Taking a fresh look at Warren Harding, Jimmy Carter and other US presidents

When I studied this subject at university I thought American historians were not up to much compared with British ones. It does seem as if judgements by historians on US presidents, and American historians are very keen indeed on awarding presidents marks, are wildly inaccurate.

Buchanan is unjustly maligned. He, rightly in my opinion, thought the Federal Government did not have the authority to prevent the South seceding and his view would have prevented the Civil War. I like Andrew Johnson for wanting to conciliate the South. Despite his racism and belief in eugenics Coolidge was in many ways a good president, who did very little. Hoover was an interventionist in economics who anticipated the New Deal - was this good or bad?

I read a persuasive article in the New York Times praising Mr Carter yesterday and a very interesting article today in the same paper that praises Warren Harding.

In October 1921, Harding traveled to Birmingham, Ala., where, in a powerful speech to a mixed-race (though segregated) audience, he demanded justice for African-Americans. In the first speech in the South by a sitting president on race, he argued for full economic and political rights for all African-Americans. Pat Harrison, a Democratic senator from Mississippi, was aghast. If Harding’s views “were carried to its ultimate conclusion,” he said, “that means that the black man can strive to become president of the United States.”

This is in sharp contrast to the views of Coolidge and Hoover as well as Democrats.  

Wilson of course was a great believer in segregation. Almost all presidents before Kennedy were opposed to racial equality including Lincoln. According to Ronald Kessler, Lyndon Lyndon Johnson told two unnamed Southern governors 

I'll have them nig-ers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years. 

If true this does not mean LBJ was insincere in his views on civil rights. Most African Americans had voted Democratic, in presidential elections, since 1936 (71% of them did so then) and certainly since 1948 so Johnson was not so much winning black voters as losing white ones.

Wilson told jokes about darkies, mimicking their accent, in cabinet. Coolidge thought the Nordic race deteriorated when mixed with other races. Hoover thought 

one white man was worth two to three coloured people even at simple tasks like shovelling. 

Truman, like Wilson and LBJ a Southerner, said he did not care to live near negroes and opposed the civil rights movement, which he considered, perhaps rightly, to have been instigated by communists. 

Eisenhower told jokes about blacks that would be considered racist these days but I think he was benign enough. He told Chief Justice Earl Warren that the southern whites 

are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.

I stumbled today on what to me was news that Eisenhower's mother was of mixed race. I remember Americans have told me that in America, even if you are only one eighth black, you count as black (an octoroon) and that therefore Pushkin, by American standards, was black. It seems that so was President Eisenhower. He was probably an octoroon too.

Finding the open coast in Albania

I stayed three or four miles away from where this picture was taken, in the beach at Durres, a place which was empty coastline in 1998 and now is the great Albanian seaside place, the equivalent in Romania of Mamaia. Why do I hate seaside resorts so much? Because I grew up in one?Yes. Because I hate the masses, because I can't stand families, because I dislike battery farms, because I want hidden obscure things? Because I dislike modern unintellectual unironic normal life?

I came here to escape the heat of Tirana. My desktop tells me it's 19 degrees Celsius in Bucharest which reminds me I came to Albania to escape the heat of Romania.

The hotel I stayed kin one of thousands is full and gimcrack but next door but one was a black of luxury flats with a swimming pool and a nice restaurant. Pasta or risotto with fresh seafood cost less than ten euros with wine and the use of the pool was three euros. Not expensive but I had it almost to myself all day. In case you decided to stay in Durres beach (I don't recommend it unless you like beach resorts full of families) it's name is Alibi.

At 5.30 Tomi picked me up and took me south until the buildings petered out. 85% of the buildings along the coast are illegal. Not only do they not have planning permission but the owners often do not have title to the land which belongs to the state. All along the coast are tunnels and military installations. Albanians when they go to the coast prefer the Ionian sea where the sea or clearer and there are no mosquitoes. The coast south of Durres is popular with middle aged foreigners and the owners of the improvised restaurants and hotels do not advertise them in the Albanian media for fear of attracting the evil eyes of the authorities.

A solitary fisherman with a net caught nothing, he said.

I had promised Tomi and Osman dinner in Tirana but instead we had a much better one than the best restaurant could have afforded back in town. Freshly caught fish, eaten outside a shack on the beach, a mile from the nearest village - simply delicious. Eaten with good Montenegrin wine. 

We stayed until the mosquitoes arrived and then fled. Tomi never sleeps on the coast here because of the mosquitoes. The hotels in Durres have netting on the windows but eating after dark outside is not a good idea,


I wanted to go to Albania very much in 80s when the whole coast was untouched - of course it was only possible in guided tours watched carefully by secret police but that would have added to the fun. A friend of mine who did this in 1979 said that only very interesting people took such tours - interesting people and Stalinists but Stalinists were interesting too. Albania until 1991 had statues of Stalin dotted around, of course. I left it very late but it is still in this year of grace 2015 an exciting strange place. As Romania was ten or fifteen years ago.

And like Romania ten years ago it has wonderful food, Everything is bio - the tomatoes and onions are poems - the fish and meat is wonderful. 

And people think and talk and behave like human beings in the way they did in Western Europe forty or fifty years ago. How Albanians manage it so close to Greece and Italy I don't know.

Slaughtering lambs on the holy mountain

Today was a really astonishing day which makes me feel I am living in a 19th century lithograph. This is, of course, the ideal for which one travels but which one so rarely attains in our day. The English scholar-gentleman-gypsy. 

Tomi Luzati and Osman drove me from Berat to the annual Bektashi festival on Mount Tomori, where tens of thousands of families of Bektashis come, camp out, sacrifice and eat lambs and pray on the holy mountain. Some bring dead lambs, some buy them live from butchers who slaughter them. Once they climbed or came on horseback, now they come by car. On top of the mountain, the second highest in Albania,  a very holy man is buried. 

Bektashis are Sufis, devoted to the memory of Haji Bektash, a dervish who lived in thirteenth century Asia Minor. His cult was very popular with the Janissaries who were the equivalent in Ottoman Turkey of the Praetorian Guard in the Roman Empire. Like the Praetorian Guard chose emperors the Janissaries chose sultans and in 1827 the Sultan Mahmud II disbanded them. Many of the Janissaries were taken as boys from Albanian families and they sought refuge in Albania. Almost a century later another moderniser, Kemal, expelled the dervish brotherhood (think Greenmantle) from Turkey and they made Albania their headquarters. Albania seemed a natural choice until the Communists took over and in the Cultural Revolution (Albania was Mao's ally) made religious practices illegal.

Tomi, who is one, says Bektashis like rakia, pork meat and enjoying the life. This is his philosophy but another Bektashi confirmed this. Sufism is the mysticism of Islam and it seems in every way more attractive than the dour Calvinism of orthodox Mahometanism. I am sorry to say that there have been no whirling dances in Albania since the Communists took over. Bektashis are Alawites, like President Assad of Syria, although not all Alawites are Bektashis. Their religion is secret in part. A Turkish friend told me that the Alawis have a secret, passed from one to another orally but not written down and my friend had an Alawite friend who revealed it to him: Ali is God.

This, if it is true, and the role of alcohol in their religious rite, might be the reasosn that Sunnis sometimes call the Bektashis 'little Christians'. 

Several years ago an English journalist friend, living in Belgrade, posted on Facebook a picture he took at the festival of a young boy, his cheeks smeared with blood, eating raw lamb. My friend told me that the festival was this weekend but there was nothing about it on the net in English. The travel agency in Tirana said it was not an organised festival, it was not official and they couldn't help me with it or confirm even when it took place. Luckily I found Tomi, friend of a friend, instead.

Tomi, Osman and I drove for an hour through idyllic countryside, the countryside of Greek gods and wood nymphs, till we left the made road and spiralled up the mountain on a track which took another hour of vertiginour views, Tomi told me that in other years the cars get jammed and people have to walk to the plateau where the festival happens. However the Albanian police had said on the radio that there should be no problems this year and we made it all the way. The policemen we met were smiling broadly and wore sunglasses. This year there were no problems.

Lambs, hundreds of them, herded, being slaughtered, being cut open, cooked and eaten. I couldn't help remembering Paul Potter's lines

All over London

There are chickens on spits

And this, say the chickens,

Is their Auschwitz.

I didn't see anyone eating raw lamb, not did the people I spoke to know about this, though the Bradt guide mentions it. Bektashis' foreheads are smeared with the blood of the lamb. I think Armenians sacrifice lambs in a similar way for Easter.

Almost everyone rests content with staying on the plateau where they camp out. Today was the first day but thousands had camped out last night. The more determined used to climb to the summit and this would take some hours. Tomi who has never done this himself had told me this is what I should have to do and I was on for it, though rather dreading it as I am not fit. Instead I got talking to a charming Albanian from islington who works as a beautician in Harrod's and she and her family  took me up in their four wheel drives to the very top. There stands a little hermitage and I was blessed by their charming imam. 

I was happy because I thought I was a traveller not a tourist, a man of letters even, but quite a few of the Albanians lived in Greece, Italy or North London.This is not the hermit kingdom of Hoxha. I missed that.

For primitive man man seeking the transcendent without a revelation, mountains were always very sacred. This religion is much older than Islam of course or any religion that was written down.

Tirana and Tomi

Only a fool goes to Greece or smartly-painted Croatia or Montenegro when, for a short time longer, the real thing exists in Albania.


I decided on Friday that after five weeks of dog days in Bucharest I had to get away. One has to be guided by ones heart and my heart didn't want Malta or Copenhagen or crowded Rome or even cool raining England. I found a very cheap flight - such things used not to exist before Air Serbia became a budget airline - and came to Albania. I have intended to each summer since I first came here eight years ago. For five years I have not kept my promise but now I am thankful to be here. I shall come back each year from now on.


I came without making plans but a dear friend who used to live here put me in touch with Tomi and this proved providential.


Tomi is an architect who works on all sorts of projects for international organisations. He even worked on one about gender equality, a subject he seems to find slightly amusing.  He also dedicates his time to 'enjoying the life' which involves spending much of the summer on the beach or roaming the countryside, often from his kindness showing lucky people round. He bought some wonderful Albanian wine from a shop which the owner of the bar we went to let him drink there - it's better, he explained, than the Italian wines that are just colourings and water. And it really was. The bar was fully of lovely, pretty flirty twenty-something girls - just like Bucharest was while Romanians had to get visas to go to the European Union. Like Romania the girls are comely and the men less handsome.
Tirana is nowadays clean and pretty. An odd achievement since it is the poorest capital in Europe and has grown from a population of 160,000 in 1990 to a million. Old men in dark suits and fezes. Narrow faces. 

I am so lucky. Two weeks ago the temperature was 46 degrees Celsius says Tomi but while I was in Belgrade on my way here the weather broke and it is an acceptable 28 or 30. Nevertheless I decided to stick to my plan to escape to the mountains and the lakes. Tomi decides to take me and show me around.

Tirana at night had an astonishing vibe, utterly unlike anywhere else. Unlike Romania it's effortlessly cool. And it feels exciting. It was eight years ago when I was last in the city and it has even more bars and restaurants. The Italian fascist government buildings painted terracotta and ochre and the cool villas built before the war do not feel like anywhere else, nor the pyramid intended as a mausoleum to the Stalinist Maoist dictator Hozha. I know all the former Communist capitals and it's not like any of them. It's a bit like Turkey I suppose. Balkan certainly but not Yugoslav. Yugoslavia has the ersatz Westernness of a 1970s Yugoslav lounge lizard smoking a Western cigarette and wearing a gold medallion.

Tirana doesn't feel Western unlike the resort of Sarander, opposite horrible, overcrowded Corfu. Sarander is like the South of France. What does Tirana feel like? The imaginary capital of an imaginary country in a good, quirky thriller. That all I can answer.

A postcard from Lin

I am in Lin, a tiny village on the Albanian shore of Lake Ohrid. It has one tiny hotel where village boys drink beer. It has four rooms on the first floor and on the second floor lives the owner and his family. I am the only guest. The lake view from my terrace is as lovely as you can imagine. Sitting by the lake I have it to myself except for a lilting ballad or some folk-pop on the radio and chatter from locals at a table . A fisherman strenuously rows a boat across the dark blue, pellucid water.


Apart from the hotel there is one other place which has six rooms. One narrow street makes up the village and the lake is hidden behind the cottages, coming into sight only for moments.


Tomi said before we got here that Lin was a tourist village. Nothing could be less enticing but it scarcely is. Tourism is just starting and this is actually, I'm ashamed to say, an advantage. It means it has this one restaurant-hotel-bar, opened last summer. Three other places at least are being built. A coach party stopped here and passers by come here for lunch. Like the lovely bays I saw in 2008 that are now ruined this place will lose its charm in five years.


Tomi took me to Podradec a pleasant, well-mannered lakeside resort, Broadstairs not Margate, and then the nearby village of Tushemisht, where we ate fish and drank rakia and some good wine. After lunch Tomi showed me Hoxha's villa, one of three he had in the area, set where a mountain river enters the lake. Newly weds are being photographed. A restaurant with two handsome stuffed bears, one clapping. 

Tomi believes in 'enjoying the life' as he has done since he went AWOL while on a cultural delegation to Athens in the late 1980s and took advantage of perestroika to bed a young Russian girl. No doubt there was much more life to be enjoyed in Pogradec but I do not like resorts and prefer a couple of nights in Lin instead.

I went for a long walk along the lake this morning. Braying donkeys drawing carts full of hay, men picking dates, The whole bourgeois dream of authenticity. Poverty and tradition.

Lake Ohrid has the great advantage of not being warmer than the early 20s Celsius in August and the great advantage, on the Albanian side, of being some where unmediated, uncooked, where one can find oneself. There may be lakes equally beautiful in Sweden but they do not appeal. I am listening to folk music, the jazzed up kind that young Albanians like.

The Guardian backed the South in the American Civil War

The Guardian used to me a much better newspaper years ago, when it was liberal in the true sense of the word liberal, before it became social democrat. Reading it yesterday I found that it backed the secession by the South in 1861 and said slavery would 'gradually expire'. As it would have done, of course. 

The great Liberal statesman Mr. Gladstone said the South was 

a nation rightly struggling to be free. 

If only the British had won the war of 1776 with the help of a slave revolt. Washington et al would have been hanged, slavery in the 13 colonies abolished and America would now be part of Canada. 

i am still with huge enjoyment reading War and Peace, where serfs are viewed without sentimentality but serfdom is not condemned either. I should very much like to read Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom by Peter Kolchin. 

Here is a very interesting comparison, by a pseudonymous blogger, between Russian serfdom and  US slavery (and slavery under Stalin), based on Peter Kolchin's work. It includes these insights:

Kolchin makes very clear that Russian serfdom was much more like chattel slavery than its medieval precursor. Medieval serfs existed in much more complex social arrangements and generally had relatively static obligations. Russian serfs were literally owned and far more subject to the whims of their owners. 

Kolchin characterises both American slavery and Russian serfdom as responses by elites on the periphery of the capitalist world to labour shortage coming from demand for products of labour coupled with low population density. In both cases, the cost of coercion ‘paid off’ economically, particularly as there was deemed to be no moral cost. Kolchin has an excellent sense of how differently embedded in their different societies American slavery and Russian serfdom were (for example, the slaves lived in a slaveholder’s world, the serf’s in a peasant’s world; American slaveholders were much more effective and empowered as a social group than Russian serfowners; American slavery was vibrant and expanding, Russian serfdom was a system in decay).

It's interesting to see that US slaves were much better fed than European workers and marginally better fed than workers in the American North.

Red wine is good for you

A Glass Of Red Wine Is The Equivalent To An Hour At The Gym, Says New Study

This is a serious story in the press, I think. Click here and decide for yourself.

I recall that in 1990 a French professor of cardiology said that drinking 'a small amount' of red wine each day was beneficial for the heart. When he was asked what he meant by a small amount he said, 

'Oh, no more than a bottle or so.'

Yet some people, like my sister, deny that the French are the most civilised people in the world. 

Weekend in the Delta

‎The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

Marc Chagall

Rains finally came. The dog days came to a pause for two days but Bucharest was still hot. We drove to Tulcea - the quiet of a small town in a poor province on a summer afternoon - and took the speed boat to Chilia which gives its name to one of the three branches of the Danube delta. The Danube which is a polite city river when it runs through Vienna, Budapest and Belgrade finally polyfurcates before it reaches the Black Sea. The little visited delta is the place where Europe reaches an end. It's possibly the last truly wild part of the continent.

Green and cool.

Pelicans and storks. Wild horses. Wild boars. Even wild cats, that catch fish.

Chilia is separated from New Chilia, which is in Ukraine. Its factories are seen across the river but the ferry crossing was discontinued after the 1989 revolution. Many of the 4,000 inhabitants of Chilia have relatives in Ukraine, but do not see them. Anca Plesca tells me that to do so would not only involve  going to Tulcea to get ones passport stamped but paying $200 to have the customs opened up by Ukraine in order to receive them.

Mirel and Anca Plesca have opened a hotel in Chilia, called Limanul Resort, which has been recommended to us by glamorous friends in Bucharest. Anca Plesca, like most Romanians I know, was reared by her grandmother in a country village and this was her village.

We brought Claudiu Magris’s astonishingly good ‘Danube’ and several guidebooks. They recount the history of Chilia, an ancient place named after Achilles, but it has very little history. One monk left a record that slaves were embarked there in the eleventh century.  A reminder that slavery was universal in Europe at that time. It existed in what is now Romania until the time of the American Civil War, by which time gypsies were slaves. Ethnic Romanians were serfs until the same time.

That's almost it until the War of independence of 1877-78, so called, in which the Romanians were inveigled by the Czar to fight for Russia and Bulgaria. Romania's reward was to gain its nominal independence (it already had home rule from the Sublime Porte), to lose Bessarabia (approximately what is now the Moldovan Republic) to Russia and to be given in exchange a stretch of scantily populated coast called the Northern Dobrudgea which included most of the Danube Delta. The Dobrudgea had little connection with the Romanians but its Muslims, Greeks and Jews have mostly left by now and it has been Romanian-ised.

The Danube delta has 20,000 inhabitants making it the most sparsely populated area in Europe below the frozen north. It was and remains populated in large part by Lipoveni, Russians who had fled to the delta to escape religious persecution in the time of Peter the Great. Lipoveni are renowned for the beauty of their women and their almost limitless ability to drink vodka, tuica, beer, industrial alcohol. They can even drink the turbid waters of the Danube itself. They talk an archaic form of Russian and listen to Ukrainian pop music on transistor radios in the village bar.

But the delta is a place innocent of history and long in natural history. The delta is the third most important biosphere reserve, a term I don’t fully understand but which I think means home for flora and fauna. The Coral Reef is first. 

The joy of travelling in Romania is staying with peasants. 'Limanul Resort' is not that but it is something surprising - it is cool. Cool, until about five years ago, was unknown in Romania. I do not entirely approve but it makes a nice change from most Romanian hotels which are in the most terrible taste imaginable, unless built before Communism. The resort has been beautifully designed by a good architect and design means a lot. It's comfortable and though peasants charge only ten Euros the fifty Euros the hotel charges is not exorbitant. One of our group was shocked it was so cheap. He is used, he said, to comfortable hotels in Transylvania which charge twice as much. Poshness to my regret has come to Romania.

One drawback though. It is not on the water but a five minute walk away, close to Chilia's extraordinary church which is the highest orthodox church in Romania. Why so small a place has so imposing a church I don't know but I imagine that it was a statement that the Turks were no longer masters here. The Turks forbade high churches, which is the reason other churches in the Dobrudgea were built half-underground.

The food at the resort is very good. We ate a wonderful fish dish where the outside of the fish had been emptied and filled with minced fish meat. We had some good fish borsches. We drunk very much local tuica - plum brandy - but was it local? I saw no plum trees. It was at least weak and I drank several, usually a very unwise course of action. The others complained but I was thankful.

This is however not the right way to see the delta. The right way is camping by the shore of the water with mosquito repellent. We saw many people doing this as our speed boat took us through the delta. Solitary men who looked like hermits, visionaries or men on the run from the police. In fact in a country which is very conformist here is where the non-conformists go. They are the Romanian equivalent of hippies but a great improvement on hippies.

This is my sixth expedition to the delta. Once the delta was criss-crossed by natural water channels but more and more canals have been built. They are straight and at times they become dull. At other times, I was reminded of sailing a dhow in a mangrove swamp in the islands of Northern Mozambique. But all this is so close to Europe, is in Europe.

The rivulets are studded by fishermen’s cottages, which fishermen use only occasionally, and where benches are available in the shade. I read, my companions paddled, one of us, who was a professional photographer, took pictures.

The beautiful moments are the storks, pelicans, all manner of birds, which suddenly fly up from the reeds. The lakes are where the birds suddenly fly up en masse, driven by a divine impulse to find happiness.  

Outside the delta empires rose and fell. The Turks came and after many centuries left. The Communists did the same much more rapidly, but in the delta very little has changed. Florin, our boatman, regrets the passing of communism. He is a Lipovan in his fifties. Many or most people of his age and education in Romania feel the same and he is probably right, from his point of view. The Lipoveni always had plenty to eat even in the 1980s.

Florin takes us to the little wooden monastery of St Athanasius, which I first visited years ago. It was founded by some monks in the early 1990s who, looking for a site, got talking to a local fisherman who donated his land for the monastery. Six monks live there now and a charming man called Emil, who dedicates half his year to helping the monks and the other half to working in Italy to make enough money to keep himself. Monasteries appeal to Romanians and lots of people come and go. I’d like to stay there but one can only stay by permission and the monk I speak to didn’t seem keen on extending an invitation to me, even though Emil told him that my companion had made a substantial donation to a monastery in Bucharest.

There are, Emil says, a number of hermits living in the delta, saying Mass alone. Two of them come to this monastery for food from time to time. The others subsist by themselves. Since I first set foot on Romanian soil in 1990 I have been enchanted by the place but now I start to see that it is the other worldly religiosity of the people, their mysticism, that makes this country so remarkable. All our life long we go from one spot of holy ground to another, according to John Updike. This is even more true in Romania than elsewhere.

When I go next time I’ll not go to the Sulina channel I prefer the part of the 'old Danube channel' and Mila 23. It’s more than a decade since I first stayed there and it has become more now touristified. We heard the little towns of Sulina and Sf. Gheorghe are in the same case. PSD politicians have bought the land and development is going on, though slowly. 

Our third and last day was a beautiful trip via Mila 23 to Tulcea and then a drive through small roads to the great seaside resort of Mamaia. The heat was intense. It was Sunday. We stopped at the famous mosque at Babadag, the oldest in Romania.  Absolute silence in the insufferably hot little place. The mosque is closed. So was the Museum of Oriental (meaning Muslim) Art and Artefacts. No-one was insight except for two boys who pleaded with us for a leu (15p). One said there were no problems between Muslims and Christians in the town. The Muslims were gypsies, by the way. This is not the story I'd read about that week in the press, which said the Muslim gypsies are ostracised by the other ethnic groups in the town, the Romanians, Tatars, Lipoveni, Hungarians, Greeks and even the rest of the gypsies.

On we drove and came at last to the ruined Roman city of Histria. Histria is, as Dr. Johnson said of the Giants’ Causeway, worth seeing but not worth going to see. But we were only ten miles away. Some pillars, some statues, a lot of communist renovation. The sea is not in sight to give a lonely melancholy to the place, but a melancholy and sense of desertion exists. Two charming students, the girl a shy beauty who does not know she is good-looking, gave us a questionnaire to fill in about how we would react if we saw a frog, a snake, a fox or a scorpoion among the ruins. i felt loving and pure saying I would interact in a friendly way with each. Some benighted people ticked the box that said they would kill the snake. British twenty-year old students, even making allowance for the fact that they are science side not arts side, would not be nearly so innocent as these two.

I shall go back but next time to stay in simple places and find somewhere in the little dead town of Sulina. Sulina is a place that was briefly important after an international Danube Commission was housed there at the end of the (first) Crimean War and until the harbour silted up. One of my friends once spent a week there. When she came back I asked her if Sulina had a beach and she replied, apologetically,

Yes it has, but it's completely uncommercialised.

i must hurry in the hope that this is still the case.

The social media mob loves the hunt as much as Cecil's killer

People who are angry with the dentist who shot the lion think they are being compassionate and don't realise that in many cases they are consumed with hatred. Hatred is an interesting emotion which can be very deceptive, Pacifists, vegetarians, people who are concerned about animals and progressives are prone to hate without knowing it. 

Eighty or ninety years ago, Great White Hunters were heroic figures. Hunting or killing animals that are no threat absolutely does not appeal to me - unlike hunting foxes which is part of the English tradition and very useful but I wasn't aware that things had changed so much until this palaver about Cecil. I thought hunting lions was normal. And in fact it is. They are not a protected species and are killed all the time for sport.

But attitudes change and that's fine.

There is more kindness nowadays towards animals and in general than there used to be and this is good, but also a sense which is very worrying that the difference between man and beast is not absolute.

I feel very sorry for the man who shot Cecil. The internet is alive with whoops of delight from people who say his dental practice will disappear, has disappeared. Mia Farrow, the actress, has posted his address in Twitter and one can imagine him being killed by some American crazy.

The anti-hunters love the hunt as much as the big game hunters but they prefer hunting men not beasts.

Hemingway said, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

That's what the mob on the internet thinks.

I remember reading an Edwardian travel book about South America which referred to rumours that men, 'natives' or Indians of course, had been hunted on occasion instead of wild game. Murder as big game hunting. The book said these rumours were unsubstantiated, but I wanted to know more.

I hope it did not happen. But no-one can ever know.

There is an idea for a book or more probably a film here. Something like Heart of Darkness.

Dogs

The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.

Marquise de Sevigne

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Mark Twain

The average dog is a nicer person than the average person.

Andy Rooney 

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

Groucho Marx 

So what about Cecil?

• 
  

The anguish all over the social media about Cecil, the popular lion who was shot dead in Zimbabwe with a bow and arrow by a dentist from Minnesota.

It is a non-story which soft hearted soft headed people care a lot about. And it is the silly season. Even so it seems inane. Had this dentist killed a dog would that be as bad? A fox?

Scratch people who are very concerned about animals, like Cecil the lion who was shot dead, and you often find people who don't like people. Hunting lions is permitted and so very many human beings are killed each day, so why the commotion over a lion?

So many people in Zimbabwe live in terrible circumstances, as they do throughout the world, even in Belgrave Square. Zimbabwe, by the way, has the 20th highest murder rate of the 190-odd countries in the world.

I suppose it's because animals are not self-conscious that many prefer them to men. That's the difference - animals, like children, have not eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What is very important about this story - and oddly enough it is important - is not the death of a lion, painful and illegal though it was but the savage persecution of this man by the mob.This is not just about social media but about the way a mob mentality unthinkingly persecutes. As A.J. Balfour said, society is always persecuting but social media make it very easy to ruin people's lives. Every man his own tabloid newspaper.

In the 1970s and 80s most of the big game in the national parks in Mozambique was shot and eaten. This doesn't outrage me. War, hunger and communism were to blame. Everyone talks about apartheid, never about the suffering wrought by communists in Africa, which was much greater.

Paul Gottfried on U.S. presidents

Professor Paul Gottfried, the contrarian American political thinker, interests me.

He said that, unlike England, with its essentially medieval social structure, America was made by 

Protestant sectarians who neither had nor desired a medieval past and whose descendants have turned into celebrants of progress, commerce and human rights.

He thinks American historians skew their works to favour of modern political agendas. In The Managerial President he notes that 

All the major conflicts into which our leaders thrust us from the Civil War on, with the possible exception of Vietnam, are seen as morally desirable actions. … The U.S. is a land of morally driven, energetic presidents who have made us into the envy and dread of the world.

For such historians Lincoln is their great hero. Naturally they also like Franklin Roosevelt. This is the thinking that led to George W. Bush’s presidency and to Mr Obama’s domestic policy though not his foreign policy.

I have always liked Americans and admired very much about them - they are our children and their role in the world has been a very benign one on balance, but I have never liked American culture and Paul Gottfried explains to me why.  Progress, commerce and human rights depress him and depress me. Human rights used to be fine when they meant freedoms, the things protected in the first ten amendments of the U.S. constitution, but nowadays they are largely about restrictions on freedom. Age discrimination, forsooth!

For me, a sense of the past rooted in the middle ages or the ancient world are what makes daily life beautiful. Even in a country like Romania, where I live, which does not have old institutions or many old buildings and did not exist as a state till the 1860s. The absence of a tradition, the absence of a church, the absence of conservatism in the European sense and the absence of anything much to conserve make it very hard for me to love America. But I do love Frank Capra films and Garrison Keillor and the novels of Raymond Chandler.

Paul Gottfried also believes that America, which dominated Europe after 1945 from the military, economic and cultural points of view after 1945, gave Europe in the 1960s the idea that multiracial societies are good. If true it's odd since in the 1940s America was utterly white supremacist.

Professor Gottfried is a small government man. I don't know which side he prefers in the civil war but it seems to me that the USA stopped being a republic with very diffuse power with Lincoln.

Progressives admire Lincoln and think America's intervention in Vietnam was wrong, but the Northern states had a weak casus belli and could and should have avoided war, whereas South Vietnam was fighting something absolutely evil and was fighting in self-defence. But historians are like women. They are attracted to power and success. Had the Third Reich defeated Stalin and made peace with the USA and the UK, American and British universities would have had many fascist academics and very few Marxists.

Who were the worst US Presidents? George W Bush, Lincoln, Wilson. Washington if you are British. Were there (m)any good ones?

I remember back in my first term at Cambridge studying US history noticing that American history unlike British history is largely mythic. We see this especially with Washington, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, FDR etc

The Second Iraq War has cast new light on the Civil War. There are many parallels between Lincoln and the younger Bush. Both launched unnecessary and from a legal point of view probably unjust wars that overturned the local elites and social structures of the conquered peoples, with disastrous short-term and long-term consequences. By his foolish over-reaction to the September 11th murders Bush handed the islamists an unimaginable victory. Lincoln and Grant are responsible for 100 years of racial disharmony in the South and a race problem that has still not been solved. Though had Lincoln lived he might have been much more conciliatory than the Republican zealots.

If only Lincoln had not won in 1860 but someone else - maybe poor, decent Buchanan - war would not have happened. Not for a while, at least. Buchanan said the Union had no right to prevent secession by force. I think he was right. In any case his view would have saved 800,000 lives.

Washington and his cronies, of course, were responsible for another unjust, unnecessary war. 

FDR I have to be grateful to, I know, as an Englishman but I don't like his domestic policy. Thank God he lived to start his fourth term and the world thus escaped President Henry A. Wallace. 

I believe people should submit to lawful governments, so I do not think the 1776 rebellion is justified, especially as George III's government was a benign one. I sympathise with the good, patriotic people who died or were ethnically cleansed because they were loyal to their King. 

Why do I not therefore think the South should have obeyed the federal government? Simple. Because how can a government that derives its legitimacy from a revolution in 1776 and the pooling of sovereignty between sovereign states then insist that as a legitimate government it is entitled to stop those states seceding. The constitution says nothing on the matter, which means, I think, that the states had not give away their essential right to join or leave but even if I do not persuade you of this, why wage a war to stop the Southern states leaving. As Gladstone said the Confederacy was 

a nation rightly struggling to be free.

I am a monarchist, a throne and altar man, an admirer of Clarendon and Metternich, a conservative in short. But, most of all, I think war needs a strong justification. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Lincoln WAS justified in making war on the South. Very well but how much infinitely more admirable he would be had he given them the right of self determination. If Americans disagree with me why do they approve of European countries giving their colonies independence?


Who were best? Truman was good, though I have never decided whether the Cold War was necessary. George Kernan opposed it for good reasons. Dr Tim Stanley thinks Calvin Coolidge was the best president ever. Dr. Ivan Eland thinks John Tyler was.

It's worth reading Dr. Ivan Eland's criteria for presidents. He's thinks John Tyler was the best. Eland has amassed a presidential ranking system that rewards such qualities as:

commitment to small government; 

faith in a limited role for the executive branch; 

ability to avoid war; 

yielding power to Congress.

I wonder if, apart from Truman and possibly Theodore Roosevelt and maybe Jefferson, there might not have been any, at least not by the standards of English Prime Ministers. There's no one to compare with the Pitts, Canning, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone or Lloyd George. Wellington was not as good a political leader as Eisenhower, it's true, but no one pretends Wellington was much of  a statesman. Gladstone infinitely excels the wretched Wilson, who kept his bust on his desk. I suppose, if you are a socialist, Lyndon B Johnson is a great president.

All Americans are liberals in a very important sense. The Declaration of Independence is a very un-conservative, very Whiggish document. Republics, as opposed to monarchies, are liberal and so is the ridiculous idea that all men are equal. Goldwater and Reagan were right-wing liberals, Mrs. Clinton is a left-wing one. Most presidents were also liberal and idealistic in foreign policy, including Ronald Reagan, although Nixon and the elder Bush were in foreign policy terms conservatives. But George W Bush, egged on by the neo-cons, ex-Marxists who never had a conservative bone in their bodies, was a consummate liberal in his idealistic, un-pragmatic foreign policy. He was very much the illegitimate son of the very disastrous Wilson.

Wilson's legacy was the disintegration of Austria Hungary, innumerable ethnic conflicts and the Second World War. Reader, if you seek George W. Bush's monument, look around you.

One more thing. It was George W Bush's talk about 'the Axis of Evil' (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) that led North Korea to get the bomb. 

Last thoughts on slavery, in the USA, Russia and Mauritius

The Comte de Tilly said that to begin ones life by being raped is a very poor school for virtue. Slavery is a very poor school too and it takes more than a generation for the descendants of former slaves to be able to overcome the lessons slavery teaches. 

I am not sure how long the effects of slavery will last or what exactly they are. Some blame slavery for the large number of single black mothers in the USA, for example, and others get angry at the suggestion. The area is a minefield.

Slavery was a thoroughly bad thing, even for its times - we can all agree on this, except the KKK and a small number of fascists. Some slaves in America were contented, some very unhappy, but all would have preferred freedom. Bad though slavery was, however, it cannot be compared, as liberal historians regularly do, to the Germans' murder of six million Jews in the Second World War. 

This comparison indecently belittles the Holocaust, but it explains the significance of the slavery in the modern American imagination. The attention paid to slavery is not primarily because of the very great cruelty with which many slaves were treated, nor even because of the wickedness in principle of slavery but because of the racial issue. Because white people owned black people and could treat them as they liked.

My ancestors were Irish peasants and lived through the Potato Famine of the 1840s -the Whigs were in power then and did nothing. Slaves in America were better off than Irish who starved to death. The Slave Narratives suggest most freed slaves in their old age did not complain about their masters, though even decent slave owners, such as Washington, had slaves whipped, which is very bad. In the 1820s, it is true, Englishmen were flogged for many things and hanged for stealing sheep or sodomy, but not without a trial or at their masters' whim. 

Slavery and serfdom in Russia - which Alexander II abolished in 1861 freeing many times more people than the Americans did - were very similar. 

Serfs were also liable to be whipped, but in America slavery was made worse because, unlike the Russian serfs, who were living in an essentially medieval word and owned by their own people, the American slaves were commodities in an advanced, capitalist society, foreign to them, and were owned by foreigners.

I stayed in Mauritius with a Hindu friend whose ancestor had made a fortune importing Indian indentured labourers into the island, after slavery was abolished by the UK in 1833. My friend told me there was 'almost no difference' between indentured labourers and slaves. He is vaguely a socialist and ashamed of his ancestor, though, as a Brahmin, he takes hierarchy for granted. 

I met a number of Mauritian Indians (Hindus make up 61% of population and Indian Muslims a further 25%) who told me how grateful they are that their ancestors came to Mauritius rather than stayed in India. I perfectly understood why - they have a far higher standard of living and live in a more civilised country. I wonder if African-Americans wish their forbears had stayed in West Africa.

Slavery brought Africans to America. They have enriched America in many ways - were it not for them America would be a duller country - but they do not seem, as far as I can tell, to live happily alongside whites. Thus are the sins of the slave-owning fathers visited on the sons. 

This was foreseen by Madison, Jefferson, and Clay who were in favour of deporting freed slaves to Africa. Lincoln also hoped they might be persuaded to leave.

In 1862, Lincoln invited a delegation of black men to the White House, the first time African Americans had been invited to the White House, to suggest that they should leave the USA for Central America. He told them:

You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. This physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. ..



If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated.. 


Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoys. The aspiration of man is to enjoy equality with the best when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.


Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.


I need not recount to you the effects upon white men, growing out of the institution of slavery. I believe in its general evil effects on the white race. See our present condition the country engaged in war; our white men cutting one another's throats, none knowing how far it will extend.. .



But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. .



It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated. There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free coloured people to remain with us.

Lincoln’s words provoked great anger among black leaders and abolitionists, who argued that African-Americans were as much natives of the country as whites. 

In an early draft of the emancipation proclamation colonisation was mentioned but it was quietly dropped. The war had a momentum of its own and by the end of the war Lincoln, who had originally been opposed to blacks being given civil rights, came round to thinking some blacks should have the vote. 

It’s interesting that the Fifteenth Amendment to the US constitution, which  gave the right to vote to black men, did so two years after Disraeli's Reform Act of 1867 gave the vote to most though not all working men in towns in England - a move by Disraeli that shocked liberal intellectuals.

Why I support the Confederacy in the U.S. Civil War

In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne said that  if the South lost,

It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant debt as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.

Of course this is what has happened, especially since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

The Second Iraq War, however, I hope has cast new light on the U.S. Civil War. There are many parallels between Lincoln and Bush. Both launched unnecessary and from a legal point of view probably unjust wars that overturned the elites and social structures of the conquered peoples, with disastrous long-term consequences. The Civil War was a terrible tragedy and could have been avoided, by statesmanship on both sides, but Lincoln could have allowed the South to secede. One therefore has to blame him mostly for this unnecessary and unjust war.

Half a million people died because of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Lincoln is responsible for a war in which 800,000 died. It was followed by a settlement which led to a hundred years of racial disharmony in the South and a race problem that has still not been solved. I hope the evil consequences of overthrowing Saddam do not last a hundred years or more. I suspect they will.

I have always unreservedly supported the Southern States in the Civil War and find it hard to understand how any informed fair-minded person can do otherwise. This is not because  particularly like the South or think their slave society was pleasant but because they had the legal and moral right to leave the Union. Reader, if you doubt this, imagine that the Scottish parliament were to vote to secede from the UK and the UK were to fight a bloody war for four years to prevent them doing so.

Gladstone, the great British Liberal, called the Confederacy

'a nation rightly struggling to be free'.

Lancashire mill girls, unemployed because of the Northern blockade of the South and consequent Cotton Famine, supported the North, but though poor people are usually wiser than rich ones Gladstone was right and the mill girls wrong.

The war by the north was not fought to free the slaves but to preserve the Union. By the South it was not fought to preserve slavery, which they could have preserved while remaining in the USA, but to gain independence. Supporting the Confederacy does not mean supporting slavery.

Had Lincoln let the South secede In time the South would have emancipated the slaves, though not, we can be sure, given them the vote. (Lincoln only came round to thinking some blacks should have the vote towards the end of the war, in gratitude for their military service.) The South might have had something like apartheid, which in fact is what they did have - after huge numbers of deaths [during and after the war] and years of conflict and misery. 

Stalin is supposed to have said 

'One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.' 

I very much doubt he said it but it is true that every single death is a tragedy. From what I can find perhaps 388,000 slaves were brought direct from Africa to North America, of whom between ten and twenty percent (but it's a guess) perished horribly in the voyage. Thousands more died shortly after landing. The numbers of slaves killed in coming to America, the unspeakable conditions in which they came and the numbers who died on arrival seem to have been the worst aspects of American slavery, whether measured in terms of loss of life or in terms of horror and suffering. In terms of deaths, the Civil War which killed 600,000 was therefore the worst consequence of slavery. In addition to those 600,000 very many former slaves died of hunger after emancipation. 

What certainly perished in this dreadful war was the idea of the original USA with a weak central government, strong states, diffused power and social cohesion. I suppose Switzerland is the one country that lives up to some extent to republican ideals. The South did exactly what the American rebels had done in 1776 and Lincoln reacted to secession exactly as King George III did. The difference is that Lincoln, unlike George III, won. But by the time Lincoln did so the USA had changed in its essence. It was no longer a republic but an empire under the form of a republic. The same thing happened with Rome.

Lincoln was the USA's Cavour or Bismarck. I regret his success as I regret theirs. Lincoln's war cost far more lives than theirs and left scars that still haven't healed.

Since the recent massacre of blacks in a church in Charleston by a young white man there have, unfortunately, been many killings of blacks by blacks in the USA and even at least one massacre of blacks by blacks. These did not attract much attention. Racist murders of blacks by whites in the USA are, fortunately, very rare - but the massacre was important for what is symbolised, the memories it stirred, the deep wound it re-opened. I wonder when or whether blacks and whites will live together in amity in the USA and why they do not do so 150 years after Lincoln's famous victory.

The three worst US Presidents of all time

I often heard that Grant was the worst US President, or Buchanan or Andrew Johnson or Harding but none of these were the worst. The worst was George W Bush, very closely followed by Abraham Lincoln, closely followed by Wilson.

Bush squandered the US's moment as global hegemon, began a seemingly endless war in the Middle East and, by over-reacting, turned the September 11th murders into a triumph for the Islamists. Lincoln made war on his own people for the offence of wanting national self-determination. His legacy was an America embittered on geographical lines for a century and on racial lines till this day. Wilson's dire legacy is the break-up of Austria Hungary and the Second World War, though, to be fair, the latter would probably have happened even without his help.

Some old-fashioned people consider Hoover the worst, but in fact Hoover was better than but rather similar to Franklin Roosevelt, whom people rate very highly, or used to.

Hoover was not a laissez faire man like Coolidge. He effectively started the New Deal. Rexford Tugwell who helped invent the New Deal said: 

“We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.” 

On the other hand, I doubt whether the New Deal under FDR was effective. Under FDR, unemployment averaged  18 % from 1933 to 1940. The policies of the British government during the depression, once considered a by-word in myopia, are now thought to have been more effective.

Someone recently said Tyler was the best. Perhaps. Though if I were Texan I would regret the annexation of Texas. As a free country Texas could have avoided the Civil War and avoid an awful lot of things that the North forced on the South from 1860 till the present day. But this was not a possibility, unfortunately for the Texans. Texas was broke by the time Tyler annexed it.

Truman was good but to rate him one has to decide whether he was right to wage the Cold War against Stalin and keep American troops in Europe. I have always been grateful for the troops but never sure the Cold War was necessary.

Hoover’s history of his times was published only fairly recently and blames FDR for much from prolonging the depression to Pearl Harbor and war with Germany. One of the very few reviews it got is here.