Bucharest

 

Quotations

'Money is just makeup for men.' Rose Pinochet 

'Maybe this world is another planet's hell.' Aldous Huxley. I think this world is wonderful but would not were I in Gaza.

'Genocide Joe has got to go'

Here is the tweet. How odd a time we live in when leftists like Max Blumenthal and Caitlain Johnstone speak the sort of common sense that conservatives should but don't. 

Peter Hitchens today

'As a small chocolate-smeared child, I was taken on a tour of HMS Victory at Portsmouth, in those distant days still showing quite severe damage from German bombing a few years before. The entire visit was about the bravery and endurance of Nelson and his men. I was allowed to stand on the spot where Nelson fell, shot by a French sniper. I walked among the great black iron guns, imagined myself scurrying about as a powder-monkey, bringing gunpowder to the crew amid the smoke. I was shown the red-painted orlop deck, where the wounded were taken to be sawn up without anaesthetic, amid lakes of gore, by crude surgeons. How I longed to have been there at Trafalgar, at the battle which secured this country's liberty and independence for more than two centuries. But 40 years later, when my own children were old enough to make the same tour, it was all sociological – about flogging, the press gang, and health and safety. I don't think anyone even referred to the great signal 'England Expects…'. All that stuff was too big for the small country we had since become.

'I have been unsurprised since then to watch our armed services turned into politically correct, softened bodies, whose main job seems to be to act as bag carriers for the US and its increasingly odd foreign adventures.'

The Mihai Voda church

From Christmas to this week the weather was very mild in Bucharest. Perhaps global warming is true after all. I love urban walking, particularly when I walk past old churches. Bucharest has many but most are hidden, deliberately. 

This is the church of St Nicholas, known as the Mihai Voda church, built by Mihai Viteazul in 1591. It contains what is supposedly the saint's hand. Martin Harris when I took him here exclaimed 'Santa Claus's hand!' The church was moved on wheels to avoid demolition when Ceausescu remade the city centre on North Korean lines.

A Black King of Anglo-Saxon England: King Offa

 

Does any Englishman believe he lives in a free country any more?

 As I have mentioned before, Stanley Baldwin said freedom was England's secret.

The West is heading into degrowth socialism while China is escaping from it. Europe is in steep decline, accelerated by the euro and the EU.

The new Argentinian President's speech at Davos, as Count Dancula said, resembled Ricky Gervais introducing the Golden Globes awards. 

Senor Milei defended freedom and private property and attacks the big state which impoverishes everyone. 

Western rulers had been 'co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and therefore to poverty'. He attacked 'radical feminism' and the idea that men and women or man and earth are in conflict, and the 'bloody agenda of abortion'.

I am not sure if I posted this before

 

Quotations

"A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions."

Jim Camp

"The existence of nation states is in itself one of the biggest problems with the European project."
Ulrike Guérot

Straw Bear at Whittlesey today

Today at the annual Straw Bear Festival in Whittlesey in the English fens The custom dates back more than 150 years, but was stopped in 1909 by the local constabulary, which saw the "straw bears" as a form of "cadging" or begging and was revived in 1980. Morris dancers parade through the town. At the end the bear is burnt.

Exclusion like hierarchy is inevitable and praiseworthy

The purpose of a nation, like any other club, or like any house or dwelling, is to exclude people. This is its raison d'être. Discuss.

Women

I am sorry if many of these seem sexist. They were not chosen for this reason. Most quotations about women from before 1960 reflect a very different way of thinking from modern progressives. It's the same with many other subjects.

"That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more natural than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tigers claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are." Nietzsche

"You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men." Sir Max Beerbohm

Patriotism

Let me explain why England (and Wales but not Scotland and not Northern Ireland) voted for Brexit. It is not about economics or lack of life chances or any of that rot. Only socialists and liberals are foolish enough to believe that. It's about the love that dare not speak its name. Love of country.


I am ashamed not of the lack of patriotism of Oxford and Cambridge students who disapprove of Remembrance Day, but of their stupidity. The noisy minority were stupid and progressive in my day. They all grow up to be lawyers and doctors but they keep a lot of liberal foolishness and thus do great harm. Oxbridge is to blame for modern Britain. Brexit was an anti-Oxbridge revolt.

Good advice

"Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” 

Mary Kay Ash

"In the article I wrote two months ago, before my [prostate cancer] surgery, I mentioned the three principles that, I felt, were essential to happiness: imagine how much worse it could be, rather than how much better; change what you can change, accept what you can’t; and do not let fear rule your life.

War's cost

Catholic

"One who is holy cannot dissent from the Pope." Pope St Pius X

"People make the mistake of thinking Catholics always agree with the Pope." Mgr Alfred Gilbey

"'Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said 'It's going to rain', would that be bound to happen?' 'Oh, yes, Father.' 'But supposing it didn't?' He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.'" Fr Mowbray recounts to the Flytes a conversation with Rex Mottram while instructing him in the faith, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.

Quotations

“The whole world is not worth one soul.” St. Francis de Sales. 

"Ukrainians have to understand that they and the Russians are brothers and Russians have to understand that once you cross the Dnieper they are completely different from us." Solzhenitsyn quoted by Glenn Diesen

"The sentimentalist preparing the pathway for the brute." Robert Louis Stevenson. This is the history of the this century so far.

Intelligence failures

"Certainly, spies are everywhere, but were they ever any use to anybody? Western intelligence didn't know the Berlin Wall was going up; Soviet agents didn't have a clue it was coming down." Robert Lochner, American journalist in Germany, son of Louis Lochner who was AP correspondent in Berlin until 1941.   

A brave spy risked death to tell Stalin that Germany was about to invade Russia.  Stalin had him killed.  A spy told Roosevelt that Japan was about to attack. Netanyahu was informed beforehand of the Hamas attack and did not prevent it.  Whether these were examples of incompetence, inability to accept the truth or occult Machiavellian stratagems Lochner's point is good.

Hitler did say 'Who now remembers the Armenians?'

Genocide is, alas, alas, extremely much in the news.

I discovered by chance today that the “Lochner Version” of the secret address by Hitler to ministers, generals, admirals at Obersalzberg on 22 August 1939 is genuine, according to German historian Norman Domeier.

This means that Hitler used the well known words 'Who now remembers the Armenians?' and ordered a genocide of Poles. (He said nothing in the speech about Jews.)

'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.' This is inscribed on Karl Marx's grave

Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser (journalism should not be taught, by the way), wants journalism to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice... Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.” More here.

Most people now accept that a ceasefire that hardens into peace is best for Ukraine - I used to be much criticised for saying so

‘To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.’ Walter Cronkite, 27 February1968,

When the left disliked George Soros

This is from a profile of him published in the British left-wing magazine The New Statesman in 2003.

“The conventional view, shared by many on the left, is that socialism collapsed in eastern Europe because of its systemic weaknesses and the political elite's failure to build popular support. That may be partly true, but Soros's role was crucial. From 1979, he distributed $3m a year to dissidents including Poland's Solidarity movement, Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union. In 1984, he founded his first Open Society Institute in Hungary and pumped millions of dollars into opposition movements and independent media. Ostensibly aimed at building up a "civil society", these initiatives were designed to weaken the existing political structures and pave the way for eastern Europe's eventual colonisation by global capital. Soros now claims, with characteristic immodesty, that he was responsible for the "Americanisation"; of eastern Europe. ...

If I expected the Ukrainian counter-offensive to fail (though I hoped it would succeed) why did these people not?

Because the wish was father to the thought? Or were they whistling in the dark? Or trying to build public support for Ukraine?

A clever, well-informed Lithuanian friend was very confident until the US papers were leaked in April.

  

Senator Lindsey Graham: “I expect major gains in the coming days and weeks. I think they can expel Russia from Ukraine.” [May 28 Fox News]

 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin: “I think Ukraine will have a very good chance of success.” [03/28/23]

 

National security adviser Jake Sullivan: “We believe that the Ukrainians will meet with success in this counteroffensive.” [06/04/23]

 

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg: “I’m confident that when Ukraine decides to launch new operations to liberate more land, Ukraine will be successful.” [4/21/23]

 

Former CIA Director, Gen. David Petraeus: "I personally think that this is going to be really quite successful. .. And [the Russians] are going to have to withdraw under pressure of this Ukrainian offensive, the most difficult possible tactical maneuver, and I don't think they're going to do well at that." [05/23/23] “I think that this counteroffensive is going to be very impressive.” [06/03/23]

 

Edward Luttwak: “If Kyiv and the West are looking for the most plausible path to victory, this is it.” [05/11/23]

 

Atlantic Council fellow Richard Hooker: “As we are often told, no plan survives contact with the enemy. There will likely be the occasional tactical miscue or operational hiccup during the coming counteroffensive, but a careful assessment suggests the odds are heavily in favor of Ukraine.” [05/23/23]

 

Former Chief of the British General Staff, General Richard Dannatt: “after Kyiv's successful counteroffensive, Vladimir Putin ‘may be swept out of the Kremlin.’” [03/28/23] 

Paul Massaro, senior policy adviser, the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe: “Full Ukrainian victory is coming. Sooner than you think.” [06/12/23]

Paul Massaro is the most irritating person on the internet, by the way. He is not Graham Greene's Quiet American because he is extremely noisy. 

I thought we had learnt the lessons of Iraq and American overextension. Usually we learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new mistakes (AJP Taylor). 

I know this time it was Russia not America that invaded another country but America intentionally or probably not had provoked Russia.

Colonel Douglas Macgregor was largely right about the counter-offensive, though he had overestimated the Russians in 2022. He quoted unbelievably high numbers of Ukrainian losses last year for which he gave no evidence (I presume he believed Russian propaganda). I don't particularly recommend him, though I sometimes listen to him and he understands things much better than the academics who are very parti pris and not at all dispassionate. Professor John Mearsheimer, whom I recommend highly on Ukraine and Gaza, is the exception - he was right that Ukraine did not have enough ammunition. 

There is very much blood on Boris Johnson's and Old Man Biden's hands

 

Quotations

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." Thoreau

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” Einstein

"I'm making such a lot of money from articles - £22 since Xmas so I'm saving it up to be married but Evelyn [Waugh] says 'don't save it, dress better and catch a better man. Evelyn is always so full of common sense.'"

American empire

America uses "fighting for democracy" (or human rights) as a means to continue an empire originally built to contain Stalin. The cold war was probably never necessary and not after 1952.

Another insane newspaper article

 

 

Russia has reacted to American behaviour from 2008 onwards. Putin is not another Napoleon or Hitler.

 

To paraphrase AJP Taylor talking about Hitler, Putin is a rational though no doubt a wicked statesman.

 

I wish I thought Donald Tusk was rational, though perhaps he is  and is talking nonsense to get money from America.