Buczacz

I blogged about Buczacz last year and Professor Omer Bartov's excellent and searing book about the murder of the town's Jews. I have now visited the pretty little town. In warm weather on the first day of June it brought to mind Sherlock Holmes' remark about the vilest alleys not hiding as much sin as the smiling and beautiful face of the countryside. 

Buczacz was founded in the seventeenth century by Polish nobles in what was effectively the Wild East. The  nobles who started towns encouraged the settlement of Jews, desirable immigrants because of their commercial expertise. The Jews came east tired of constant friction with Poles. The Jews lived in their own community and were largely preoccupied by their own religion until the nineteenth century. In the 1920s 60% of the townspeople were Jewish.

The electorate is the problem

Populist voters are the problem. Politicians should dissolve the electorate and choose a new one.

Oh wait, they are doing so.

Even if you are not interested in history, history is interested in you

Many people are completely ignorant of and uninterested in history, before about 1963. 

Ignorant, for example, of how very little immigration there was into Europe, after the Muslim invasions of the Dark and Middle Ages, which were halted and finally after long centuries rolled back by the warriors of Spain, Portugal, central Europe and the Balkans.  

But even if you are not interested in history, history is interested in you.

Sir Roger Scruton

"Mismanaged sexual feelings lead to a society of casual encounters, jealousies, and aggressions, in which there are neither lasting commitments nor sacrifices on behalf of children."


"This period of courtship was also one of display, in which men showed off their manliness and women their femininity. And this is what we mean, or ought to mean, by the 'social construction' of gender. By playacting, the two partners readied themselves for their future roles"

First woman to join infantry regiment since defence chiefs lifted ban on females serving in combat units quits after two weeks

A headline in the British press restores ones faith in human nature.

First woman to join infantry regiment since defence chiefs lifted ban on females serving in combat units quits after two weeks

Apparently 

"In 2016, then Prime Minister David Cameron said it was essential that the make-up of the Armed Forces reflected society and he lifted the ban on women serving in combat units."

I have to concede what people keep saying to me is true, that there was really virtually no difference between the Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Labour Blairites. Theresa May, of course, is a Blairite and so is Michael Gove.


The full story is here.

New Zealand adds “sex work” to “employment skills” for those wishing to migrate

The New Zealand immigration service has added “sex work” (as prostitution is increasingly described) to the list of “employment skills” for those wishing to migrate.
Julie Bindel, The Guardian, Monday 30 Apr 2018

Abbott declared support for IRA defeat of Britain

[Diane] Abbott, who will become home secretary if Labour wins the election, said in the 1984 interview that Ireland “is our struggle — every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us. A defeat in Northern Ireland would be a defeat indeed.”

Andrew Gilligan
May 21 2017, The Sunday Times

Quotations

"People triggered by blood probably shouldn’t be in medical school. People triggered by ideas probably shouldn’t be in university."
Stefan Molyneux 

“A nation that cannot get angry about the slaughter of its own children is a nation that has lost its moral anchor.”
Brendan O'Neill 

"You wouldn't believe the things they have said about me. They have said I am Georgian... forgive me for saying this... even much uglier things, they have even called me an Armenian, but I am Turkish."
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a 2014 interview on the NTV news network

'The nation state is the political masterpiece'

What matters in politics, more even than freedom or tradition, is the nation. It's a truism and yet I bet in our day many people, who are not Marxists, do not agree. 

'The nation state is the political masterpiece' as Raymond Aron said - but making central and eastern Europe into nation states was Procrustean and painful.  The process by which Eastern Europe became the collection of nation states that we know today was in many ways regrettable (the Habsburg Empire was a European Union that worked, at least until the Hungarians were taken into partnership) but also hard to avoid because, as travel became easy and people were taught to read, a common language and sense of national community became necessary. 

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

Bernard Lewis died at the weekend and I thought it appropriate to republish this from a year ago.



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?"

Seen

"Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential." - Sir Winston Churchill


US bank Morgan Stanley estimates that the energy needed only for mining Bitcoin will represent some 0.6% of the world energy consumption in 2018.


WikiLeaks Retweeted WikiLeaks
Harvard has announced that Hillary Clinton will receive a medal for "transformative impact on society". But there is only one society she truly transformed. Libya--from the most developed society in Africa, into a smoking, ISIS-infested ruin

Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray in a godforsaken world

Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray have much in common. Both are very intelligent, very eloquent, very charismatic. Neither is particularly conservative but common sense is now considered right-wing. Both think like human beings rather than ideologues. Both have flourished on the internet and above all both are trying to find something with which to replace belief in God.

As Douglas Murray put it,

Having been for some years, as Roger Scruton has put it, downstream from Christianity, there is every possibility that our societies will either become unmoored entirely or be hauled onto a very different shore. Very unsettling

Royal Wedding

Diaries

Tallulah Bankhead: 

"Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time."

Fanny Burney, March 1768:

"To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintances and actions, when the hour arrives in which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a journal."

Gwendolen in "The Importance of Being Earnest"

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

Quotations

Joseph Campbell:

"If you want to know what a given society believes in, look at what its largest buildings are devoted to."

Chris Beck, 'Claire Lehmann’s Forum for the Intellectual Dark Web':

“Lehmann contributed to a number of publications before launching Quillette, but claims the Australian media blacklisted her as soon as she started criticizing feminism. She rejects the ‘blank slate’ view that feminists, and progressives in general, have made a centerpiece of their dogma. It’s the belief that humans are strictly the product of culture and socialization, and the rejection of the idea that humans are born with certain innate characteristics.”

Romania and Turkey are the least well educated countries in Europe

This map says Romania and Turkey are the least well educated countries in Europe.

Since WHEN was Turkey in Europe? 

Balkan countries not in the EU are a blank space, unless Turkey is still a Balkan country.

The English on the Irish

Dr Johnson: "The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, Sir; the Irish are a fair people; -- they never speak well of one another."

Quotations

A future Archbishop of Canterbury worried about mass immigration

The modern Anglican clergy's keenness on multiculturalism and immigration contrast with Anglican clergy in previous ages.

It is misleading to argue that England has always been a nation of immigrants. Immigration levels until the last two generations were low, unlike on the Continent. According to the reliable Migrationwatch, more people came to the UK in the single year 2010 than to the British Isles in the whole period 1066-1950. 

Nevertheless, there were always immigrants in England and in the Middle Ages their number was not negligible. A survey of foreigners in England in 1440 listed by name around
20,000 foreigners in England, who made up about one percent of the population. This was long after King Edward I expelled the Jews and centuries before Queen Elizabeth I expelled the few black people in the country. 

Quotations

Ben Judah‏ @b_judah

Ben Judah Retweeted POLITICO Magazine

Anglo Macron hype/hate has nothing to do with his actual performance. For liberals he must succeed, for socialists, nationalists he must fail. All ideologies sense of what must happens converge on Macron right now.

New York Times: "Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!"

I used to support the Democrats in US politics, back in the day of Carter and Reagan. I have changed and so, even more, have they.

I stopped being a Democrat after Bill Clinton had been in office a few months but I was neutral in 2000, strongly backed Gore in 2004 and hesitantly backed Obama, despite his being a European-style Social Democrat and his enthusiasm for horrible things like partial birth abortion, because of his colour, but also because of anger at the way Republicans had ruled since 2000 and because John McCain seemed like another George W. Bush.

Evening sky in Bucharest by Octav Dragan

Sibiu or Hermannstadt

They just drew back the ceiling at the Hotel Imperatul Romanilor in Sibiu to let in a sunny April morning. It's one of my favourite hotels, old, a bit down at heel, a faded grand dame. Its real name is the Romische Kaiser and it was founded in 1555, which is not old by English standards but is by Transylvanian standards and unheard of in where I live, in Wallachia, on the other side of the Carpathians.

Sibiu in 1999 when I first came was stunningly beautiful and as decayed and broken as Havana or Rangoon. Now it is rather depressingly well painted and tidy, but this is good, I remind myself. And there is still a fair amount of peeling paint if you leave the Big Square. It draws many tourists who are having breakfast beside me but it is not an over painted tourist gem like Brasov.

Sibiu is full of lovely Catholic, Protestant and Unitarian churches and lovely town palaces built for German noblemen. It was built by Germans and the majority of the people here were German until most were expelled after the war for the sins of their countrymen far away. The rest mostly went to West Germany in return for large subventions for Ceausescu or left after the revolution. About two thousand remain, one of whom left for Bucharest where he is the current President of Romania, Klaus Iohannis.

Ethnic displacement happened in cities throughout Eastern Europe that were once occupied by Germans and Jews. It happened to the Ascendancy towns of Southern Ireland. It will presumably happen in London and Paris, where the imperial monuments built by conquering peoples are increasingly inhabited by the descendants of the conquered.

Prince Louis

Lewis is the English spelling. Macaulay wrote about King Lewis XIV.

95% of Romanians believe in God, as opposed to 28% in Great Britain

72% of Americans believe in a divinity, according to a Pew survey this week.


According to a Pew survey last year 88% of Eastern Europeans (including the population of the former Soviet Union in Europe and the Greeks) do so.

95% of Romanians believe in God.

The one country in the former Soviet bloc where belief in God is unusual is Czechia, where 66% of people do not believe in God. I think this is because Catholicism was forced on the Czechs by military might, as it was on Hungary and France, but the figure for believers in Hungary, which does not seem a religious country, is 59%. The full figures from the survey last year are here.

In France it was 27% in 2010 but, by contrast, a couple of years ago 25% of French children of 15 told a survey that they were Muslim.


28% of people in the UK believe in God according to a survey in December 2016, of whom many are Muslim, Hindu or belong to other exotic faiths. Of the Christians, many are of Eastern European, African, Caribbean, Filipino or Cypriot stock. The figures for Northern Ireland also skew the figures. 

Robert Tombs: universities now teach civilisations, not western civilisation

In an article in The Times today historian Robert Tombs says that Cambridge now avoids the history of Western civilisation.

'In my own university, Cambridge, once-popular courses called “The Expansion of Europe” and “The West and the Third World” have long been replaced by a decentred “World History”. Simon Schama and Mary Beard now celebrate not “Civilisation” in their BBC TV series but “Civilisations”.'

God save the new prince

This blog greets with delight the prince who was born today.

How Prince William's birth seems to me. I have good reason to remember that evening well.

Quite unbelievably BBC Radio 4 news put the new prince in 3rd place! After, first, free citizenship for the Empire (why is that word always omitted?) Windrush immigrants and, second, the creation of Stephen Lawrence Day! 

(That's unbelievable in itself. Why not Drummer Rigby Day?)

Barbara Bush subverts careerism

The third choice that must not be missed is to cherish your human connections: your relationships with family and friends. For several years, you’ve had impressed upon you the importance to your career of dedication and hard work, and, of course, that’s true. But as important as your obligations as a doctor, lawyer, or business leader will be, you are a human being first and those human connections—with spouses, with children, with friends—are the most important investments you will ever make. At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent. . . .

Whatever the era, whatever the times, one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children—they must come first.

The late Barbara Bush, who died on Tuesday, in her commencement address to the 1990 class of Wellesley College, the leading U.S. women's college.

The FBI men who guarded her for decades guarded her coffin at her funeral.

Quotations from Sir Roger Scruton

"Conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing. And lifting your eyes from this joyless stuff, you will thank God that you are a conservative."

Enoch Powell: "In the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans."

"Ah, Enoch, dear Enoch! He once said something to me I never understood. He said, "You know, I've told you all I know about housing, and you can make your speech accordingly. Can I talk to you about something that you know all about and I know nothing? I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans." You know, I had no idea what he meant. I do now."

Sir Anthony Eden to Andrew Freeth after the Suez Crisis

The global village

Manuel Castells: “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local”.

Samuel Huntington: “A major gap is growing in America between its increasingly denationalised elites and its ‘thank God for America' public.”

Thomas Friedman: "When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job."

Quotations

To the man-in-the-street who,
I'm sorry to say,
Is a keen observer of life,
The word intellectual suggests right away
A man who's untrue to his wife.

W H Auden


The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.

Henry Hazlitt

Warning

The Lost Heart of Asia

I am just rereading Colin Thubron's The Lost Heart of Asia which I first read in the mid-90s, about his journey to Central Asia just after the USSR split up. 

It is quite marvellous and the perfect introduction to Uzbekistan. I wish I had reread it before my recent visit, though I did read his Shadow of the Silk Road about his return in 2006.

Uzbekistan is a place whose heart has been ripped out by communism. Lovely people but half destroyed by atheism, materialism, socialist internationalism and deracination. 

Had the khanates of Samarkand, Bokhara, Kokand and Khiva been British not Russian protectorates they might be something like the UAE now, with gold and plutonium instead of oil. Though thinking about Dubai that does not seem such an attractive idea.


For decades I only travelled in post-Communist Europe and I still find it rather depressing to go to Western Europe. All that shininess and affluence make my heart sink. Now I travel around Western Europe because it has the best monuments and to exotic places like Iraq and Mozambique, because I wanted to see the world, but I realise it is only Eastern Europe and the especially the former USSR that I really love - where people are human and normal. 

I loved Uzbekistan, as I expected to. Colin Thubron says he is in love with the whole of Asia but for some reason I am not.

China, Vietnam and Laos which still are Communist and Cambodia, which was Communist, do not greatly interest me. I wonder why not.

Is it because Uzbekistan was ruled by Russians and is therefore less Asian? No, because Indochina was ruled by the French. 

A lot of it is to do with the attraction of the Muslim world. I am a proud orientalist who thought Edward Said's critique of orientalism vapid and uninteresting. I found Pakistan more appealing than India.

The attraction of the Mohametan world and the former Soviet bloc. Former Soviet Central Asia is where the two circles overlap and it has the poetry of inaccessibility and obscurity.

"At the moment you see we have no feeling about ourselves as a nation. History is the key and the Soviets took ours away. We were sold a mass of Bolshevik stories and nothing of our own." An Uzbek talking to Colin Thubron in 1992. 

I detect faint echoes of this in present day Western Europe.

That was the news

Some people prefer just not to follow the news. I think it's a duty. Perhaps in a macabre way it's even a dark pleasure. But no not a pleasure.


Winnie Mandela who said 

"Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country"

died and was praised in the Western press. Necklaces meant burning people alive by putting tyres around their necks filled with petrol.


When F.W. Klerk, who dismantled apartheid and freed Nelson Mandela dies, his obituary will be unflattering.


Emmanuel Macron talked about the threat to democracy from populists, by which he meant the threat to democracy from politicians who offer to do what the public wants. He won widespread praise for this.


In England a male voice choir was ordered to admit women.


Canada announced she will no longer discriminate on the grounds of physical disability when deciding which immigrants to accept.

Tweets

Tara Ann Thieke‏ @TaraAnnThieke
Basically I don't want to hear a single supporter of the Iraq War offer their foreign policy advice without long, sustained mea culpas and explanations of why they should now be heeded. The burden of proof is on them, not on war skeptics.


Scott Greer (@ScottMGreer):
Principled conservatism: the president can drop bombs wherever he feels like but we can't deport criminal aliens

Censorship and fake tweets

Something very strange happened to me yesterday. Can anyone give me advice?


I was told my Twitter account was being temporarily limited for 8 hours because of a tweet I sent.


This was very annoying but the tweet in question (below) is not one I sent or retweeted though it has my 'avatar'. 


Paulvew
@paulica44
@BourneWolf @AlfDubs @paullewismoney @stellacreasy @YvetteCooperMP @guardian @ThangamMP @safepassageuk @HelpRefugees @refugeecouncil @KateGreenSU Syrian refugees have already been involved in terrorist murders in Europe.

The people it was sent to are not people I know.

“Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with blood”

"All quotations are out of context." (Enoch Powell)

Two weeks ago an extraordinary thing happened. The BBC World Service made the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King its first item on the world news. 

Was the fiftieth anniversary of anyone’s death ever before, since the world began, first item on the news around the world? Lenin’s perhaps, in the Soviet bloc in 1984, but not worldwide.

Two weeks after the murder of King and fifty years ago today, Enoch Powell, a member of the British Conservative Shadow Cabinet, gave his famous and misnamed 'Rivers of Blood' speech, in which he warned in very highly coloured terms of the consequences of continued immigration from the former colonies into Great Britain. 

Godless communism

This Godless Communism, 1961, a story in volume 17, issue number 2 of Treasure Chest, a monthly comic book published by the Catholic Guild in the USA from 1946 to 1972. Each issue featured several different stories intended to inspire citizenship, morality, and patriotism. 

2 former British Ambassadors are sure that Assad is not responsible for chemical attacks

I was opposed to a strike on Syria in 2013 but have been thinking through the arguments this time. 

The 2017 strike by the Americans seemed worryingly like the start of a US intervention but in fact had no consequences apart from showing that Trump was not a Russian stooge, repairing the damage to US prestige caused when Mr. Obama did nothing after his red line was crossed and killing some innocent people. 

If Assad is responsible for using chemical weapons this time the 2016 strike did not deter him.

But is he?

I am very reluctant to think this is a trick by Western governments but is it a false flag operation by others unknown? The Saudis? 

How can we know?

But we do know this.

A former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, thinks that the Syrian government did not use chemical weapons this time. The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, is certain that Assad is not guilty. I think two former Ambassadors saying this means the case against Assad is not proven. 

Taken today by Octav Dragan

Today was a heavenly day.

House of the People, Bucharest - acknowledgements, Octav Dragan

Frank Furedi: for anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought

Frank Furedi says very truly:

For anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought - especially in places like Hungary. Why because the people are unreliable and then to vote the wrong way. And yet they dishonestly go on about threat of dictatorships.

He has written a very good article which says everything you need to know about the election result. It includes this insight.

The emergence of Hungary as the bad boy of Europe has little to do with its supposed plunge into authoritarianism. As I argued in my book, Populism and the European Culture Wars, the pathologisation of the Orban regime is largely due to its promotion of national sovereignty and its willingness to uphold traditions and values, including those of Christianity. It is hostile to those who would dismiss the legacy of Europe’s past as the ‘bad old days’. Hungary is hated by the Western political oligarchy for the simple reason that it dares to challenge post-traditionalism, identity politics and anti-humanism.

Easter in Bucharest - acknowledgements, Octav Dragan

What did I think of Uzbekistan?

Tashkent is a very eery, quiet place with wide roads, few cars and few pedestrians. The Bradt Guide said Samarkand was bustling but it was nothing of the sort. It too was almost deserted. Neither city had a centre or much life.

The mosques were beautiful, over-restored for the benefit of tourists but empty of worshippers. Islam I felt was repressed by the Communists much more than was Christianity in other parts of the Soviet Union and this repression continues now, though

Tamburlane's tomb

I saw the tomb today of Tamburlane in Samarkand and must now read the play by Marlowe, which I can download on my kindle. 

I found the Samarkand Necropolis much more beautiful. Here among many others are buried Tamburlane's favourite two wives. He had 90 legal wives and very many concubines.  

He is responsible for the death of perhaps 17 million people, perhaps 4% of the world's population. He is naturally regarded as a very great man and a national hero of the Uzbeks, despite being no more Uzbek than Boadicea was English. Coach parties swarm converge on his tomb. 

How will Hitler be regarded in 700 years?

Nobody knows.

From beyond the far distant Oxus

Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara, delighted to watch his enemies boiled in oil. I am enough of a Tory to think he was slightly better than the Bolsheviks who deposed him.



The Registan in Samarkand. Lord Curzon, as he then wasn't, thought it the noblest public square in the world. Now I can agree with him. 

Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle knew some interesting places in Samarkand and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, as he then wasn't, walked here through semi desert from Bokhara, followed by an NKVD man in an ill-fitting dark suit.


I read once that Tennyson's poems are like objects that you hold in your hand and are one moment astonishing diamonds and the next pieces of coloured glass.

Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand are like that.

Each of them in turn has impressed me at first sight as the most impressive place I ever saw in my life, but each, like some famous beauty, on closer inspection proves to have had a lot of work done to make her stunning. 

I am never sure what is centuries old, what Brezhnev era and what created under the unlamented dictator who died last year.

A German designer who comes here because Bukharan patterns are alive and German ones lifeless (at first I thought she meant patterns of life but she meant patterns) told me that if the Acropolis were in Uzbekistan it would be completed and roofed. This is exactly right. 

The Soviets were not romantics: romanticism was bourgeois and decadent.  They saw no poetry in ruins. Nor did President Karimov after he sloughed off Lenin.

It could be much much worse. They are building a huge tourist centre close to the Ark in Bukhara, the fortress from which the Emir watched his enemies killed with cruel and unusual punishments.

Already Bukhara has 150 mostly small hotels but still the number of tourists is relatively few. Samarkand and Bukhara feel remote despite the occasional coach party, often of Indians.  

Marrakech is perhaps equally beautiful but it is a tourist trap and now almost as familiar as Bournemouth or Southend. Though these things change fast.

Gertrude Bell was the first white woman to enter Samarkand but when she left she noticed advertisements for charabanc excursions.


Enoch Powell said the life of nations like the life of men is lived in the imagination. Travel is lived entirely in the imagination and being somwhere distant and little visited fires the imagination. 

Lord Byron proudly said 'I have seen the ruins of Ephesus' but so can anyone for the price of a budget flight to Ismir. Lord Curzon boasting about Samarkand still moves us to envy.

I arrived in time to see the fairly deserted Registan at Samarkand tonight at dusk, the birds making a deafening noise and the tourists gone. I envy myself.

Part of it is the name. Samarkand like Madagascar, Persia and Mozambique captivates by the sound of its very name. We visited Lalish the Yazzidi holy village because Noemi loved the name. Names contain magic.

We are not far from the Oxus here.

I take the golden road to Samarkand

Tashkent is not dour if you lived twenty years in Bucharest but it has no heart. Though a city of four million people, once the largest in the Soviet Union after Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, it is empty. It is very Soviet, which to me is charming, but my ignorant impression was that here was a place which had had its heart ripped out and nothing to replace it with.


The city is as old as Rome but badly damaged in an earthquake in 1966 and its ancient buildings have been rebuilt. The roads have little traffic but, as throughout the USSR, are wide enough for military planes to land on them,


I had a pleasant plov (pilaff, the national dish) at the city's best restaurant, Caravan, and a much better dinner at Florea. I attended La Traviata sung very well. The very talkative audience was almost entirely female and over fifty. This I read was the place where one came closest to the still beating heart of Tashkent. The beautiful opera house was built for the Communist administration by the architect of the last Emir of Bukhara.

Khiva

I remembered Colin Thubron's 'The Lost Heart of Asia' and wanted to miss out Khiva but luckily my travel agent persuaded me not to. Colin Thubron found it a lifeless over restored museum. That was in the early 90s and I suppose it is true, but Khiva is less well cared for than when he saw it, everywhere else is now much more restored than 25 years ago and it has far fewer  tourists than most beautiful places nowadays. Every vista makes your jaw drop

Marrakesh is less lovely but still very lovely. But Marrakesh is touristland. Khiva has what Marrakesh has lost, that wonderful feeling of being remote. Every scene looks like it's from the Sunday Times colour supplement but there seem to be no Sunday Times readers. An Englishman does not go abroad to meet Englishmen.

Yesterday was very hot. Today was supposed to be 31° Celsius but instead it is 3° which is a surprise. It's also raining, which one doesn't expect in a desert.

I have read about twentieth century Englishman in Uzbekistan like the heroic Colonel Bailey and that great writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean but the astonishing Captain Burnaby, who defied the Tsar by entering Khiva, was only a name to me until today. Here is an excerpt from the conversation he had with a worthy citizen who put him up in a large house in a village through which he passed.

' Which do you like best, your horse or your wife ?' inquired the man.—' That depends upon the woman,' I replied ; and the guide, here joining in the conversation, said in England they do not buy or sell their wives, and that I was not a married man. 'What! you have not got a wife?'—' No; how could I travel if I had one ?'—' Why, you might leave her behind, and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on a journey.' In my country the women are never locked up.'—' What a marvel l' said the man ; 'and how can you trust them ? Is it not dangerous to expose them to so much temptation ? They are poor, weak creatures, and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband, what does he do ?'—' He goes to our moullab, whom we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries some one else.'—' What! you mean to say he does not cut the woman's throat?'—' No he would very likely be hanged himself if he did.'—' What a country!' said the host ; we manage things better in Khiva.'

From what I gather from my reading even seventy years of Marxism did not lift the condition of women very much higher.

This morning I went back to the Village Museum

How to fix the Irish border problem

The border between Northern and Southern Ireland and whether it will have to become hard again if the UK leaves the European Economic Area is much in news (the news that people interested in Brexit read). This article by Shanker Singham reveals the interesting information that 87% of Northern Ireland’s turnover represents sales within UK. Just 5% is sales to Eire, 3% to the rest of the EU and 6 % to the rest of the world. So Northern Ireland's primary economic interest is in maintaining the UK single market.

Shanker Singham argues that a customs border would give rise to few problems with

Cambridge Analytica and the Romanian election

My friend Rupert Wolf-Murray has made the headlines in Romania by telling Associated Press that Cambridge Analytica approached him before Romania’s 2016 parliamentary elections to work for the Social Democratic Party (PSD). 

He would have worked with another person and given strategic advice and assistance to the PSD campaign team for two or three months. Here Rupert is talking about it on television.

He declined the offer so does not know whether Cambridge Analytica did play any role in the election, which the PSD won by a wide margin.

Playing truant this morning in the Village Museum after a meeting

Evil and historical judgments: more reflections on R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny"

Historians used to have heroes and villains. Livy's hero was Scipio Africanus for good reasons, though Hannibal was too great to be a villain. Macaulay's wooden hero was the usurper William III. Leopold von Ranke's hero was Napoleon. 

American historians admired another high minded warmonger, Lincoln.

But no man is a hero to his valet and historians these days think like valets. 

Almost everyone has been debunked. They don't usually spend much time painting historical figures as heroic except when race comes into it, as it does with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parkes, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. With them old fashioned history, of the type taught around 1900 and parodied by Sellars and Yeatman, still obtains. 

Because of race,  Lincoln is still a great American hero, even though he wanted to deport the freed slaves to Central America because, as he told the first ever meeting of blacks in the White House, 

"not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours".

Mandela and Gandhi, you note, are the Americans' foreign heroes now. They have replaced the racist and imperialist Churchill.

Historians do not much use the word evil, except about Hitler and the Nazis.

As Lord Bullock said

"If he is not evil, who is?"

Lord Peter Hennessy

I find this absolutely incredible. I knew standards at my middle class university had fallen (and the politics faculty was always made up of Calibans) but for a university website to describe Peter, Lord Hennessy (an annoyingly P.C. life peer) as 'Lord Peter Hennessy' as if he were the son of a duke, marquess or earl....

The Village Museum, Bucharest, under snow

Pope Francis is a populist

The other  day I agreed with Daniel Hannan that President Macron is the ultimate populist. I also said his far left opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was one. 

It seems to me that another populist is Pope Francis.

Women down under

The old cohesive, blokish, laid back Australia has changed in many ways. The 1960s social revolution is working itself out there as much as anywhere.

An Australian feminist last year was advising women who want to have careers not to have children. I can't find the link. 

Australian feminists have marched against Donald Trump but never against female genital mutilation, an increasingly common thing in Australia.

Feminism has always been a top down movement, in which a small group impose their views on the mass of people who couldn't care less. But that small group is not just a few activists and left-wingers but also academia and the global bureaucracy.

International organisations are just as feminist as anyone these days.

Australia's solid labour market performance is sullied by its failure to fully tap the potential of women: those with young children, single mothers and females in their late 50s. Women with children under five and sole parents with a child under 15 in Australia face an employment gap of about 25 percentage points to those without kids, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development said in a report on Friday. (The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 2017)

Islamism is a post-colonial movement

'Free market capitalism cannot provide for everyone or sustain the natural world. Its very imperative is of ever hastening exploitation of all resources including people, and it needs armies and weapons to secure those supplies. The political appeal, unchallenged in the 1990s, of this concept is fast fading by a combination of Islamic opposition and the radical popular movements of landless and poor peoples in many poor countries.' 

Jeremy Corbyn in the foreword to Imperialism: A Study, 2006.

“[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.”

Christopher Hitchens

"We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning."

Fjordman

Quotations

"Whereas people of faith tend to accept the natural world, those who profess a material view often go to war with it. Such discontent has proved of great value to successive political movements that have promised to transform everything, from society to gender."
Toby Guise

"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner."
Albert Jay Nock

Macron is the ultimate populist

Macron is the ultimate populist. So said Daniel Hannan the other day.

In many ways this is true.  He is up there with Napoleon III. But no-one calls him one. 

His left-wing opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was also a populist and his right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen. 

And Charles de Gaulle?

Immigration and robots

Professor James Newell of Salford University, in his latest posting in LSE blogs about the Italian election result, thinks that in Italy

immigration is essential to helping Italy overcome its economic problems, especially to ensure the sustainability of the pensions system, since immigrants are on average younger than Italians and have a higher fertility rate.

The same arguments apply to other Western and Eastern European countries. 

But why not use robots instead?

Donald Trump is being clever with tariffs, Korea and China

The global economic system, like NATO, was set up after the war by the U.S.A., with British help, to contain Soviet expansion. 

Like spending on Nato, which Donald Trump in his election campaign called 'obsolete', U.S. tariffs unfairly disadvantage the U.S. for reasons that ceased to exist in 1991.

The U.S., which is less dependent on trade than the other G-7 economies, could easily win a trade war if it conducts one cleverly. 

A new era dawns in Italy

I take back what I said about the LSE's blogs reflecting the sad lack of diversity of thought among academics, who are almost always left-wing or at least liberal. Roberto Orsi's blog post on the Italian election has proven me wrong and makes up for wading through the muddy waters of Conor Gaerty's writing.

Dr. Orsi comes straight to the point.

The outcome of the election was determined primarily by the policies of uncontrolled mass immigration which started in 2014 under Enrico Letta and continued under Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni. These have de facto turned Italy into a giant camp for asylum seekers, generating a sense of societal breakdown and acute political conflict.

I want to know the reasons why European leaders have failed to defend their countries

Books are becoming everything to me

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

Lord Macaulay, in a letter to his sister Margaret.

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” 

Rereading Peacock forty years after

I picked up a second hand Penguin edition of Gryll Grange, Thomas Love Peacock's last and mellowest novel from 1860, in a charity shop in the enchanting and enchanted Devon town of Totnes last summer. Thanks to giving up the net (more or less) for Lent I actually reread it. I loved him when I was 14, but one is so much more highbrow at 14 than after 40.

Peacock's are conversation novels and therein is their great charm. Aldous Huxley revived the genre with Crome Yellow.

How civilised the conversations and the characters are. Dr Opimian's

tastes, in fact, were four: a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks.

What good have we done for America asks Lord Curryfin and Dr Optimian answers that we gave the Americans wine and Latin and Greek literature.

Nowadays such a question between British intellectuals would get such a boring answer. From Robert Peston on the BBC for example. I shall eviscerate his new book when I have time.

Real wages of Soviet workers regained their 1913 level only in 1963

My nephew was taught at school in England that Lenin was an improvement on Tsar Nicholas II. This article on the complete failure of socialism in the Soviet Union is worth reading for people who are not clear about it. 

It tells us inter alia that

According to such scholars as Professor Sergei Propokovich, Dr Naum Jasny, and Mrs Janet Chapman, for instance, the real wages of Soviet industrial workers in 1970 were hardly higher than in 1913. Similarly, the Swiss economist, Jovan Pavlevski, calculated in 1969 that the real wages of Soviet industrial workers attained the level of 1913 only in 1963. Pavlevski also found that the real incomes of Soviet agricultural workers in 1969 were only 1.2 per cent higher than in 1913.

Aristocrats

Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuinely religious life requires a leisure class, or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work disgraces is not altogether alien—the feeling that it makes soul and body common. And that consequently our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for “unbelief.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil'

Henry de Montherlant

Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.


When something is detestable, and yet inevitable, what one must do is not merely to endure it-a hard task whatever one may do-but find an excuse for loving it. Everything is a matter of points of view, and misfortune is often only the sign of a false interpretation of life.

Teffi on Lenin

'As an orator, Lenin did not carry the crowd with him; he did not set a crowd on fire, or whip it up into a frenzy. He was not like Kerensky who would make a crowd fall in love with him and shed tears of ecstasy. I myself witnessed such tears in the eyes of soldiers and workers as they showered Kerensky's car with flowers on Marinsky Square. Lenin simply battered away with a blunt instrument at the darkest corner of people's souls, where greed, spite and cruelty lay hidden. He would batter away and get the answer he wanted... 

“Yes, we'll loot and pillage—and murder too!” 

Squire Haggard has died

Alas Squire Haggard (Michael Green) has died. 

I want to reread Squire Haggard's Journal in memoriam, which I found precis-ed thus by Amazon:

'Haggard's typical entries begin with some notation of the invariably miserable weather (typically "Fog," "Sleet," or "Gales") followed by itemization of recent deaths, either by exotic disease, like "Bloating of the Bowels," or by some witless human act, such as drinking a pail of ale in one continuous swallow. Haggard then plunges into his own affairs in his inimitable style, abbreviating freely and capriciously. Sometimes the squire has his slow days: "Lay on my bed nearly all day, shootg. at tradesmen who approached the Hall with bills and succeeded in damaging a particularly obnoxious grocer."'

The real Charles Darwin was a social Darwinian

A psychopath once told me that his religion was Darwinism "because Darwinism is a religion". 

All psychopaths are at least unconsciously Darwinians, even if they believe in another religion, as Stalin, for example, believed in Marxism, which is also a religion.

Nothing makes liberals angrier than conservatives who reject the idea of evolution for religious reasons, as Vice-President Pence does. I wonder if they give Muslims a free pass to do so. 

But Darwin's ideas are only liberal and progressive in the sense of making it very hard to believe in the existence of souls and therefore of the Christian God. Darwin clearly saw, as all biologists must, that hierarchy is the law of the universe. 

In fact Darwinism, like nature itself and like pagans (real pagans, not Intersectional Pagans for Social Justice), is right-wing in tooth and claw. It is pretty obvious that the ideas of Darwin and his cousin, the now discredited Sir Francis Galton who invented eugenics, are a large part of the basis for the ideas of Hitler.

Charles Darwin on race and sex

A psychopath once told me that his religion was Darwinism "because Darwinism is a religion". 

All psychopaths are at least unconsciously Darwinians, even if they believe in another religion, as Stalin, for example, believed in Marxism, which is also a religion.

Nothing makes liberals angrier than conservatives who reject the idea of evolution for religious reasons, as Vice-President Pence does. I wonder if they give Muslims a free pass to do so. 

But Darwin's ideas are only liberal and progressive in the sense of making it very hard to believe in the existence of souls and therefore of the Christian God. Darwin clearly saw, as all biologists must, that hierarchy is the law of the universe. 

More Thomas Love Peacock

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.


They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

Lenin, who is still admired in Eastern Europe, in British universities and by Jeremy Corbyn

"If for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy nine tenths of the people, we must not hesitate." 
V.I. Lenin

Dr Opimian on America, from Thomas Love Peacock's Gryll Grange (1860)

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Without magnetism we should never have discovered America; to which we are indebted for nothing but evil; diseases in the worst forms that can afflict humanity, and slavery in the worst form in which slavery can exist. The Old World had the sugar-cane and the cotton-plant, though it did not so misuse them. Then, what good have we got from America? What good of any kind, from the whole continent and its islands, from the Esquimaux to Patagonia?

Mr. Gryll. Newfoundland salt fish, Doctor.

There are two sides to the story of East Ghouta

Why are the Russians bombing East Ghouta (I assume they are) and killing civilians (among them children, of course) instead of starving the inhabitants into submission, which is how sieges usually work (though this is now, for some reason, considered a war crime)? 

My namesake Paul Wood writes about it here and is more even-handed than one expects from the mainstream media.

My namesake thinks Putin may have bitten off more than he wanted to chew. Journalists

Mărțișor

Today is Mărțișor and the first day of spring in Romania. Some years it's sunny. This year we've a foot of snow and it's minus 16° Celsius = 3° Fahrenheit.

"Mărțișor is an old tradition celebrated throughout Romania every year on March 1st. The name Mărțișor is a diminutive of March (Martie in Romanian). It is believed that the person who wears the red and white string would enjoy a prosperous and healthy year." 

More on Mărțișor here.

Footnotes to history

Poles and Swedes partitioned Ukraine 100 years before Poland was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria, but nobody talks about that. Lord Salisbury, the future Prime Minister, pointed this out.

People always say that the 1905 Russo-Japanese war was the first time in the modern era that a European state was defeated by a non-white state, but the Abyssinians defeated the Italians at Adwa in 1896.

Enlightenment values as a secular religion

"The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilised but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
T. S. Eliot, "Thoughts After Lambeth" {the 1930 Lambeth Conference that permitted Anglicans to use contraceptives in certain circumstances)

"Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Justice" was the official and public motto of the Ottoman Empire under the reforming liberal Young Turks who organized and carried out the Armenian Genocide -the template for the litany of nation-building State slaughters that has ensued for over a century of progress. Christian Roy

Germany's "historically unique experiment"

Yascha Mounk is a German in his mid-30s who is a Lecturer on Political Theory at Harvard and describes himself on his website as "one of the world's leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism". Talking recently in an interview with German TV about the threat to democracy posed by populists he said populists thrive for three reasons. The first is economic stagnation and the third is the internet, which allows extreme politicians to be heard. The second reason is this:

"We are in a historically unique experiment. There is no example in history of a democracy founded on mono-ethnicity and transformed into a liberal multi-ethnic democracy. We are halfway, but certainly not arrived yet and have to feel in the dark."