Quotations

"The return to the office is well under way, just as summer in the northern hemisphere begins. Pretty soon, people will be able to resume the habit of staring wistfully out of the window, hoping it will still be sunny at the weekend." The Economist today.

"Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door." Saul Bellow

"Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past." George Orwell, 1984

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.” (Aldous Huxley, lecture to the Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961)

Susan Michie shows that lockdowns, climate alarmism and communism fit together

"And the third thing is people’s behaviour. That is, the behaviour of social distancing, of… making sure there’s good ventilation, or if there’s not, wearing face masks, and [keeping up] hand and surface hygiene. We will need to keep these going in the long term, and that will be good not only for Covid but also to reduce other [diseases] at a time when the NHS is [struggling]… I think forever, to some extent…"

These words said recently on Channel 5 News by Susan Michie, who sits on the ill named SAGE, a committee of scientists that advises the British government on scientific questions, suggested that she saw social distancing and mask wearing as never coming to an end. 

She is a "health psychologist", by the way, not a hard scientist, still less a medic.

She says her words were taken out of context. 

As Enoch Powell said, all quotations are taken out of context.

What interests me is that she is apparently a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. 

Imagine - a card-carrying member of the Communist Party! - almost as old fashioned as a Jacobite, but unlike Jacobites, very malign.

Trump proven right in 9 out of 10 contentious claims - but not when he said he closed the Southern border

Seven out of ten important claims by Donald Trump, which were widely said to be untrue, were in fact true, according to an article this week in Unherd.

In fact, preliminary results from a study show hydroxychloroquine does help prevent infections with Covid. Whether Critical Race Theory is "a disaster for our schools and our country" is a matter of judgment but I find it hard to imagine any serious person doubting that it is, so I make that 9/10 not 7/10.

The article begins 

"Former President Trump was no stranger to bending the truth" 

but I imagine he was quite a lot less mendacious than his successor, who lies without shame. Think of Mr Biden's repeated lie that Mr Trump referred to Neo-Nazis as fine people. Or the many lies about his CV.

If you doubt me click on this article written by a Never Trumper, for the Democrat source Bloomberg.

Mazzini and a united Europe

I started Denis Mack Smith's biography of Mazzini, a man of whom I knew shamefully little, last night. These are just disjointed quick thoughts. 

As early as 1836 Mazzini used the word nationalist in a pejorative sense to denote chauvinists, xenophobes and imperialists. He thought himself not a nationalist but a patriot and patriotism should serve the wider interests of humanity. "The brotherhood of peoples which is our overriding aim" . 

Less than 5 percent of inhabitants of Italy in the 1840s spoke Italian which is much less than the numbers in Transylvania Wallachia or Moldavia who spoke Romanian or inhabitants of Hungary who spoke Hungarian. 

Historical traditions and sense of community were what mattered, not langauage, Mazzini thought. I am not sure what he thought about Italians as an ethnos. 

Weekend in Turin

I am waiting for the Wizzair plane to take off and take me to Turin and steel myself for lots of propaganda about the unification of Italy being a good thing. Of course it was an utter disaster. Strange how some nationalists like Garibaldi, Cavour, Gandhi, Lincoln, Kenyatta etc are considered good things but most are for some reason considered bad. What idiotic and often malign ideas the people who rule us subscribe to.

Small is usually beautiful but some unions work. France, Spain and Great Britain do. The union of Great Britain with Ireland would have worked had Ireland been given Home Rule. Italy and Germany have not and Europe would be very much worse. 

Quotations

“I do think that future historians will look back on this [lockdowns] and say this was the single biggest public health mistake, possibly of all history, in terms of the scope of the harm that it’s caused. Every single poor person on the face of the earth has faced some harm, sometimes catastrophic harm, from this lockdown policy.” Professor Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, this week.

“We must build back better in a greener, more gender neutral, and perhaps a more feminine way” - Boris Johnson yesterday at the G7 summit in Cornwall. 

"Xi Jinping, probably the only world leader who knows Faust by heart." Edward Luttwak. This is true, oddly enough, though in translation.

“In my opinion, the tailored suit can be the perfect garment even for today’s fast, athletic, and on-the-go generations. All you have to do is skillfully interpret it according to the times.” Georgio Armani in 2016

“‘Simon[Sir Simon McDonald, the Permanent Under Secretary and head of the Diplomatic Service]… didn’t I tell you? The CFI [Conservative Friends of Israel] and the Israelis think they control the Foreign Office. And they do!’” Former British Foreign Office Minister Alan Duncan (a Conservative) in 2017, from his recently published diaries.

Ben Irvine

@BenIrvineAuthor

·

Jun 10

Has any other country ever invited millions of immigrants into its capital, given them equal rights, including free education and healthcare, then been subjected to a relentless campaign of racist socialism as a reward for having the most tolerant and liberal values in the world?

Lily Lynch

@lilyslynch

·

1h

A Palestinian consultant tells me that Belgrade looks just like Damascus and Beirut “in the good old days”, i.e. the 1970s.

Lies, damned lies and statistics (a phrase Disraeli never used) about rain forests and gonorrhea

By this late stage in the Covid-19 pandemic I hope all observant people are tired of experts and the media consistently getting things very badly wrong. 

Great Britain saw how woefully wrong the Bank of England and the experts were about the consequences of a vote for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. 800,000 added to the unemployment figures, grounded planes, super-gonorrhea? 

One good thing to come from the Covid disaster is that it seems very hard now to think that the experts are right about climate change.

As for forest fires in Brazil or news about Brazil in general, where can we go for the truth? 

Not to the BBC or, alas, the Vatican. I am busy but suspected the official story would be wrong as usual and found out from the estimable Zerohedge that of course it was.

"It didn’t take long before BBC’s science editor, David Shukman, brought up the familiar “football field-per minute” metric. The area deforested last year was around 1,552,320 standard British football fields, or over 4,000 of them each day, for just under 3 football fields a minute. While Shukman and countless others have tried to make the topic visually understandable for a layperson – we can imagine the size of three adjacent football fields – our imagination is quickly swamped by a “massively large area that I can’t even grapple with.” Quickly, when we scale those minutes to hours and days, we get the impression that huge areas of this important forest is melting away faster than ice cream on a hot summer’s day.

"But we already know that the Amazon forest alone is some 5,500,000 m2 large, the portion within Brazil’s borders some 4,000,000 m2. What was deforested last year, then, was less than 0.3% of the Brazilian forest left standing. Now, does it still sound like an incredibly vast amount? If we estimate that farmers and loggers deforest a similar amount in the next few years, and we ignore potential runaway feedback processes for a minute, Brazilians have enough forest for 360 years. We know enough about economic development and Kuznets curves to know that Brazilians won’t mindlessly deforest the Amazon for that long."

"Lies, damned lies and statistics" seems to originate with the radical politician Sir Charles Dilke, of the Three Beds Scandal fame.

Rod Dreher in Bucharest

Good readers, I think it was Borges who said, are very black swans. I have such a swan in Toma, who comments brilliantly on my posts and is probably more interesting than my stuff. He just alerted me in a comment to the fact that Rod Dreher was in Bucharest at the weekend and has written about it in a very interesting piece.

Rod Dreher's ideas are very similar to mine and I too want to write to explain to Romanians how much they have here that they are in danger of losing because of the influence of the West.

"The peoples of this part of the world looked to the West for hope and direction when they suffered under Communist dictatorship. They still hold the West in high esteem. Yet they also experience a great deal of Western arrogance, mostly from western Europeans, but also Americans — liberal elites who treat them like primitive children who need to be taught how to be proper moderns. Perhaps the main source today of Western contempt has to do with the natural conservatism in this part of the world vis-à-vis LGBT rights. Billionaire George Soros, among others, has poured money into countries like Romania via his NGOs to try to undermine traditions on the family, and religious authority. I had heard on my first night in Romania, and in various conversations throughout the day, that political elites in Bucharest routinely mock social and religious conservatives, in particular over their views on family and sexuality.

Michel Houellebecq: The world will be just the same after the banal virus - just a bit worse

He wrote this a month ago on the website of France Inter, which is part of Radio France and I imagine is the French equivalent of the BBC World Service,  answering a good question.

Emmanuel Carrère (Paris-Royan; he seems to have found a valid reason to travel). Will interesting books be written inspired by this period, he wonders.

I wonder too. I really asked myself the question, but deep down I don't think so. We have had a lot of things about the plague, over the centuries, the plague has interested writers a lot. I have doubts. I don't believe for half a second in statements like "nothing will ever be the same again". On the contrary, everything will remain exactly the same. The course of this epidemic is even remarkably normal.

 

The West is not for eternity, by divine right, the richest and most developed area in the world; it's all over, for some time now, it's not a scoop. 

...The main result of the coronavirus, on the other hand, is to accelerate certain ongoing mutations. For quite a few years, all technological developments, whether minor (video on demand, contactless payment) or major (teleworking, Internet shopping, social networks) have mainly been consequence (for main objective?) to decrease the material contacts, and especially human. The coronavirus epidemic offers a

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow

“Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.”

Oscar Wilde

"There are three things extremely hard - steel, a diamond, and to know one's self."

Benjamin Franklin

"Only the shallow know themselves."

Oscar Wilde

"The first thing to be decided about a script is whether it is a winning one or a losing one. This can often be discovered very quickly by listening to the person talk. A winner says things like "I made a mistake, but it won't happen again.” A loser says “If only... I should've... Yes, but.”"

Eric Berne

“There was never any lockdown – there were just middle-class people hiding, while working-class people brought them things.”
JJ Charlesworth, quoted without naming him by Julie Birchall

St Athanasius was one of the six most important men in history

Had Arius defeated St Athanasius in their disputes and the Arian heresy been adopted by the Catholic Church, the world thereafter would have been very different. 

I thought, when I stumbled across the tomb of St Athanasius on Sunday in the beautiful church of San Zaccaria in Venice, that Athanasius is perhaps one of the six or so most important figures in world history. 

Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus and Mahomet would be the first three. 

Who would the others be?

Lockdown scepticism and IQ

I am deeply ashamed that I ever gave up on the Tory party as I did in the late 1980s. It had grave faults then and is far, far worse now, but it is the one political camp with a chance of power that has some people with good instincts, a belief in freedom and common sense. This is best shown by lockdown-sceptic Tory MPs. 

Lockdown sceptics are almost silenced in the UK but the tradition of parliamentary government is not extinct and allows their speeches to be reported. 

We have come to the point where we have to be grateful to the media for that mercy.

It is hugely to the credit of Toryism that the Tory house paper, the Daily Telegraph, tends to be lockdown sceptic too. 

Lionel Shriver (an American novelist and Democrat living in England, who supported Brexit) was interviewed in it today. I agree with her when she said this.

“It is about what we have done to liberal democracy all over the world. We used to have civil rights. They were irrevocable. Now, they are revocable.

The decline of Europe is impossible to ignore now

From what, partly because of its enthusiasm for the European Union, has become my least favourite magazine, The Economist.

Just two decades ago, America was reeling from the dotcom crash, China was struggling with its Maoist past and Europe, with its new currency and a burgeoning single market, seemed on the threshold of something spectacular. Today America and, increasingly, China are ascendant, accounting for 76 of the world’s 100 most valuable firms. Europe’s tally has fallen from 41 in 2000 to 15. Of the 19 firms created in the past 25 years that are now worth over $100bn, nine are in America and eight in China. Europe has none.

The Common Market, the Single Market and the Euro have not made Europe more powerful or richer in comparison to the other rich parts of the world. The Euro has had the opposite effect in spades, though it has made Germany richer.  I read yesterday an article by an economic analyst comparing the EU with deflationary Japan which said 

'The shocking truth is Europe may actually be in much worse shape than Japan ever was.'

I have no idea if this is true in economic terms but we should start to think of European decline as comparable with the decline of Japan. 

For certain, Japan is doing much better in general than Europe. 

She governs herself, has her own currency, a thriving manufacturing sector, far fewer graduates than Europe, because of her pacifist constitution she avoids liberal wars for values (much more even than in Europe her defence is outsourced to America), has enormous social cohesion, very low crime rates, is nativist and therefore does not deal with the political consequences of mass migrations. 

She avoided the 1960s social revolution and is free from political correctness and Woke, which are the continuation of the 1960s revolution. These social movements are ultimately distortions of Christianity.

Modern civilisation is a universal conspiracy to destroy the inner life

"...the only problem that concerns you is how to get your carcase conveyed from one place to another at a speed faster than lightning. Fools! Who are you running away from? Alas! you are running away from yourselves—everyone of you is trying to escape from himself, as though he believed that by faster and faster flight he could, at last, get out of the close sheath of his skin… One cannot understand the least thing about modern civilisation if one does not first and foremost realise that it is a universal conspiracy to destroy the inner life."

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) in his 1944 essay La France contre les Robots. (He was a Catholic and monarchist who supported the Free French and De Gaulle during the war from the safety of his voluntary exile in Argentina, in case you wondered about his war record.)

Is technology a conspiracy to destroy inner life? Undoubtedly - and outer life too, as was clearer in 1944 than now. For some planes and trains (not automobiles) provide the best times for reflection but others work on their laptops. 

The Decline of the West

Edward N Luttwak

@ELuttwak

·

May 31

11 Chinese universities teach Greek and Latin. Another 20 seek staff to so as well. Back in the US, the Princeton CLASSICS department has just eliminated the Latin or Greek requirement "to address systemic racism". Truly racist say I. Why not just end it ? Jobs await in 中国

"The past two decades of globalisation are only comprehensible if you understand the role China has played in the process and the deflationary shock that its entry into the world economy has created.

"China’s admission into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 can best be understood in the context of the West’s confidence that history was coming to an end after the fall of the Berlin Wall."
James Forsyth

"It is a minefield on virtually everything. If you are of a certain generation you are not sure what you can or what you can't say. Or whether you can make a joke about something you cannot make a joke, so I will leave it at that."
Tony Blair, interviewed on ITV's Good Morning Britain, May 11 2021

"He was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it"

"I see now that he was one of those rare people who had found a philosophy for himself and whose life was occupied in trying to live it."
Lawrence Durrell on Baltazar in the eponymous novel.

"He had been a fellow-student and close friend of the old poet, and of him he spoke with such warmth and penetration that what he had to say always moved me. ‘I sometimes think that I learned more from studying him than I did from studying philosophy. His exquisite balance of irony and tenderness would have put him among the saints had he been a religious man. He was by divine choice only a poet and often unhappy but with him one had the feeling that he was catching every minute as it flew and turning it upside down to expose its happy side. He was really using himself up, his inner self, in living. Most people lie and let life play upon them like the tepid discharges of a douche-bag. To the Cartesian proposition: “I think, therefore I am”, he opposed his own, which must have gone something like this: “I imagine, therefore I belong and am free”.’

Back in Venice

"He who has truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue." 

John Ruskin. But he can fear censorship by Facebook or Twitter.

John Ruskin said it in The Stones of Venice, a book I still haven't read. I shall start by reading quotations from it on Goodreads.

I am in Venice again, ten months after I spent six days here. I decided today that I find it repulsive.

Even though it has comparatively few tourists, which is the reason I flew over when I have a lot to do. Though there are quite a lot more than last July. It will be much better tomorrow though when the weekenders from Bavaria and Austria go home. 

Ruskin's theme was that Tyre, Venice and England were the three great maritime empires and the first two were merely memories. 

Before Margaret Thatcher (to whom I was opposed at the time) most people would have said England's day was over too. Now I don't think that is true but it is very clear that Europe, though never richer, is in a relative decline which seems likely to be terminal. 

Who won and lost in Gaza?

The Israeli Jewish birth rate overtook the Israeli Arab birth rate in 2018. Israel is becoming more and more religious and nationalist, as religious Jews have more children than secular ones. 

The Labor Party, which governed Israel for decades, won only 7 seats out of 120 at the last election, which was 3 more than it won in the previous election.

The Likud were once the extreme right (they began as the Irgun, a gang of terrorists who murdered many British servicemen and civilians) but they are now the centre.

Hamas, another gang of murderous terrorists, were defeated in the last two weeks far more completely than they expected. 

Netanyahu won and might thereby have saved his career. 

But Hamas won too. 

The strength of the Arabs is their anger. This has not been mollified. 

Mahmoud Abbas, the 85-year-old leader of the corrupt Fatah administration in the West Bank, who cancelled once more the Palestinian elections (presidential ones were last held in 2005 and elections for the legislature in 2006) is the loser. 

Israel has lost too - not in the court of public opinion, which does not matter, but by failing to weaken Hamas's support among Arabs.