Quotations

"America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization." Georges Clemenceau

Katie Herzog

@kittypurrzog

·

Oct 17

If anti-immigration types want to gain leftist support they should start calling migrants “settlers”

America is the big danger to world peace, obviously

The biggest danger to the world is certainly not Russia or even China but American hawks who want war with the world. 

China and Iran cannot let Russia be defeated. They are next on the neocons' menu and know it.

Andrew Michta is one of the worst warmongers. How can people as unimpressive as him be academics?

Fiona Hill is right to want an opening to China, though I lost my respect for her after she told a congressional committee that the word globalist was an antisemitic trope.

Quotations from Napoleon Bonaparte

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.


In politics stupidity is not a handicap.

I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man. There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.

In a few years, the Muslims conquered half of the world. They plucked more souls from false gods, knocked down more idols, razed more pagan temples in fifteen years than the followers of Moses and Jesus did in fifteen centuries. Mahomet was a great man. He would indeed have been a god, if the revolution that he had performed had not been prepared by the circumstances.

Quotations

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

George Santayana. Well known but very topical, so worth repeating. General Douglas MacArthur misattributed it to Plato.

We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs; we have no place to go.

Golda Meir

I came across these today

Decline of the West

“The real cause of the great upheavals which precede changes of civilizations, such as the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Arabian Empire, is a profound modification in the ideas of the peoples .... The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought .... The present epoch is one of these critical moments in which the thought of mankind is undergoing a process of transformation.” Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931)

The sorely missed Pope Benedict XVI talks in English here about the future of Christianity (as small communities, a bit like Rod Dreher's 'Benedict Option' though he named that after St Benedict).

Sunrise makes the windows of Ceausescu's House of the People pink

'What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!' (Logan Pearsall Smith)

Anca Petrescu, who died in 2013 at the age of 64, was appointed the very young chief architect of Bucharest's Palace of the Parliament (always known here by its Communist name "House of the People") in 1978. It spans 3.77 million square feet and is the biggest building in the world measured by floor space after the Pentagon.

Miss Petrescu worked at the still-unfinished palace until the year she died. She said in an interview in 2012 that Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Versailles were her inspirations for the building, and not North Korean architecture. 

It reminds me slightly of a palace in a painting by Claude Lorrain.

Miss Petrescu said in the interview that Ceausescu, were he alive to see what had become of the palace, "would make the sign of the cross", meaning that he would have been horrified. A charming thought - a communist making the sign of the cross.

9,000 homes were demolished, many churches were razed, 15 were moved on wheels and two mountains of marble were hacked down to build it.

Ceausescu never addressed the crowd from the huge balcony in the front of the building. Only two men did: Ion Iliescu who had him shot and Michael Jackson.

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false

Robert Adams: "Translations are like mistresses: the faithful ones are apt to be ugly and the beautiful ones false."

C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

Marcel Proust: "Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Pope Pius IX said "If a Future Pope Teaches Anything Contrary to the Catholic Faith, Do Not Follow Him!”

“Pope Francis’ pontificate is like a standard lifted up before Catholic integralists and those who equate material continuity and tradition: Catholic doctrine does not just develop. Sometimes it really changes: for example on death penalty, war." Professor Massimo Faggioli, joint editor of the Oxford Handbook of Vatican II

"The tradition of the church is always in movement." Pope Francis

“Rigidity [in the church] is a sin against the patience of God.” Pope Francis

“Let nothing new be introduced, but only what has been handed down.” Pope Benedict XV

“Nothing new is allowed, for nothing can be added to the old. Look for the faith of the elders, and do not let our faith be disturbed by a mixture of new doctrines.“ Pope St. Sixtus III

Lord Sumption, retired Supreme court judge and mediaeval historian, in Unherd today

'War is crucial. Until the beginning of the 20th century, the two principal collective activities of mankind were religion and war. The purpose of the state was to serve the second of those things, but usually the first as well. War is at the heart of the experience of societies. It is what created the state, in that war made it necessary for the state to find a way of organising the resources of a country.' 

'Medieval societies had a completely different attitude towards conflict. We regard war today as an unwanted catastrophe that periodically breaks in on us against our wishes. They regarded war as the norm, the normal way of settling international disputes, and quite a few internal disputes.'

'In the 14th century, the English adopted what I can only describe as terrorist tactics to try and batter the French government into submitting to their demands. They conducted huge raids in which they indiscriminately killed large numbers of people and burned whole villages. This is what we would call terrorism. It really wasn’t until the 18th century that war became a battle between organised armed forces. We’re now reverting to an earlier pattern in which at least one side in any war is a disorganised group of people. Hamas is a good example. They’re semi-organised, and their object is indiscriminate violence because they do not have the resources to confront whoever their enemy is with the same sort of weapons. If you are a semi-state, and the underdog, this is how you wage war. England was 100% of a state in the 14th century, and they still waged war that way.'

The interview is here.

52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered

The Vatican website says that "according to the report “Martyred Christians in Nigeria” issued by Intersociety, over the past 14 years at least 52,250 Nigerian Christians have been brutally murdered at the hands of Islamist militants." British, European and American public opinion is indiferent. Public opinion is mainstream media opinion to a large extent.

Journalist Alessandra Bocchi is worth following on Twitter

German Chancellor forced to lie on the ground at Tel Aviv airport

 

The Chancellor and other passengers had taken their seats on the plane when the alarm suddenly sounded. Everyone was instructed to disembark, crawl across the ground and lie there because of rockets shot towards the airport.

Francis Stuart

"We are Catholics, but of the School of Pope Julius the Second and of the Medician Popes, who ordered Michaelangelo and Raphael to paint upon the walls of the Vatican, and upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the doctrine of the Platonic Academy of Florence, the reconciliation of Galilee and Parnassus. We proclaim Michaelangelo the most orthodox of men, because he set upon the tomb of the Medici “Dawn” and “night”, vast forms shadowing the strength of antedeluvian Patriarchs and the lust of the goat, the whole handiwork of God, even the abounding horn. We proclaim the we can forgive the sinner, but abhor the atheist, and that we count among atheists bad writers and Bishops of all denominations. “The Holy Spirit is an intellectual fountain”, and did the Bishops believe that Holy Spirit would show itself in decoration and architecture, in daily manners and written style? What devout man can read the Pastorals of our Hierarchy without horror at a style rancid, coarse and vague, like that of the daily papers? We  condemn the art and literature of modern Europe. No man can create, as did Shakespeare, Homer, Sophocles, who does not believe with all his blood and nerve, that man’s soul is immortal, for the evidence lies plain to all men that where that belief has declined, men have turned from creation to photography." Signed H Stuart and Cecil Salkend in the second and final issue of the modernist journal To-morrow in August 1924, but attributed variously to W.B. Yeats, Liam O'Flaherty and Francis Stuart. 

Former Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych: Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them.

Mr Arestovych on Twitter yesterday said that rather than get sucked into fighting for Bakhmut the Ukrainian army should have concentrated on breaking through the southern frontlines and preparing its own defences.

 Translation: Google Translate.

Now we are at an impasse. The Russians cannot defeat us, we cannot defeat them. For a decisive shift in the war, either side needs to be able to dramatically increase resources, but there is no such possibility. What's the solution? The Russian leadership is radically increasing its military budget, intensifying production, trying to secure supplies from North Korea/China, improving smuggling schemes and building a “Global South versus Global West” policy. Its task is to hold out until the US presidential elections (November 2024), and then negotiate to his advantage. Our leadership is suppressing business, civil liberties and political competitors, quarrelling with neighbours and key partners, encouraging corruption. It is also trying to establish production, resolve something with military and financial assistance, form international coalitions and support, but Russia, for all its shortcomings, has real sovereignty, and we do not. Russia makes cannibal decisions, but adequate to the current situation, and our leadership is corrupt and inadequate - as our Aspen sponsors and partners constantly point out. This policy leads us to a dead end. Our leadership, in my assessment, has exhausted the limits of its competence a long time ago. We can no longer expect them to make adequate decisions that suit the situation. They don’t even want to tell the people the truth - there will be no return to the borders of 1991, and there will be no Crimea in the near future, but there will be defence, blood, sweat, tears. And instead of making defense easier, sweat, blood and tears expanding civil liberties, freeing up the economy and concentrating resources on defence, there is a tightening of screws, rubbish points and persecution of those who tell people the truth.

Things I read recently

"A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials." Seneca

"You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." Marcus Aurelius

"And the money's only important because it's like the tennis. You don't earn it to

Frau von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, speaks to the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, October 19, 2022

 

I feel like Leonardo

Leonardo da Vinci: 'I awoke only to find that the rest of the world was still asleep.'

War in Gaza, 634

Less than five years after the (Byzantine) Roman Empire had won back Palestine from the Iranians, on 4 February 634, Muslim Arabs defeated the Byzantine army, commanded by the candidatus, Sergius, at the Battle of Dathin, a village near Gaza. Sergius himself was killed. The Muslim victory was celebrated by the local Jews. 

This is the moment when Islam enters history. 

The fascinating Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a Christian polemic against the Jews and one of the very few historical sources, records voices from an otherwise eerily silent period of Middle Eastern history:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying "the candidatus has been killed," and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared." So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible.

Amerexit

Why can't England declare independence from America as we did from Europe?

The 2,500 year old Pazyryk carpet

I have been buying wonderful carpets and recently turned up two antique ones in the loft that I had forgotten about. I therefore was delighted to learn of the oldest carpet in the world, the Pazyryk carpet, which dates from 500 years before Christ. It was found in the grave of a Scythian nobleman in the Altai Mountains in Kazakhstan in 1949. The carpet was frozen in ice and very well preserved. It may have been made by an Armenian, a Persian or a Turk (in that period living far to the east of what is now Turkey).

It is in the Hermitage in St Petersburg. I wonder if the Kazakhs would like it back.

Three American thoughts

I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare and the constitution and Stradivarius violins, and at the bottom of this post I do*, but really I shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half of the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all of Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate--probably as low as about ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable.

Sam Bankman-Fried, a cultural critic better known as the defendant in a trial taking place now where he is accused of defrauding investors of $10 billion.

Friends are the theatres of our actions

'Your reference group determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.' 

Dr. David McClelland, an American psychologist of whom I had never heard, noted for his "need for achievement" theory.

Your reference group are the people with whom you habitually associate. He found that changing the reference group completely transforms the way someone thinks.

That seems easy, to me, but for most people it is probably not so easy and not so easy for me, really. 

The actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov said that he thought ones friends are not the people with whom one has most in common but the people who got there first.

Has the Russian offensive collapsed? We shall see

Michael Clarke, Director-General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) from 2007 to 2015, says the Russian offensive has collapsed.

'All they can do is dig in and play for time, trying not to lose. Come the winter, Ukraine will have to assess its military progress and make political judgements from there.'

Who knows the truth?

Have both sides reached a stalemate? Or is Putin about to attack?

What people think will happen seems always linked to whether they think America is to blame in part at least for the invasion, but why is this?

Michael Clarke said last year that anyone who believes in democracy has to side with Ukraine. I believes in democracy and side with Ukraine, but democracy has nothing to with it - were Ukraine a dictatorship it would be just as wrong for Russia to invade Ukraine. Just as it was very wrong for Nehru to conquer Goa.

I heard him speak in Cluj a few years ago at the festival to mark the centenary if Ion Ratiu's birth. Michael Clarke, I mean, not Nehru. 

I liked him, think he is very intelligent though I disagreed with him on much. He said having Trump as president was like having a New York cab driver as a president, which is true but he said it as if it were a bad thing.

I just withdraw my great esteem and respect for him forever I'm afraid. I just read his penultimate tweet in which he says 

'Modern Russian imperialism is no longer just an academic conceit. And this is not just Putin's war; the present Russian elites really will go on to create Catherine's empire if we just step back from Ukraine.'

If one thing is obvious it is that the Russians are in no position to invade more countries. 

(Catherine's empire of course extended  to the Baltic States and eastern Poland.)

Thank God for Eccles

The sainted Eccles was banned by Twitter for a period, like so many conservative Twitter users, but reinstated before Elon Musk bought it. Some great people who survived the old regime have been removed by the new management. 

Ukrainians and Russians are dying for a few miles of territory - and Ukraine faces destruction.

Does Putin want the war to carry on indefinitely, costing Ukrainian lives and American money? 

I think so.

The Ukrainian population is dwindling fast. Six million Ukrainians have left the country, mostly women many of whom will not return but marry abroad. Russia is much bigger and sustain casualties much more easily - in any case many more Ukrainian men have recently died or been wounded. When peace come who will replace the dead, injured and those who fled?

“When both sides’ gains are added up, Russia now controls nearly 200 square miles more territory in Ukraine compared with the start of the year,” the New York Times reports.

At the same time the Wall Street Journal published an article under the headline “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.”

Ukraine cannot win, unfortunately, but the war reminds me of Robert Southey's 'The Battle of Blenheim', which he  wrote before he changed from being a radical to a Tory. In his day, the conservatives were the war party. They were not in Dr Johnson's day and the right is divided now.

"It was the English," Kaspar cried,

"Who put the French to rout;

But what they fought each other for,

I could not well make out;

But everybody said," quoth he,

"That 'twas a famous victory.

Who decides what is disinformation?

“Do you know [who] the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The U.S. government.” 

U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee (Republican), son of Ron Paul, during a May 2022 Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing.

“So, we’re creating at the U.N. a central capacity to monitor and also have the ability to rapidly react when mis- and disinformation and hate speech is not just threatening our people, our operations, but also, the issues and the causes that we’re working on. But also, we’re going to be gearing up our verified initiative around climate change and developing this U.N. code of conduct on information integrity and digital platforms hoping to set global standards that we can all advocate around so we can collectively work for a more humane internet.”

Melissa Fleming, UN undersecretary-general for Global Communications, at the Nobel Prize Summit in May 2023 in a speech called “Healing Our Troubled Information Ecosystem”.

Change and decay in all around I see but Romania is a refuge

In the western world all the institutions have been wrecked since 1990. The churches, the universities, the armed forces, the legal profession, all professions, the civil services. 

The institution that has failed worst of all is the Catholic Church. 

Even if you are an atheist, as devout Jew David Goodman says, this matters because the Catholic Church is essential to European civilisation. 

After the Church, in a very crowded field indeed the institutions that have failed us most are the mainstream media. 

They are now very untrustworthy political actors who consider suppression of the truth necessary because they are trying to save democracies from the people.

Eastern Europe is horribly corrupt. The press and TV is awful here, the politicians too. A colleague told me yesterday that she felt Western Europe would be a better place for her son to grow up because of the corruption. 

I understand why she feels this. Most Romanian parents do. I told her that Romania was a much better place for him.

This morning

Dâmbovița

 

Bucharest early Saturday morning

Interesting results of Pew polls in 2017 about attitudes in Orthodox countries

Is the US being defeated?

"The United States is being defeated in Ukraine.

"One could say that it is facing defeat — or, more starkly, that it is staring defeat in the face. Neither formulation is appropriate, though. The U.S. doesn’t look reality squarely in the eye. It prefers to look at the world through the distorted lenses of its fantasies. It plunges forward on whatever path it’s chosen while averting its eyes from the topography it is trying to traverse. Its sole guiding light is the glow of a distant mirage. That is its lodestone."

John Simpson anecdote

Once met a British oil exec in Lagos. The day before, he’d been to a disastrous party at a top minister’s house. The invitation said ‘Fancy dress compulsory’. He had no fancy dress, but was an enthusiastic scuba diver and by chance had his gear with him. He dressed up, took a cab to the house, rather surprising the driver, squelched up the drive in wet-suit, mask & fins, climbed the steps, and found himself in the midst of the party. All the men were wearing dinner jackets, since in Nigeria ‘fancy dress’ means ‘black tie’. He fled back down the drive and understandably had problems getting a cab to take him back to his hotel.

The Nord Stream attack was the most important event in the Ukrainian war, but journalists are sublimely incurious

I am shocked at how naïf I am. When I read the news articles blaming Russia for having attacked Nord Stream I did not dismiss them out of hand but half believed them. I don't think anyone thinks so now because the assertion is absurd. But instead it is forgotten.

Only two counties can be responsible - America or Ukraine. Fiona Hill thinks it is Ukraine. Seymour Hersh has a source in the US government who says it was the Americans. Vladimir Putin is sure it was them not the Ukrainians and though he tells whopping lies sometimes he also has an unpoliticianly habit of saying what he thinks.

But this is of enormous importance either way. The explosions were the most significant thing that happened so far in this awful war.

Either America destroyed the pipeline which was an attack on a faithful ally or Ukraine did while receiving money and materiel from Germany. The former is much more likely, I think. Either is outrageous and a huge, huge story, but journalists have a sublime lack of curiosity about it. They have no curiosity about most things that matter these days.