Quotations

“It was a misjudgment which I regret, but it’s been a privilege to bring the news to households throughout the UK for the past 40 years.”

Statement by British newsreader Alastair Stewart who today left ITN after forty years. These apologies remind me a little of the confessions of the defendants in show trials in Stalin's Russia.

Quotations

"You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks - habitually stinks, I mean."
George Orwell

"I have never come across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity."
Oscar Wilde

“America solves problems, Europe manages them...”
John Bolton

“Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” 

Joe Biden on Saturday on Twitter.

"If we have to move into a post-Christian crisis of meaning in the West, and it looks like that’s inevitable, picking up off the shelf the tested wisdom of the pre-Christian world is a better bet than looking to be guided by nebulous nostrums dreamed up in 2014." Gareth Roberts article, Unherd.

The atrocious crime of being a young man

'The atrocious crime of being a young man, which the honorable gentleman [Horace Walpole] has, with such spirit and decency, charged upon me, I shall neither attempt to palliate nor deny; but content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies may cease with their youth, and not of that number who are ignorant in spite of experience. Whether youth can be
imputed to any man as a reproach, I will not, sir, assume the province of determining; but surely age may become justly contemptible, if the opportunities which it brings have passed away without improvement and vice appears to prevail when the passions have subsided.'

Tourism is democracy in action, with all the horrors that implies

When I was lucky enough to come to Eastern Europe for the first time in January 1990, I congratulated myself on my cleverness for buying a return ticket from London to Vienna for £199. Then, after staying one night in the charming and, I discovered, wicked Hotel Orient, walking through three feet of snow, and more falling, to the first restaurant I found, the Café Landtmann, which I also learnt much later is very famous, I took the train the next day to Budapest.

There were winter package holidays to Austria and so the cheap air tickets that made package holidays cheap were available for purchase separately. This was the only way you got cheap tickets at the end of the Margaret Thatcher era. Return tickets from London to Budapest cost around £350, because there were no package holidays to Hungary, which was behind the Iron Curtain. 

But though £199 for a ticket was cheap then, it is £500 in today's money or €550. 

Return tickets from London to Budapest cost around the equivalent of $1000.

The Daily Telegraph talks about how cheap travel now is here. I quote it.

'It’s easy to take for granted just how affordable travel has become. We can fly to Europe for as little as £10 (so long as you’re willing to pack light), or to New York for less than £150, while back in the Fifties a one-way ticket across the Atlantic with TWA could cost in excess of £5,000 in today’s money.

In another article today the Guardian, as you'd expect, looks at the bad side of all this.

And it is very bad indeed, for conservatives and romantics and for cities, though good for the people who enjoy cheap holidays or make money from them. Tourism provides 10% of the world's GDP. It is what coal and steel were to Victorians. 

There are still places not spoilt, Algeria, Albania, Armenia, even Romania, but not for long.

Quotations

"It’s not a coincidence that two of the institutions that not only inspire public affection but are seen to define British identity are bodies created in the last century, and are equally available to the millionaire and the pauper – the NHS and the BBC."
Jonathan Freedland today in the Guardian


I fully agree with him about how they (quite rightly) inspire public inspection but I hope they have no connection at all with national identity. I am not sure he understands national identity, and probably thinks it is linked to values.

'Putin, a once in a hundred years political phenomenon'

Commentators have often speculated on whom Putin was grooming as his successor. We now have the answer: no one. And this is a wise approach to the issue, because no one in Russia would be capable of filling the shoes of Vladimir Putin, who is a once in a hundred years political phenomenon. And so the shoes to be filled in 2024 and thereafter have been downsized via the power sharing provisions of the proposed constitutional reforms.

I thank my very loyal reader Toma, who provides such excellent quotations in the comments on this blog, for providing this one from Gilbert Doctorow

Vladimir Putin will not yield power, which would mean he would easily end up put in prison or blackmailed by a successor, as he blackmailed his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, by threatening to investigate his corruption. But Mr Putin, objectionable though he is, like Donald Trump, same caveat, is a very remarkable political phenomenon. 

Things I did not know about the Kaiser

From The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 by Sir Richard Evans. Without having read him I was very prejudiced against him indeed, but I may well have been wrong. 

He is left-wing, but so was the incomparable A.J.P. Taylor, though in sharp contradiction to Taylor Sir Richard is passionately in favour of what was the EEC and is now the EU. 

Of course, his politics has in itself nothing to do with how good a historian he is. However, being on the left usually makes even great historians lack a dimension. Tony Judt, for example. 

When it comes to left-wing history, Marxists are usually better historians than liberals, because they see through liberalism and moderate socialism.

A.J.P. Taylor, though left-wing Labour was a 'Tory historian', meaning he wrote detailed, factual history as a sceptic without any political bias. Reading the Guardian's review of The Pursuit of Power, it is clear that Sir Richard Evans is not only very politically engaged but that his political engagement flows into his writing. It is probably something to do with his Welsh blood.

Books

'From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.' Heidegger, interviewed by Der Spiegel in 1966 (yes, I know he joined the Nazi Party)


'In some way, great books wait for you, biding their time until the moment you are ready for them.' Douglas Murray in Unherd yesterday


'But isn't it really time you handed over those tiresome petty duties to someone else and shut yourself up with your books in the peace and comfort of your retreat? This is what should be both business and pleasure, work and recreation, and should occupy your thoughts awake and asleep!' Pliny the Younger, Letters 1.3.3 (to Caninius Rufus; translated

The American left is literally mad

A footnote to the history of our times.

France is an archipelago

While I am on the subject of city versus country, an article in this week's edition of Der Spiegel talks about the city-countryside split in France. My sympathies are entirely with the countryside and the provinces, the people who hunt and shoot and the working class, even though I could only be happy living in a big, bad capital city and have no idea how to handle a gun.

'France is no longer a united, solidary republic, says Jérome Fourquet, but a fragmented kingdom of islands, an archipelago of sorts. Fourquet works at IFOP, the oldest polling agency in France. It's his job to measure the nation's sensitivities with a sober eye. More than half of all French people still support the protesters, Fourquet says, and two-thirds are dissatisfied with Macron.
Last year, he published a best-selling book about his archipelago theory. 

'Fourquet attributes the division of the country into "many small and some large islands" to the diminishing importance of Catholicism. In the past, it was the Catholics versus the secularists -- just two camps, and everyone's positions were clear. You were either religious or you weren't. You were on the left or the right. Now, however, there's also a geographical fragmentation. Elites, Fourquet says, tend to live in big cities, while those people who fear change usually live in the countryside.'

Big cities and the global village

[England] 'doesn't have a sense of itself as a nation to be transformed and is divided between the vibrant, youthful and pro-European big cities — especially London — and the aging, stagnating and anti-European rest of the country.' English historian David Edgerton in the New York Times, a Remainer obviously.

This is the struggle across the rich, mostly white countries of the world - between cities and the rest and between young and old. 

The countryside used to be considered the heart of every country, except in Romania where the word peasant was, at least until very recently, the most contemptuous description Romanians could apply to anyone, except perhaps for gypsy. 

Once older people were respected but in the 1960s, as a kind of delayed flowering of the spirit of the Romantic Age, people began thinking young people were interesting, which, in the words of Peter Oborne, they are really not.

Quotations

'The people who used to run the country and those who thought they had some influence over how it was run are angry, confused and resentful. They feel, to borrow a phrase, left behind.' Stephen Daisley, Remainer

‘An old Akan proverb that I picked up while I was in Ghana, “All fingers are not the same.” There is wisdom in these Akan proverbs.’ Boris Johnson, wicked Leaver

“Get a reputation for foreseeing the future by predicting that someone will die, & then have him killed” - advice offered in the Artha-shastra, a textbook on politics supposedly written by Kautilya, minister of the 4th century BC Mauryan emperor, Chandragupta

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) January 23, 2020

Humanity is horrible, but nations are beautiful

Another aphorism.

Quotations

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.”
Mark Twain

“We should try to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.” Miguel de Unamuno

"Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world."
The Observer, 22 February 2004

Quotations

"Brexit will alter Britain irrevocably. Any project that presupposes close alignment with the EU – such as Scottish independence – belongs in the past." English philosopher John Gray

"Gramsci’s belief that the working class makes history has turned out to be right, at least in Britain, but not in the way he and his disciples imagined. Somewhere in the heavens, the gods are laughing." John Gray

"According to Jay Keyser, professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [George] Steiner was told at a seminar in the 1970s that, while he had written at length on Dostoevsky's use of the definite article, there was no such thing in Russian. "It was as though a fly had landed on his shoulder," says Keyser. "A criticism that should have been devastating made no impact."
Maya Jaggi, The Guardian, 17 Mar 2001

Democracy and traditionalists versus the new elite

A quotation from a new book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, by an American, Professor Michael Lind of the University of Texas. 

“The new class war is very real – and the managerial class is winning. A few decades ago, corporate managers, politicians and university professors had distinct subcultures. No longer. What we might call ‘woke capitalism’ represents a fusion of the three elites at the commanding heights of the economy, the culture and politics; they increasingly constitute a single conformist caste.

Conservatism is about love

'The market-based legal order of the Brussels bureaucracy helped to fill the legal vacuum created by communism, and was warmly received on that account. But, because of the unwise provisions of the Treaty of Rome regarding freedom of movement, it has led to the mass emigration of the professional classes, and to the loss of the educated young from countries that stand desperately in need of them.'
Sir Roger Scruton

'My thought is that the essential feature of conservatism is love of the actual, love of the things that you've inherited and a desire to reassert that inheritance. Not uncritically you know, but it's in the way that you do with your family, your parents,your brothers, and sisters.You know their faults but you love them and they're a part of you, and it's your primary duty to affirm that love. Then work for any improvements, of course.'

Sir Roger Scruton

'There is now a large constituency of people on the left – middle class, metropolitan, Remain-supporting, interested in foreign policy and identity politics over bread and butter class issues – who quietly welcome the party’s shift to more bourgeois terrain. They never liked the working class much anyway, and in some cases have attempted to equate the phrase “traditional working class” with white supremacism.'  James Bloodworth, in CapX


'The past is a part of us, perhaps the most essential.' Victor Hugo, one of the epigraphs for Sybille Bedford's A Compass Error, which I finally finished rereading today.

The decline and fall of the English high street

'Woman is born free but is everywhere in chain stores.'

This is the line to a Spectator cartoon of thirty years ago - would it be considered sexist now?

The British High Street is dying. All the time the papers cover stories about famous retail chains going bust. It saddens me that people are now going to shopping centres instead, but they are terribly convenient. 

It does not sadden me that the chains are dying. Let them die. They made every high street in England the same street. Now they make every shopping centre the same too, I suppose. 

More from Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

The right way to live is by enjoying one's faculties, striving to like and if possible to love one's fellows, and also to accept that death is both necessary in itself and a blessed relief to those whom you would otherwise burden. The health fanatics who have poisoned all our natural enjoyments ought, in my view, to be rounded up and locked together in a place where they can bore each other rigid with their futile nostrums for eternal life. The rest of us should live out our days in a chain of linked symposia, in which the catalyst is wine, the means conversation, the goal a serene acceptance of our lot and a determination not to outstay our welcome.

Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with right-wing people because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with left-wing people because I simply believe that they are mistaken.

Once we came before God’s presence with a song; now we come before his absence with a sigh.

Bernie Sanders: a country exists for the benefit of the people in it

Bernie Sanders shocked his supporters in 2016 by pointing out that a country exists for the benefit of the people in it.


This is from an interview with Bernie Sanders in 2015. The interviewer is the Editor of Vox.

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that's a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …