islam?

In 2010 the greatest historian of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, predicted that by the end of the decade Iran would abandon political Islam, while Turks adopted some form of Islamist rule. The old man might yet be right.

He also said in 2010 that Muslims were making their third attempt to conquer Europe, an attempt which seemed to have a much better chance at success than the first two as it took the form of peaceful migration rather than military aggression.

“The only question remaining for us to answer regarding the future of Europe is will it be an Islamised Europe or a European Islam?"

I suspect that the country that poses the biggest danger to Christendom/Western Christian civilisation is not Iran or Turkey, and certainly not Russia or North Korea, but Saudi Arabia.

ISIS is a very big danger if we overreact to them, as the Americans overreacted to September 11th, and alienate many Muslims in Europe.

Macron will be President of France

French exit poll result:

Macron - 23%
Le Pen - 23%
Fillon - 19%
Melenchon - 19%

The Gaullist Fillon might have been a good President, despite the corruption allegations. Macron will do less well against Marine Le Pen than Fillon, so she will be happy to meet him in the second round. Nevertheless I am sure that Macron will be President.

He will be another Trudeau. Possibly another Hollande.

And bad news for Britain in the Brexit negotiations.

Why should Great Britain or America fight for the Sunnis?

Obviously, the USA and UK should never have invaded Iraq. They should have launched a short punitive expedition into Afghanistan in 2001, restored the monarchy and then allowed the Taliban to come back. Nation-building was always (a liberal) folly: Afghanistan and Iraq were not post-war Germany, as should have been clear.

But having broken it, as Colin Powell warned, the USA bought Iraq. Leaving it alone led to ISIS. So what is the solution?

I don't know. Unfortunately, the USA may now back the Israeli-Saudi-Sunni alliance against the Shia crescent (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah). I hope Mr. Trump resists this temptation.

Almost all the terrorist atrocities against Western Europe and the USA are committed by Sunnis, yet we are constantly told that Iran, which is fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, is the great threat. Why? 

Will there always be an England, Europe or America, whatever the origin of their inhabitants?

But today, France’s most read and most discussed popular writers—novelists and political essayists—are conservatives of one stripe or another. They are not concerned, even slightly, with the issues that animate American “mainstream” think-tank conservatism—lowering taxes, cutting federal programs, or maintaining some kind of global military hegemony. Their focus is France’s national culture and its survival.

These words are from an article by Scott McConnell in the latest issue of The American Conservative called The Battle for France, which you should print off and read, whether or not you are interested in France. It is about the future, or lack of one, of Western/Christian civilisation. 

I came across it via Professor Tom Gallagher, the historian and commentator.

It contains a quite astonishing piece of information, which I had seen before.

Because the government does not publish statistics about race, some curious researchers have looked at the number of newborn babies screened for markers for sickle-cell anemia, a test given if both parents are of African, North African, or Sicilian origin. The figure has risen from 25 percent in 2005 to 39 percent in 2015. In the Greater Paris region it has risen from 54 percent to 73 percent.

Gentle reader, I don't suppose you have time or patience just now to read several brilliant articles about the effects on the West of mass immigration from the Third World. 

Still, I wanted to post links to another six 'must read' articles on the subject, which is almost the only important political issue of our days. You might want to bookmark this page or even print them off to read at your leisure. 

Like most nice people, I didn't give immigration from the Third World into Great Britain or Europe much thought until a few years ago. When a man I knew in MI6 tried to tell me about the dangers caused by Muslims in Europe I assumed he did so because he was a very rigorous Low Church Protestant. When Tom Gallagher told me about the late Oriana Fallaci and opened the subject of the 'Islamisation' of Europe with me I thought he was absurdly alarmist. I thought the same at first when Ruth Dudley Edwards talked about Islamisation.

Now, like everyone's, my views have changed, because the world has changed and we have all noticed. Despite the official propaganda. It is not that we become more extreme as we age, though we certainly become wiser and less inhibited. It's the world that has become more extreme.

The best comment on Brexit I've seen

I voted for the principle of national sovereignty and I expect to suffer for this choice. You do know there have been actual *wars* of independence, don't you? It will not be easily won. A lot of Remainers seem to be saying that they are *not* prepared to suffer for the principle of national sovereignty and that if we suffer just one jot of inconvenience or anxiety, we should have remained.

1O pieces of advice

I don't like work — no man does — but I like what is in work — the chance to find yourself. Joseph Conrad

What people said this weekend

Peter Hitchens‏Verified account @ClarkeMicah  15 seconds ago

Must sign off now. But amazed by liberal left. Donald Trump transformed in a night from fascist moron to hero. I still think he's an oaf.

Michael Caine, interviewed on Sky on Friday, explaining why he voted for Brexit,

It wasn’t about... racism, immigrants or anything, it was about freedom

[On the possibility that Britain might be less prosperous because of Brexit]

I'd rather be a poor master than a rich servant.

Politics is always chaotic. In politics, you’re always going into areas you’ve never been before, so you’re going to get lost and then you’re going to find your way. And then it’ll be all right.

Has Donald Trump been turned? Not necessarily

On Thursday night there were a lot of interesting news stories. 

A horrible story about the use of chemical weapons in Syria.17 suicide bombs had briefly opening the road out of Mosul, presumably allowing the leader of ISIS to escape. The story or non-story about Donald Trump's nefarious links to Vladimir Putin trundled on, now involving Carl Bernstein. 

When we woke up yesterday there was only one story. President Trump had bombed Syria because of the pictures he had seen of dead children, including 'beautiful babies'.

I feared and more than half-expected that Mr. Trump would be turned by the American foreign policy establishment. Now that danger is acute. Especially since Rex Tillerson said the day before that the US still wanted regime change in Syria.

Steve Bannon being shoved off the National Security Council was a worrying sign, as was the destruction of Mike Flynn by the FBI. Instead of a National Security Advisor who worried about Islam the USA has one who worries about Russia. 

Donald Trump has many good instincts and insights, which is why he is President, but a very short attention span. He has surrounded himself with a bunch of people, including James Mattis and Nikki Haley, who do not share any of his vision of the world, possibly because there are few experienced people in public life who do.

Steve Bannon is Mr. Trump's conscience and must be very beleaguered.

Mr. Trump could turn out to be another Republican president who cuts taxes for the rich and sends soldiers to kill and die in pointless wars in the Middle East. Ones from which Saudi Arabia and Israel benefit, rather than America. While taking in as many refugees as Obama did and doing not much more about illegal immigration.

But it does not have to be like that.

Christopher Caldwell Tells Us How to Think About Vladimir Putin

Christopher Caldwell is the most interesting journalist I read. Do read this talk he recently gave, gentle reader. 

'Yet if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

Well happ'd on, brother-ranger of the brine!

A mixed bag of quotations today.



Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom. Oswald Spengler


A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire. Duc De La Rochefoucauld

Emil Cioran predicts the end of European civilisation

 

Vacillating instincts, corroded beliefs, obsessions, and anility: everywhere conquerors in retreat, rentiers of heroism confronting the young Alarics who lie in wait for Rome and Athens; everywhere paradoxes of the lymphatic. There was a time when salon sallies traversed whole countries, foiled stupidity or refined it. Europe, coquettish and intractable, was in the flower of her age; — decrepit today, Europe excites no one. Even so, certain barbarians await their chance to inherit the finery, impatient at her long agony.

The Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran, in Syllogismes d’Amerture (1952) - the English translation of the book is here. 

It's interesting that he said this before the Algerian War, when Algeria still constituted three departments of France.

Pessimism was to Cioran what daffodils were to Wordsworth or butlers to P.G. Wodehouse. Cioran even achieved the feat of being too pessimistic for Samuel Beckett. This broke up their friendship.

Carl Jung on good and evil

Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Why I don't like International Women's Day

A week ago sunny weather arrived in time for Mărţişor. Time to walk
hatless and scarfless along Calea Victoriei in the spring
sunshine.

Romanians consider that spring starts on March 1 (Mărţişor) and men here
celebrate it by offering mărţişoare to women. A mărţişor is a trinket,
usually by peasants who come to Bucharest to sell them,
though some fortunate ladies receive expensive versions of mărţişoare
encrusted with gems.

If you failed to invite a lady for dinner on Mărţişor today you have a

second chance, because March 8th is International Women's Day. It is a day which, if it is noticed at all in the West, is marked by left-wingers and feminists. In Romania it is a very big thing but, after more than forty years of left-wing ideas and political correctness, it is simply about giving women presents and inviting them to dinner.

A very pleasant custom but, still, I dislike IWD because it is Marxist.

Chamberlain, Churchill and the End of Glory

If I am to manage to continue reading books I probably have to give up fiction. Having taken almost two years with 'War and Peace' (do read it if you haven't), I returned with relish to John Charmley's 'Churchill: the End of Glory'.

The book caused great controversy when it appeared 25 years ago because it portrayed Churchill in a new and unflattering light. It is sceptical about Chamberlain and Deladier's decision to go to war with Germany in 1939 and the British cabinet's decision not to find out the details of Hitler's peace overtures after the fall of France in 1940. Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax wanted to. Churchill, the new Prime Minister, and the Labour leader Attlee convinced the (all-party) war cabinet not to do so.

Having been lucky to evacuate the army from France in time and having ruled out negotiations, Churchill had no plan for defeating Germany nor any means of doing so.

As Professor Charmley points out:

The Americans were not about to enter the war in December 1941, as Churchill's despair in November showed. They came in because they were forced to, just as the Soviets had done; only the British and the French were mad enough to volunteer for war.

I followed 'Churchill: the End of Glory' with Professor Charmley's 'Chamberlain and the Lost Peace', which dissects the way in which England came to go to war.

Neville Chamberlain and Benito Mussolini at Munich, 19 September 1938

I recommend both books very highly.

They tell a very sad story about the end of British greatness.

I admire Churchill as a great Englishman, comparable with Nelson, Wellington and Dr Johnson. I have come to think, however, that Neville Chamberlain and Halifax were wiser statesmen.

Yet it was they, not Churchill, who took us to war.

The crucial decision that led to war was the decision to give a guarantee to Poland and, oddly, Romania. It was taken by Chamberlain in March 1939, under pressure from Halifax, after Germany seized the Czech lands.

Quotations for the weekend

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger’s claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are. Nietzsche

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down. Terry Pratchett