A new era dawns in Italy

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

Dr. Orsi comes straight to the point.

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

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

Books are becoming everything to me

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

Lord Macaulay, in a letter to his sister Margaret.

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

Rereading Peacock forty years after

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It tells us inter alia that

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

Aristocrats

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

Henry de Montherlant

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


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

Teffi on Lenin

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

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

Squire Haggard has died

Alas Squire Haggard (Michael Green) has died. 

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

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

The real Charles Darwin was a social Darwinian

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Darwin on race and sex

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

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

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

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

More Thomas Love Peacock

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


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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Gryll. Newfoundland salt fish, Doctor.

There are two sides to the story of East Ghouta

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

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

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

Mărțișor

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

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

More on Mărțișor here.

Footnotes to history

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

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

Enlightenment values as a secular religion

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

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

Germany's "historically unique experiment"

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

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

Quotations

"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld


"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

"He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future."
Adolf Hitler

Life and Death in a Small Town in Ukraine

The history of Eastern Europe is a series of national or ethnic conflicts, one on top of another. Galicia, now Western Ukraine, which came under the rule of the Habsburgs when Poland was partitioned in the 18th century, was always divided by conflicts between the Austrian government, the Polish landed gentry, the Jews who dominated business and the professions, owned 20% of properties and half the property leases, and the Polish and Ukrainian (or Ruthenian) peasants. 


I think Ukrainians and Ruthenes are the same thing but some think otherwise. Gentle reader, please educate me on this point.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli historian, has written Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, about his mother's home town in Galicia, which was in Austria when she was born, in Poland when she emigrated to Palestine, was later ruled by the USSR, the Germans, the Soviets again and is now in Ukraine.

Before the Second World War Jews made up the majority of the town's population and lived in the best houses. They were a minority of 11% in Galicia as a whole but made up most of the Galician business class, owned 20% of terrains of land and held 50% of the leases. They were resented for racial, religious, class and economic reasons, as were the Poles and Ukrainians.

Violence was part of the town's history going back at least to 1648 when the the town's large Jewish population were tortured and killed by Cossacks (Ukrainians) in extraordinarily horrible ways, including skinning Jews alive, tearing unborn children from their mothers' wombs and other equally terrible things. From the first chapter, then, this is a harrowing book to read, though after the town was liberated from the Turks by the Poles for the last time in 1683 it seems to have been largely undisturbed by war until 1914.

The town changed hands several times during the First World War and the enormities committed during and after the war are hard to read or to believe. Witnesses tell of mass murders, mass rapes, torture and gouging out of eyes. These things happened to Jews, especially at the hands of Russians, and also to Ukrainians and Poles, who killed one another and raped one another's women.

Austria Hungary had kept order and peace between the ethnic groups. It was an E.U. that worked. When the Empire fell apart in 1918, thanks partly to the foolish idealism of the American President, Poles and Ukrainians struggled to replace Austrians. 

Jews were seen as having been loyal to the Austrians, which made them unpopular with both nationalities.

After seven years of horror in which a generation of frightened and embittered Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish children grew up, including a brief period of Bolshevik rule, peace returned in 1921 and the town settled down as part of Poland. The monarchy had provided its own legitimacy but Poland's legitimacy rested on ethnicity. It was an ethnic state where minorities made up almost a third of the population and who were inevitably second class citizens. 

So the peace that lasted until 1939 was a frozen conflict.

With the Poles now in charge, the Jews started speaking Polish (almost everyone in this drama spoke German, Polish and Ukrainian) and Ukrainians dreamt of their moment of national revival. Some joined the nationalist party of Stepan Bandera that began to use violence.

The First World War and the Second World War were one Thirty Years' War. This is the background to the atrocities committed by Germans, Ukrainians, Poles and Russians between 1939 and the late 1940s when Stalin asserted Communist control over the area, deported the Poles and slowly suppressed the Ukrainian resistance.

The Soviets took over Buczacz in 1939. The Soviet invasion meant

"those national minorities that had been under the thumb of the Polish authorities, the Ukrainians and even more so the Jews, now had the upper hand as the Soviets used them to enforce their rule."

No doubt the Jews were very grateful to be ruled by Communists rather than Nazis. The local Catholic priest, Father Rutyna, an ethnic Pole, testified that Ukrainians and Jews greeted the Soviet soldiers with flowers and pointed out to them whom to arrest, including teachers and municipal officials. 

"'I saw how they threw their captives like cattle into the truck and sat on top of them with their rifles and took them away. These were teachers, people from the administration whom they unfortunately all later slowly murdered.'"

The Polish elite suddenly lost its power. A Jew became mayor and Jewish proletarians were appointed to jobs in the town hall and police. Poles were anti-Soviet and many were deported. 

When the Germans invaded in 1941 the Ukrainians thought that their time had at last come. Ukrainian militias, some members of which had resisted the Communists, took charge of the town and began killing Communist collaborators and others against whom they had a grudge, but in a couple of weeks the Germans took over. With the help of very many Ukrainian collaborators the SS began a comprehensive massacre of the vast majority of the fifteen thousand Jews in the town, drawn out over three years, as well as killing people from other ethnic groups.

Professor Bartov is writing about the fate of the town's Jews, not the townspeople as a body, but acknowledges that another tragedy was also unfolding, the ethnic cleansing of the Poles by the Ukrainian militias. In my opinion it would be a better book had it covered this story too. 

He says that the Polish government in London estimated that half of the original 48,000 Poles in the town were lost through killing, flight or deportation and that the Poles were pleased when Soviet soldiers returned to deal with the Banderite Ukrainians. I'd have liked much more about this but the book skirts it.

One Ukrainian in the town told local Jews that

"the Ukrainian intelligentsia does not approve of the murder of the Jews"

but plenty of Ukrainians of a lower intellectual level did approve of it and of murdering Poles. They did not know that, had Operation Barbarossa gone to plan, the Germans intended to starve to death millions of Ukrainians that winter.

The Ukrainians in 1941 were repeating the murderous role they played in the revolt of 1648 but I'd have liked a detailed explanation of what sort of Ukrainians killed Jews and Poles and why. I presume that, as in 1648, they were peasants, wreaking revenge on groups who were perceived to be well-off and privileged, meaning this was a peasant's revolt. The Romanian revolt of 1907, always said to have been Europe's last peasants' revolt, and glorified as such by the Communists, was also aimed at Jews. As Solzhenitsyn said, writing about the Russian civil war, Jews were generally wealthier than the peasants and therefore they were obvious targets for attack.


In addition, Jews were no doubt considered by Ukrainians to have sided with first Austria, then Poland and then Bolshevik Russia. 

Professor Bartov has a good gift for narrative and details a very long and harrowing catalogue of atrocities by the Gestapo and the SS and their Ukrainian collaborators. He notes the

“astonishing ease [with which] spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region”

as they killed people whom they knew. 

“For many of them, this was clearly the best time of their lives.”

One Gestapo driver, who in the 1950s was investigated by the Germans for murder, before the case was dropped as most such cases were, told the investigation that he still could not understand why

“the Jews went to the execution like sheep. . . . I shook my head over that at the time.” 

He seemed, to the author, to blame the Jewish community leaders, not the Germans, for the killings.

There are many stories in the book of sickening killings, some horrible stories of Jews who were betrayed by Gentiles and somewhat fewer stories of brave Christians who saved Jews at great risk. There are also plenty of stories of robberies and murders of Jews carried out by young Jewish policemen recruited by the Germans. One Jewish witness said Jewish policemen 

"made a fortune from the torments of the Jews and lived by the slogan: 'Eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die!'"

The most affecting stories are the stories of children killed. They remind me of the unbearable stories of the children hunted and murdered by Gilles de Rais.
One five year-old girl in a school held a German officer's hand and begged her not to kill her, but he shot her first because she was annoying him.

A girl of six hiding in a bunker remembered hearing a Jewish boy saying to a Ukrainian policeman,

“I'll show you where there are Jews, will you let me live?"

A Jewish girl who was given shelter and passed off as Polish, despite speaking the language poorly, and who survived remembered:

"The children always played 'Germans and Jews' . . . and 'Jew hunt.'"

After a time, children at execution sites were buried alive rather than shot, to save bullets.

Meanwhile Frau Koellner, the wife of the SS man in charge of killing Jews in the town, discussed with a German woman friend how they could keep their children from knowing what was happening. The friend, years later, testified to this when, at her husband's trial, Frau Koellner denied that they had known about the killings.

I read it all, but you might want to skip parts.

At least one American reviewer has read this book and drawn the conclusion that after reading it we should be more welcoming to immigrants and refugees. This is obviously aimed at readers who support Donald Trump or aimed at making readers who dislike him feel pleased with themselves. 

Another conclusion is that because different ethnic and confessional groups can get along for generations, when forced to do so by a strong state, before exploding into violence, it therefore follows that increasing the size of ethnic or religious minorities creates a greater risk, in the long term, of terrorism, civil war or genocide.