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“Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
'In ramping up military support for Ukraine, western officials are mindful anything less than a crushing defeat for Russia risks failing to deal with the problem.
'“We need to ask ourselves: How do we want this to end up? Do we want to end up in a situation when Putin will survive and he will have more time?” says an EU foreign minister. “Something like the lull between the first and second world war.”'
Overheard in the Athénée half an hour ago. (I hate calling it the Hilton.)
'How are things in Britain?'
'The middle classes are still in shock.'
'The process of European integration has historically not been a European project but rather an American one.
'It is an American project both ideologically and politically. Ideologically because, from the American viewpoint, the European continent is home to quarrelsome micro-states still trapped in their own history, unlike the United States of America which broke away from its past, discovered the secret of good government in 1776, and never looked back. That secret is to be found in federalism and constructivism—the idea that a polity can be created ex nihilo, based on rational principles alone, and free from the determinisms of history. It is this invented nature of the American republic that gives it its famous millenarianism—novus ordo saeclorum or “the end of history” as it has been more commonly known in recent years. The European project is inspired by the same idea that Europe should turn its back on its own history and embrace a constructivist and rationalist project in order to achieve peace.
'Politically, this deep American conviction that Europe should Americanise has been conjugated since 1945 with the conviction that the U.S. needs to maintain a military presence in Europe to ensure its global hegemony. Without a bridgehead on the Eurasian continent, the “island” state cannot hope to dominate the “World Island,” to use Sir Halford Mackinder’s terms for the U.S.A. and the Eurasian continent. Americans hold their inter-war isolationism responsible for the outbreak of World War II because, with a Hobbesian logic, they believe that their power is the only antidote to the otherwise anarchical society of international relations.'
In 19th century Italy the bundle of rods, fascio, came to symbolise strength through unity, because whilst each independent rod was fragile, as a bundle they were strong. Fascio came to mean union, band or league in the 1870s and was used by groups of revolutionary democrats in Sicily to describe themselves.
The word had heroic, revolutionary connotations. Young men who demanded Italian intervention in World War I formed fasci and it was to one of these groups, with no party affiliation, that Benito Mussolini belonged.
The Italian fascists had imitators throughout Europe and beyond until the end of the 1939-1945 war. Since then there have been few who use the word of themselves.
As Douglas Murray said, the need for fascists (by progressives) far outstrips the supply.
Franco remained after 1945 but he strictly speaking was not a fascist. He was supported by three organisations, one of which, the Falange, was. Salazar was not one either, just another right-wing, reactionary Catholic dictator.
The interview with Stanley Payne in the National Review that I mentioned below quotes Orwell who said "Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’”
'Like the wheel, bronze, iron, the stirrup, gunpowder, guns, rifling, navigational instruments, airplanes, and submarines, the hypersonic missile is about to change warfighting dramatically, perhaps causing the demise of the Navy’s carrier fleet and its air wing—which is what America has used to project power since WWII. There’s no question that a surface fleet, especially carriers and planes, will still have vital functions to perform, but if it comes to war among major powers with thousands of hypersonic missiles ready to launch, then a pilot lifting off a carrier deck would look anachronistic, like something belonging in the 20th, not the 21st, century.
'We may long for the romantic and heroic days when acts of military derring-do were performed by Medal of Honor recipients, but it looks like the future belongs to the ugly, impersonal, and utilitarian high-tech hypersonic missile.'
I just listened to a short talk on the origin of the werewolf and vampire myths.
I don't think those myths were of great importance before Hollywood used them, by the way, but all myths are very interesting and appealing, to me at least.
Even though fairy tales bored me to tears when I was three or four I love them now. Why, I don't know.
Were Neanderthals the original vampires?
Others think vampires are linked to the rare disease porphyria, which makes sufferers flee the sun.
Perhaps porphyria is a Neanderthal legacy.
Vampires are not important in Romanian culture, by the way. An Anglo-Irish pulp fiction writer copied the idea of a vampire story from another more gifted Anglo-Irishman, who had set his vampire story not in Transylvania but in Styria in Austria.
I have no idea if Robert Sepehr is a good authority but his theories about war between Cro-Magnon and cannibalistic Neanderthals who saw well in the dark are worth hearing, though his stuff smacks slightly of the stuff people like Erich von
This is the beginning of an astonishing article in the achingly liberal, globalist, Democrat newspaper the New York Times, about Richard N. Haass, the outgoing president of the oldest American foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, set up by the daddy of American liberal foreign policy, President Woodrow Wilson.
It seems Mr Haas, 71, has witnessed a shaft of light before the setting of the sun.
It reminds me of the mystical experiences that Aquinas and Pascal experienced late in life which they said were worth more than all their philosophy.
Everywhere he has gone as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard N. Haass has been asked the same question: What keeps him up at night? He has had no shortage of options over the years — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, climate change, international terrorism, food insecurity, the global pandemic.
But as he steps down after two decades running America’s most storied private organization focused on international affairs, Mr. Haass has come to a disturbing conclusion. The most serious danger to the security of the world right now? The threat that costs him sleep? The United States itself.
“It’s us,” he said ruefully the other day.
At breakfast yesterday on the terrace opposite the National Bank a lady at the next table with a German accent was deploring this story about Old Man Biden making AI woke.
I deplore it too. It seems the developed world is a country under enemy occupation.
She said 'I agree with everything Trump said. Even his remarks about girls. Those girls are only interested in money, baby'.
She thinks Biden should go to prison. I didn't hear why.
I wish my Romanian was good enough to eavesdrop - eavesdropping is the best source of writing material.
A Romanian friend, who publishes novels in America and has to keep her liking for Donald Trump a secret if she wishes to continue to be published, says AI 'already is woke. I use it.'
The US Democrats and Western progressives are like an army of killer zombies.
I should keep telling you what taxi drivers say about the Ukrainian war. The last two once again divide the blame but think America provoked Russia. The second talked about how badly ethnic Romanians are treated in Ukraine. And how much money given to Ukraine is stolen.
One hears both those points quite often. Both are true but I remember an American who lives here getting angry when I mentioned the stealing. He's a Democrat. He has lived here eighteen years but has not learnt cynicism.
It is naivete which runs right through American foreign policy, like the word Southend through a stick of rock .
A close Romanian friend told me last night that there is no hope for West and suddenly for the very first time after years of doomsaying, I felt a cold chill of something like despair.
But I refuse to despair.
She has and moved to the countryside, and a village with a convent, to escape modernity.
I said that Bucharest was my refuge and by British standards it is one.
For the time being.
It's a bit like the civilised, Christian Britons after the Romans left, waiting for the German barbarians.
That was the moment when King Arthur fought and we should too.
He is at least a beautiful heroic myth.
Here is something good but very frightening that I read just now in an article by William Lind called The Future of War.
<The origin of fourth-generation war lies not in technology nor in tactics, but in a vastly larger phenomenon: a growing and near-universal crisis of the legitimacy of the state. All around the world, the state has become a prisoner of a new class—an elite class that can’t make things work, that uses its wealth and power to insulate itself from the consequences of things not working, and which cares about only one thing: remaining the elite.
The non-elite majority is seeing through the game and trying, where they are allowed, to vote the bastards out; hence the victory of President Donald Trump in 2016. But the whole elite rallies to defend its position, often by destroying the person who threatened to topple it. And when populist forces do score a victory, the deep state mobilizes to thwart them at every turn. Eventually, ordinary people just switch the whole thing off.
But that “thing” includes their primary loyalty. Instead of giving it to the state, which they now view as illegitimate, they bestow it, as before Westphalia, on a wide variety of alternatives: on races and ethnic groups, religions and cults, business enterprises (legal and illegal), gangs, regions, causes such as “animal rights” and radical environmentalism—again, the list is endless. And many of these people, who would never fight for the state, willingly, even eagerly, fight for their new primary loyalty. (The environmentalist who engages in “tree spiking” by burying a metal rod in a tree, hoping to kill a logger, is committing an act of war, not just a crime.)
And so states dissolve in a many-sided civil war, returning one former state after another to a Hobbesian state of nature, a place where life is dominated by wandering groups of armed men taking whatever they want from anyone too weak to resist.>
