Closing time in the gardens of the West

A British Pakistani friend wrote to me yesterday that

"We are seeing the invasion and destruction of Europe. Hundreds of millions of people are thinking of heading towards Europe now. We need to determined to keep them out and to preserve Western Europe. Instead, people have gone all soppy and sentimental."

A British Indian friend tells me she feels much the same. 

So does an Albanian Muslim friend.

A black American friend just sent me this message:

"This is much worse than 9/11 in the long run."

I agree with them. 

I never generally get downhearted for long by the news but this army of economic migrants crossing Europe and breaking through immigration borders makes me almost hopeless.

Just when it should have been clear to most people that, if European countries were to keep their identities and indigenous majorities, they - regrettably - have to stop taking refugees from outside Europe, this huge migration erupts, accompanied and caused by an extraordinary outbreak of sentimentality among virtue signallers. Their noise is great, even though opinion polls show that most voters, in the UK at least, do not want to admit any refugees. 

What European countries should do, by contrast, is make reservations to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees, removing their obligation to accept refugees from outside Europe. This would be a return to the status quo ante. The UK and other countries made such reservations when they originally signed the Convention.

Mr. Viktor Orban is widely attacked for pointing out that if refugees in numbers continue to be accepted Europe will eventually have a Muslim majority. Though Mr. Orban is in many ways a very unsatisfactory hero he is obviously right on this, but being right does not make you friends when most people are wrong. 

What would the BBC and the Economist have made of Charles Martel, Stephen the Great of Moldavia, John Sibiesky, John Hunyadi (Ioan de Hunedoara) or the Albanian hero Skanderbeg, who all fought wars to protect Europe from Muslim invasion?

This is a turning point more important than September 11th and comparable to 1989 and to 1979 - 1979 being the Iranian revolution.

I saw immigrants in Belgrade on Wednesday. Some were families but many were young men in their twenties without women. The older people looked bewildered but some of the young men looked like cunning opportunists, which you have to be to make such a journey. Quite a number obviously came from Central Asia (the Stans at a guess?), not Syria. 

The PERGIDA people (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) were not Nazis or racists, not at first at least, but originally nice, concerned East Germans who simply thought there were enough Muslims in Europe. For their pains they were accused by Mrs. Merkel, just a very few days after the Hebdo massacre, of

"having hate in their heart."

They look justified today, though not in her eyes.

I am told since then PERGIDA has changed for the worse but I do not know.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Syrians, though I am not sure how many of these migrants are fleeing danger. I'm not sure how many are even Syrian. 

I'd like to allow asylum seekers to enter Europe, on the very strict condition that they must leave after a maximum of three years. As Australia does. Many will leave voluntarily and return home, but the majority will not and once in Europe it would prove very difficult to make them leave, even did the will to do so exist. They would mostly disappear. 

So that won't work. What would work would be to fund the refugee camps in neighbouring countries - as Saudi Arabia is doing - and turn back the people smugglers instead.

What would also work is for EU countries to allow suitably qualified immigrants to enter and work in Europe on the understanding that their right to stay ends when their contract does. In this way we get the economic growth Europe needs and preserve European countries as organic communities, as nations.

The only alternatives to my suggestions are Fortress Europe or an immigrant society that draws people from every part of the world, what America, Canada and Australia have become since the 1960s.

Hungary's robust response to illegal immigration is admirable. Dozens of young men lobbing stones at the Hungarian police were captured on film. These youths were trying to harm Hungary before they had even got in. People who lob bricks at border guards are not people who should be given asylum and yet on Facebook and Twitter silly people are cross with Hungary, not the invaders. These silly people include many journalists and historians -including ones who write for allegedly conservative papers.

Serbia is safe for asylum seekers so why should Hungary accept them? As for Germany - the government there has made a problem for itself. Why should other countries help? But Germany is trying to use majority voting to force Eastern Europe to do so.  To change East European societies to make up for Angela Merkel's inexplicable decision to accept eight - hundred - thousand people in her country. 

And another thing. If she wants the migrants, why isn't she sending buses and trains to get them?

Germany has ensured that a huge flood of immigrants will continue year after year unless people are prepared to use the arguments Viktor Orban deploys against the idea of migrations. My money unfortunately is not on him winning the debate. Hence I feel so despondent. After all these years Count Oxenstierna is still right. 

"Thou dost not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed."

And then there's the issue of terrorism. Most Muslims are exemplary people but some are not. We have a problem with Muslims born in Europe who want to kill people to restore the Caliphate. That problem is going to get much worse.

A Lebanese minister has said that his gut feeling told him that about one in fifty of the Syrian refugees is likely to be an ISIS terrorist. If he is right, for those wanting to follow Pope Francis' admonition to take in a refugee, your chance of taking a terrorist into your home is only about 2%. 

The number of ISIS sympathisers and Islamists among the genuine Syrian refugees is, however, probably very much higher than 2%. 22% of Syrians think that ISIS are a positive influence in their country, according to a recent poll by a British market research company. I imagine that a similar proportion of the Syrian refugees like ISIS too. After all ISIS supporters are attracted to life in Germany as much as Syrian democrats. 

Quite a few other migrants do not like ISIS in the least but are still Islamists, radicalised by the cruel war against a tyrannical, secular government. These would be the moderate rebels that we read about. Assuming that decades of secular government means Syria  does not have as many Islamists as Egypt, where Islamists won the recent election, we can still expect, on a conservative estimate, that a quarter of the refugees will be by European standards extremists.

If only people as resolute as Margaret Thatcher or as cunning as Francois Mitterand were still in charge in Europe. It may be closing time in the gardens of the West, in Cyril Connolly’s  words. It certainly feels like amateur night.

The Great Invasion

The Invasion of 1910 was the name of William Le Queux’s 1906 bestseller warning the readers of cheap British thrillers of the danger from the Kaiser’s Germany. The Invasion of 2015 is the best way to describe what is happening in Europe today. Europe is being invaded - this is just the start – and refugees are likely to change Europe more than would have victory for the Kaiser.

Did I miss the moment when people in Europe decided that they wanted their countries to become immigrant societies like the USA and Canada?

Mrs. Merkel’s decision to admit 800,000 refugees from the Middle East may be that moment. It may therefore be much more significant than the opening of the Berlin Wall.

In fact there are two choices. European countries can remain ethnic states, the large majority of whose inhabitants are indigenous people whose forbears lived in that country since the Middle Ages, or they can become immigrant societies. The choice most politicians and business leaders in Western Europe want may be the latter, but they do not say so.

Instead people who want immigrants talk about economic growth and those who don't mention pressure on schools and hospitals. This would not make sense to Wellington or Napoleon.

Presumably, using this as a precedent, from now on Europe will accept scores or hundreds of thousands of refugees from every war in the Eastern hemisphere. The whole thing is a mass hallucination as rational as the outcry over Cecil the lion. But that outcry only hurt one dentist. This hallucination may transform Europe forever, unless people defeat the philosophical arguments for taking asylum seekers into Europe.

This week Romania has agreed to take 1,500 Syrians and the EU wants the country to take another 3,000

Romania should not and nor should any European country. This army of migrants worries me very much - it is symbolically and actually an invasion. David Cameron, were he a statesman possessed of authority and eloquence, which he sometimes is,  should explain that these boat people are not fleeing danger and that we can pay to house the people in camps, who have already fled danger, in various other countries. So should all the European leaders.

But instead soft headed, soft hearted people confuse the migrants trying to find refuge in Europe - the ones who have the money to do so - with the war refugees who in fear of their lives live in camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Sam Cameron does and so do opinion formers who have no excuse.

Why has Angela Merkel summoned up this invasion which, like the children’s crusade, winds across Europe forcing its way through international borders?

Nobody knows. 

I suspect it is something to do with political calculation - to appeal to idealistic German voters. It is certainly about Germans' admirable revulsion from the racial ideas of the Nazis. (The whole history of Western Europe since 1945 is a meditation on the Nazis.) Cynics think she needs immigrants because Germans have one of the lowest birth rates in Europe and congratulate her because she will thereby get the best ones, the most courageous and self-reliant. 

In fact if she thinks that she is an even bigger fool than it is manifest that she is. A British Pakistani friend of mine told me he knows from personal experience that those who make these tough and illegal journeys are not only the physically fittest ones, but also the biggest rogues, charlatans and chancers. Who can doubt it? 

And then there is the question of Muslim extremists, Islamists, admirers and members of ISIS. They exist in Europe already in sizable numbers and they are for sure among the refugees. An ISIS commander gloated about his to the press a couple of days ago.

Mrs. Merkel has just made herself the toast of the world's people traffickers. If she insists in taking 800,000 Syrian refugees, which is a huge mistake, she should take them from the camps in Jordan (as the UK is doing). By accepting those who turn up, she's creating a massive market in the illegal movement of people and will be responsible for many more drownings.

Most Eastern Europe people have very different attitudes from Angela Merkel’s, even though she is one of them. Most East Europeans do not want to allow large numbers of Muslims or non-Europeans to settle in their countries and become citizens. The question is why Western Europe does not feel this way and the answer is that they the majority, according to polls, do but their rulers do not.

I don't like Viktor Orban at all, a demagogue with worryingly undemocratic tendencies, but he is the only leader who is right about the refugees. He is a nasty piece of work but, since 1945, the nice people have been wrong about immigration and the nasty ones right. He sees what Eastern Europeans see, that Hungary’s and Europe’s identity is in danger from immigrants.

Eastern Europeans, at least the wiser ones, sees this as a Muslim invasion of the kind Eastern Europe fought and lost in the early modern era.  They ask why these refugees are strapping, young and exclusively Muslim men ready to fight their way to the welfare-rich lands of northern Europe? Where are the Christians? Where, if they are fleeing danger, are the women and children?

Queen Elizabeth II becomes our longest reigning English monarch

At around 5.30 today the Queen surpasses Queen Victoria's reign of 63 years and 216 days and becomes England's longest reigning monarch. 

Or not. King James III reigned for 64 years, from 16 September 1701 to 1 January 1766. He is better known as the Old Pretender, son of King James II, brother of Queen Mary II and Queen Anne, who invaded Scotland to claim his throne in 1715 and is buried in St Peter's in Rome.

In so very many ways Queen Elizabeth II's reign has been the best period in our island story but we lost our empire, our independence, our sense of who we were and many other important things. It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. But even though I am, like Dr. Johnson, a Jacobite when I remember, I wholeheartedly say 'God save the Queen'.

Her first prime minister was Winston Churchill, who enjoyed being Lord Melbourne to her Victoria. Stalin ruled Russia and Mr. Truman led the USA. 

In her long reign the Queen never said a word out of place. Except just once. She was talking to some foreign students somewhere and one mentioned that they were going to Manchester. And she said, 'Manchester isn't a very nice place.'

She has, I am told, a lot of influence. Unlike the Duke of Edinburgh who would like us to leave the EU, she believes the advice her Prime Ministers give her about the EU. Unlike the Queen Mother she is colour blind and loves the Commonwealth.

She was angry that Mr. Reagan had toppled the Communist government of Grenada without asking her - she is Queen of Grenada - and blamed Mrs. Thatcher, somewhat unfairly. At her next weekly audience Mrs. Thatcher was not invited to sit down. 

Actually Queen Victoria required all her Prime Ministers to stand except Disraeli. When he was old and weak she let him have a chair. Gladstone, whom she hated - in his 80s when PM for the last time - always had to stand. Keeping Prime Ministers standing is a nice habit that Charles should revive. Politicians should be kept in their place. As should we all.

Queen Victoria, by the way, wanted to do Disraeli the completely unprecedented honour of visiting him as he lay dying, but he declined the honour with what were said to be his last words,

“Why should I see her? She will want to give a message to Albert.”

He had flattered the Queen for years, but now saw no reason to do so.

Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine will still have reigned longer than Elizabeth II has been Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, if you count the years she was Duchess of Aquitaine. But she was a queen consort and does not count.

The Prince of Wales has waited longer to be monarch than any other heir apparent to the throne and if and when he ascends the throne he will be the oldest sovereign to do so, but he is not the eldest heir to the English or British throne. That was the Electress Sophia of Hanover, who died, aged 83, in 1714, a few weeks before Queen Anne, whose heir under English and Scottish law she was.

A street called twisted

Last week I found myself in Constanta in a street called Labarinta, which was as straight as a die. 

This is typical of life, I feel.

The Third World War has broken out

General Mircea Chelaru, who was Chief of the General Staff of the Romanian Army in the late 1990s, said last week that the asylum seekers proceeding across Europe, and the possibility of millions more coming represent the start of  the Third World War. He fears the destruction of European culture and the Islamisation of Europe.


This is reminiscent of Admiral Chris Parry of the Royal Navy who made a warning about asylum seekers and migrants being Britain's great security threat back in 2006. 

Asylum seekers are Europe's greatest defence threat, say Syrian refugees

My Syrian Christian friends - refugees themselves in Bucharest, though affluent refugees- strongly oppose admitting Muslim immigrants to Europe. They have reasons.

Quite by chance, one just called me, on business. He is an intelligent man of good family. (Christians make up much of the middle class in Syria.) He didn't call to talk politics, but he did anyway. 

His parents are in Syria, in a place which is pretty safe, close to the Lebanese border. But the forces of law and order have no power. If you were to commit a murder in Syria no-one would arrest you. Yet life goes on. 

He is horrified by the influx of refugees into Europe. He says it is caused by the people smugglers dropping their prices from $10,000 to $2,000 per person. He thinks the waves of refugees, if unchecked, will lead to 'civil war' in Europe.

The refugees are not poor, nor in fear of their lives, he says. They all have money to pay the smugglers, they all want to go to rich countries, not countries like Romania or even Hungary, and quite a few of them are ISIS supporters. He fears Muslims gradually taking over Western Europe.

Of course he exaggerates.

We all feel so very, very sorry for the 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian child, the picture of whose dead, cold body, lying on the shore, has gone all round the world. 

We all feel very sorry for his grieving father, Abdullah Kurdi. He said he simply wanted to give his children a better life. He is absolutely admirable and brave and reckless - and an economic migrant, not a refugee fleeing danger. By his folly he is responsible for his sons’ and wife’s deaths. He must live with this.

The family were not in Syria, but in Bodrum in Turkey, a pleasant seaside town where there is no war and where rich people whom I know choose to holiday. Mr. Kurdi worked as an odd job man. The family had been in Turkey for three years. They were in no danger till they boarded that boat.

They were Kurds. Turkey, which has a very large Kurdish community, is a much better place than the other countries where Kurds live, Syria, Iraq or Iran. As Kurds their life should have been much easier in Turkey, where millions of Kurds spoke their language and shared their culture, than had they been Arabs. They could have integrated much better into Turkey than into Europe. But for very understandable reasons Mr. Kurdi wanted to join the burgeoning Kurdish communities in Western Europe instead.

Beside the Turkish-Syrian border is Hatay province which includes Antakya (Antioch). Turkey stole Hatay from Syria in 1939, when Britain and France were preoccupied, and it always had many Arabs. It has huge numbers of Syrian refugees now and it seems a good place to house Syrians, rather than in Europe.

Yet 104,460 asylum seekers arrived in Germany last month and over 800,000 this year, part of a revolutionary change not only in Germany but in the whole of Europe. 

The Australians insist asylum seekers move on after three years. For some reason that I do not understand in Europe asylum seekers are not given asylum for a year or two and then asked to leave but allowed to settle permanently, which is why centuries from now Germany will always have large Arab and Kurdish minorities. This will be irrevocable.

Refugees have every reason to want to live in Europe. It is Europe's duty to the refugees and, more importantly, to future generations of Europeans to stop accepting any asylum seekers from other continents. No-one drowns trying to get to Singapore because Singapore accepts no asylum seekers. This is the only way the drownings will stop.

We can pay poor countries to take them for us. I wonder how many Syrians and Libyans will accept refuge in Bukino Faso. We can try the experiment and see.

About half of the Vietnamese 'boat people' who managed to reach Hong Kong during the 1980s were repatriated by the British to the Communist regime – somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand. Many went to the United States. Many others were kept cooped up in squalid conditions for the best part of a decade. My feeling is that times have changed and Europe will take many of the tidal wave of asylum seekers and economic migrants. As more are taken, more will come.

Some think the population of Africa alone may grow by one billion over the next thirty years. As populations grow and developing countries grow richer the numbers of migrants, legal and illegal, will increase by leaps and bounds. The only alternative to indigenous inhabitants becoming a minority in each Western European country is to do what former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder recently said we must not do – create a Fortress Europe.

Admiral Christopher Parry, one of the Royal Navy’s cleverest strategists, warned in a paper in 2006 that Britain and Europe faced being overrun by mass migration from the Third World within 30 years, because of population growth and environmental destruction. The Internet, cheap flights and free international phone calls would hinder assimilation. (Is there anything left to assimilate to, nowadays?)

He compared the plight of the West to that of the Roman Empire in the fifth century. The Blair Government liked to encourage senior public servants to indulge in blue sky thinking but Admiral Parry had taken it too far. He was silenced and accused of racism.

Nine years have gone past since then and he seems prescient.

What is clear now is that while Vladimir Putin is bad news, and ISIS much worse news, the real threat to Europe is not from Russia but from asylum seekers.

Four men and a tent in Albania in 1879

One day last autumn I was sitting in my Temple chambers, wondering what I should do with myself in the Long Vacation, when I was aroused from my reverie by the entrance of my clerk...

And so begins for E. F. Knight the journey that led him to write 'Albania: A Narrative of Recent Travel', which he published in 1880. A friend showed me a first edition of the book a couple of years ago. I loved the flavour of Oxford, Cambridge, public school and England at the zenith of her imperial self-confidence. In many ways 1879 does not seem so very long ago - it's on the horizon that separates the recent from the distant past. Buildings built in 1879 we do not consider old. Yet how very distant the world that Knight describes. 

He and his three companions, whom he calls Brown, Jones and Robinson, say good-bye to their friends at Spiers and Pond's refreshment-bar at Victoria Station and take the boat train to Paris, a train to Venice and thence a ferry along the Adriatic coast of Austria Hungary. They disembark and ride to post-war Montenegro, which the Congress of Berlin had made an independent kingdom the year before. They take with them across the continent a number of Robinson's cumbersome inventions, including a huge unwieldy tent they call the White Elephant. They sleep in it for a total of two nights.

it's slightly like Jerome K. Jerome but our four are upper middle class, not lower middle class and the laughs are fewer. Though Knight can be funny.

Victorians were usually careful observers. They are disparaged now by terrifying women who write critical apparati detecting sexism and racism, but their comments generally sound perceptive to me, often more so than those of contemporary academics.

The four travellers were repeatedly told that they would not come back from Albania alive. I was told that in Hungary before I came to Romania for the first time in 1990. What impression did the first Albanian city, Scutari, now Shkoder, make on them?

The first thing that strikes one is the utter lawlessness of the people. The Turks have never assimilated their remoter possessions. It is not in their character to do so. They seem, even after so many centuries, to be merely temporarily encamped in Albania.

An Albanian gendarme who befriends them points out

an ill-featured Albanian Mussulman

to the travellers and says,

This is a brave man ; much respected ; has killed more of his follow-townsmen than any other Scutarino.

An Albanian Christian, however, assures Knight that Albania is safer than Trieste, despite the fact that the police have been on strike for months. He says that blood feuds, whereby the family of a murder victim is required to revenge him, keep the peace more effectively than the police.

"Does not this system lead to a good many lives being sacrificed over one quarrel?"

"It acts well as a rule. But, as you say, it does lead to some bloodshed. Just before I left Scutari a man shot another's pig, which had strayed into his field; the owner of the pig immediately walked over to the other man's house and blew his brains out, which he was bound to do as a man of honour; then a relation of the slain man shot a relation of the other behind his back as he strolled into the bazaar,totally unaware of the existence of any quarrel between the families." 

"Was that looked upon as fair play?"

"Everything is fair in our blood feuds. This very man was himself shot a few days afterwards as he was coming out of a mosque, by the brother of the man he had killed, who was waiting for him behind a wall.Several others on both sides were killed in this pig dispute, till at last the two families met and settled the matter amicably, and without dishonour to either party, for it was shown that an equal amount of damage had been inflicted on both families--ten men of one having been slain; nine men, one woman, and a pig of the other."

Blood feuds were suppressed in Albania under Communism but sprung up again as soon as Communism was overthrown.

It is a mistake to imagine the Ottoman Empire assimilated her subjects, as some clever men nowadays think. Muslims, Christians, Jews and gypsies  lived in separate quarters of towns, in different villages and under their own laws.

interestingly, the way of life of the Christians and the status of Christian women was thoroughly Oriental. In Albania Christian women lived in purdah. Marriages were arranged in the following way.

Courtship is curiously managed among the Scutarine Christians. The lover--if he can be so called--never sees his intended till the day of his marriage. A young girl is confined in her father's house for a few years before she arrives at a marriageable age. No men but her nearest relatives ever see her. When her parents consider she is old enough, they let it be known among their friends that they have a marriageable daughter on hand. Probably the young lady's brother will come up to you--if you are a good catch--some day in the street, and say,

"You are just the man I wanted to see. My sister is now fourteen years of age. You must marry her."

It is an insult to refuse such an offer, for it is generally looked upon as a great honour. However, if the Benedick be rather doubtful as to the advantages of the match, and is desirous of ascertaining whether his proposed bride be endowed with personal attractions, he goes off to an old woman, whose profession it is to intervene in such cases. She calls on the bride, inspects her, and returns to give him an unbiassed summing-up of the young lady's qualities. If he is satisfied, the wedding-day is fixed, but not till the last moment does he view his bride.

I like this compliment to Albanian and English womanhood by Knight, which is accurate. 

The women of this country do not wither up into old hags by the time they are thirty, as do most orientals and southerners, but preserve their peachy complexions and youthful beauty as long as do the women of our own island.

This comment seems topical. 

In this valley are Ipek [Peja], Jakova [Gjakova], and Priserin [Prizren], three of the most interesting cities of Albania.... But the population of these towns is ferociously fanatical. Surrounded as they are by Christians, knowing that the day is not far off when the rising ambitions and energies of the oppressed race will drive them from their homes eastwards and southwards, the Mohammedans here hate the Christians with a hatred more intense than even the followers of this fanatical creed entertain in other parts.

But there is more to it than Mohammedan fanaticism. These towns are in northern and eastern Kosovo. The newly independent Kingdom of Serbia, then as now, considered Kosovo her ancestral homeland. I am told by a friend who knows Kosovo that this conflict was always more ethnic than religious. The Christians in those regions were Serbs and the Muslims were Albanians. Elsewhere in Kosovo Catholic Albanians had no more wish to be ruled by the Serbs than did the Muslims.

At one point Knight is advised by a diplomat to go back to Montenegro to witness the outbreak of war between Montenegro and Turkey. He does goes back to Podgorica but to his disappointment the war is inconveniently delayed and he returns to Scutari.

Knight and friends were travelling in the aftermath of the Bulgarian Atrocities, committed by Muslims against Balkan Christians, which had led to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, Mr Gladstone's Midlothian campaign and almost to a rerun of the Crimean War between Britain and Russia. In the London music halls, the words of the great hit song of 1877, sung by the Great MacDermott, went:

'We don't want to fight,

'But by jingo if we do,

'We've got the ships,

'We've got the men,

'We've got the money too.'

I once heard an ancient recording of the Great MacDermott singing it in a very thin voice. How poignant the past is.

As every schoolboy used to know, Mr. Gladstone declared to a crowd in the Midlothian campaign that he wanted to get rid of the Turks from Europe 

bag and baggage. 

He meant, I assume, Muslims rather than Turks, though Englishmen in his day tended to think all Balkan Christians were Greeks and all Muslims Turks. In any case, Gladstone was arguing for ethnic cleansing. 

Odd how what is liberal in one age becomes illiberal later. But this happens a lot.

Disraeli, who had travelled around Albania as a young man, knew much better and was pro-Turk because the Sublime Porte was the legitimate ruler of his domains. Disraeli was not a classicist like Gladstone and was possibly a less sincere Christian. 

Disraeli's views on ethnic cleansing were expressed with his customary feline playfulness in his account of his Albanian journey in the 1830s. He spoke of the pleasure, when he was the guest of Ali Pasha,

of being made much of by a man who is daily decapitating half the country.

Funny, almost Wildean, but unpleasant. 

Very unpleasant indeed.

Taking a fresh look at Warren Harding, Jimmy Carter and other US presidents

When I studied this subject at university I thought American historians were not up to much compared with British ones. It does seem as if judgements by historians on US presidents, and American historians are very keen indeed on awarding presidents marks, are wildly inaccurate.

Buchanan is unjustly maligned. He, rightly in my opinion, thought the Federal Government did not have the authority to prevent the South seceding and his view would have prevented the Civil War. I like Andrew Johnson for wanting to conciliate the South. Despite his racism and belief in eugenics Coolidge was in many ways a good president, who did very little. Hoover was an interventionist in economics who anticipated the New Deal - was this good or bad?

I read a persuasive article in the New York Times praising Mr Carter yesterday and a very interesting article today in the same paper that praises Warren Harding.

In October 1921, Harding traveled to Birmingham, Ala., where, in a powerful speech to a mixed-race (though segregated) audience, he demanded justice for African-Americans. In the first speech in the South by a sitting president on race, he argued for full economic and political rights for all African-Americans. Pat Harrison, a Democratic senator from Mississippi, was aghast. If Harding’s views “were carried to its ultimate conclusion,” he said, “that means that the black man can strive to become president of the United States.”

This is in sharp contrast to the views of Coolidge and Hoover as well as Democrats.  

Wilson of course was a great believer in segregation. Almost all presidents before Kennedy were opposed to racial equality including Lincoln. According to Ronald Kessler, Lyndon Lyndon Johnson told two unnamed Southern governors 

I'll have them nig-ers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years. 

If true this does not mean LBJ was insincere in his views on civil rights. Most African Americans had voted Democratic, in presidential elections, since 1936 (71% of them did so then) and certainly since 1948 so Johnson was not so much winning black voters as losing white ones.

Wilson told jokes about darkies, mimicking their accent, in cabinet. Coolidge thought the Nordic race deteriorated when mixed with other races. Hoover thought 

one white man was worth two to three coloured people even at simple tasks like shovelling. 

Truman, like Wilson and LBJ a Southerner, said he did not care to live near negroes and opposed the civil rights movement, which he considered, perhaps rightly, to have been instigated by communists. 

Eisenhower told jokes about blacks that would be considered racist these days but I think he was benign enough. He told Chief Justice Earl Warren that the southern whites 

are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.

I stumbled today on what to me was news that Eisenhower's mother was of mixed race. I remember Americans have told me that in America, even if you are only one eighth black, you count as black (an octoroon) and that therefore Pushkin, by American standards, was black. It seems that so was President Eisenhower. He was probably an octoroon too.

Finding the open coast in Albania

I stayed three or four miles away from where this picture was taken, in the beach at Durres, a place which was empty coastline in 1998 and now is the great Albanian seaside place, the equivalent in Romania of Mamaia. Why do I hate seaside resorts so much? Because I grew up in one?Yes. Because I hate the masses, because I can't stand families, because I dislike battery farms, because I want hidden obscure things? Because I dislike modern unintellectual unironic normal life?

I came here to escape the heat of Tirana. My desktop tells me it's 19 degrees Celsius in Bucharest which reminds me I came to Albania to escape the heat of Romania.

The hotel I stayed kin one of thousands is full and gimcrack but next door but one was a black of luxury flats with a swimming pool and a nice restaurant. Pasta or risotto with fresh seafood cost less than ten euros with wine and the use of the pool was three euros. Not expensive but I had it almost to myself all day. In case you decided to stay in Durres beach (I don't recommend it unless you like beach resorts full of families) it's name is Alibi.

At 5.30 Tomi picked me up and took me south until the buildings petered out. 85% of the buildings along the coast are illegal. Not only do they not have planning permission but the owners often do not have title to the land which belongs to the state. All along the coast are tunnels and military installations. Albanians when they go to the coast prefer the Ionian sea where the sea or clearer and there are no mosquitoes. The coast south of Durres is popular with middle aged foreigners and the owners of the improvised restaurants and hotels do not advertise them in the Albanian media for fear of attracting the evil eyes of the authorities.

A solitary fisherman with a net caught nothing, he said.

I had promised Tomi and Osman dinner in Tirana but instead we had a much better one than the best restaurant could have afforded back in town. Freshly caught fish, eaten outside a shack on the beach, a mile from the nearest village - simply delicious. Eaten with good Montenegrin wine. 

We stayed until the mosquitoes arrived and then fled. Tomi never sleeps on the coast here because of the mosquitoes. The hotels in Durres have netting on the windows but eating after dark outside is not a good idea,


I wanted to go to Albania very much in 80s when the whole coast was untouched - of course it was only possible in guided tours watched carefully by secret police but that would have added to the fun. A friend of mine who did this in 1979 said that only very interesting people took such tours - interesting people and Stalinists but Stalinists were interesting too. Albania until 1991 had statues of Stalin dotted around, of course. I left it very late but it is still in this year of grace 2015 an exciting strange place. As Romania was ten or fifteen years ago.

And like Romania ten years ago it has wonderful food, Everything is bio - the tomatoes and onions are poems - the fish and meat is wonderful. 

And people think and talk and behave like human beings in the way they did in Western Europe forty or fifty years ago. How Albanians manage it so close to Greece and Italy I don't know.

Slaughtering lambs on the holy mountain

Today was a really astonishing day which makes me feel I am living in a 19th century lithograph. This is, of course, the ideal for which one travels but which one so rarely attains in our day. The English scholar-gentleman-gypsy. 

Tomi Luzati and Osman drove me from Berat to the annual Bektashi festival on Mount Tomori, where tens of thousands of families of Bektashis come, camp out, sacrifice and eat lambs and pray on the holy mountain. Some bring dead lambs, some buy them live from butchers who slaughter them. Once they climbed or came on horseback, now they come by car. On top of the mountain, the second highest in Albania,  a very holy man is buried. 

Bektashis are Sufis, devoted to the memory of Haji Bektash, a dervish who lived in thirteenth century Asia Minor. His cult was very popular with the Janissaries who were the equivalent in Ottoman Turkey of the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire. Like the Praetorian Guard chose emperors the Janissaries chose sultans and in 1827 the Sultan Mahmud II disbanded them. Many of the Janissaries were taken as boys from Albanian families and they sought refuge in Albania. Almost a century later another moderniser, Kemal, expelled the dervish brotherhood (think Greenmantle) from Turkey and they made Albania their headquarters. Albania seemed a natural choice until the Communists took over and in the Cultural Revolution (Albania was Mao's ally) made religious practices illegal.

Tomi, who is one, says Bektashis like rakia, pork meat and enjoying the life. This is his philosophy but another Bektashi confirmed this. Sufism is the mysticism of Islam and it seems in every way more attractive than the dour Calvinism of orthodox Mahometanism. I am sorry to say that there have been no whirling dances in Albania since the Communists took over. Bektashis are Alawites, like President Assad of Syria, although not all Alawites are Bektashis. Their religion is secret in part. A Turkish friend told me that the Alawis have a secret, passed from one to another orally but not written down and my friend had an Alawite friend who revealed it to him: Ali is God.

This, if it is true, and the role of alcohol in their religious rite, might be the reasosn that Sunnis sometimes call the Bektashis 'little Christians'. 

Several years ago an English journalist friend, living in Belgrade, posted on Facebook a picture he took at the festival of a young boy, his cheeks smeared with blood, eating raw lamb. My friend told me that the festival was this weekend but there was nothing about it on the net in English. The travel agency in Tirana said it was not an organised festival, it was not official and they couldn't help me with it or confirm even when it took place. Luckily I found Tomi, friend of a friend, instead.

Tomi, Osman and I drove for an hour through idyllic countryside, the countryside of Greek gods and wood nymphs, till we left the made road and spiralled up the mountain on a track which took another hour of vertiginour views, Tomi told me that in other years the cars get jammed and people have to walk to the plateau where the festival happens. However the Albanian police had said on the radio that there should be no problems this year and we made it all the way. The policemen we met were smiling broadly and wore sunglasses. This year there were no problems.

Lambs, hundreds of them, herded, being slaughtered, being cut open, cooked and eaten. I couldn't help remembering Paul Potter's lines

All over London

There are chickens on spits

And this, say the chickens,

Is their Auschwitz.

I didn't see anyone eating raw lamb, not did the people I spoke to know about this, though the Bradt guide mentions it. Bektashis' foreheads are smeared with the blood of the lamb. I think Armenians sacrifice lambs in a similar way for Easter.

Almost everyone rests content with staying on the plateau where they camp out. Today was the first day but thousands had camped out last night. The more determined used to climb to the summit and this would take some hours. Tomi who has never done this himself had told me this is what I should have to do and I was on for it, though rather dreading it as I am not fit. Instead I got talking to a charming Albanian from islington who works as a beautician in Harrod's and she and her family  took me up in their four wheel drives to the very top. There stands a little hermitage and I was blessed by their charming imam. 

I was happy because I thought I was a traveller not a tourist, a man of letters even, but quite a few of the Albanians lived in Greece, Italy or North London.This is not the hermit kingdom of Hoxha. I missed that.

For primitive man man seeking the transcendent without a revelation, mountains were always very sacred. This religion is much older than Islam of course or any religion that was written down.

Tirana and Tomi

Only a fool goes to Greece or smartly-painted Croatia or Montenegro when, for a short time longer, the real thing exists in Albania.


I decided on Friday that after five weeks of dog days in Bucharest I had to get away. One has to be guided by ones heart and my heart didn't want Malta or Copenhagen or crowded Rome or even cool raining England. I found a very cheap flight - such things used not to exist before Air Serbia became a budget airline - and came to Albania. I have intended to each summer since I first came here eight years ago. For five years I have not kept my promise but now I am thankful to be here. I shall come back each year from now on.


I came without making plans but a dear friend who used to live here put me in touch with Tomi and this proved providential.


Tomi is an architect who works on all sorts of projects for international organisations. He even worked on one about gender equality, a subject he seems to find slightly amusing.  He also dedicates his time to 'enjoying the life' which involves spending much of the summer on the beach or roaming the countryside, often from his kindness showing lucky people round. He bought some wonderful Albanian wine from a shop which the owner of the bar we went to let him drink there - it's better, he explained, than the Italian wines that are just colourings and water. And it really was. The bar was fully of lovely, pretty flirty twenty-something girls - just like Bucharest was while Romanians had to get visas to go to the European Union. Like Romania the girls are comely and the men less handsome.
Tirana is nowadays clean and pretty. An odd achievement since it is the poorest capital in Europe and has grown from a population of 160,000 in 1990 to a million. Old men in dark suits and fezes. Narrow faces. 

I am so lucky. Two weeks ago the temperature was 46 degrees Celsius says Tomi but while I was in Belgrade on my way here the weather broke and it is an acceptable 28 or 30. Nevertheless I decided to stick to my plan to escape to the mountains and the lakes. Tomi decides to take me and show me around.

Tirana at night had an astonishing vibe, utterly unlike anywhere else. Unlike Romania it's effortlessly cool. And it feels exciting. It was eight years ago when I was last in the city and it has even more bars and restaurants. The Italian fascist government buildings painted terracotta and ochre and the cool villas built before the war do not feel like anywhere else, nor the pyramid intended as a mausoleum to the Stalinist Maoist dictator Hozha. I know all the former Communist capitals and it's not like any of them. It's a bit like Turkey I suppose. Balkan certainly but not Yugoslav. Yugoslavia has the ersatz Westernness of a 1970s Yugoslav lounge lizard smoking a Western cigarette and wearing a gold medallion.

Tirana doesn't feel Western unlike the resort of Sarander, opposite horrible, overcrowded Corfu. Sarander is like the South of France. What does Tirana feel like? The imaginary capital of an imaginary country in a good, quirky thriller. That all I can answer.

A postcard from Lin

I am in Lin, a tiny village on the Albanian shore of Lake Ohrid. It has one tiny hotel where village boys drink beer. It has four rooms on the first floor and on the second floor lives the owner and his family. I am the only guest. The lake view from my terrace is as lovely as you can imagine. Sitting by the lake I have it to myself except for a lilting ballad or some folk-pop on the radio and chatter from locals at a table . A fisherman strenuously rows a boat across the dark blue, pellucid water.


Apart from the hotel there is one other place which has six rooms. One narrow street makes up the village and the lake is hidden behind the cottages, coming into sight only for moments.


Tomi said before we got here that Lin was a tourist village. Nothing could be less enticing but it scarcely is. Tourism is just starting and this is actually, I'm ashamed to say, an advantage. It means it has this one restaurant-hotel-bar, opened last summer. Three other places at least are being built. A coach party stopped here and passers by come here for lunch. Like the lovely bays I saw in 2008 that are now ruined this place will lose its charm in five years.


Tomi took me to Podradec a pleasant, well-mannered lakeside resort, Broadstairs not Margate, and then the nearby village of Tushemisht, where we ate fish and drank rakia and some good wine. After lunch Tomi showed me Hoxha's villa, one of three he had in the area, set where a mountain river enters the lake. Newly weds are being photographed. A restaurant with two handsome stuffed bears, one clapping. 

Tomi believes in 'enjoying the life' as he has done since he went AWOL while on a cultural delegation to Athens in the late 1980s and took advantage of perestroika to bed a young Russian girl. No doubt there was much more life to be enjoyed in Pogradec but I do not like resorts and prefer a couple of nights in Lin instead.

I went for a long walk along the lake this morning. Braying donkeys drawing carts full of hay, men picking dates, The whole bourgeois dream of authenticity. Poverty and tradition.

Lake Ohrid has the great advantage of not being warmer than the early 20s Celsius in August and the great advantage, on the Albanian side, of being some where unmediated, uncooked, where one can find oneself. There may be lakes equally beautiful in Sweden but they do not appeal. I am listening to folk music, the jazzed up kind that young Albanians like.

The Guardian backed the South in the American Civil War

The Guardian used to me a much better newspaper years ago, when it was liberal in the true sense of the word liberal, before it became social democrat. Reading it yesterday I found that it backed the secession by the South in 1861 and said slavery would 'gradually expire'. As it would have done, of course. 

The great Liberal statesman Mr. Gladstone said the South was 

a nation rightly struggling to be free. 

If only the British had won the war of 1776 with the help of a slave revolt. Washington et al would have been hanged, slavery in the 13 colonies abolished and America would now be part of Canada. 

i am still with huge enjoyment reading War and Peace, where serfs are viewed without sentimentality but serfdom is not condemned either. I should very much like to read Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin. 

Here is a very interesting comparison, by a pseudonymous blogger, between Russian serfdom and  US slavery (and slavery under Stalin), based on Peter Kolchin's work. It includes these insights:

Kolchin makes very clear that Russian serfdom was much more like chattel slavery than its medieval precursor. Medieval serfs existed in much more complex social arrangements and generally had relatively static obligations. Russian serfs were literally owned and far more subject to the whims of their owners. 

Kolchin characterises both American slavery and Russian serfdom as responses by elites on the periphery of the capitalist world to labour shortage coming from demand for products of labour coupled with low population density. In both cases, the cost of coercion ‘paid off’ economically, particularly as there was deemed to be no moral cost. Kolchin has an excellent sense of how differently embedded in their different societies American slavery and Russian serfdom were (for example, the slaves lived in a slaveholder’s world, the serf’s in a peasant’s world; American slaveholders were much more effective and empowered as a social group than Russian serfowners; American slavery was vibrant and expanding, Russian serfdom was a system in decay).

It's interesting to see that US slaves were much better fed than European workers and marginally better fed than workers in the American North.

Red wine is good for you

A Glass Of Red Wine Is The Equivalent To An Hour At The Gym, Says New Study

This is a serious story in the press, I think. Click here and decide for yourself.

I recall that in 1990 a French professor of cardiology said that drinking 'a small amount' of red wine each day was beneficial for the heart. When he was asked what he meant by a small amount he said, 

'Oh, no more than a bottle or so.'

Yet some people, like my sister, deny that the French are the most civilised people in the world. 

Weekend in the Delta

‎The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

Marc Chagall

Rains finally came. The dog days came to a pause for two days but Bucharest was still hot. We drove to Tulcea - the quiet of a small town in a poor province on a summer afternoon - and took the speed boat to Chilia which gives its name to one of the three branches of the Danube delta. The Danube which is a polite city river when it runs through Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade finally polyfurcates before it reaches the Black Sea. The little visited delta is the place where Europe reaches an end. It's possibly the last truly wild part of the continent.

Green and cool.

Pelicans and storks. Wild horses. Wild boars. Even wild cats, that catch fish.

Chilia is separated from New Chilia, which is in Ukraine. Its factories are seen across the river but the ferry crossing was discontinued after the 1989 revolution. Many of the 4,000 inhabitants of Chilia have relatives in Ukraine, but do not see them. Anca Plesca tells me that to do so would not only involve  going to Tulcea to get ones passport stamped but paying $200 to have the customs opened up by Ukraine in order to receive them.

Mirel and Anca Plesca have opened a hotel in Chilia, called Limanul Resort, which has been recommended to us by glamorous friends in Bucharest. Anca Plesca, like most Romanians I know, was reared by her grandmother in a country village and this was her village.

We brought Claudiu Magris’s astonishingly good ‘Danube’ and several guidebooks. They recount the history of Chilia, an ancient place named after Achilles, but it has very little history. One monk left a record that slaves were embarked there in the eleventh century.  A reminder that slavery was universal in Europe at that time. It existed in what is now Romania until the time of the American Civil War, by which time gypsies were slaves. Ethnic Romanians were serfs until the same time.

That's almost it until the War of independence of 1877-78, so called, in which the Romanians were inveigled by the Czar to fight for Russia and Bulgaria. Romania's reward was to gain its nominal independence (it already had home rule from the Sublime Porte), to lose Bessarabia (approximately what is now the Moldovan Republic) to Russia and to be given in exchange a stretch of scantily populated coast called the Northern Dobrudgea which included most of the Danube Delta. The Dobrudgea had little connection with the Romanians but its Muslims, Greeks and Jews have mostly left by now and it has been Romanian-ised.

The Danube delta has 20,000 inhabitants making it the most sparsely populated area in Europe below the frozen north. It was and remains populated in large part by Lipoveni, Russians who had fled to the delta to escape religious persecution in the time of Peter the Great. Lipoveni are renowned for the beauty of their women and their almost limitless ability to drink vodka, tuica, beer, industrial alcohol. They can even drink the turbid waters of the Danube itself. They talk an archaic form of Russian and listen to Ukrainian pop music on transistor radios in the village bar.

But the delta is a place innocent of history and long in natural history. The delta is the third most important biosphere reserve, a term I don’t fully understand but which I think means home for flora and fauna. The Coral Reef is first. 

The joy of travelling in Romania is staying with peasants. 'Limanul Resort' is not that but it is something surprising - it is cool. Cool, until about five years ago, was unknown in Romania. I do not entirely approve but it makes a nice change from most Romanian hotels which are in the most terrible taste imaginable, unless built before Communism. The resort has been beautifully designed by a good architect and design means a lot. It's comfortable and though peasants charge only ten Euros the fifty Euros the hotel charges is not exorbitant. One of our group was shocked it was so cheap. He is used, he said, to comfortable hotels in Transylvania which charge twice as much. Poshness to my regret has come to Romania.

One drawback though. It is not on the water but a five minute walk away, close to Chilia's extraordinary church which is the highest orthodox church in Romania. Why so small a place has so imposing a church I don't know but I imagine that it was a statement that the Turks were no longer masters here. The Turks forbade high churches, which is the reason other churches in the Dobrudgea were built half-underground.

The food at the resort is very good. We ate a wonderful fish dish where the outside of the fish had been emptied and filled with minced fish meat. We had some good fish borsches. We drunk very much local tuica - plum brandy - but was it local? I saw no plum trees. It was at least weak and I drank several, usually a very unwise course of action. The others complained but I was thankful.

This is however not the right way to see the delta. The right way is camping by the shore of the water with mosquito repellent. We saw many people doing this as our speed boat took us through the delta. Solitary men who looked like hermits, visionaries or men on the run from the police. In fact in a country which is very conformist here is where the non-conformists go. They are the Romanian equivalent of hippies but a great improvement on hippies.

This is my sixth expedition to the delta. Once the delta was criss-crossed by natural water channels but more and more canals have been built. They are straight and at times they become dull. At other times, I was reminded of sailing a dhow in a mangrove swamp in the islands of Northern Mozambique. But all this is so close to Europe, is in Europe.

The rivulets are studded by fishermen’s cottages, which fishermen use only occasionally, and where benches are available in the shade. I read, my companions paddled, one of us, who was a professional photographer, took pictures.

The beautiful moments are the storks, pelicans, all manner of birds, which suddenly fly up from the reeds. The lakes are where the birds suddenly fly up en masse, driven by a divine impulse to find happiness.  

Outside the delta empires rose and fell. The Turks came and after many centuries left. The Communists did the same much more rapidly, but in the delta very little has changed. Florin, our boatman, regrets the passing of communism. He is a Lipovan in his fifties. Many or most people of his age and education in Romania feel the same and he is probably right, from his point of view. The Lipoveni always had plenty to eat even in the 1980s.

Florin takes us to the little wooden monastery of St Athanasius, which I first visited years ago. It was founded by some monks in the early 1990s who, looking for a site, got talking to a local fisherman who donated his land for the monastery. Six monks live there now and a charming man called Emil, who dedicates half his year to helping the monks and the other half to working in Italy to make enough money to keep himself. Monasteries appeal to Romanians and lots of people come and go. I’d like to stay there but one can only stay by permission and the monk I speak to didn’t seem keen on extending an invitation to me, even though Emil told him that my companion had made a substantial donation to a monastery in Bucharest.

There are, Emil says, a number of hermits living in the delta, saying Mass alone. Two of them come to this monastery for food from time to time. The others subsist by themselves. Since I first set foot on Romanian soil in 1990 I have been enchanted by the place but now I start to see that it is the other worldly religiosity of the people, their mysticism, that makes this country so remarkable. All our life long we go from one spot of holy ground to another, according to John Updike. This is even more true in Romania than elsewhere.

When I go next time I’ll not go to the Sulina channel I prefer the part of the 'old Danube channel' and Mila 23. It’s more than a decade since I first stayed there and it has become more now touristified. We heard the little towns of Sulina and Sf. Gheorghe are in the same case. PSD politicians have bought the land and development is going on, though slowly. 

Our third and last day was a beautiful trip via Mila 23 to Tulcea and then a drive through small roads to the great seaside resort of Mamaia. The heat was intense. It was Sunday. We stopped at the famous mosque at Babadag, the oldest in Romania.  Absolute silence in the insufferably hot little place. The mosque is closed. So was the Museum of Oriental (meaning Muslim) Art and Artefacts. No-one was insight except for two boys who pleaded with us for a leu (15p). One said there were no problems between Muslims and Christians in the town. The Muslims were gypsies, by the way. This is not the story I'd read about that week in the press, which said the Muslim gypsies are ostracised by the other ethnic groups in the town, the Romanians, Tatars, Lipoveni, Hungarians, Greeks and even the rest of the gypsies.

On we drove and came at last to the ruined Roman city of Histria. Histria is, as Dr. Johnson said of the Giants’ Causeway, worth seeing but not worth going to see. But we were only ten miles away. Some pillars, some statues, a lot of communist renovation. The sea is not in sight to give a lonely melancholy to the place, but a melancholy and sense of desertion exists. Two charming students, the girl a shy beauty who does not know she is good-looking, gave us a questionnaire to fill in about how we would react if we saw a frog, a snake, a fox or a scorpoion among the ruins. i felt loving and pure saying I would interact in a friendly way with each. Some benighted people ticked the box that said they would kill the snake. British twenty-year old students, even making allowance for the fact that they are science side not arts side, would not be nearly so innocent as these two.

I shall go back but next time to stay in simple places and find somewhere in the little dead town of Sulina. Sulina is a place that was briefly important after an international Danube Commission was housed there at the end of the (first) Crimean War and until the harbour silted up. One of my friends once spent a week there. When she came back I asked her if Sulina had a beach and she replied, apologetically,

Yes it has, but it's completely uncommercialised.

i must hurry in the hope that this is still the case.