Wedgie Benn and Eric Heffer

Tony Benn, whose death was just announced, was a foolish, foolish man and much worse. But he was right on this: 

"Britain's continuing membership of the Community would mean the end of Britain as a completely self-governing nation" 

May he be in heaven. 

He was kinder about Lady Thatcher when she died than I have been about him and recorded:

"I remember her at the funeral of MP Eric Heffer. I was asked to make a speech and as I was waiting, there was someone behind me coughing. It was Mrs Thatcher, and at the end I thanked her for coming and she burst into tears. She had come out of respect for someone whose opinions she disagreed with.

Though I do not observe the nil nisi bono rule, most on the right do. The internet is littered with tributes from conservatives to their fallen arch-foe, as it was earlier this week with Tories praising Bob Crow. But then the Conservatives have many strong reasons to be grateful to Mr. Benn. He and General Galtieri won them the 1979 and 1983 general elections, though in 1983 Michael Foot could also take much credit. 

It is Mr. Benn's real foes, in the Labour Party, who have reason to shudder at his memory. People like Denis Healey for example. Healey and the Labour Right of the 1970s were way to the left of people nowadays, on economic  matters - the SDLP were too. Everyone even the loony left look right-wing now on social issues. Even Ken Livingstone did not contemplate homosexual marriage.

The best remark I read was made by someone I don't know called Paul Shankland on Facebook:

"Dear Tony Benn, rest in peace and thank you for so many years of wisdom. Anyone looking at Concorde or the Post Office today would agree that you were indeed a visionary."

I do not have time to offer original insights into the man, but here is an earlier short post which says a lot.

He wanted to nationalise a High Street bank I remember and Harold Wilson joked that he wanted to bring Marks and Spencer's up to the standard of the Co-op. I only learnt today that he very nearly got the telephone boxes of England painted yellow. It would not have mattered much, though, as under Margaret Thatcher the lovely red ones disappeared anyway and today such red telephone boxes as remain are mostly used as improvised urinals.

I had a liking for old Heffer, Benn's lieutenant, who had difficulties in speaking intelligible English. Heffer was a devout Christian and once began a speech with dissolved the House in laughter with the words:

 'My father, like Jesus Christ's, was a carpenter.' 

I liked this as I can say the same thing. We were even in Happy Families, Mr Wood, the carpenter, Mrs Wood the carpenter's wife, Miss Wood, the carpenter's daughter and I was Master Wood, the carpenter's son. I suppose Happy Families is now considered sexist and homophobic.

Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Missing Aeroplane

The Malaysian airplane that has disappeared reminds me of 

'the cutter Alicia, which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew', 

a mystery that defeated Sherlock Holmes.

Reflections on the Revolution in Ukraine

Is Ukraine a real country, even by the standards of Eastern Europe? We shall see. Nation-building is what the Ukrainian revolution is about.

Ukraine became an independent country in 1991 as a result of a deal between leading Eastern and Western Ukrainians. To be specific, between people in Western Ukraine, (which was once part of Austria and then Poland) who wanted independence and certain powerful Russian members of the nomenklatura running factories in the East, who wanted to keep control of them rather than ceding it to other Russians in Moscow. This uneasy alliance threatened to fall apart the last time Mr. Yanukovych was toppled in a revolution, ten years ago, and might do so again now.

I am told by reliable sources that the reason Viktor Yanukovych ordered the snipers to stop killing protesters on Friday is because the two richest oligarchs in Ukraine told him to do so, not because he got tired of wallowing in blood. They saw that a Yanukovych victory achieved through great bloodshed would lead Ukraine in a clear direction: Belarus. And Belarus was not a good place for their businesses.

The end of Communism was essentially a management buy-out and the new owners ultimately conduct things on business principles.

For an old cold warrior and Romanophile like me the defeat of Mr. Yanukovych is good news. He is recognizably like but much worse than the worst kind of Romanian politician. He is the Ukrainian equivalent of what Ion Iliescu would have liked to have been had Romania occupied Ukraine’s geographical and political position.

The demonstrators seem like the equivalent of the brave Golani (‘hooligans’ according to the Romanian Government) who were beaten up by the miners in University Square in the summer of 1990, revealing to the outside world that the Romanian National Salvation Front were not the good guys that the Western media had thitherto thought but the Communists.

But some points should be mentioned.

Mr. Yanukovych rigged the election that he won in 2004 but he won the 2010 election fair and square, so he was the legal and democratic president. He was dismissed on Saturday by parliament, it is true, but he was in effect overthrown by an uprising, a rebellion aided to some unknown extent by foreign powers. The EU has also been lending support to the protesters and to some extent (I have no idea what) the EU helped overthrow the government.

Mr. Yanukovych is nasty and corrupt. So are all other Ukrainian politicians who have so far held office.

In opinion polls I saw at the end of last year, he enjoyed the support of over 40 percent of the electorate. By contrast, Victor Yushchenko, who replaced Mr. Yanukovych in 2004 in the ‘Orange Revolution’, became more unpopular than any leader in any democratic country in history, since opinion polls began.

Of course Mr. Putin and Russia were interfering to impede and destroy the governments that held power between 2004 and 2010 and had many means to do so. But Putin has interfered in other countries far less than the USA and UK have done in his time. Remember Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya.

In the rebellion the lives of many protesters were lost, shot by snipers whom we can presume Yanukovych ordered to shoot on the crowd. These people were brave, heroic. But on the first day of bloodshed more police than protesters were killed. The demonstrators in University Square in Bucharest in 1990 did not attack anyone, let alone kill policemen.

When is it right to rebel against a legitimate government, however unsatisfactory? Never, according to the Orthodox Church, who nevertheless swung their support behind the protesters.

Russia has been smarting for a quarter of a century because the West took advantage of Gorbachov’s surrender at the end of the Cold War to unify Germany and later to incorporate Russia’s satellites including the Baltic States which were part of the USSR into NATO. They wanted Georgia in NATO and are now moving into Ukraine which Russians consider part of Russia. Kiev, after all, is where the Russian state originated.

Many social conservatives in Western Europe and elsewhere have decided that the EU is their enemy and Vladimir Putin their great white hope. This is partly Vladimir Putin’s strategy – gone are the days when American conservatives inveighed against ‘Godless Russia’. On the other hand, tn Kiev the Svoboda party, which the BBC calls far right, was fighting against Mr. Yanukovych.

Some say he originally helped create the party. If so it reminds me of how the National Salvation Front helped created the Romanian far right party, even financed a far right newspaper, thus making the government look moderate and statesmanlike. So Svoboda is lined up with those people – they are fewer than they were at the time of the Arab Spring, but include what is left of the the Neo-Cons (in fact Wilsonian liberals) – who think revolutions will make the world more democratic.

The BBC does not like Vladimir Putin – not so much because he is a former Communist and former KGB station chief, or alleged by Wikileaks to have salted away many billions, or even because of the brutal war he waged in Chechnya, but partly because he is alleged to have opponents murdered, partly because he gaoled Pussy Riot and to a large extent because he has made homosexual propaganda a crime. I think the BBC hates him for the reasons some right-wing foreigners like him – he looks like a sexist, racist homophobe, or in the words of Paul Gottfried, the paleo-conservative writer,

Putin gives the exhilarating impression of being a non-reconstructed, non-sensitized MAN.

But if the victors in Kiev include a party that contains anti-Semites and racists, this for some will make Putin seem the lesser of two evils.

I suspect that very few people under sixty in Ukraine are either genuine communists or genuine fascists and that most people in Ukraine are casual racists, homophobes and sexists in the way Romanians were in the late 1990s and the British were in the early 1970s. I expect that goes for people of all parties and none. I also doubt whether homophobia, sexism and racism are of pressing importance in Ukraine right now.

I hope the Ukrainians escape from a future as a satrapy of the Kremlin and become part of Europe and the European Union. This is, on the whole, the best hope for them and for us in the West.

I am sorry that this will mean they are forced to obey Brussels and the ruling human rights ideology of the West – but this is better by a long way than obeying the Kremlin and copying its affronts to human rights. Above all in a post-Communist country the EU means some check on the rule of the post-Communist ‘structure of power’. Let’s hope Ukraine can avoid having her agriculture destroyed by the EU as Romania’s has been.

The alternative is what Ukraine has had for the last twenty years. Putin has done some good things and some bad things for Russia, has above all restored her pride, but he cannot give Ukraine pride.

Ukraine, on the other hand, is just about small enough to be able to be one day absorbed by the EU. She is Western enough too, having Hapsburg Catholic and Polish traditions, as well as a Tsarist one. If Romania and Bulgaria can be part of the West, why not Ukraine?

The failure of the reformist governments between 2004 and 2010 was partly about Russian interference, partly about incompetence, partly about corruption, but partly a failure by the EU to make it clear that Ukraine’s future belonged in the Union. The deal offered to Ukraine by the EU at the end of last year did not offer Ukraine a path to EU membership but an existence outside the EU but closely connected to it. Russia sees the EU as being aggressive and not respecting the Russian sphere of influence but in fact EU has done that only too well.

There are a number of questions.

In 2004 the chanceries of Europe discussed offering Ukraine a path to EU membership and decided against it. Will they do so now?

If not, how can Turkey be considered European and Ukraine not?

What will Russia do now? So far, it is obvious that Mr Putin does not know what to do.

In 2004 Putin said a European Ukraine was good for Russia. He may well be right but he changed his mind.

Does the EU have the money to bail out Ukraine? Does it have the will?

What does this mean for Moldova’s chances of joining the EU?

Will Ukraine split in two? This question was asked in 2004 too. The authorities in Kharkov released Yulia Timoshenko from prison hospital on Saturday in obedience to Parliament, which suggested that Kharkov was not about to secede. Russia has many levers with which to influence Ukraine, without creating an enclave in the Crimea.

Will this revolution be a catalyst for a similar outbreak in Moscow? Probably not, I should say, but we shall see.

Can the next government, after fresh elections, succeed where Mrs Timoshenko’s failed and do better than Mr Yanukovych’s?

Why must Russia and the West be enemies? Russians and other Europeans want the same things: freedom, nice holidays, consumer durables, peace or whatever it is we all want.

'Learning maths is even more pointless than Latin'

This interesting article by Simon Jenkins in today's Guardian is a refreshing diatribe against mathematics. 

I wonder what subjects schools should teach. What come to mind immediately are: driving, typing, religious instruction (as opposed to religious education), cooking, history, literature, especially poetry (but nothing after 1945 please), German and at least one other language, probably Spanish or Russian (and teach lots of grammar rather than trying to get thirty boys to make conversation), history of art, useful non-team sports like tennis that people will actually play in adult life and, most important of all, psychology. 

The most important are the life lessons taught by other children in the playground - and these can be incredibly painful for children who do not fit in.  Philip Larkin put it well.

When I was at school I thought I hated the human race, but when I grew up I realised it was just children I couldn't stand.

It would be much better to skip these often very damaging playground lessons which are a form of child abuse. If you can afford a private tutor for your child, get one. In Bucharest they are affordable.

In fact, a lot of schooling can now be done at home over the internet which is the best place for children to learn but if I am right we should need to decide whether schools are necessary to educate children or to enable mothers to go out to work. There is no longer much need for many universities. Most universities should become virtual and teach largely online. This will enable a much wider access to university - to everyone of any age, class, nationality and educational achievement who has sufficient access to the net. There should only remain a few major universities in each country, for educating a small academically-minded elite and for conducting research. Such universities should only teach real subjects and this would not include vocational subjects like law or medicine, or still less that trahison des clercs 'business education'.

I think teaching comparative religion to British schoolchildren instead of Christianity (or another religion if the school is Jewish or Muslim) was the most significant development of that very socially liberal decade the 1980s and will have immensely far-reaching and disastrous consequences.

I do not agree with Simon Jenkins that teaching Latin is necessarily a bad idea, unless like me you were taught using the Cambridge Latin Course and therefore not taught to write Latin. If you are taught by that accursed course, which is still widely used, and get a grade A at A Level, as I did, you still cannot read Latin - or not without a crib. So what is the point? My school gave me a choice between German, Latin and Russian as the second foreign language and I wish I had learnt Russian instead of Latin. If I had, I could now read Pushkin in the original and make myself understood in Samarkand or Yerevan.

In any case, Latin should just be for the fairly few children (few boys at least, more girls) who have literary tastes (as should most courses at universities, come to that, except for maths and the hard sciences). Latin should be accompanied by Greek, which gives you very many more good things to read. Latin literature is overrated. One learns a language to read poetry, as prose can be translated. Catullus is wonderful, I must reread Horace now that I am the age to enjoy him, Virgil and Ovid are very good indeed but none are as good as Shakespeare and English literature has many more great poets than Latin. Latin, though, is enormously influential. Ovid begat Shakespeare, for example. So there is a case for teaching Latin, though not an overwhelmingly strong one. The same is true of maths.

Writing this rigmarole, I am put in mind of the Mock Turtle:

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

These words are uttered sublimely by Sir John Gielgud here. 

What the UN really wants from the Catholic Church - it's much more than just about preventing sex crimes

"The UN watchdog for children’s rights denounced the Holy See for adopting policies allowing priests to sexually abuse thousands of children. 

"It heavily criticised the Vatican’s attitudes towards homosexuality, contraception and abortion."

The terrible crimes again children by Catholic priests are truly appalling but the recent Report by the UN Committee on Children berating the Church goes much further than saying this and criticising the Church for the way it responded to the crimes. The Report itself is an extraordinary attack on the Church and, in fact, on Christianity. The Catholic Church's response has been far too mild. 

My friend who wrote this analysis says, "clerical sex abuse was homosexual in nature" - I'd like more information about whether this is so. Most victims of these terrible crimes were boys but some were girls. In any case, people should know that the UN wants the Church to change her teaching on women, abortion and homosexuality. 

This is almost unbelievable but has passed without notice by journalists who spend their time criticising the Church. The UN Children's Committee is not an institution to be respected but an enemy worth fighting. As Guy Crouchback felt about the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy - it is 'the modern world in arms'.

An interesting analysis is here.

"I’m annoyed at hearing ‘you’ll kill children’ in the foreign media. We don’t use that kind of language anymore."

The Belgians are “surprised” that much – not enough, but still much – of the world is repulsed by the country legalising child euthanasia. From the Reuters story:

Bart Sturtewagen, chief editor of De Standaard, one of the country’s largest daily newspapers, said that after 12 years of legal euthanasia in the country, Belgians had grown used to it as an option for the final stages of their lives. “I’m annoyed at hearing ‘you’ll kill children’ in the foreign media. We don’t use that kind of language anymore. It’s a very different debate on a different level,” he said..

In Belgium the age of criminal responsibility is 18 but when this law is signed by the King there will be no minimum age below which a child in Belgium is deemed too young to give consent to being killed. At present the age limit is 12.

The last country in Europe to legalise abortion is a pioneer in child euthanasia. This is not just about Belgium but is a trend spreading across Europe. 

Europe is dying in so many senses.

The floods in Great Britain are not caused by climate change - official

For a sixth week storms continue to batter Great Britain. It is a lie that the floods have anything to do with climate change. My friend Tom Cain put it beautifully on Facebook (I quote with his permission).

In case you believe the lie that the floods - whose immediate cause is wet weather brought on by a shift in the jet stream - have anything to do with climate change, listen to Professor Mat Collins. He's the Associate Professor in Climate Systems at the University of Exeter, and co-ordinating lead author to the International Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report, Chapter 12: “Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility.” Collins said at the weekend: "There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge." 

Just guessing, but my suspicion is that having devoted his entire career to the study and modelling of climate change, Collins (a) knows more about it than David Cameron, Ed Miliband, et al and (b) would be only too happy to ascribe the deluge to climate change if there were any scientific justification for doing so. But there isn't. So he doesn't.

The ideology of climate change (it is an ideology because it is no longer susceptible to scientific disproof) reminds me of Whittaker Chambers's explanation of Communism as

'in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communists vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world." 

If the weather is awful this does not mean the climate is changing but if the climate is changing - and Bucharest's taxi drivers seem unanimous that it is this, and if human activity has some part in the process, this  does not mean human activity is of crucial importance or that we can prevent warming. We are clearly living in the end of an Ice Age. This was clear to me, who hates physics, as soon as climate change was first bruited abroad. 

I should be a guru or at least a famous writer.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56, Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum in the introduction to Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-56 quotes Hannah Arendt, who said the story of how East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Bulgaria became Communist after the war

 while unspeakably terrible, is without much interest of its own and varies very little.

Naturally Miss Applebaum thinks otherwise and sets out to show the manner in which each country became Communist. Each country of course was sui generis but each became Communist because Stalin and the international communist movement which did his bidding willed it. Hannah Arendt is right. The history of these years is very harrowing and not in the end particularly enlightening.  

Let us always remember that Eric Hobsbawm, C.H., referred to the process by which these countries became satellites of Stalin as the 'East European revolutions'. This man Hobsbawm  was accorded great respect when I read history at Cambridge in the 1980s.

Anne Applebaum takes us through the results of a quarter of a century of historical research since the end of the Cold War and this adds much to the story. She reminds us that the Communists in 1945 believed in their doctrine. They believed they could win free elections because had they thought they would inevitably fail to win mass support they would not have been Marxists. This is a point worth making and stressing. The Communists who took power in the region in the late 1940s were working for a foreign power, were therefore traitors, from a democratic or conservative point of view, but they were also dedicated idealists and brave men - in most cases at least. There were a few exceptions, of whom one might be Bierut Boleslaw, who became leader of Poland. Nothing much is known about what he did in the war. Like the other 'Muscovite' Communist leaders he was a spy but his career is very murky before 1945. Miss Applebaum speculates that he was a double agent whom Stalin could blackmail. Perhaps, though Stalin could blackmail anyone living in the Communist bloc.

We should always bear in mind that what is long in the past was once in the future. No-one expected the USA to keep troops in Europe after the war. The fact that they did so is Stalin's greatest failure. It was expected that Britain would face the Communists alone, with only shattered France's support, and Britain had been almost destroyed by her Pyrrhic victory over Germany and Japan. Britain had no means of stopping Russia imposing Communism on Eastern Europe, though her prestige is the reason Stalin insisted that a Communist Greece was out of the question - he said Britain would never tolerate it. Even with the decision of Harry Truman to keep his men in Europe and wage the Cold War the Western powers had no means of leverage in Eastern Europe. Yet for some reason East Europeans blame America and Britain for selling them out in Yalta. It makes no sense yet everyone in Romania continues to trot out this idea.

Stalin would have been better off allowing the Finlandisation of Eastern Europe - allowing the Eastern European countries to have democratic systems in return for their being the USSR's allies as Finland was. This would probably have meant the USA leaving Europe to its own devices. If Stalin wanted a cordon sanitaire, as he did, to protect the USSR from Germany and Britain, a ring of Finlands would have provided this, but he wanted more. He believed in the inevitable victory of Communism and wanted to export the revolution. And Soviet society needed an enemy - so the Cold War served his purposes. When Khrushchev offered to permit the unification of Germany - in effect handing over the DDR (East Germany) to the Federal Republic in return for German neutrality America and NATO foolishly turned down the offer. Ulbricht was horrified by Khrushchev's offer but it was only Eisenhower who saved him and the DDR.

I learnt from this book that Churchill did ask his planners in spring 1945 to look at the possibility of war with the USSR in central Europe. The plan called Operation Unthinkable turned out, predictably, to be completely impractical and unaffordable. What was tragic was the decision not to push further East when the Allied armies had the chance in 1944 and 1945. Eisenhower’s decision to liberate Paris rather than attack Germany, for example, meant the Iron Curtain was further west than it need have been, but in any case Romania's fate would have depended on Stalin. Romania would have only been saved from Communism had the Allies attacked Germany via Yugoslavia rather than via Italy or had Britain and France not gone to war with Germany at all in 1939. 

The blurb reminded me of something I had forgotten, that Anne Applebaum is married to Mr Sikorsky, the Polish Foreign Minister. (He was a member of the Bullingdon Club and is alongside David Cameron and Boris Johnson in that famous photograph). Her book is very strongly weighted to Poland, covers Hungary and East Germany in detail, does not say much about Czechoslovakia, elides Romania and Bulgaria and does not cover Yugoslavia or Albania at all, nor the countries that ended up back in the USSR.

For me the most interesting part was the history of the Polish resistance to the Communists, particularly the WiN. What a great country Poland is – I yearn to revisit. I learnt that there was some sort of a Hungarian resistance too. What interests me more is the moving and heroic story of the Romanian and Ukrainian resistances, but these are not mentioned.

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

Attlee, Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945 ordered these vast movements of people to get rid of the ethnic patchwork that had led to war in 1939. At almost the same time, oddly enough, the ethnically homogeneous countries, Britain, France and Holland, began to become rapidly multi-ethnic. British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, agreeing to the ethnic cleansing of Turkey in 1923, had agreed that ethnic minorities do not live happily side by side but the British Government by the 1960s had changed its mind.

I was recently reading Mircea Eliade’s Lisbon Diary, written while he worked as a diplomat in Salazar’s neutral Portugal. For him the defeat of Germany by Communist Russia was a disaster because it was a disaster for Romania. It is hard not to agree with him  that Romania would have been much better off had the Axis won, her Jews apart, and we do not know what their fate would have been in Antonescu’s Romania had the Axis won.

Things are as they are and happened the way they happened. There is not much point in wondering what would have happened if ...except to remind ourselves that there was nothing inevitable about the way things happened. To think otherwise is to fall into the Marxist fallacy of historicism. Stalin won the Second World War and so did Communism and many left-wing ideas. The Communists eventually gave up their grip on Eastern Europe but socialists and Marxists remain influential because they had been on the winning side in history. The defeat of the Nazis, a very good thing in itself, also led to a big left-wing shift in thinking. Had, say, the Kaiser won the Great War in 1915, or the Great War been avoided or had Nazi Germany not gone to war things might have been completely different. It might be that colonial empires still stretched across Africa and Asia, Europe remained white or the USA were still isolationist as the founding fathers intended. The EU, on the other hand, might have existed in a Europe dominated by the second or third German Reichs. We do not know. As it is, Communism was finally defeated in Eastern Europe, thankfully, after more than forty years of horror. 

In Western Europe, as a response to Stalinism, the democratic left largely won the battle of ideas, meaning ideas like: decolonialisation, confiscation of money from the rich, redistribution of income, the state being responsible for planning and managing the economy, the welfare state and legislating for sexual, racial and every other kind of equality.  

The one hopeful chapter in this book is the last, about the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, even though it was a brave, sad failure and repressed with much bloodshed. Anne Applebaum makes the point that no-one expected the uprising - Western experts and Communists alike assumed the Hungarians had been brainwashed to accept totalitarianism. In fact, every fresh generation is born with an instinct to discern truth from falsehood. This is why we must never lose hope.

Snobbery with violence: John Buchan and Al Qaeda

I have been sick for a couple of days and stayed at home, unable to do much work. The one consolation for being sick is that reading John Buchan becomes possible. He is my comfort blanket. So I reread Greenmantle.

My mother read The Thirty-Nine Steps to me when I was five and I loved all his books. Richard Hannay, the hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and his companions, Sandy Arbuthnot and Peter Pienaar, are family, though, on this reading, the fourth in the group, the dyspeptic John S. Blenkiron, is an unconvincing stage American. His American accent sounds horribly false. 

Buchan is the link between Robert Louis Stevenson and John Le Carre, but is closer to the former. How strange to see what books become classics, but a classic is simply a book that continues to sell well after its copyright has expired. John Buchan is now a classic writer, while Wyndham Lewis is forgotten and George Meredith is fading away.

Buchan is a very fine writer and is in my heart's blood, but I long ago outgrew him. I am astonished to remember that I read Buchan's novels with pleasure while at university - how young I must have been then - but only when sick can I now read them. They are far too light. They depend on a number of extraordinary coincidences and consist largely of a series of chases, something Buchan excelled at.

I got half way through Greenmantle in November 2001 while sick and then put it down, but not without noting that this book, which I had always considered deeply old-fashioned - that is a large part of its charm - had suddenly after September 11 become topical.

For those who missed out on Greenmantle in their adolescence, it is about a German plot in the First World War to organise a jihad or holy war to rouse the British Mahometans in India to fight for the Caliph against Britain. 

It was the Caliph/Sultan/Ottoman Emperor's decision (in fact the decision of the disastrous 'Young Turk', Enver Pasha) to declare war on the Allies and Turkey's subsequent defeat which led to the end of both the Caliphate, which Al Qaeda wants to restore, and the Ottoman Empire, It created the mess we have today in the Middle East. Regular readers of my blog already know my lament. If the Turks had stayed out of the war there would have been no Saudi Arabia, no Israel, no Syria or Lebanon, no Armenian genocide and Turkey might retain her huge Greek population along with a lot of oil.

 Sandy Arbuthnot's words throw light on the impulse which has led to Al Qaeda.

"The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. They settle down and stagnate, and by and by they degenerate into that appalling subtlety which is their ruling passion gone crooked.....And then comes a new revelation and a great simplifying. They want to live face to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priestcraft... It isn't inhuman. It's the humanity of one part of the human race."

The problem comes, Arbuthnot says, when this longing for purity and the "simplicity of the ascetic" is replaced by "the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilisation". This sounds like Osama bin Laden.

The BBC were dramatising Greenmantle on Radio 4 when the terrible bombings took place of the London tube by, as it turned out, British Muslims in 2005. The BBC pulled the serial for fear of causing offence, though it is not clear how it might have done. Charles Moore wrote beautifully about this and about the book here.

Nowadays I feel like the protagonist of Graham Greene's wonderful The Ministry of Fear, who says, during the Blitz, apostrophising his dead Edwardian mother, 

The world has been re-made by William Le Queux

A shame Hitchcock who filmed The Thirty-Nine Steps did not film Greenmantle as he wanted to. He thought it a better book than The Thirty-Nine Steps. (I disagree. The Thirty-Nine Steps is sparer.) However, they could not agree on a price for the rights. 

Two more serious books that suddenly became topical on September 11th were Joseph Conrad's great masterpieces, The Secret Agent, the world's first spy novel, which Hitchcock improbably did film, and the second one, Under Western Eyes. Everyone nowadays should read both of them because they are about the psychology of terrorism, but Greenmantle is also a rattling good yarn. Read it if you have not outgrown rattling good yarns or if you are sick.

Alan Bennett, in his very funny first play, Forty Years On, parodies Buchan hilariously and refers to him, Dornford Yates (very droll) and Sapper (an unpleasant fascist without literary skill) as purveyors of 'snobbery with violence'. It's a sublime pun, but in fact there is not much violence in Buchan and it is of the most wholesome kind. Hannay is always a clean fighter and a chevalier sans raproche. Even when faced, in one book, with a man who holds in his hand anthrax with which he proposes to poison a town Hannay does not fire at him unprovoked. Come to think of it, Buchan is not at all a snob either, though very establishment.

Mr. Bennett borrowed 'snobbery with violence', by the way, with permission, from one Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, who in 1932 had used it as the title of a pamphlet. The Count sounds interesting. He was a New Zealander, who is described by Wikipedia as a 'poet, polemicist, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne'.

It was a  great surprise to me when a biography of Auberon Herbert came out called The Man who was Greenmantle and I discovered that the whole improbable story was based on historical truth. You can read about Herbert, the remarkable man who was the basis for Sandy Arbuthnot and who twice declined the crown of Albania (as did C.B. Fry, the cricketer), here.

I knew I was feeling much better last night when I skipped most of the last two chapters to reach the end. But it was fun to have remet old friends.

Now I have returned to Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace, a highly acclaimed historical novel set in Burma, which is much more adult, very easy to read but no-one can know whether it will be read in a hundred years' time and the statistical chances are slim. It has in fact a lot in common with Greenmantle, including an exciting plot and the themes of war and imperialism. For Buchan the British Empire is good, for Ghosh bad, Buchan's heroes are thoroughly chaste and know nothing of women, whereas The Glass Palace has plenty of sex, but both simply reflect the ideas of their times, without original thinking. People do not read novels to be asked to reconsider conventional ideas.

A lot of Buchan's conventional ideas seem to me sound, especially his strong belief in the great men theory of history, which I remember Alan Bennett mocks very amusingly. Marxists, who see history as propelled by class struggle, tend to hate the great men theory and yet the history of Marxism-Leninism is not about great historical forces. It is about Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and some others. Let's not forget Pol Pot too.  

The story of Richard Hannay, Sandy Arbuthnot and the beautiful, evil Hilda von Einem is very far-fetched, but so is the real history of Lenin's plots, which remade the world. If only Richard Hannay had been able to stop Lenin as he stopped Hilda von Einem and the Black Stone how much misery we should have been spared. If Sandy Arbuthnot, who knew many curious places and people in Aleppo, were in Syria now, in one of his impenetrable disguises, we should be much safer.

Life as a party which I gatecrashed

George Kennan said, 

"One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household." 

Actually I never really felt like a guest. I always felt a bit like a stranger who had wandered into a party uninvited. I think this is the human condition and I remember Monsignor Gilbey used it as an argument for the existence of heaven, but I feel this applies more to me than to most of those around me. They seem to belong at this party.

For example, unlike the others, I never heard of any of the famous men who die these days. I had never heard of Philip Seymour Hoffman or Lou Read or Pete Seeger or Phil Everly. I think I had vaguely heard of Maximilian Schell, though I might have suspected him of possibly being either a woman or a soft porn film. 

I just put 'black singer died' into Google to remind me of the name of one Barry White, of whom I had not heard when he went to a better place. I heard of Freddy Mercury a day or two before his death, thanks to the BBC News.

I just now came across someone in his late 30s lamenting that he had met someone in their teens who had not heard of Heath Ledger. Nor had I but - and this is the killer - he died a decade or more ago.

I am evidently no longer young. But I realised this when I realised I was older than Basil Radford was in The Lady Vanishes.

A character in that wonderful novel, The Rector's Daughter, says of himself that he ignored his own generation and this was very priggish. I did too and agree that it is a very big mistake. Although, if you were in your teens in the 1970s, when almost the actors, singers, television stars and politicians were pretty ghastly, the fault is venial. 

Think of President Nixon.... and those dreadful suits he wore...and Patty Nixon. Though in retrospect he was rather a good president. Harold Wilson, Edward Heath....Cilla Black, Slade, all that awful rhythmic uneuphonious noise called music. The architecture, the executive semis in grey brick with Georgian bits stuck on unconvincingly. Even Pope Paul VI, though I wept when he died, was scarcely an impressive pope.

The only two famous 1970s figures whom I can think of with affection, offhand, were the comedians Eric Morecambe and Eric Sykes. Were there any others?

But there were wonderful Englishmen alive in every decade and the death of one of the finest, Kenneth Rose, last week hits me hard. I wish I had met him. He was the author of one of of the funniest books I have ever read, his biography of King George V. Sir Harold Nicolson who had written the King's official biography said in despair that he did nothing for years except stick stamps into albums. Rose, on the other hand, with a free hand that was denied Nicolson, turns the King into one of the immortal comic characters of English literature.

I remember so many stories from that book and wonder which ones to quote. Perhaps the story of how the King and Queen were shown round the world's first plastics factory by Sir Alfred Mond the Chairman of ICI who explained the process by which plastics were made in great detail. At the end the King turned to the Queen and said,

'Isn't that marvellous? And it's all made with milk, you know. Isn't that right, Mond?'

To which Mond replied,

'Yes, sir.'

Yet the King, though no intellectual, and in some ways very flawed, is yet an attractive figure, saying to one of his Prime Ministers (probably Baldwin?) that 

I worry that my subjects don't say their prayers at night. 

The King said when someone's homosexuality was mentioned,

I thought people like that shot themselves.

I remember my lecturer, David Cannadine, in a review of the book, thought that remark deplorable. I thought it showed a charming unworldliness. (James Callaghan, by the way, did not hear about homosexuality until he was in his thirties, despite being in the navy. If only such innocence were possible now.)

Rose's equally amusing The Later Cecils, which has wonderful anecdotes about twentieth century members of the Cecil family, is exactly the kind of book that makes Guardian readers foam at the mouth. It deserves praise for that but it has many other merits. The story that comes to my mind is about the Rev. Lord William Cecil, presented with a statuette by wartime refugees whom he had housed. He looked at it, his mind turning to the reasons why they had been billeted on him, and said mournfully,

War is a terrible thing.

I own but have not opened Rose's life of Lord Curzon. Curzon's patrician glamour and what one biographer called his 'rollicking pomposity' made it easy to overrate him, especially in our egalitarian era. 

The Telegraph's obituary makes it clear that Rose was a charming social climber. Social climbing was one of many pretty harmless activities that I always used to consider morally wrong but in fact I wish I had been one. I often tell myself that these days but do not bother to do anything about it and thereby miss out on kindred spirits and good conversation.

I finished The Broken Road and loved it

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road, the final volume in his account of his walk aged 18 across Europe in 1934, is like feeling a fresh spring breeze. It reminds me of Aristotle's definition of happiness as bloom upon the cheek of youth.  It reminds me too of why I am in South-Eastern Europe and how much I love Romania and Bucharest, because after fifteen years here I am still a tourist. But let's start with Constantinople.

After taking over a year to walk there from the Hook of Holland, we now learn from The Broken Road that Patrick Leigh Fermor stayed in the city he (rightly) always called Constantinople only ten days before setting off again for Greece, where he was to make his life. He said he never left Constantinople without a lightening of the heart. This is all the more telling because he saw it when it was still Constantinople, by which I mean still the Ottoman city made of wood and many Greeks still lived there. 

When I first saw the city in 1990 it was a great anticlimax. I arrived by train from Budapest and I had just seen and fallen in love with Romania. Hungary, where I had watched the red star being winched from the top of the Parliament building and Bulgaria were also fascinating though much less so than Romania. Istanbul was sort of Third World, but with Mars bars and Coca Cola, the International Herald Tribune and all mod cons it meant coming back to the West. 

Since then on many visits I  keep changing my mind about the place. I had a Lithuanian friend who lived there, in a flat facing the Golden Horn, who a long time said it was the most wonderful city in Europe. The last time I was with him there he said he had moved from hating it to complete indifference. I, on the other hand, on my last two or three visits, decided I loved it, despite the fact that it is no longer multiracial, has been rebuilt in concrete and the traffic is impossible. But I love it away from the tourist-crowded bits. I love working-class Fatih, full of barbershops, cafes where men sit eating falafel on little stools and wondrous mosques sans tourists.

Fermor's passion for mediaeval history and old churches and his knowledge of Ancient Greek gave him a great dislike of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Turkish rule destoyed the social structure and the upper classes of Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia, though Fermor speculates that paying heavy taxes to the Porte rather than being directly ruled by the Sultan might have done Wallachia and Moldavia just as much harm. It may well be that Turkish administration was even worse than administration by native princes, with rule by Phanariots being somewhere in between. I just don't know. On the other hand had Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece not liberated themselves the First World War would not have come about or at least not where and when it did. The First World War was the Third Balkan War. 

Fermor did not love Constantinople, but on the other hand he did love Bucharest, as do I, even after fifteen years here. Oddly enough though, the chapter on Bucharest is one of the weakest in the book. It does read at times, as he himself admits, like an article from The Tatler. Yet the chapter is terribly interesting for those of us who live in Bucharest; one cannot imagine a Tatlerish Bucharest now. How different Bucharest was in 1934 - not least in the upper class circles where he moved, after putting up by mistake for a few days at a bordello called Pisica Vesela, where the girls made friends with him.

On his first full day in Bucharest he enters a cafe on Calea Victoriei and feels a revulsion from the well dressed customers, who looked 

'shiny and commercial despite their rice-paper cheeks. I had the illusion that the talk of this gleaming and overupholstered Babylon consisted entirely of sneers.

That sounds like some Bucuresteni of the present day but Fermor has a remarkable gift for inspiring friendship in total strangers and in the cafe he meets a man who takes him to the opera and after that to a grand party and from then on he is lionised by the aristocracy. He also had many introductions from his time moving from castle to castle in Transylvania as described in the second volume of his travels. 

He says

there was a strong bohemian, anti-conventional and un-pompous strain in the section of the Romanian world in which I now found myself.

That describes quite a number of my close Romanian friends, but I have been very lucky indeed. Most Romanians are very different, very conventional, very unbohemian, sometimes even a little pompous. 

Of course he is describing a class most of which has gone now. Most of the 'historic centre' of Bucharest, i.e. the part built from 1880 to 1914, as a taxi driver reminded me the other day, was built by and for a class of people who left the country after the war if they could - not the upper classes only but the upper middle classes and the business class. Bohemiansim in 1934 in Romania and in England was confined to a minority of the upper classes and a tiny minority of metropolitan intellectuals. Since then it became much more common in England, but is very rare in Romania.

The Romania of the elite in 1934 had great style, we learn. Nowadays the elite - the rich and powerful, if they are the elite - are singularly lacking in style. In fact, Romania has so many wonderful charms but style is not one of them. Another reason why Romania should restore the monarchy. The peasants clad in costume are gone too but much about the countryside remains much the same or did until a moment ago. 

Apart from two chapters on Romania the book is about Bulgaria and very good indeed. I liked it all the more because even though I do not think I know Bulgaria very well I had been to all the places he visited. He describes Plovdiv and Veliko Tarnovo well and thinks Sofia a pleasant village. How lucky he was to get there in time - before modernity. 

Reading his Roumeli in memoriam just after he died has made me decide that Greece is still worth visiting, despite the affluence and tourism that have altered it out of recognition from the shepherd-strewn Balkan kingdom he knew. I shall try to find the profound Greece, if it still exists, far from motorways and airports. The profound Romania is everywhere and I must visit it much more before it too goes.



More on The Broken Road here.

Patrick Leigh Fermor at last reaches Bucharest

I am loving Patrick Leigh Fermor's chapter on Bucharest in The Broken Road. I find this city spell-binding and am pleased that he did so. I gave up hope that we would ever read his description, to set beside his description of Budapest in Between the Woods and the Water, Then after his death we were told that the final volume in his trilogy had almost been completed. In fact it is a very much unfinished and not at all like his finished work - which makes it much easier to read quickly. At least now we have it, although not in the final form which would have satisfied him.

I find I cannot put this book down. I emphatically do not agree with the man in my local English-language bookshop, who told me the other day that it should not have been published. I tend to agree with the friend last night who prefers it to the earlier two books. I find that because it is not finished it is easier to read. Reading Fermor's wonderful Ruskinian prose can sometime be, as Tennyson described reading Ben Jonson, like swimming in treacle.

Fermor arouses in me for the first time an interest in Bulgaria, whose gentle charm for me has been an acquired taste. I acquired it in the end but only now do I feel an interest in the place. Fermor at the time he travels through Bulgaria has never set foot in Greece, which is to be his great love, but we see his philhellenism prefigured in his liking for Bulgaria and his distaste for Turkey and Islam. Perhaps this is why, having walked from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, as he rightly always called it, he spent only ten days there before setting off for Greece and Mount Athos.

I enjoy reading Fermor because he makes me remember why I am living in Romania, which is because I fell in love with the country when I first came in the autumn of 1990. I still am in love with her, though it is a married love now, not a schoolboy infatuation. I am delighted that Fermor shared my enthusiasm for Romania and for Bucharest.

I also see that, like him, it is old churches that make me want to travel more than anything else. This is the reason why Burma a week ago did not move me as I had hoped. Pagodas and Buddhist temples are just not  so interesting or remotely so beautiful as churches, especially the monasteries of the Balkans. 

I have been telling family and friends for fifteen years to come to Romania before it is spoilt but I have not followed my own advice and have seen far too little of the provinces. From now on I shall stay around here.

Here 'The Broken Road' is reviewed by the wonderful Neal Ascherson and here by William Dalrymple, who is a writer comparable to Fermor.

I somehow missed reading Artemis Cooper's Life of Fermor which came out a year ago and which I shall hurry to get. Hardbacks seem scarce but I do not want to read it in paperback. I did read this intriguing review. I am not sure whether the reviewer knows much about Fermor though, as he says,

He sometimes slept rough in stables and barns but this was interspersed, we now learn, with sojourns in the castles and country houses of the eccentric, amusing, minor nobility. (My italics.)

Anyone who has read Fermor's books knew that. He himself likens his journey to Surtees' Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour.  Somerset Maugham apparently described him as "a middle-class gigolo for upper-class women". That might contain a scintilla of truth, unfortunately. A gigolo, though, if that is what he was, who was a prose stylist to compare with Sir Thomas Browne.

I write more about The Broken Road here.