What would Churchill or Thatcher have thought of Trump?

I think Winston Churchill would have liked Donald Trump, despite his teetotalism.  Churchill who suggested to his cabinet in 1955 "'Keep England White' - that would make a good election slogan" would have liked the idea of Trump's wall and illegal immigrant policy, agreed that immigration has been a disaster for Europe, shared his enthusiasm for Israel and probably have agreed that Communist China is the big threat. 

What would Margaret Thatcher have thought of Trump? She would have handled him very well, for sure.

And Disraeli? Disraeli would have lavished Donald Trump with outrageous flattery and run rings around him, I think, though it is not as easy to run rings around him as it might look.

Quotations

Everyone carries his parents around inside of him.
Eric Berne


Modern persons abandon myth and creed alike in favor of the subtler projections of ideological and social prejudice.
David Bentley Hart


Losers have goals.
Winners have systems.
Scott Adams.



A loser doesn’t know what he’ll do if he loses but talks about what he’ll do if he wins and a winner doesn’t talk about what he’ll do if he wins but knows what he’ll do if he loses.
Eric Berne

Judge Kavanaugh hearings: #Metoo is left's riposte to MAGA

I said this week on this blog that Donald Trump would change America as much as Reagan did, unless the left found an effective response to him and I did not think either socialism or identity politics would be effective. 

I was forgetting something I had already worked out: Feminism and #metoo will be the Democrats' response to Trumpism. 

A response that might succeed.

I wish I had time to follow the hearings of the U.S. Senate Judicial Committee. Everyone says they demean America. I thought the speeches I saw, by Messrs. Graham, Cruz and especially the charmingly courtly Southerner Kennedy (until 2005 he was a Democrat), were very good. 

What a fascinating and intelligent drama - ending with Senator Flake at the last moment, after being confronted in a lift by two young women, asking for a one week delay for a FBI investigation. What did Jung say about surnames being apt?

A lot of the background to this is that the Republican senators are white men, mostly

EU says it wants to increase (not decrease) migration into Europe

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the Greek conservative who is European Union Commissioner for Migration, told the United Nations General Assembly on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration on Wednesday that the European Union is working to “enhance legal pathways” to mass migration, to comply with the Global Compact for Migration, and to take many more legal immigrants from outside Europe. 

This compact is intended by the UN to be a "non-legally binding, cooperative framework" for dealing with mass migration. A draft version claims that very large movements of people across borders are “inevitable, necessary, and desirable”. 

The draft was approved in July by all UN member nations except the U.S., which withdrew from the scheme after Mr Trump became President, and Hungary. 

The Hungarian Foreign Minister said:

Its main premise is that migration is a good and inevitable phenomenon. We consider migration a bad process, which has extremely serious security implications.

'How a secretive elite created the EU to build a world government'

The EC, said Nicholas Ridley over lunch to Dominic Lawson, is a German plot to take over Europe. He had to resign from Margaret Thatcher's cabinet when his words were published.

He was wrong, of course. The EU, as it is now called, was an American idea.


So Alan Sked, the historian and founder of Ukip explains here.


I quote:

Despite advice from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, that membership would mean the end of British parliamentary sovereignty, Macmillan deliberately misled the House of Commons — and practically everyone else, from Commonwealth statesmen to cabinet colleagues and the public — that merely minor commercial negotiations were involved. He even tried to deceive de Gaulle that he was an anti-federalist and a close friend who would arrange for France, like Britain, to receive Polaris missiles from the Americans. De Gaulle saw completely through him and vetoed the British bid to enter.Macmillan left Edward Heath to take matters forward, and Heath, along with Douglas Hurd, arranged — according to the Monnet papers — for the Tory Party to become a (secret) corporate member of Monnet’s Action Committee for a United States of Europe.According to Monnet’s chief aide and biographer, Francois Duchene, both the Labour and Liberal Parties later did the same. Meanwhile the Earl of Gosford, one of Macmillan’s foreign policy ministers in the House of Lords, actually informed the House that the aim of the government’s foreign policy was world government.

The Nazis were right-wing

The discussion about whether Nazis were right-wing or socialists is infantile and boring. 

A lake is a body of water that people call a lake and a right-winger is someone who is considered and considers himself a right-winger.


Of course the Nazis were right-wing. Although right-wing originally meant averse to change, which the Nazis certainly were not. Very certainly they were not any sort of conservatives, as surely as they were not liberals.


However, and more importantly, the Nazis were progressives not reactionaries. They were the first people to want a European Economic Community, they were environmentalists, anti-smoking fanatics, very New Age, etc, etc. Eugenics was considered modern and progressive before the war, as abortion is now.


Anti-Semitism is reactionary, you say, and it certainly often can be, but the Nazi reasons for persecuting Jews were to do with newfangled bogus pseudo-science and not the old reasons for disliking Jews. Anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe was linked to hatred of the bourgeoisie which for some reason is considered by many bad people as progressive.

The astonishing drama in America is as good as Balzac or Sophocles

The US Senate Judicial Committee hearings are so fascinating. The Americans do wonderful mini series like Monica Lewinsky and OJ Simpson, though with Sept 11th that joke was no longer funny. These hearings are like something from Balzac. Or Dostoevsky.




Unlike with Anita Hill, all those years ago, in whose eyes I saw evil (as I did with Diana, Princess of Wales) I sympathise with all the protagonists.




The hearings are a Rorschach test for a divided America. If you are a Republican, if a Democrat the other.




By the way, I think deep divisions over religious, moral and cultural issues are a very good thing. America contrasts admirably in this respect with Western Europe, where people sheepishly follow the consensus on abortion, single sex marriage, sex change people, feminism, the big state, mass immigration, restrictions on free speech and much else.

Europe’s Muslims worry bishops

In 1999 the Catholic Archbishop of Smyrna/Izmir (how many Catholics were in his archdiocese?) told the European bishops' synod that a Muslim leader once told him:

“Thanks to your democratic laws, we will invade you. Thanks to our religious laws, we will dominate you.”

An account of the synod headlined 'Europe’s Muslims worry bishops' is here.

Paddy Pantsdown

Paddy Ashdown the former Liberal Democrat leader in 2016:

“I will forgive no one who does not respect the sovereign voice of the British people once it has spoken. Whether it is a majority of 1% or 20%, when the British people have spoken, you do what they command.”

Children in 1966 predict life in the year 2000

In December 1966 the British TV programme Tomorrow's World asked children (now around 60) to predict what life would be like in the year 2000. Their answers are poignant.

What is noticeable is their pessimism and that so many of them were worried about overpopulation and high birthrates. This was exactly the moment when British birthrates fell between replacement levels.

They are well-spoken, middle class and of course all white.

Some of their predictions are very far off but others have come true. This one, for example:

"Black people won't be separate but will all be mixed in with the white people. The poor people and the rich people will become the same. There will be poor and rich people but they won't look down on one another."

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is life-giving

Traditionalism is deadly, tradition is the root of life.

As Mahler said: "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire."

Two Archbishops and the Dalai Lama

The Archbishop [of Canterbury]’s background is, rather unusually for a clergyman, in business, since he worked as an oil executive until the late 1980s. So it is unlikely that he is altogether unaware of these straightforward economic truths. Unfortunately, he has failed to grasp that inequality and poverty are reduced by markets, and that the real examples of exploitation and injustice that he notes are largely the products of attempts to subvert them, either by corporate distortions, government interventions, or discredited socialist economic plans.

He might take a lesson from the remaining Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered, and whom I missed out from the earlier list. In 1381, Simon Sudbury was dragged out of the Tower of London and on nearby Tower Hill had his head hacked off by a mob. His offence was that he had approved of the introduction of more taxes.

Andrew McKie


[Cardinal] Wuerl’s defense is that he is not an evil man who looked the other way about the behavior of a known sexual predator, but merely an incompetent dolt. And Wuerl

The Vatican says the Pope's critics are far right extremists

Vatican Insider, a website run by La Stampa, today suggests that the far right is battling the Pope. In fact the Pope's critics are not far right or even right-wing - they are simply appalled or bewildered Catholics who fear he deliberately chose to ignore the allegations against former Cardinal McCarrick. And, if they are well informed, they think he has been ignoring other sex scandals involving prelates who are his allies. 

This line is very disingenuous of the Vatican, assuming that this story comes from the Vatican, as I do. The name Vatican Insider does suggest this, after all.

By the way, and digressing, what is meant by the far right? Admirers of General Franco or Mussolini? 

The article explains. Catholics who like the traditional family, dislike the modern liberal world, fear the Islamification of Europe, see a clash of civilisations between the West and the rest, prefer conservative Catholic societies to multicultural ones and disapprove of single sex marriage. (I thought all Catholics disapproved of single sex marriage.) 

Changing Europe

“Those beautiful Greek islands, the pearls of the Aegean, now house over 20,000 ‘refugees and migrants’ according to government statistics.” - Taki's Magazine

"Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” too anemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them.
Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity" - Emil Cioran

58% of rapes in Sweden are committed by foreigners

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats came third in the Swedish election on Sunday, narrowly behind the Moderates (conservatives) but did much less well than polls had predicted. 

Some suggestion has been made of irregularities at the ballot. The Danish observer said it was the worst conducted election he had ever observed (and he has observed one in Russia). 

As centre left and centre right coalitions almost tied, however, the Sweden Democrats are in a powerful position as kingmaker.

As background to why Swedes vote for the Swedish Democrats, I came across this information.

"There is data about the ethnic background of convicted rapists in Sweden. Over 58% of

Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons

“Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO.”

From Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in the White House.

 I assume they meant if Nato started such a war, in which case the Russian attitude is what one would expect - deterrence is why Russia and the other nuclear powers have the bomb. But how could Nato start a war IN the Baltic States which are members of Nato.

In any case, there will be no war in the Baltic States.

Quotations

"Burke's point was simple. The dead, he argued, were the guardians of the unborn. By respecting what they have handed down to us we hold their legacy in trust. This is not to engage in some stultifying ancestor worship: it is to respect what has been set aside for our successors"

Sir Roger Scruton

"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society." 
Antonio Gramsci

"In the middle of the 20th century, the [Swedish] Social Democrats’ grim social-engineering project was devoted to the promotion of eugenics. During a near 40-year-long programme, between 1934 and 1970, the Swedish government’s eugenics policy resulted

Referendum to define marriage will be held on October 7

Romanian senators today voted overwhelmingly - 107 in favour, 13 against (7 abstaining) - to hold a referendum on October 7 on whether to redefine constitutional definition of marriage to between a man and a women (rather than between two spouses, as now). 

If the electorate votes for the new definition, as they will, it means there has to be another referendum before single sex marriage can be enacted in Romania. This is very democratic, much more so than the procedure in countries where the people were not consulted before this change was made.

The reason for the vote is that 3 million people signed a petition organised by the Romanian Orthodox Church.

I wish far more referendums were held in all countries on these sort of moral issues which everyone can understand. 

More plot turns in the story about the Pope and child molestation

The story about the Pope, former Cardinal McCarrick and Archbishop Vigano is like a cheap melodrama written by a fervent anti-Catholic.

Many things these days seem like cheap fiction, starting with Osama bin Laden.

It is clear that the Vatican was told about the allegations against the then Cardinal Edgar ('Uncle Ted') McCarrick in 2000, in Pope John Paul II's reign.

Robert Mickens, whose liberal views I always disliked, had to resign from The Tablet because of something he said on Facebook about Pope Benedict XVI (I thought he was unfairly treated). Two or three days ago Mr. Mickens accused Archbishop Vigano of lying to the Pope about wanting to look after his sick brother. He also accused him of having kept quiet about the child abuse allegations for years in the hope of receiving a Cardinal's red hat. 

The Struggle for Mastery in Europe

From Angela Merkel to Macron, the advocates of globalisation are now relying on voters who cling to a social model that held sway during the three decades of postwar economic growth. Thus their determination to accelerate the adaptation of western societies to globalisation automatically condemns them to political unpopularity. Locked away in their metropolitan citadels, they fail to see that their electoral programmes no longer meet the concerns of more than a tiny minority of the population – or worse, of their own voters.
They are on the wrong track if they think that the “deplorables” in the deindustrialised states of the US or the struggling regions of France will soon die out. Throughout the west, people in “peripheral” regions still make up the bulk of the population.

From a very interesting article in The Guardian by left-wing French geographer Christophe Guilluy, entitled Trump’s poll ratings are better than Macron’s, after a year. Why?