Owen Matthews, who is half Russian, thinks the war will end in a Ukrainian victory or a stalemate.
A Political Refugee From The Global Village
An Englishman in love with Bucharest's blowsy charms
Monday, 6 February 2023
How will the Ukrainian war and new cold war end?
Owen Matthews, who is half Russian, thinks the war will end in a Ukrainian victory or a stalemate.
Friday, 3 February 2023
Africa begins at Naples
A European Quarter (also: "European District", "EU Quarter" and other variations or by the French: Quartier européen) usually refers to an area of a city containing a concentration of pan-European institutions (notably, those of the European Union and Council of Europe). At present, there are three such quarters;
The European Quarter of Brussels, Belgium
The European Quarter of Strasbourg, France
The European Quarter of the city of Luxembourg, LuxembourgI find this dispiriting.
Quotations
“That England, that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.” John of Gaunt in Richard II.
"If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. … you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing." Carl Jung.
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.” - Oscar Wilde
Ernest Hemingway
"I drink to make other people more interesting."
"Prose is architecture, not interior decoration."
Sarah, Duchess of York on writing a novel: 'I tried to channel Ernest Hemingway by using a Montegrappa pen from Italy.'
I wrote this 9 years ago - now I'd like to read Hemingway and Fitzgerald but time is too short
What great books should we leave unread? I would start with all books by Henry James. Perhaps Fitzgerald and Hemingway too? And T.S. Eliot's poetry, but not his prose. Definitely The Scarlet Letter. Three or four people recently have assured me that Don Quixote is worth reading. I have grave doubts but may have a go. I did start and hugely enjoyed the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, then put it aside but shall finish it. I managed to get through and enjoy even Paradise Lost by listening to the BBC audio version. I started the Fairy Queen when I was 11 which was much too young (or perhaps was exactly the right age). Perhaps I shall go back but I know I am kidding myself.
Tuesday, 31 January 2023
Russia is still what Lenin called it in 1914, the prison of the nations
Russia is the last European colonial empire still intact. Its expansion really began only in the 16th century starting from a relatively small state entity, namely the Princedom of Moscow, and largely coincided with the creation of the first European overseas empires.
Those who doubt the colonial nature of Russia emphasize the differences between it and what is currently interpreted as the epitome of colonialism, the British Empire. In fact, Russian colonialism was very different from Anglo-Saxon colonialism. Instead, it bears strong similarities to Ibero-American colonialism.
Sunday, 22 January 2023
Torture and totalitarianism
'Before being deported as a Jew, [Jean] Améry had been tortured as a Resistance fighter in Belgium. After spending one year beside the gas chambers of Auschwitz, he described torture not as an “accidental quality of the Third Reich” but rather as its “essence.” According to Améry, torture was “the apotheosis of National Socialism”:
I came across these words in an article by an Italian Marxist historian called Enzo Traverso.“It was precisely in torture that the Third Reich materialized in all the density of its being.”'
Saturday, 21 January 2023
Germany's hunger plan to murder millions
Middle aged men stop reading serious novels and start reading military history.
I always intended to avoid this fate, one I associate with boys who enjoyed games at school, but I have succumbed.
History is the subject that tells us most about the world, after psychology, and military history, in a sense, is the most essential part of history.
Grahame Greene said thrillers are more like real life than real life. Military history is also more like real life than real life.
Skipping the war sections in War and Peace is a huge mistake.
Reading about the Second World War in the last few weeks, certain things stand out for me.
One was the German need for food, caused by the Royal Navy's blockade.
Another, closely linked, was that perhaps 3.5 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity, most from starvation which is a very cruel way to die.
General Erich Vlad: 'What are our war aims?' (Answer: 'Defeating Hitler'?)
'Oh! let us never, never doubtWhat nobody is sure about!'
Wednesday, 18 January 2023
Chris Arnade writes about Bucharest in a blog called 'Chris Arnade Walks The World'
"I quickly saw the city was roughly divided into a wealthier, more modern, more American influenced northern half, and a poorer southern half, so I focused on the south, because wealthy neighborhoods, no matter the country, are pretty much the same.I thank my loyal reader Toma for putting me onto this great writer.
"They are all variations on the same privileged theme. All have upscale shops and malls filled with the same stuff. All have bespoke restaurants serving the same food. And all are filled with residents who are careerists who happen to be where they are because that is where they have the biggest edge, by birth. They are best at making money in Romania since they grew up there, but if they ever get the chance to go elsewhere to make more money, they would happily do so."
Tuesday, 17 January 2023
French historian Emmanuel Todd thinks the Third World War has already begun
“It’s obvious that the conflict, which started as a limited territorial war and escalated to a global economic confrontation between the whole of the West on the one hand and Russia and China on the other hand, has become a world war,”
Quotations from King Charles III
Speech at the Prince of Wales Education summer school, October 4 2002
Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?
Putin seems as indifferent to human life as the Kaiser
Monday, 16 January 2023
Paul Johnson died on Thursday aged 94
Paul Johnson and Margaret Thatcher on Putin
‘I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as carry guns. Putin also resembles Hitler in his use of belligerent minorities to spread his power. Am I becoming paranoid about Putin? I hope not.’
Margaret Thatcher, September 2000
"Now we have the new Mr. Putin. I looked at the pictures of Mr. Putin, trying to look for a trace of humanity. I should, within a few weeks, have known better.
Sunday, 15 January 2023
Today would be Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 109th birthday
'Through all our history she clings to us, a poor, half-witted, gypsy relative, defying our improvement, spoiling our appearances, exposing our pretences, an irredeemable, irrepressible slut, dirty when we are most clean, superstitious when we are most rational, protesting when we are most complacent, and when we are most prosaic, inspired'.
Today is the Reverend Martin Luther King’s 94th birthday
Martin Luther King's famous speech “I have a dream” was actually written by Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones, both of whom were said by the FBI to have been Communists.
'Jew-hating Poles helped Jews to murder British soldiers and civilians'
'In the 1930s the anti-Semitic government in Warsaw wanted rid of 3.5 million Polish Jews. Initially they tried to pack them off to Madagascar. But then the Poles hit on the idea of helping Jews create their own state in British-occupied Palestine. The problem was that Britain would not allow large-scale Jewish immigration into Palestine, where the Irgun terrorist group was beginning a bloody campaign for independence in a Jewish homeland. The Irgun’s principal backer was Poland, whose military trained scores of guerrillas, gave them generous supplies of arms and smuggled them into Palestine. So Jew-hating Poles helped Jews to murder British soldiers and civilians, supposedly their allies.'
The body of Pope Benedict XVI was brought to St Peter's by van. Pope Francis preached a brief homily at his funeral which scarcely mentioned Benedict and did not attend his interment
Things I read this weekend
"Politicians are not people who seek power to implement policies they think necessary. They are people who seek policies in order to attain power."
Friday, 13 January 2023
Reading about the German mass murder of the Jews
Wednesday, 11 January 2023
Quotations
'In 1995 the New York Times invited its readers to try to name the era in which they were living. The paper argued that, more than five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the term “post-Cold War era” carried an air of “self-doubt”. The entries submitted were no better and included the “Age of Uncertainty” and the “Age That Even Historians from Harvard Can’t Name”.' From the review in the New Statesman by Gavin Jacobson of The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Sperber.
Tuesday, 10 January 2023
I stole these from Laudator Temporis Acti
A world where there is no longer an elsewhere
'Along with the decline of popular political participation, the mass availability of television – “a distinctly national medium” as Sperber rightly notes – and the balkanised info bubbles of the internet, the second half of the 20th century was, as one political scientist put it recently, “a wasteland of sociability”.
'This isn’t to say that interconnections didn’t exist, but there are reasons the phenomenon referred to as globalisation – the extension over the whole earth of markets and networks of information and communication – was so profoundly alienating. One of the more radical answers came from the French anthropologist Marc Augé, whose Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (1992) described “a world where there is no longer an elsewhere”. Modern life was now dominated by homogenous “non-places” where people spent most of their lives: airports, motorways, hotel rooms, leisure parks and supermarkets. These spaces of eternal traffic and deadening consumption, in which “people are always, and never, at home” represented the real End of History.
'“The space of non-place,” Augé wrote, “creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude”....'
From a review by Gavin Jacobson in the latest edition of the New Statesman of The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century by Jonathan Sperber.