Congratulations, sir and ma'am

I congratulate the Duke and Duchess of Sussex on the latter's pregnancy, I suppose.


Romanians congratulate me, which is so nice of them, but I don't really know why. It's not like the birth of Prince George of Wales or even his brother, whose name escapes me. Their child will be seventh in line to the throne. It would take a massacre for her to become Queen.


I love the monarchy rather than the Royal Family, who obscure the importance of the monarch, an importance which is very deep and probably for Jungians part of the collective unconscious. This however always happens when a Queen is on the throne. The cult of the royal family began in Victoria's reign. 


Still, we are so very lucky not to have Roy Hattersley, Douglas Hurd or Gordon Brown as our head of state.


There are quite a few ways in which Romania is more civilised than England and quite a lot of ways in which we are better, the first of which is that we have a monarchy.

Why Donald Trump will probably win a second term

The Guardian in England and The New York Times and The Atlantic in the USA all recently published articles saying that Trump will probably win a second term. It was not something the writers wanted to write or most of the readers wanted to read.

Katty Kay of the BBC said during the 2016 campaign that Donald Trump is a Democrat. I can't find the link and I wonder if she has had it taken down. I agreed with her then - but now I see him as a throwback to the old Republicans of the pre-war era: protectionist and if not an isolationist, at least in favour of pursuing American interests and not an internationalist. So I think he is a Republican, even though at the same time he is clearly a third party candidate who took over one of the parties.

But he did not cast a spell on the GOP or fool them with Russian collusion. There were very good reasons why the Republicans chose him and people who dislike him, which is most people, should try hard to understand those reasons.

Cambridge University Students' Union votes against Remembrance Sunday motion

The Cambridge University Student Union (a body most students have no contact with and less important than the Cambridge Union) voted down a motion to promote Remembrance Sunday amid fears that it glorified war. Which is in fact the opposite of what it does.

The news story is confused and feeds the appetite the papers know their readers have for scandals at Oxbridge and public schools. Nor is anything the students' union does of much importance. But it seems a motion put forward by two members of CUCA, the Cambridge University Conservative Association, to "ensure that Remembrance Day becomes a well-established and well-marked event across the university” was rejected and another

Wise Democrats should vote Republican this time in congressional elections

It is such a shame that the Republicans will probably lose their majority in the House this time. It will send the stock exchange plummeting further which could even trigger a financial crash and will certainly mean a painfully divided country becomes much more painfully divided. Even Democrats should vote Republican this one time for these two reasons.

Cismigiu and the Russian church in autumn

Feminists are the locomotive which pulls the train of political correctness

Feminists are the locomotive which pulls the train of political correctness.

Other minority groups are that, minorities. Women are the majority.

More and more it becomes clear in politics and, if they are still distinguishable from politics, in society as a whole and in the churches that, as an anonymous 1960s American radical said,

“The issue is never the issue."

Tory Island

Tory Island, Donegal, the remotest inhabited island in Ireland.

The islanders elect one of their number to be king. When Sachaverell Sitwell visited the king was a woman.

Tory is an Irish word for robber or bandit and many dispossessed Irish Catholic peasants became bandits in the reign of King Charles II. Newspapers in England were just starting in his reign (the London Gazette, at first called The Oxford Gazette, began publication in 1665) and Tories were news.

The original Tories in English politics were people well disposed to the Catholic Duke of

Things people say

“I love rebellion, and I love getting rid of things that have outlived their usefulness. Brexit is both – after years of treading water and trading away our autonomy for a pathetic package of Euro-portioned mediocrity.” Julie Burchill

Cardinal Wuerl finally resigns, but will remain very influential

Cardinal Wuerl has at last resigned as Archbishop of Washington D.C. after being accused of covering up cases of clerical child abuse when he was Bishop of Pittsburgh, rather than reporting them to the police. Crimes committed by priests in his former diocese were extensive and revealed in the Pennsylvania Grand Jurors' Report that has so shocked everyone. He was mentioned 200 times in the report.

Donald Wuerl began his career as private secretary to Bishop, later Cardinal Wright who was a pederast who interfered with teenage boys. Wright became Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy — that is, head of the Vatican’s apparatus for overseeing priests worldwide - and shared an apartment with Donald Wuerl.

Quotations

“If a natural cataclysm had placed a broad sea between the Germans and the French, the German character would not have been dominated by militarism. If – a more conceivable possibility – the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbors as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation." 

AJP Taylor


"Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.
For those who are near you are far away …

Sic transit Nikki

I am glad Nikki Hayley has resigned as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. She was in the George W. Bush mould and eager for U.S. involvement in the Middle East. The BBC says she received nationwide praise for removing Confederate statues from the South Carolinan capitol. Nationwide from some people but those were brave men who fought for what they considered their country.

Of course, Nikki is much less objectionable than Ivanka who thankfully will not replace her.

What Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh means for America

Judge Kavanaugh was confirmed in the most bitter battle anyone can remember by a majority in the Senate of 50-48.

The U.S. Supreme Court has a conservative majority for the first time since the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to pack the Court with 6 extra judges to make sure Democratic legislation was not struck down.

Previous Republican presidents often either nominated judges who turned out not to be conservative (Eisenhower nominated the former Republican Governor of California Earl Warren who turned out to be very liberal) or had their choices rejected by a Democrat controlled Senate (Reagan's choice, Robert Bork, for example).

Dan Rather, the TV anchorman who succeeded Walter Cronkite as the personification of
Middle America, took it very badly. I found his reaction below funny when I read it, funnier in fact than anything since Paul Krugman's drawn-out agony on Twitter following Donald Trump's victory, but on reflection it is very unkind to laugh. He expresses deep, sincere and high-minded feelings which he shares with a lot of nice, small c conservative, liberal Americans. 

He talks about the need for identity politics, whereas identity politics are disastrous.

For most women and many men it’s a bitter, devastating loss. Which makes it all the sweeter for the old bulls, and for the forces of power, privilege and money everywhere. A sense that the nation’s climate of justice has taken another turn toward dark clouds rises. The age-old question for the country of whether we prioritize power, privilege and money over justice takes on renewed importance. 

So I talk to the wife—the good, gentle wife—who is furious and deeply disappointed. Talk to my daughter—the lion-hearted eldest child—whose first words are, “Can we, will we survive this?” I answer, “Of course we can, and if we have the will and the spirit, we will not only, survive we will thrive. Eventually. But if, and only if, we are “get-up fighters.” Strong as she usually is, she doesn’t seem convinced. 

So, I take a walk, to be alone with my thoughts and reminders to stay steady. Among the thoughts that emerge are these: 

Cut through the clouds of the present, consider the long river of history, and one can see this as a breakthrough moment for women. To paraphrase the daughter who recently said in another context, "women have never had a better moment to be heard in politics, to make a difference.” That is, if they—and those of us men who support them—seize the moment (if they don’t miss the moment as Senator Collins has.)

In fact, he is wrong - a large number of women, especially white women, have swung to the Republicans as a result of the hearings. They feel sorry and angry for Judge Kavanaugh. He could be their husband, son or brother.

The Republicans at the 2016 elections become the party of the white working and lower middle classes and the Democrats the party of ethnic minorities and feminists plus much of the elite. Trump's voters nevertheless had en masse above average incomes so the Republicans have not lost the well to do.

This is an obvious, logical reaction to Donald Trump. It spells doom for the Democrats, even if or especially if they win control of the House next month, as they probably will.

If they do they will make a very painfully divided America much more painfully divided.

On reflection, I do not believe Dr Ford and do believe the Judge, though I think much less of him since I read Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's claim that he suppressed evidence to protect the Clintons, in the investigation into the death of Vince Foster. 

Of course I might be wrong but I think dark forces have been unleashed, as with Anita Hill's allegations against Clarence Thomas. Abortion is at the heart of it. I think hysteria over abortion rights have much to do with the allegations and who knows what things in Dr Ford's life. 

Abortion is where politics becomes very personal - it becomes about sex, about life and death and about religion. This is visceral.

Oddly enough, Brett Kavanaugh's nomination was welcomed when President Trump announced it, because he was a moderate. Catholics complained that he was not pro life enough. He is going to be more conservative now after what he has been through, just as Clarence Thomas has been all these years. 

Donald Trump, for once, was trying to avoid acrimony, but he has shown once more that he knows very well how to turn acrimony to his advantage. Mocking Dr Ford's testimony stoked up his base and triggered his opponents whose predictable reaction then stoked up his base all over again.

It might even keep the House Republican next month, though a month is a long time in politics.

Of course America has been as badly divided many times before now. Only twice did it lead to civil war. 

Of course there are very good existential reasons for the current divisions. 

And of course the Democrats cannot win if they cannot win enough white men.

The falling number of whites in the electorate is indirectly much of the the reason why Donald Trump won and the reason why the 'far right' candidate is likely to win the Brazilian presidential election, but the USA, unlike Brazil, still has a white majority. 

That white majority, men and women, can make things impossible for the Democrats if the Democrats become the party of minorities, feminists and the internationalised Ivy League educated elite. 

The wiser Democrats know this, but not how to prevent it.

Worrying about Russia is like Cromwell fighting Spain

Churchill suddenly said to Harold Macmillan in Cairo in 1943 late one night: 'Cromwell was a great man, wasn't he?' 'Yes, sir, a very great man.' ' But he made one great mistake. Obsessed in his youth by the fear of the power of Spain he failed to observe the rise of France. Will that be said of me?' 

Out of Africa

I thought Mrs. Trump looked delicious in her pith helmet in Kenya but some accused her of looking colonialist. 

She shows that at 48 years of age she is a remarkable beauty, with great clothes sense and great wit, as with the 'I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?' jacket she wore on a trip to visit immigrant children. Some not very perceptive people thought she meant she didn't care

Quotations

I think the most terrifying thing about growing up is that you realise that no one ever grows up, and that the world is, in fact, run by children.
Peter Istrate

Rebellion has psychological, sociological and anthropological bases. The idea that teens "need" to rebel is an Anglo-Saxon idea. In Portugal, my students always thought it was a strange concept.
Teresa Pole-Baker 

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam [...] has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to

When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a small heron

Hamlet's enigmatic line "When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw" has been explained. I just heard an actor on the BBC say he discovered this in Norfolk but others on the net had discovered it before him.

The handsaw, hanser or heronsaw is a Norfolk dialect word for a small heron. A hunter would be expected to know the difference. Birds generally fly in the direction of the wind . If the wind flies north, the sun gets in the hunter’s eyes and he can’t distinguish the two birds. If the wind is south, the bird flies with its back to the sun and can easily be distinguished.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's battle with Brett Kavanaugh over the truth

I do not really understand this complicated story by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. Mr Evans-Pritchard, whom I have been reading since he was covering the Clinton Administration as a foreign correspondent, often seems wild in his judgments but he may be right to think very badly of Kavanaugh. He thinks him intellectually mediocre - which he obviously is- and says he suppressed evidence to protect the Clintons, in a case where some hinted that Hillary was a murderess. This, of course, is the opposite of the usual view that he was a Republican partisan who wanted to hang the Clintons out to dry.

I am going off Judge Kavanaugh.

Letter to the Times today

Sir, I agree with almost everything that Clare Foges writes in her article about Michael Gove, but she got one part slightly wrong. She says that “trashing experts was not his finest hour”. But really, it was. What he actually said was “the people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best.” In the same interview, and in the same context, he said: “I’m asking the people to trust themselves.”
Two statements that set Mr Gove apart from many of those experts, and many other politicians, in not patronising the people of this country.

Nigel Barratt

Melton, Suffolk

I agree with this very strongly. This was the high point of the referendum campaign and roused the most irritating sort of Remainers to fury. 

Michael Gove should have stood for the Tory leadership as soon as David Cameron resigned - he was the only good candidate.

Sober as a judge

I don't mind if Judge Kavanaugh drinks so long as it's not before hearings. I am not sure he should drink as much as the great reactionary Lord Chancellor Eldon whose judgments after sharing 3 bottles of port over lunch with a friend "continued to perplex the law of equity for a half century after his death", according to Lord Campbell's Lives of the Lords Chancellors, a delightful forgotten classic.


What he did as a teenager is a long time ago. Nowadays Judge Kavanaugh seems to be a respectable church-going paterfamilias. I suppose that is what leftists call 'hetero-normative'. By contrast, Lady Justice Hale's divorce did not prevent her being made President of the English Supreme Court. Though Melanie Phillips was not talking about her private life but her record as a law commissioner arguing for no-fault divorce when she described her as a marriage wrecker.

The Kavanaugh hearings are about abortion and about war between two elites

The Senate confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is a gripping novel where things done in their youth come back to haunt and punish the characters in middle age. It has almost everything: sex; politics; religion; possibly a crime.

It's as gripping as the Dreyfus affair, though I do not know who is Dreyfus and who Esterhazy. I hope an innocent man does not get sent to Devil's Island.

The hatred and bigotry that Democrats display towards Judge Kavanaugh is astonishing, though Republicans are just as hateful and bigoted when the boot is on the other foot. I have not seen one Democrat who believes or one Republican who doubts Kavanagh's
testimony. 

This, I think, is on the whole a good, not a bad thing. In England this would all be sorted out by civil servants.

Marriage

"You only know what happiness is once you're married. But then it's too late." Peter Sellers

Laurel and Hardy on single-sex marriage:

OLLIE: "I'm getting married" 

STAN: "Who to?" 

OLLIE: "A woman of course. Did you ever hear of anybody marrying a man?" 

STAN: "Sure. My sister."


“I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.” 
Martha Gellhorn

What would Churchill or Thatcher have thought of Trump?

I think Winston Churchill would have liked Donald Trump, despite his teetotalism.  Churchill who suggested to his cabinet in 1955 "'Keep England White' - that would make a good election slogan" would have liked the idea of Trump's wall and illegal immigrant policy, agreed that immigration has been a disaster for Europe, shared his enthusiasm for Israel and probably have agreed that Communist China is the big threat. 

What would Margaret Thatcher have thought of Trump? She would have handled him very well, for sure.

And Disraeli? Disraeli would have lavished Donald Trump with outrageous flattery and run rings around him, I think, though it is not as easy to run rings around him as it might look.

Quotations

Everyone carries his parents around inside of him.
Eric Berne


Modern persons abandon myth and creed alike in favor of the subtler projections of ideological and social prejudice.
David Bentley Hart


Losers have goals.
Winners have systems.
Scott Adams.



A loser doesn’t know what he’ll do if he loses but talks about what he’ll do if he wins and a winner doesn’t talk about what he’ll do if he wins but knows what he’ll do if he loses.
Eric Berne

Judge Kavanaugh hearings: #Metoo is left's riposte to MAGA

I said this week on this blog that Donald Trump would change America as much as Reagan did, unless the left found an effective response to him and I did not think either socialism or identity politics would be effective. 

I was forgetting something I had already worked out: Feminism and #metoo will be the Democrats' response to Trumpism. 

A response that might succeed.

I wish I had time to follow the hearings of the U.S. Senate Judicial Committee. Everyone says they demean America. I thought the speeches I saw, by Messrs. Graham, Cruz and especially the charmingly courtly Southerner Kennedy (until 2005 he was a Democrat), were very good. 

What a fascinating and intelligent drama - ending with Senator Flake at the last moment, after being confronted in a lift by two young women, asking for a one week delay for a FBI investigation. What did Jung say about surnames being apt?

A lot of the background to this is that the Republican senators are white men, mostly

EU says it wants to increase (not decrease) migration into Europe

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the Greek conservative who is European Union Commissioner for Migration, told the United Nations General Assembly on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration on Wednesday that the European Union is working to “enhance legal pathways” to mass migration, to comply with the Global Compact for Migration, and to take many more legal immigrants from outside Europe. 

This compact is intended by the UN to be a "non-legally binding, cooperative framework" for dealing with mass migration. A draft version claims that very large movements of people across borders are “inevitable, necessary, and desirable”. 

The draft was approved in July by all UN member nations except the U.S., which withdrew from the scheme after Mr Trump became President, and Hungary. 

The Hungarian Foreign Minister said:

Its main premise is that migration is a good and inevitable phenomenon. We consider migration a bad process, which has extremely serious security implications.

'How a secretive elite created the EU to build a world government'

The EC, said Nicholas Ridley over lunch to Dominic Lawson, is a German plot to take over Europe. He had to resign from Margaret Thatcher's cabinet when his words were published.

He was wrong, of course. The EU, as it is now called, was an American idea.


So Alan Sked, the historian and founder of Ukip explains here.


I quote:

Despite advice from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, that membership would mean the end of British parliamentary sovereignty, Macmillan deliberately misled the House of Commons — and practically everyone else, from Commonwealth statesmen to cabinet colleagues and the public — that merely minor commercial negotiations were involved. He even tried to deceive de Gaulle that he was an anti-federalist and a close friend who would arrange for France, like Britain, to receive Polaris missiles from the Americans. De Gaulle saw completely through him and vetoed the British bid to enter.Macmillan left Edward Heath to take matters forward, and Heath, along with Douglas Hurd, arranged — according to the Monnet papers — for the Tory Party to become a (secret) corporate member of Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe.According to Monnet’s chief aide and biographer, Francois Duchene, both the Labour and Liberal Parties later did the same. Meanwhile the Earl of Gosford, one of Macmillan’s foreign policy ministers in the House of Lords, actually informed the House that the aim of the government’s foreign policy was world government.

The Nazis were right-wing

The discussion about whether Nazis were right-wing or socialists is infantile and boring. 

A lake is a body of water that people call a lake and a right-winger is someone who is considered and considers himself a right-winger.


Of course the Nazis were right-wing. Although right-wing originally meant averse to change, which the Nazis certainly were not. Very certainly they were not any sort of conservatives, as surely as they were not liberals.


However, and more importantly, the Nazis were progressives not reactionaries. They were the first people to want a European Economic Community, they were environmentalists, anti-smoking fanatics, very New Age, etc, etc. Eugenics was considered modern and progressive before the war, as abortion is now.


Anti-Semitism is reactionary, you say, and it certainly often can be, but the Nazi reasons for persecuting Jews were to do with newfangled bogus pseudo-science and not the old reasons for disliking Jews. Anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe was linked to hatred of the bourgeoisie which for some reason is considered by many bad people as progressive.

The astonishing drama in America is as good as Balzac or Sophocles

The US Senate Judicial Committee hearings are so fascinating. The Americans do wonderful mini series like Monica Lewinsky and OJ Simpson, though with Sept 11th that joke was no longer funny. These hearings are like something from Balzac. Or Dostoevsky.




Unlike with Anita Hill, all those years ago, in whose eyes I saw evil (as I did with Diana, Princess of Wales) I sympathise with all the protagonists.




The hearings are a Rorschach test for a divided America. If you are a Republican, if a Democrat the other.




By the way, I think deep divisions over religious, moral and cultural issues are a very good thing. America contrasts admirably in this respect with Western Europe, where people sheepishly follow the consensus on abortion, single sex marriage, sex change people, feminism, the big state, mass immigration, restrictions on free speech and much else.

Europe’s Muslims worry bishops

In 1999 the Catholic Archbishop of Smyrna/Izmir (how many Catholics were in his archdiocese?) told the European bishops' synod that a Muslim leader once told him:

“Thanks to your democratic laws, we will invade you. Thanks to our religious laws, we will dominate you.”

An account of the synod headlined 'Europe’s Muslims worry bishops' is here.

Paddy Pantsdown

Paddy Ashdown the former Liberal Democrat leader in 2016:

“I will forgive no one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken. Whether it is a majority of 1% or 20%, when the British people have spoken, you do what they command.”

Children in 1966 predict life in the year 2000

In December 1966 the British TV programme Tomorrow's World asked children (now around 60) to predict what life would be like in the year 2000. Their answers are poignant.

What is noticeable is their pessimism and that so many of them were worried about overpopulation and high birthrates. This was exactly the moment when British birthrates fell between replacement levels.

They are well-spoken, middle class and of course all white.

Some of their predictions are very far off but others have come true. This one, for example:

"Black people won't be separate but will all be mixed in with the white people. The poor people and the rich people will become the same. There will be poor and rich people but they won't look down on one another."

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is life-giving

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is the root of life.

As Mahler said: "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."

Two Archbishops and the Dalai Lama

The Archbishop [of Canterbury]’s background is, rather unusually for a clergyman, in business, since he worked as an oil executive until the late 1980s. So it is unlikely that he is altogether unaware of these straightforward economic truths. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp that inequality and poverty are reduced by markets, and that the real examples of exploitation and injustice that he notes are largely the products of attempts to subvert them, either by corporate distortions, government interventions, or discredited socialist economic plans.

He might take a lesson from the remaining Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered, and whom I missed out from the earlier list. In 1381, Simon Sudbury was dragged out of the Tower of London and on nearby Tower Hill had his head hacked off by a mob. His offence was that he had approved of the introduction of more taxes.

Andrew McKie


[Cardinal] Wuerl’s defense is that he is not an evil man who looked the other way about the behavior of a known sexual predator, but merely an incompetent dolt. And Wuerl

The Vatican says the Pope's critics are far right extremists

Vatican Insider, a website run by La Stampa, today suggests that the far right is battling the Pope. In fact the Pope's critics are not far right or even right-wing - they are simply appalled or bewildered Catholics who fear he deliberately chose to ignore the allegations against former Cardinal McCarrick. And, if they are well informed, they think he has been ignoring other sex scandals involving prelates who are his allies. 

This line is very disingenuous of the Vatican, assuming that this story comes from the Vatican, as I do. The name Vatican Insider does suggest this, after all.

By the way, and digressing, what is meant by the far right? Admirers of General Franco or Mussolini? 

The article explains. Catholics who like the traditional family, dislike the modern liberal world, fear the Islamification of Europe, see a clash of civilisations between the West and the rest, prefer conservative Catholic societies to multicultural ones and disapprove of single sex marriage. (I thought all Catholics disapproved of single sex marriage.) 

Changing Europe

“Those beautiful Greek islands, the pearls of the Aegean, now house over 20,000 ‘refugees and migrants’ according to government statistics.” - Taki's Magazine

"Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them.
Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity" - Emil Cioran

58% of rapes in Sweden are committed by foreigners

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats came third in the Swedish election on Sunday, narrowly behind the Moderates (conservatives) but did much less well than polls had predicted. 

Some suggestion has been made of irregularities at the ballot. The Danish observer said it was the worst conducted election he had ever observed (and he has observed one in Russia). 

As centre left and centre right coalitions almost tied, however, the Sweden Democrats are in a powerful position as kingmaker.

As background to why Swedes vote for the Swedish Democrats, I came across this information.

"There is data about the ethnic background of convicted rapists in Sweden. Over 58% of

Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons

“Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO.”

From Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in the White House.

 I assume they meant if Nato started such a war, in which case the Russian attitude is what one would expect - deterrence is why Russia and the other nuclear powers have the bomb. But how could Nato start a war IN the Baltic States which are members of Nato.

In any case, there will be no war in the Baltic States.

Quotations

"Burke's point was simple. The dead, he argued, were the guardians of the unborn. By respecting what they have handed down to us we hold their legacy in trust. This is not to engage in some stultifying ancestor worship: it is to respect what has been set aside for our successors"

Sir Roger Scruton

"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

"In the middle of the 20th century, the [Swedish] Social Democrats’ grim social-engineering project was devoted to the promotion of eugenics. During a near 40-year-long programme, between 1934 and 1970, the Swedish government’s eugenics policy resulted

Referendum to define marriage will be held on October 7

Romanian senators today voted overwhelmingly - 107 in favour, 13 against (7 abstaining) - to hold a referendum on October 7 on whether to redefine constitutional definition of marriage to between a man and a women (rather than between two spouses, as now). 

If the electorate votes for the new definition, as they will, it means there has to be another referendum before single sex marriage can be enacted in Romania. This is very democratic, much more so than the procedure in countries where the people were not consulted before this change was made.

The reason for the vote is that 3 million people signed a petition organised by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

I wish far more referendums were held in all countries on these sort of moral issues which everyone can understand. 

More plot turns in the story about the Pope and child molestation

The story about the Pope, former Cardinal McCarrick and Archbishop Vigano is like a cheap melodrama written by a fervent anti-Catholic.

Many things these days seem like cheap fiction, starting with Osama bin Laden.

It is clear that the Vatican was told about the allegations against the then Cardinal Edgar ('Uncle Ted') McCarrick in 2000, in Pope John Paul II's reign.

Robert Mickens, whose liberal views I always disliked, had to resign from The Tablet because of something he said on Facebook about Pope Benedict XVI (I thought he was unfairly treated). Two or three days ago Mr. Mickens accused Archbishop Vigano of lying to the Pope about wanting to look after his sick brother. He also accused him of having kept quiet about the child abuse allegations for years in the hope of receiving a Cardinal's red hat. 

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe

From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters.
They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population.

From a very interesting article in The Guardian by left-wing French geographer Christophe Guilluy, entitled Trump’s poll ratings are better than Macron’s, after a year. Why?

The Tyranny of Now

I don't drive and so learn a huge amount, as well as improving my Romanian, by talking to taxi drivers. I had one especially interesting one who impressed me a lot but lost my confidence when he told me in confidence a discovery he had made. He had discovered that the world was flat. He explained that the moon landings had been staged. 

He asked me to keep this a secret and though I made him no promise I feel bad about repeating the story.

I do so because a film has come out about man (person) landing on the moon. It does not pretend that the moon landings were faked out but it lies in its own, to me very curious, way. It does not show Neil Armstrong planting the US flag on the moon, which was the point of the whole hideously expensive enterprise. I know because I watched it on TV.

Transgender wo/man accused of rape is remanded into female prison and sexually assaults four women inmates

A man who 'identifies as' a woman was charged with raping a women and put on remand in a women's prison in Yorkshire to await trial. Within days he sexually assaulted four women prisoners.

Karen Bradley didn't know people voted on sectarian lines in Northern Ireland before she was made Secretary of State

We are not talking about a well-informed person, but the standard of general information and education among even Conservative politicians is becoming lower and lower. 

The story is here. 

She was parachuted into Parliament like so many other duds as part of David Cameron's A-List, designed to give seats to women, people from ethnic minorities and people who did not seem like traditional Conservative MPs (i.e. upper and upper middle class patriotic, church-going men, who were members of good clubs and sometimes hunted, shot or wore stiff collars). This is how people like Anna Soubry, Louise Mensch and Andrea Leadsom got into the Commons. A Listers who failed to get in include one Adam Rickitt from Coronation Street, who is now part of the "pop supergroup 5th Story, set up for The Big Reunion".

Pakistani in Chemnitz interviewed about his feelings on events and Germans

This video clip well repays watching. In it a Pakistani in Germany (I don't know if he has German or Pakistani citizenship) talks about how he attended out of curiosity the anti-migrant demonstration in Chemnitz, after a German-Cuban was killed allegedly by a recent Arab migrant. 

The Pakistani says that the media had created the impression that it would be dangerous for him to attend the demonstration, that 

"someone brown-skinned could not walk through here" 

but, though he received some dirty looks, he was not made to feel in any danger. Nor, he says, has he experienced any hostility from Germans in three years in Dresden.

"Overall, I'm not bothered by the dirty looks. What bothers me more are murders, rapes, sexual assaults, manslaughter and robberies, which are

Everybody trusts an unidentified source

"Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source."

Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford's Press Secretary  

Excerpts from [Bob Woodward's] forthcoming account of Trump’s White House, first published Tuesday in The Washington Post, portray Mattis as scornful of the president’s intellect and judgment, and, in a boost to an already prominent narrative, as a vital check against the president’s dangerous instincts. Woodward depicts an agitated Mattis explaining to Trump in a meeting that the United States maintains a military presence on the Korean peninsula to “prevent World War III” and later deriding the president as “a fifth or sixth grader.” Woodward also claims that when Trump called up Mattis and suggested the United States “fucking kill” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians in 2017, Mattis played along but then hung up the

Oscar Wilde, André Gide and sex with underage boys

I have a huge admiration and much affection for Oscar Wilde, but I get annoyed when he is treated as a hero because of his sex life. There is nothing remotely heroic about it. 

I asked in this blog a long time ago, in a post that gets lots of clicks, if he were a child molester. He had relations with boys under the age of 18, which was illegal in England till twenty years ago and one boy was mentioned at his trial who looked fourteen. 

I recently accidentally came across this book review from 1997, which suggests that Wilde procured young boys for Lord Alfred Douglas and Andre Gide and had relations with them himself. I quote.

''Wilde lost his virginity to Robbie Ross when the latter was a year below the current age of consent [in England in 1997] , and the boys Wilde wined and dined were frequently younger than that - as when he became involved with a 16-year-old who had been smuggled into London from Bruges to be installed in the Albermarle Hotel. According to Oscar Browning, the pederastic Victorian public-school master, "on Saturday, the boy slept with Douglas; on Sunday he slept with Oscar. On Monday he slept with a woman at Douglas's expense."

Romanian women write about immigrants in England

Jaywick Sands is a very poor coastal town in Essex, inhabited mostly by people who once lived in the East End of London. The majority were Leave voters and are part of Clacton, a constituency I know very well, which had a UKIP MP.

A Romanian woman, Alexandra Bulat, who is a PhD Candidate at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), in University College London, writing a dissertation on the attitudes of British people to EU migration, went to visit and speak to people there. Her report is here.

A much more revealing and interesting discussion about multiracial Britain, by a young Romanian woman living and blogging in East London, is here. Google Translate will translate it if your Romanian is rusty.

The Clacton by-election in 2014, that Douglas Carswell precipitated after leaving the Conservatives and won for UKIP,  led Conservative journalist Matthew Parris to make a day trip and write about it for the Times. 

What he wrote tells you everything you need to know about why Leave won the referendum two years later. He spoke for the Conservative 'Modernisers' like David Cameron and George Osborne when he said this.

I met nothing but helpfulness there. Clacton-on-Sea is a friendly resort trying not to die, inhabited by friendly people trying not to die. 

The moment Max Hastings realised Remain had lost the Brexit referendum

'The moment I despaired of the Remain cause during the 2016 referendum campaign came when, in a conversation with George Osborne, I urged him to hold out some scintilla of hope to the many people distressed by immigration levels. “I think we should leave that to Ukip”, he said primly. But what about raising the possibility of revisiting the ECHR? The chancellor responded that to fly any such kite “would set a very poor example to countries such as Belarus”. I came home and transferred my little all into US dollars.'

From today's Daily Telegraph. 

Things I learnt from Robert Tombs' 'The English and Their History'

Victory at Agincourt and the consequent capture of Rouen caused dancing in the streets of London.

Scott coined the phrase Wars of the Roses. They lasted thirty years but there were only a few weeks of intense conflict. Life went on as normal.

The English in the 15th century were richer and safer than many countries in the 20th century. I don't find this surprising, though Dr. Tombs thinks it shocking.

The Tudor monarchs called themselves Plantagenets, never Tudors. It was David Hume who first called them Tudors. 

Henry VIII attempted to reconquer France and got within fifty miles of Paris, unaware that the Hundred Years' War had long ended.

Robert Tombs was in his thirties and handsome when he supervised me but now he looks old. What can have happened?


Wikipedia confirms my fears. He is now 69.

Sir Hugh Dowding: 'All the unemployables of Europe will invade us and succeed where Hitler failed' if we join EEC

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who won the Battle of Britain, claimed in 1961 in a letter to Lord Beaverbrook which is shortly to be auctioned, that 'all the unemployables' of Europe would 'invade' Britain if the country were to join the European Economic Community, which posed a 'terrible menace' that would 'succeed where Hitler failed'

At last some very good news about Brexit

If Robert Peston is to be believed, and he usually is, Michel Barnier agrees with David Davis, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the European Research Group that only a Canadian type deal is possible.

This has always been my choice though I could live with a temporary Norway deal or leaving in an orderly way without a deal.

"So as pretty much every Tory MP who is not on May’s payroll will tell you, Chequers is dead.

"Which means that if May too isn’t to find her career as PM terminated along with it, she may have to resurrect Davis’s Canada plus - which, funnily enough, was her preferred plan, outlined at Lancaster House, at the start of 2017."

I don't think what happens to Theresa May matters very much to anyone except lobby correspondents, not even to her, as she must leave office when we leave the EU, whatever happens. The Canada option would at least save some of her reputation by saving Britain's bacon. 

Olly Robbins must be sent to govern the Falkland Islands for the rest of his career.

Francis Fukuyama discussing Samuel Huntington

Indeed, if we unpack the psychology of identity, we see that much of what is labeled religious extremism is actually not driven by religious belief per se, if by that one means personal piety and individual commitment to a particular doctrine. Many of the young European Muslims who left the countries of their birth to fight for the Islamic State in Syria were trapped between two cultures, the traditional one defined by the piety of their parents, and the secular Western one in which they were brought up. This identity confusion could easily be answered by a radical Islamist who presented an ideology that answered the question, “Who am I?”, and connected that individual to a larger community of Muslims around the world.
In a less violent manner, many of the Muslim women who have taken to wearing the hijab are doing so not because they have suddenly become so much more pious; the hijab rather is a marker of identity that tells those around them that they are proud and unafraid to be seen as Muslim. 

From an article entitled 'Huntington’s Legacy' arguing that identity politics is a more important fact in the world than traditional cultures.

Angela Merkel thinks Europe owes Africa 'a great debt'

I just discovered that Angela Merkel said in January of this year at the Davos conference that co-operation with Africa was 

“very very important first because we Europeans owe a great debt to the continent of Africa from colonial times and secondly because we have a profound interest in positive development in Africa.”

It is true that there were very shameful moments in the brief history of German colonisation of Africa, as well as terrible things that happened in French Africa and in the Congo Free State while it was the private property of King Leopold II of the Belgians, but it is obvious that Africans have on balance benefited vastly from their interaction with white people. Apart from such boons as Christianity, order, literacy, Western literature, art and music, the rule of law, roads and railways and planes and cars, they benefit from all the improvements in science and medicine of the last few hundred years. 

We Europeans do not have a debt to Africa. 

We do have a moral duty to help Africa become richer and the best way to achieve this is by free trade. The EU by dumping  has helped keep Africa poor. 

But research shows that the more prosperous Africans become the more they try to enter Europe and share the much better state of things in Europe. They have more money to make the journey and know more about living standards in Europe.

If by a 

'profound interest in positive development in Africa'

Mrs. Merkel means that economic growth is in Europe's interest to prevent pressure on Europe's southern border she could not be more mistaken.

Colonialism

I heard a Congolese historian on the anniversary of independence tell a shocked BBC man that all the good things in the Congo were due to the Belgians.

'But you accept that the Belgians did not act from altruistic motives?' 

'I don't care what their motives were.'

From the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy's Guide to Good Practice

Things people said to me while I was in Great Britain

I avoided talking about Brexit or Theresa May, two subjects that everyone finds painful and done to death, but I seem to have talked a lot of politics. 

A Russian expert, who sympathises with Ukraine vis-a-vis Russia, told me that Putin is the least bad leader Russia has ever had. I mentioned Czar Alexander II and later thought of Stolypin. Still, my friend might be right.

I shared a table in a pub in Fort William with a young Swedish woman prison officer who had just completed  the West Highland Way, which lasts 96 miles from the outskirts of Glasgow, camping on the way. It sounded fun, if one stayed at B and B's. I asked her how many of the prisoners in her prison (all convicted of drug related crimes) were from ethnic minorities and she said about half.

York Minster on a cool, rainy Sunday in August

Will the passing of John McCain mark the end of American interventionism?

The Wall Street Journal:

The death of John McCain will leave Congress without perhaps its loudest voice in support of the robust internationalism that has defined the country’s security relations since World War II.

This is an interesting non-eulogy of John McCain, who died on Saturday, by Tom Woods.

McCain’s preferred foreign policy has yielded death, displacement, and regional chaos on a massive scale, not to mention a huge shot in the arm to the very Islamic radicalism he assured us he was fighting against.

He thinks the media falling over themselves to mourn McCain 'Orwellian'  and compares McCain the Establishment figure with Pat Buchanan, a true maverick.

Durham cathedral, castle and church

The priest yesterday in Durham had a Northern accent and moved swiftly from the words in the Gospel about the Real Presence to the problem of rich people eating the poor. He said St Paul's instruction to wives to submit to husbands was 'awful' and he had been tempted to omit these words from the Gospel reading altogether. He explained that St Paul had expected the imminent second coming and not bothered to preach in favour of sexual equality.

I was at St Cuthbert's Church, a pretty church which is one of the oldest Catholic churches in England, built in 1827. It has a beautiful altarpiece but it saddened me that Catholics celebrate Mass here and not in Durham Cathedral, a contender with Wells and Salisbury for being the most beautiful cathedral in the country. 

Durham Catholics form a community that has survived the Reformation. In 1569 Durham was the centre of the Rising of the North by the Catholic Percys and Nevilles, Earls of

The glories of our blood and state

George Mikes said how old it makes you feel when people who owe you money become boulevards. Simon Milton, in my year at university and a Union star, certainly never borrowed money from me and I knew him only slightly, but he has been a sculpture in Piccadilly for years. I remember him winning a balloon debate as Amy Carter, which shows how unimaginably long ago it was.

Scotland the brave

I ate haggis three times in a day and a half in Scotland and shall eat black pudding for the third time in 48 hours. Apart from offal the other themes of my Scotch travels are rain and overcast skies which are forecast to last for another week. And noble prospects, to quote Boswell.

I apologise to readers who want my insights into the violence in Bucharest. I am too far away but I am sure that once more the gendarmes are to blame at least for much of it. I wish it were only in Romania that the police are responsible for  violence against peaceful protesters but it happens even in England. 

Jeremy Warner in today's Daily Telegraph

The great tragedy of Turkey’s latest economic crisis is that it has come just too late to influence the outcome of recent elections, and that, far from dethroning a corrupt and incompetent autocrat, it might, despite the inevitable years of economic hardship that now lie ahead, even bolster his position, irretrievably turning the country Eastwards and away from the Western, secular traditions of modern day Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Erdogan is fast shaping up to be the Mediterranean’s next Nasser, further destabilising a region already wracked by economic/tribal/religious rivalry and war. It would only require him to seize the US nuclear base at Incirlik, as Gamal Abdel Nasser did the Suez canal, to complete the picture.

'How Matteo Salvini pulled Italy to the far right'

The Guardian regularly publishes a long essay as 'The Long Read'. Today it published an interesting discussion of Matteo Salvini of the League and the new Italian government from which I gleaned these two pieces of information:


The number of immigrants in Italy rose from 2.5 million in 2007 to 5 million in 2017. 

Last year 664,000 Italians died and 464,000 were born, of whom 100,000 had a foreign mother or father.

I also learnt that the Italian Families Minister caused a scandal by saying there was no such thing as a gay family and suggesting that laws against hate speech should be repealed. This alerts any Guardian readers who think that the League might have a point about illegal immigrants that the League is evil.

Of course the League is not far right at all. Far right means Sir Oswald Mosley not Enoch Powell, Franco not Poujade, fascists like Mussolini and people who want a dictatorship, not democrats who want to slow or stop immigration and care more about this issue than economics.

The Guardian article has as its premise the idea that economics is what politics is mostly about and talk of immigration is a distraction. But isn't the nation more important to normal people than economics? 

Plenty of things are more important to the left than economic growth, of course, which is why left-wing governments always run out of money and fail.

The real battle is not between the League and the left but the League, which opposes islamification and homosexual civil partnerships, and the Church, which does the same. 

The article does not mention that a Catholic magazine very close to the Vatican, 'The Christian Family', described Salvini as the devil. One priest called him the Anti-Christ.

The former bishop of Caserta, Raffaele Nogaro, said recently

“Morally and as a man of faith I would be willing to turn all churches into mosques if it were useful to the cause and if it helped to save the lives of poor and unhappy men and women, because Christ did not come to earth to build churches but to help men regardless of race, religion, or nationality.”

Liberals and ethnic groups

Daniel Hannan‏ Verified account@DanielJHannan 41 minutes ago

The alt-right and the woke Left are not opposites when it comes to race. They both define people by ethnic identity. The real anti-racists are the classical liberals who see everyone as an individual.

Daniel Hannan, Thatcherite and Brexiteer, says that he is a Whig not a Tory. He has that in common with left-wing Tories like Ian Gilmour, David Cameron and probably Harold Macmillan, whose father was a Liberal Unionist and who married the daughter of a Whig duke.

Everyone is an individual and of infinite importance to the economy of the universe, and this is liberalism's great insight, but an individual does not come into the world a blank sheet of paper. It is a great fault of liberalism to misunderstand or ignore the great importance of the many factors which form individuals and societies, especially traditions, cultures, ethnic groups and religions. 

Daniel Hannon gave a talk a year or so about the Anglosphere and was, so I read somewhere on Facebook, visibly upset when asked whether countries in the Anglosphere would still be Anglo if most people in those countries were descended from people from outside the British Isles or even from outside Europe. He got very cross and said he strongly believed that descent was irrelevant and that culture was independent of descent or lineage.  

This is liberalism rather than Toryism.

How to get on in our globalised world and the lion in Sir Edwin Landseer's drawing room

The late Marquis of Bath and friend

I shall be in London shortly, a city I so love, and may have to show some teenagers around, so I read this article in the Daily Telegraph entitled

Six educational London days out, as chosen by a teacher.

It was moderately interesting, though I understood a quite different thing about Landseer's lions at the foot of Nelson's Column, which the writer says were modelled on cats and are anatomically impossible.

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy."

“Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.” Margaret Thatcher

“Britain is something more than a European country; it’s a link between many countries in many continents. I do not believe that Britain can federate with continental Europe.” Clement Attlee in 1952, quoted by Daniel Hannan

Sir Roger Scruton

"A community that has survived its gods has three options. It can find some secular path to the ethical life. Or it can fake the higher emotions, while living without them. Or it can give up pretending and so collapse, as Burke put it, into the 'dust and powder of individuality."


"We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work."

"The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer