Sunday 21 May 2023

Foreign

George Santayana: “What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world?”

Anthony Powell: “The English . . . never really believe in the existence of the world around them.” He meant by this abroad. How different the English are now, thoroughly globalised and Americanised. More has been lost than gained.

King George VI to W.H. Auden: 'Abroad is bloody'.

Friday 19 May 2023

I hope Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Junior is elected US president

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Junior is the candidate I hope wins. 

He'd rescue his party from Woke and authoritarianism. He'd rescue the world from the Biden, neo-cons and the US military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about as he stepped down in favour of his Uncle John.

He says “President Trump [is] blamed for a lot of things that he didn’t do,” but he is most certainly to “blame for the lockdown.” The lockdown was “the worst thing that he did to this country, to our civil rights, economy and middle-class.”

His views on the Ukrainian war are here.

Thursday 18 May 2023

Quotations

"When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?''
Sellars & Yeatman said: "Obviously Adam."

"The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back."
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Tuesday 16 May 2023

As Alan Clark said, the Tory party was always a blowsy whore

It is reported in the Spectator that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (Conservative) does not agree with Conservative MP Danny Kruger’s assertion yesterday that ‘the family – held together by marriage, by mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children and the sake of their own parents and for the sake of themselves – is the only possible basis for a safe and successful society’.  Mr Kruger’s speech is here.

Sir Simon McDonald thinks Great Britain's only option is to be close to the US. Why don't the British be isolationists, enemies with no-one except the IRA, terrorists, people smugglers and illegal immigrants?

Sir Simon McDonald, former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, is the man who said Boris Johnson was lying about the aptly named Chris Pincher and therefore triggered Boris's fall. 

According to Boris Johnson 's biographer Tom Bower, he tried to undermine Boris when he was Foreign Secretary, a job Theresa May had given him to destroy him. Now he is Master of Christ's College, Cambridge. 

Interviewed by the New Statesman, he says that having left the EU, “our strategic choice has boiled down to one country”... “we don’t want to become China’s chief partner in Europe”...“getting together with Australia, Canada and New Zealand is nice, and we can agree violently on everything, but it’s not going to make the international weather”.

He believes Britain has no business sending aircraft carriers halfway across the world in a bid to be a player in the Indo-Pacific. He's right, of course, but he does not see that Britain can be isolationist, can trade with every country and not get involved in conflicts with any. 

Britain is right to impose sanctions against Russia but let's not have sanctions please against any other country, no interference in the Middle East or, save the mark, the Far East. 

Why in God's name do we have sanctions against Syria or Afghanistan, two countries in which our interests are in no way involved and yet which we illegally invaded?

Zelensky suggested Ukraine “blow up” the Soviet-built pipeline that provides oil to Hungary, according to leaked secret US documents

The story is here

I wonder if the Ukrainians blew up the North Stream pipeline. Fiona Hill said it was possible and that it wasn't the Americans or else their responsibility would have leaked out. In fact a source did tell Seymour Hersch that the Americans did it. On the one hand it's deeply shocking that the story has been suppressed - and censored on Facebook! - but on the other hand I don't think it's true. A clever man who knows Russia well and who is strongly pro-Ukraine read Oliver Alexander's rebuttal and was not impressed but it seemed persuasive to me.

Quotations

"I just want to see the universities closed down, except for Oxford and Cambridge. I think they have all been a terrible mistake." Philip Larkin. Oxford and Cambridge are dreadful now too.

"We are American at puberty. We die French." 
Evelyn Waugh

Talking about Belarus

By the way, at the best Christmas party of my life in Bodrum in 2020, I was with an eclectic bunch of people including a Venezuelan (with a Slavic name) who lived in Minsk. He said he couldn't understand what the protestors were unhappy about. 'Everything works fine in Minsk!'

Monday 15 May 2023

Minsk August 2020 led Putin to invade Ukraine in February 2022, according to Owen Matthews

Owen Matthews in the Spectator makes a very important point I hadn't heard before and which I'm sure is true.

"It was mass protests in Belarus’ capital Minsk in August 2020 after an election widely seen as stolen by Lukashenko that prompted Putin to decide that the West was irrevocably hostile to the Kremlin and was hell bent on fomenting regime change across the former Soviet Union – including in Russia itself.


"To Putin and his inner circle of ex-KGB colleagues – notably Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and Federal Security Service head Aleksandr Bortnikov – the Minsk protests were, like the Maidan revolution that brought down a pro-Moscow leader in Kyiv in 2014, entirely directed and produced by Washington. Lukashenko narrowly survived the 2020 revolt, aided by lots of Russian brute force and only after arresting tens of thousands of protestors who were systematically beaten, raped and tortured. But the chain of events that led Putin to invade Ukraine was directly triggered by fear that supposedly western-backed people-power protests that had so nearly toppled Lukashenko could be repeated in Moscow."

Quotations

 


The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.
Henry Miller (Stand Still Like the Hummingbird)

Sunday 14 May 2023

Socialist genocide

Literary historian George Watson cited an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels called "The Hungarian Struggle" and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and commented that "entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution against the bourgeoisie, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." One book review criticized this interpretation, maintaining that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is ... at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." Talking about Engels' 1849 article, historian Andrzej Walicki states: "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide." Jean-François Revel writes that Joseph Stalin recommended study of the 1849 Engels article in his 1924 book On Lenin and Leninism. My source for all this is Wikipedia.

Romanians were certainly one nation Engels considered unfit, as Larry Watts explains in his 'With Friends Like These'.

Wikipedia gives various estimates by historians of how many people died because of Communism, ranging from 10-20 million to 148 million. They include these.

Quotations

Christian Nestell Bovee, Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies (1857): “Next to God, we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth having.” I agree.

William Butler Yeats, The Land of Heart's Desire:
“Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.”

A.E. Housman: “I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word.”

Derek 
Turner: "After a short and frantic storm, the sun has come back out, and cherry blossom lies in deep pink and white drifts like slain chivalry."

Peter Hitchens today on his blog: "Did Jesus want Britain to increase its population by seven million people in 20 years? That is the number of migrants who have come to this country in that period, utterly and permanently changing the country in many ways."

Will Trump return and would this be a good thing?

George Kennan had a very great mind. He was one of the very, very few genuine conservatives that America ever produced. He was the American diplomat who invented the doctrine that the Soviet Union had to be contained when in February 1946 he sent an 8,000-word telegram to the State Department known as the Long Telegram. Soviet policy, Kennan argued, was “neurotic,” rooted in Russian insecurity, Communist ideology, and the need to sustain “dictatorship.” Because of their “Oriental secretiveness and conspiracy,” the Russians would manufacture enemies and act aggressively. That's still true. Resisting Russian“expansion” and “aggression” was a necessity, he said - that was true then and now.

But he did not support the cold war, as it was waged at least, opposed the arms race, opposed the Vietnam war and vehemently opposed extending Nato in the 1990s, predicting that it would lead to war which would make people say we were right to expand Nato when in fact the reverse would be true.

The three most important things now in world politics are to end the war in Ukraine as fast as possible before Ukraine is wrecked, to contain Russia without a cold war or arms race and to avoid a cold war with China.

For all his great faults and failures. Donald Trump is the only candidate for the American presidency I can imagine achieving these three.

Saturday 13 May 2023

'Russia must be isolated. Utterly walled off,’ said the Russian. ‘When Putin falls, the new regime will be the same as the old’

At an Estonian literary festival in June a discussion about Russia was held between a journalist, a Russian exile and an Estonian politician. I learnt this in the British magazine Country Life, of all places, while sitting in a café in Lviv googlng the Estonian liqueur I was drinking.


"‘Russia,’ the Russian said, ‘must be isolated. Utterly walled off. Let the world forget Russia.’ There was no murmur of protest, so he continued: ‘The state must be declared rogue, a terrorist organisation. You don’t deal with it. Because when Putin falls, and he will, the new regime will be the same as the old one, with another figurehead.’


"Russia missed its chance to change in the 1990s and what the Estonian MP called the ‘Chekist state’ would rule Russia forever; the people are too miserable, poor and ill-educated to protest."

Thursday 11 May 2023

Quotations

"Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly." Marcus Aurelius

"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare; if common, it must become mean." George Santayana

“The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.” C.S. Lewis

"If diversity is a good thing, then diversity of thought must be regarded as the greatest good of all." Douglas Murray

"It is given to none of us to see more than a fraction of a shadow of the truth." Stanley Baldwin

AJ (@iamnotshouting):
@rubyhamad I am a brown and like you from the ME. When I migrated here I attended schools, roads, hospitals that were built by the hard work and taxes of generations of white Australians. Yet I was treated equal. For that reason, I don't act like an insulting & uppity ingrate. How about you?

"There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory—when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption,--barbarism at last."
Lord Byron

What a shame

 


Tuesday 9 May 2023

A poetic and hunting photograph of the London Underground in 1890

 





When Lord Salisbury was Prime Minister. 

(Looking back, he seems better than any of his successors. He said, "Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.")

Monday 8 May 2023

Coronation



"... it has to be said that royal births, weddings and deaths are probably the one time most contemporary Britons encounter religion." 

Tim Stanley in the Telegraph today

"It [the Gold State Coach] may be traditional, and it may look impressive in an antiquated, grotesquely ostentatious, fountains-of-gold-leaf-kind of a way. But by all accounts it is monstrously uncomfortable for its

Sunday 7 May 2023

Watching the coronation again, something they couldn’t do in 1953

The coronation was beautiful but spoilt by using 1960s liturgy and the peers not wearing ermine or swearing homage. 

And the Welsh singer and the Gospel singers. Welby and his Grace of York very unimpressive and the Queen not regal. She cuts a very odd figure. The King is as ever uncomfortable in his skin. For the first time I miss Diana. 

Saturday 6 May 2023

Coronation stream of consciousness




It's a classless, feminist multicultural coronation. How does Welby have such a classless voice? He went to Eton. I want belted earls and dukes in ermine.

The King says ahmen. I say aymen. But he is the King so is therefore right. Perhaps it's right for Protestants.

My father, the Queen of Tonga and the Young Pretender




My father stayed up all night in 1953 to see the last coronation. I didn't ask him if he slept out. He told me that it rained and all the monarchs kept the tops of their carriages closed except for the Queen of Tonga, who thought it a shame that the crowd shouldn't see anyone. 

She left hers open. Beside her in evening dress in the morning sat a small man holding a tall umbrella over the royal head.

This created huge goodwill in the UK towards Tonga which still lasts to this day.

Queen Salote of Tonga became a household name overnight. That summer baby girls were christened Charlotte (Salote is the Polynesian form), a racehorse was named after her and a song was written "Linger longer, Queen of Tonga". Of course, she received the biggest cheers of the day, except for Queen Elizabeth II and her Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.

At a grand party given on the balcony of a house overlooking the processional route, someone asked Noel Coward 'Who is that little man sitting next to the Queen of Tonga? " He replied "Her lunch".

For some reason, the subject of the coronation came up when I was talking to the parents of a German girl who was my first love and I told them that story. They roared with laughter but the girl I loved surprised me by asking, 'Isn't that racist?'

As Graham Greene said, there is always a moment in childhood which lets the future in.




In the 1990s I was one of the small minority of people in England who sympathised with the Prince of Wales when the Princess waged her guerilla war against him. She was mad and bad. He should have married Princess Marie Astrid of Luxembourg, a pretty blonde, and thereby provided the answer to the Irish Question. (Telling Richard Overy that in my interview won me a scholarship to Cambridge). The Spencers have bad blood but nevertheless I wish Queen Diana were to be crowned today.

Is Charles my king or am I a Jacobite loyal to the Stuart Pretender, the Duke of Bavaria? I think I take the position of Dr Johnson and do not know, if I could make the Young Pretender victorious in 1745 by raising my hand whether I'd do so. I'd so so in 1745, for sure, but now? As Boswell said, there have been other usurpers besides the House of Hanover. 

Henry IV and Henry VII, for example. Stephen? William I, most undoubtedly.

Friday 5 May 2023

The way we English live now

 


Stendhal, my favourite novelist after Tolstoy, is timeless

 


The world we have lost - Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore the happy city it is, about his first visit to London. How very much we have lost.

 

'Perhaps the most impressive sight I came upon was when I emerged from the tube station at Piccadilly Circus. I found a little table with a pile of newspapers and a box of coins and notes with nobody in attendance. You take your newspaper, toss in your coin or put in your 10-shilling note and take your change. I took a deep breath - this was a truly civilised people.

'After three months of London, I abandoned life in a bed-sitter in Swiss Cottage, for the university town of Cambridge where survival skills were not necessary, because the university, which catered for 10,000 gentlemen, and a few young ladies, assumed they did not have such menial skills and so ministered to their needs.

'That Britons are better off materially than they were is visible everywhere. But that quiet pride and self-confidence, that national cohesiveness that marked out the British people after victory in World War II, has dissipated. Many of my British contemporaries believed that the loss of empire caused that loss of elan. The mirage of Commonwealth unity beguiled the British people from facing up to the hard reality that Britain was no longer the heart of an empire.

'Looking back at those early years, I am amazed at my youthful innocence. I watched Britain at the beginning of its experiment with the welfare state; the Atlee government started to build a society that attempted to look after its citizens from cradle to grave. I was so impressed after the introduction of the National Health Service when I went to collect my pair of new glasses from my opticians in Cambridge to be told that no payment was due. All I had to do was to sign a form. What a civilised society, I thought to myself. The same thing happened at the dentist and the doctor.

'I did not understand what a cosseted life would do to the spirit of enterprise of a pe ople, diminishing their desire to achieve and succeed. I believed that wealth came naturally from wheat growing in the fields, orchards bearing fruit every summer, and factories turning out all that was needed to maintain a comfortable life.

'nly two decades later when I had to make an outdated entrepot economy feed a people did I realise we needed to create the wealth before we can share it. And to create wealth, high motivation and incentives are crucial to drive a people to achieve, to take risks for profit or there will be nothing to share.'


Shellenberger is the author of 'Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All ' and the junior partner in Musk’s Twitter Files team with Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.



Thursday 4 May 2023

A 'Knocker-up' was hired to ensure that people would wake up on time for their jobs. Mary Smith earned sixpence a week shooting dried peas at sleeping workers' windows in East London in the 1930s.

 


The Queen steered Boris Johnson towards Brexit deal

"After a private walk with the Queen he suggested to officials that she had delicately planted, without saying so explicitly, the idea of talking to Varadkar to solve the impasse.” From Sir Anthony Seldon's (disapproving) book on Boris Johnson.


The Times has the story today under the headline:


Queen Elizabeth ‘helped steer Boris Johnson towards Brexit deal’


Sir Anthony Seldon wrote a book of over 400 pages about Mr Blair's ministry which gave less than a page to immigration, which was the most significant aspect of his time in office. He is certainly a globalist.


So, of course, is Mr Johnson.


Both men had to resign last year. Sir Anthony stepped down as Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University after what the Daily Telegraph called 'serious financial mismanagement', though he was not personally to blame for it.


Before that he was headmaster of the minor public school Wellington. He is the son of Arthur Seldon, whose free market ideas influenced Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, but he is not a typical establishment figure, if that means descended from landed gentry, being the grandson of penniless Jewish immigrants or refugees from Tsarist Russia (the Ukraine).

He writes in the style, or lack of it, of a civil service white paper. He likes David Cameron and loathes Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings. 

He supported, of course, Remain.

This is from an interview with him by Tim Adams in the Observer.

'Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma “lights up the room”, but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.

'Of the 57 people who have held the highest office, Seldon suggests, Johnson was probably unique in that he came to it with “no sense of any fixed position. No religious faith, no political ideology”. His only discernible ambition, Seldon says, was that “like Roman emperors he wanted monuments in his name”.

'“To those many people who say, ‘Of course he believed in Brexit’, the evidence is absolutely clear,” Seldon says. “From the beginning it was striking that he believed that there was a cause far higher than Britain’s economic interests, than Britain’s relationship with Europe, than Britain’s place in the world, than the strength of the union. That cause was his own advancement.”'

Boris Johnson disapproved as strongly as Mr Adams 
of what the latter calls "the xenophobic – and untrue – scaremongering that Turkey was about to join the EU". Sir Anthony reports that, because of this,  Boris Johnson "wanted to come down to London and apparently punch Cummings”. In fact, Turkey is supposed to join the EU one day.

'“There has never been a prime minister who has been so weak to have ceded so much power to a figure like Cummings. Here was someone who went ahead and removed the chancellor of the exchequer, to replace them with someone more biddable. Who knocked out the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, appointing someone unable to assert himself. Who tried knocking out and appointing his own person as governor of the Bank of England, and as head of MI6. While all the time expressing contempt for Johnson.”'

Yes, true. This was not cabinet or parliamentary government. It was disgraceful. 

I think Dominic Cummings, who has never been a Tory, was a very good thing, all the same.

Compare him with Theresa May's advisers who ruled her as much as he did Boris. 

He blazed like a meteor and is gone and now the Conservatives are empty of ideas or talent.

Boundaries are necessary for people and peoples

Boundaries and borders are essential. They make freedom and civilisation possible.

Quotations

"One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts." C.S. Lewis

"Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut." Jean Giraudoux

"She was also incapacitated by much of daily life and had 'no aptitude whatsoever' for domesticity." Sybille Bedford. True of me too, but at least I am a man.

"The man who chases two rabbits catches neither." Confucius

Retweeted 5 years ago today by historian Tom Gallagher (@cultfree54): "It is wired into the DNA of folk in this part of Europe just how precarious life, freedom, and property are. Many of those who head West must be flabbergasted at the unnecessary risks supposedly mature societies are taking with their future well-being. https://t.co/Dwe4ERtnbB"


Current events make a lot more sense once you accept that demons literally exist & are actively roaming the Earth.


Be prepared, there is a small chance that our horrendous leadership could unknowingly lead us into World War III.

...We negotiated a ceasefire in parts of Syria which will save lives. Now it is time to move forward in working constructively with Russia!