Today is Mărţişor: the earth renews itself

Today is Mărţişor, very sunny, 12 degrees Celsius and it definitely felt like spring not winter. On this day Romanians celebrate the first day of spring by giving women talismans, adorned with a red and white string, to bring luck and protection for the rest of the year. The mărţişors, as they are called, are pinned to their clothes or worn on their wrists. If you want to know more about Mărţişor, this link will help.

This is what I blogged about Mărţişor several years ago and below is a picture I snapped hurriedly at my favourite church in Romania, despite its being so restored, the Stavropoleos monastery, round the corner from me.

No man is a hero to his valet, except Donald Trump

The FBI men who protected Hillary Clinton hated her so much that they privately snickered after she accidentally fell and broke her arm when she was secretary of state in 2009, one of her former guards told the New York Post. So it reported in October 2016. 

What a disaster Hillary would have made as US President.

I wonder what they say about the Donald? The important well-educated people working for him, the Fiona Hills and so on, are tearing their hair out and often hate him, but what of the less important ones? We know that his former butler loves him and hated Mr Obama. 

Her security people loved Condoleezza Rice, who talked football and baseball (what the English call rounders) to them. George W Bush stayed in the White House on Christmas Day so that they could have a holiday (and other staff, journalists, etc.) Obama did not.

Edward Norman said that the Church of England changed enormously between 1603 and 1960 while the Catholic Church in England changed only slightly, but did change. Since then both Churches have changed very much. A lot of the changes were the result of the Second World War. The Communist victory in the war moved the Churches a long way to the left and the shock of learning aboyt the German slaughter of the Jews made people wonder about the importance of  worrying about inadvertently swallowing toothopaste before tking communion. 

Plague and divine wrath

As far as I know, no-one has suggested that the Corona virus is a punishment from God on mankind for our sins. I do not suppose for one moment that it is, but the fact that no-one says so tells us that traditional Christianity is almost dead.

John Dryden, the Poet Laureate, was commissioned by King Charles II's government to write his wonderful Annus Mirabilis, to refute the idea that the Great Plague and Great Fire of London were God's judgment on Londoners and by implication on King Charles II.

Neither do I imagine for one moment that God permitted the September 11th killings specifically because of widespread homosexuality in the USA, as Jerry Falwell said, (why not unjust wars, murder, torture, promiscuity, materialism, drugs, divorce or abortion?). 

The preposterous Falwell's remark made me laugh aloud, but I was disappointed that he roused enormous anger among Americans for saying this. He was forced to apologise. I suppose he angered what an American friend of mine calls 'patriotards' and, at the same time, theological liberals. Between them, they account for a lot of Americans.

Christians once thought that plagues were acts of God. Now they think that 'acts of God' is just a term of art in insurance law. They think of the Divinity as 'God the Awfully Nice Chap' (Jonathan Meades, critiquing modern church architecture). 

A left-wing atheist friend asked me if I could 'respect' a God who inflicted on us terrible diseases. A left-wing Catholic friend, who devoted herself for twenty years to helping Romanian children who were HIV Positive, St Mary Veal, told me that she could not love such a God.

Gentle theologian-reader, please advise me.

Once Protestant clergymen and Catholic priests would have suggested that AIDS was a sign of God's anger. Once they would have condemned a married Prime Minister whose girlfriend was pregnant. Now they talk about climate change and migrants.

On a blog I like, I came across this passage from Agathias's Histories, a continuation of Procopius's Secret History, about the plague in the Byzantine empire in 544 A.D. (It is translated by Joseph D. Frendo.)

But that was not the end of their troubles. Not long after, they were decimated by a sudden outbreak of plague.

Some pronounced the air of the region to be contaminated and held it responsible for the disease. Others blamed he abrupt change in their mode of life, because after a routine of forced marches and frequent fighting they had fallen into habits of luxury and indolence. But they failed utterly to perceive what had really caused the disaster and in fact made it inevitable, to wit the ruthless wickedness with which they had flouted the laws of God and man.

'Elites favour federations like the European Union. Non-elites revolt.'

A taxi driver in Belgrade told a British friend of mine, who lives there, that Yugoslavia was the EU before the EU. My friend, who  is an ardent believer in the EU, found this discouraging, as well he might.

'Elites favour federations like the European Union. Non-elites revolt.' 

This is the headline on an article in the Washington Post that points out that, in addition to Yugoslavia, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the West Indies Federation, the Central African Federation and the United Arab Republic are failed attempts at subsuming nations or ethnic groups into multinational states.

So,of course, was the Hapsburg Empire though that in its time was a great success. My British-Hungarian-Russian-Jewish but 100% British friend, and ardent Brexiteer avant la lettre, Helen Szamuely justly called it a European Union that worked, but it stop working in 1918, partly thanks to Francis Joseph's folly in going to war with Serbia but more due to the malign influence of liberal American Democrats. 

There is no end to the harm that they have wreaked in the world, though George W. Bush, a Wilsonian in foreign policy, and Lincoln are responsible for more unnecessary deaths than even the Democrats.

Malaysia has stayed the course, but without some of its original components, to wit Singapore, Sarawak and Sabah.

The tragedy, of course, is that a united Germany and Italy ever came into existence or did not break up before Hitler or Mussolini could come to power. 

It is still not too late for Bavaria to seek her independence or for the Italian principalities. 

On a recent visit to Palermo the first person I met was demonstrating in favour of an independent Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. We were fated to meet. I wished him very well and parted from him with a leaflet and wearing one of his badges. It was not much, but one does what one can. 

Did the end of the Soviet Bloc prefigure the end of the European Union?

I just read Robert Service's The Cold War 1985-91 but I wouldn't recommend it, gentle reader. It is not badly written, but bored me by concentrating on the details of Russian-US diplomacy rather than the things that led Gorbachev to change the USSR. It's good narrative history, using the archives, but does not have interesting insights into the deep causes of the end of Marxism-Leninism. If you like historians to provide zinger aphorisms, they aren't here. 

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev are the heroes, of course. Mrs Thatcher and President Mitterand have impressive minor roles.

There are lots of parallels between the 1980s and now which have an Alice in Wonderland quality. Then Hungary stood out from the Warsaw Pact countries because of Kadar's supposed liberalism (he was a KGB agent all the time, though Dr Service does not mention this), now she stands out from the European Union because of Viktor Orban's Toryism. China, then as now, was seeking to expand her influence in Eastern Europe.

There is much in common between Mikhail Gorbachev's relations with his Eastern European allies and the reception Western Europe gives nowadays to Donald Trump. I see plenty of parallels between the two great reformers. Will Donald Trump end up starring in commercials for Pizza Hut?

The increasing integration of the EEC was a factor that discouraged the Kremlin. The Soviet Union's allies did not want more integration with Comecon but loans from Western Europe. They got them and thereby sealed their fate.

It was the nationalities question, not economics or American power, which brought the USSR to an end, of course. In 1991 George Bush the Elder 

"declined to espouse Ukrainian independence and condemned anyone who decided to 'promote a suicidal nationalism based on ethnic hatred.'"

This disgusted me at the time. Ronald Reagan would not have used such words. It was right both from a  conservative and liberal point of view that Ukraine should be an independent country.

These words from the mouth of an American Republican and theoretical lifelong anti-communist capture the essence of the globalist spirit. It could be Frau Merkel or Herr Juncker talking about Brexit. On the other hand, Bush was being a conservative of a certain type, a sort of perverse Metternichian.

Once the Communists had been the internationalists, but conservatives became internationalists too to defend the world from the Marxists. As communism was defeated by national identity and the war of the Yugoslav Succession began, nationalism replaced Communist Russia as the principle threat in the minds of the international political class who rule the West. 

Democracy won in 1991, but thereafter the masses became the democracies' greatest fear. 

Quotations

Fact is unstable by its very nature. 

Narouz once said to me that he loved the desert because there 'the wind blew out one’s footsteps like candle-flames'. 

So it seems to me does reality. How then can we hunt for the truth?

Lawrence Durrell

We can only hope that this epidemic will produce a literary genius like The Decameron. But considering contemporary standards of literature, I'm not counting on it.

— Alessandra (@alessabocchi) February 24, 2020

For many of these bourgeois socialists, the election was unserious. They should have campaigned in winnable marginals. Rather they tried to unseat Boris Johnson in Uxbridge. They don’t care about controlling the country, as the writer Nick Cohen says; perhaps they have just enough self-awareness to be frightened of it.

Tanya Gold

Ivan Eland: "Trump Should Get Out Of NATO Now, But Nicely"

Dr. Ivan Eland is a libertarian and American defence analyst who once called Jimmy Carter "the best modern president," opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq and called George W. Bush's presidency "one of the worst of all time." I opposed the 2003 war too, preferred Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan at the time and certainly think him an infinitely better President than Bush the Younger. Dr. Eland argues now that Donald Trump should take the USA out of Nato before he leaves office, to save a huge amount of money and to allow him to use defence spending to protect US interests from China. 

He points out that Putin is not a threat to the West but just another tin-pot dictator. Yes.

'Europe 2050: Demographic Suicide'

The Robert Schuman Foundation is a think tank set up in 1991 by EEC panjandrums which came up with a useful report on demographics in 2017. 'Europe 2050: Demographic Suicide' is the title and it complains that demographics are rarely mentioned in EU papers, except in the context of health and welfare spending. 

No doubt this is because the subject is too alarming. It is easier not to think about frightening things.

The Report says that North America should see its population rise by 75 million inhabitants by 2050 while Europe plus the UK may 'stagnate' (a loaded term) at approximately 500 million people, with 49 million fewer people of working age (20-64). That number means 11 million potentially active workers fewer in Germany and 7 to 8 million fewer in Spain and Italy. Fewer workers means not only less production but smaller markets. Old people consume much less than middle aged and young people.

By 2050, China, Japan, and Russia may lose 38, 20 and 15 million inhabitants respectively while India should increase by approximately 400 million people thus surpassing China by at least 300 million people. 

"Oh let us never, never doubt

What nobody is sure about."

The United States should see the number of potentially active workers rise by almost 20 million during the same period, but this assumes that present immigration policies in these country do not change, which they will.
The report concludes:

"European countries look like orchards whose trees were fruitful for 40 years then reached maturity without any seedlings planted. Yet, if we are to invest
and consume, we must have confidence in the future and the need to purchase basic goods. Unfortunately, these two characteristics decrease with age. Deep down, a dynamic society relies upon the same fundamentals as economics and demographics. In other words, the desire to live is expressed through economic initiatives and raising children. Somehow, the entrepreneurial spirit remains closely linked to the family spirit."

What makes people not have children? Many things but it is a phenomenon not only in the West but in Eastern Europe and most (but not all) of Asia. Feminism is not the explanation, or not a full one, because Iranian birthrates are one third of what they were when the Shah was in the throne.

A UN Report also in 2017 forecast that by 2050 around 2.2 billion people would be added to the world's population, including an additional 1.3 billion sub-Saharan Africans. Africans will be a quarter of the world's population and more than half will be under 25.

To better understand what 1.3 billion extra people means, it means more than doubling the present population of Africa, 1.22 billion. The present population of Europe is 741 million, and the Robert Schuman Report forecasts it to fall to around 500 million in twenty years, which seems extraordinary. The population of China at present is 1.36 billion, expected to peak at 1.4 billion people in 2029 and thereafter decline.

People who believe climate change is going to be a big problem talk about the prospect of climate change refugees. A more certain thing is that, as African living standards continue to rise, more and more Africans will know about life in the Western Europe (in particular via smartphones) and have the means to try to move there. People escaping floods are less likely to move continents, partly because they are less able to do so, than people who have money to travel and want to improve their standard of living.

The Passing of Leo Varadkar

'But the humiliation is not entirely over for Varadkar. For the moment, he stays on as caretaker leader until a government can be formed. In that capacity, it has fallen to him to negotiate the EU’s budget for the next seven years. These were never going to be easy negotiations given that the EU’s coffers have just been left with a Britain-sized hole. But if Varadkar was expecting any favours from the EU for his role in Brexit negotiations he has been left sorely disappointed. Ireland has been asked to pay more into the EU’s

'The EU is in trouble and Ursula Von Der Leyen is the wrong person to rescue it'

"In act five of Europe’s self-destruction, the US and the Soviet Union strode on to the stage like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Yet, Europe was at least still the central stage of world politics throughout the cold war that followed. Europeans made history once again for a brief shining moment in 1989, but then Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “world spirit”, moved rapidly on from Berlin to Beijing." Timothy Garton Ash

Ashoka Mody, the Indian-born author of EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts, has written an interesting article in the Spectator about European decline. I quote him.

"Europe is a continent rapidly declining in economic and political clout, as Jean-Claude Juncker underlined. Famous for occasionally imbibing an extra drink, the truth-telling Juncker brutally noted that Europe’s share of global value added will fall from 25 per cent now to about 15 per cent in the next generation; by then, no European country is likely to be a member of the elite G7 group of countries. And as Europe’s shrinking populations also become older, it will be ever harder to stem the downward slide.

David Frost on Brexit: It was only when we picked up our coat and waved goodbye that people said ‘Oh, are you going?’

Lord Curzon said that without India England would be a greater Belgium. A greater Belgium sounds to me very like modern Europe.

David Frost was a senior British diplomat and expert on trade. He was originally an enthusiast for the European project (like me) but became disillusioned the more he saw of the EU. He left the Diplomatic Service and, in the referendum, voted to Leave. He was  Boris Johnson’s adviser while he was Foreign Secretary and became his adviser on Europe when he became Prime Minister in July. Mr Frost leads the unit negotiating the trade agreement with the E.U. 

He gave a speech at the Université Libre de Bruxelles on Monday evening where he said some very interesting things, which you should read.

Tonight I want to give you some reflections on the revolutions, plural, in Europe – because I actually think we are looking at not one revolution but two revolutions, both in government and simultaneously.

So, the first is the creation of the European Union itself – the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648. A new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.

The second revolution is of course the reaction to the first – the reappearance on the political scene not just of national feeling but also of the wish for

The Decline of the West

"The greatest (and yet mostly unremarked) sociological change in America over the past 50 years is the collapse of membership in mainline Protestant churches — from around 50 percent of Americans in 1965 to under 10 percent today. This collapse removed a central support of American identity. Though others were welcomed, on and off, we understood that we lived in essentially a Protestant nation. The dominant churches were the cultural Mississippi pouring through the center of the nation’s self-understanding. When that well-spring dried up, the old culture died in the hard-baked mud. As the theological foundations decayed, so did the cultural institutions built on those foundations, including the novel.


"...From the 18th century through the 20th, authors produced fiction unlike anything the world had read. They did so because the civilization needed them to. Rewarded them for doing so, too. Of the authors who have published novels since the early 1990s, none is mandatory reading. This lack of cultural centrality is not necessarily the authors’ fault — we just don’t read novels the way we used to. The great ambitions have dwindled, and the engine of the art form sputters on the last fumes of its old fuel. Modernity’s metaphysical crisis was not solved — by the novel or anything else. Consequently, we are overtaken by a second crisis, one debilitating for art, as the culture loses its horizons and its sense of purpose."

These two paragraphs are from a great article on the decline of the American novel, by the curiously named Joseph Bottum, in the US edition of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator, which is also a very good magazine). 

The novel is a form in decline because of films, television and the internet. So is poetry and the theatre. But there is more to the story than just creative destruction wreaked by the internet.

Quotations for Sunday evening

"It is better to dwell in the wilderness, than with a contentious and an angry woman."
Proverbs 21:19, King James Version

"I expect that every man has to work out his creed according to his own wave-length, and the hope is that the Great Receiving Station is tuned to take all wave-lengths." Rudyard Kipling, letter to Henry Arthur Jones 

“A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.” Alexis de Tocqueville.

Thoughts

At heart, all political problems are moral and religious problems.

Russell Kirk


Looking back on it I should say that Thatcher's greatest legacy was to have placed the nation and the national interest at the centre of politics. She never succeeded in her most

'After Attending a Trump Rally, I Realized Democrats Are Not Ready For 2020'

I just read this touching article by a very nice sounding American Democrat, who decided to attend a Trump rally. 

When she stood in the very long queue everyone was friendly. When she mentioned that she was a Democrat the answer she received was 'Good for you. Welcome.' 

This was very different from the attitudes of Democrats to Trump supporters.

She found the rally

was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.

She came away with this conclusion.

'As I left the rally—walking past thousands of people who were watching it on a giant monitor outside the arena because they couldn’t get in—I knew there was

The very large silver lining in the dark cloud cast by Sinn Fein: Northern Ireland will not leave the UK

Laughing at all the Irish takes of,

"We vote for a terrorist front group because of legitimate concerns about *housing*.

Other countries vote for nasty populists because they are racist and bad"

— Stephen Wigmore (@stephen_wigmore) February 11, 2020

The very large silver lining in the very dark cloud cast by Sinn Fein is that their winning the highest number of votes in the Irish election means Northern Ireland will not leave the UK for at least a generation. But this would have been extremely unlikely to happen in any case, because Boris Johnson's Brexit deal will give the province the incredibly enviable position of being in both the EU customs union and the UK customs union. It is easy to imagine multinationals moving to the Six Counties for this reason.

Quotations

I am rejoiced to hear of your return to wine-bibbing. Laurence of this college (I forget if you have met him) has been suffering from gouty eczema, well earned: his doctor has limited him to whisky, and he made no progress. So he called in another doctor, who ordered him a bottle of Burgundy a day: he mended rapidly and is now well.

A.E. Housman to Percy Withers (May 11, 1930)


Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

Randolph Bourne


A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Robertson Davies

Item from Cambridge News

'Patricia MacCormack, a professor of continental philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, has just released her new book The Ahuman Manifesto, which will officially be launched in Cambridge today (Wednesday, February 5).

'The book argues that due to the damage done to other living creatures on Earth, we should start gradually phasing out reproduction. But rather than offering a bleak look at the future of humanity, it has generated discussion due to its joyful and optimistic tone, as it sets out a positive view for the future of Earth - without mankind.

'It also touches on several hot-button topics, from religion and veganism to the concept of identity politics, tying these into how the creation of a hierarchal world among humans has left us blind to the destruction we are causing to our habitat and other forms of life.'

Cambridge News was such a boring paper when I was up. Perhaps it still is, but this story isn't. 

Another news story that reminds me that we should defend and celebrate hierarchy and oppose the principle of equality. 

Pelle Neroth Taylor on Clueless Philippe Legrain

Anglo-Swedish journalist Pelle Neroth Taylor writes this guest post.


Here’s an article from Legrain, a Franco-Estonian Englishman.


He starts with what appears to be a recurring argument for him, that the experience of countries with Russian immigrants can be generalized to boat people, using the example of two Nobel-prize winning Russian-English physicists.


We also learn that far from crowded, England is ripe for development.

Nor is Britain “full up”. Even in England only 11% of the surface area is lived on. The problem is planning restrictions that excessively restrict development, driving up residential land prices to the benefit of large landowners and at the expense of everyone else.

So what we need to do is transform this:

into this:

Then we’ll all become rich and start winning a bunch of Nobel Prizes in physics. Also, such transformation will only harm “rich landowners” who are well known to oppose mass immigration, while the development of the 89% of England not currently paved over will benefit “everyone else.”