I wrote this exactly one year ago to the day but did not post it - now Trump is making war on Lennonism at home and abroad

"The world has now been diminished completely. There is no variety anywhere. You go off to the Congo and in the forest will find an advertisement for Coca Cola."  

The explorer and writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger said this in an interview he gave in his nursing home in 2001, a couple of years before he died. This was why I always wanted to be in Eastern Europe. I sought a kind of ecstasy, ex stasis, standing outside myself. 

I am the type of man or boy who does not want to stand on his own feet so much as yearn to fly from the ground. 

In Romania in 1990 I found what i was looking for and escaped what I was not looking for. 

Back then I wanted to escape mundane quotidian reality and the materialistic egalitarian unreal life of modernity. 

Like Lesley Chamberlain in Prague in the late 1980s (she comes from Rochford, Essex too) I was not attracted to the culture and the so-called counter-culture back home but found a counter-culture here. 

'It's like living in the 19th century' I said to friends back home and to ones in Romania. One Romanian replied accurately, 'No it's not. That's Macdonalds across the road.'

Then she supported the US Democrats and Constantinescu. Now she supports Georgescu.

Very much has changed in thirty years in Eastern Europe and in what we still call the West. 

Communism was recent in 1990 but only a few years later seemed long ago. Now it is longer ago but some Romanians think it is coming back. 

A new doctrine is gathering power that reminds many Romanians of communism.

Lennonism is the big danger to Christian civilisation. 

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin' for today
Ah

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Lennon's song with its catchy tune reminds me of how Whittaker Chambers,  a Soviet spy who converted to Christianity, described Communism. 

'Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communists vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world."

I'm proud to know the American religious and political polemicist Rod Dreher. He came to Bucharest three years ago and , wrote that he sees this country as a refuge from the left-wing social revolution sweeping the West, which he thinks comparable to Marxism of the years between 1947 and 1989. 

It is coming here fast. 

Rod Dreher talking in Bucharest told his audience

"You have looked up to America for so long, but look at us now: we are destroying ourselves, because we have forgotten God. With this woke ideology, we have nothing to offer you but destruction. You don’t need to learn anything from us; we Americans need to learn from you, and your saints...."

I used to take part in long discussions with very clever Romanians and foreigners about what Romania needed to do to Westernise but for a long time I saw becoming Western was a threat rather than an invitation. Insights suddenly come daily if you keep an open mind about not being open minded.

I came to realise that Romanian arts graduates from Western universities are the single biggest danger to Romania.

i think of what Yeats wrote, words that have been quoted by so many people for so many reasons but seem to speak to us at this moment.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?