Is Britain resigning as a world power? No, but perhaps we should

From an article in today's Washington Post by Fareed Zakaria, headlined:

• Britain resigns as a world power

On Monday, the Right Honorable David Cameron, prime minister of Great Britain, gave his first major speech after being reelected to his high office — once held by Pitt, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George, Churchill and Thatcher. Confronting a world of challenges — including Greece’s possible exit from the euro, a massive migration crisis on Europe’s shores, Ukraine’s perilous state, Russia’s continued intransigence, the advance of the Islamic State and the continuing chaos in the Middle East — Cameron chose to talk about . . . a plan to ensure that hospitals in the United Kingdom will be better staffed on weekends.

Okay, that’s a bit unfair. Leaders everywhere, including in the United States, understand that “all politics is local.” But spending a few days recently in Britain, I was struck by just how parochial it has become. After an extraordinary 300-year run, Britain has essentially resigned as a global power.

I'm not convinced we are resigning as a great power. Americans don't realise that
the NHS and health (and safety) in general are a quasi-religion in England. They fill the place formerly given to the sacred in English life. (Climate change is another quasi-religion.)

Plus David Cameron has little independence in foreign policy. The Pitts, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd George and Churchill up until Pearl Harbor could decide their own foreign policy - now we are a US satellite and part of the EU. Over hospitals David Cameron has power.

What independence he has he has used disastrously - to topple Gaddafi, for example. Yet he wanted to repeat his error with Syria but, thanks to Ed Miliband, the moribund House of Commons roused itself to stop him.

Maybe we should resign as a great power, leave the EU and concentrate on the threats to our country, rather than protecting Europe or the Middle East. The threats to the U.K. seem to come from Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, from hundreds of thousands of immigrants arriving each year and from British terrorists, not from ISIS nor Mr. Putin. But this would lead to an isolationist USA, sooner or later. Would that be good or bad? 

The Washington Post article is here. It argues that Britain should play a larger part in the world because we have the right values. Broadly we do have the right values, give or take some important things, and foreign policy should be about values, but first and foremost it should be about enlightened self-interest.

Fareed Zakaria was an advocate of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even now he evidently does not understand how that tragedy has changed Britain and the world. 

Last year he described as

"crucial elements of Putinism ... nationalism, religion, social conservatism, state capitalism and government domination of the media. They are all, in some way or another, different from and hostile to, modern Western values of individual rights, tolerance, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism."

I do not like Vladimir Putin, but if religion and social conservatism are

different from and hostile to modern Western values

then I want fewer values and more minding our own business.

"So what is the point of Europe today? For me the answer is to be found in Turkey."

Lord ('Chris') Patten, who wants Turkey to join the EU as does the present British Conservative government, said back in 2011 

'Istanbul's the city where Europe's future may be shaped– Istanbul, not Brussels, Paris, or Berlin.'

Admitting Turkey as a member would give the Europe a new reason to exist. 

'As an EU member, Turkey would add a new dimension of massive historic importance. Europeans would show that we could embrace an Islamic democracy and build a strong bridge between Europe and Western Asia.That, in turn, would create a new European identity and narrative, a new reason for the EU to exist in this century, a way of rejecting the divisive politics of old. 

Meanwhile as Lord Patten enthuses over Turkey in the EU the great novelist Orhan Pamuk (he is great) has enthused about immigration transforming Turkey. 

'As the economic crisis deepens and spreads, Europe may be able, by turning in on itself, to postpone its struggle to preserve the culture of the “bourgeois” in Flaubert’s sense of the word, but that will not solve the problem. When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year and now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble concluding that the poor, unemployed, and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely. Higher walls, tougher visa restrictions, and ships patrolling borders in increasing numbers will only postpone the day of reckoning. Worst of all, anti-immigration politics, policies, and prejudices are already destroying the core values that made Europe what it was.'

Of course, Constantinople was a multiracial, multicultural city before the 20th century and had a Christian majority in 1914. Those old multiracial cities like Vienna, Prague and Istanbul became drearily monoethnic because of genocide, war and ethnic cleansing. A bad augury?


Fortunately, there's no chance of persuading the voters that allowing seventy million Muslims free movement within the EU is a good idea. Why are the voters so much wiser than their rulers? People were frightened for millenia of democracy but the people aren't scary. Intellectuals and politicians are, once no longer attached materially or emotionally to the landed class.

Geography, Christianity and the European Greco-Roman heritage are what should define Europe, which badly needs an identity and tradition. The EU's mistake was making a promise we shall not keep - a much worse mistake would be to keep it.

Was Hitler a Mohammed who failed? Discuss.

Comme l’Islam est resté figé dans sa contemplation d’une société qui fut réelle il y a sept siècles, et pour trancher les problèmes de laquelle il conçut alors des solutions efficaces, nous n’arrivons plus à penser hors des cadres d’une époque révolue depuis un siècle et demi, qui fut celle où nous sûmes nous accorder à l’histoire ; et encore trop brièvement, car Napoléon, ce Mahomet de l’Occident, a échoué là où a réussi l’autre. 

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

When I read Levi Strauss saying Napoleon was a Mohammed who failed I wondered if Hitler was too. 

I suppose yes, more so than Napoleon.

I mean no particular disrespect to Mohammed by making the comparison with Hitler. Both were conquerors, both were moralists and both were religious figures, according at least to Jung. But Hitler was a complete failure. His legacy, seventy years after his defeat, was a continent dominated by ideas very consciously antithetical to his.

Carl Jung in 1938 said:

Hitler’s ‘religion’ is the nearest to Mohammedanism, realistic, earthy, promising the maximum rewards in this life, but with a Moslem-like Valhallah into which worthy Germans may enter and continue to enjoy themselves. Like Mohammedanism, it teaches the virtue of the sword. Hitler’s first idea is to make his people powerful because the spirit of the Aryan German deserves to be supported by might, by muscle and by steel.

Jung was asked by the Bishop of Southwark in a discussion published in 1939

…had he any views on what was likely to be the next step in religious development?

and replied:

We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. He is already on the way; he is like Muhammad. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with wild god. That can be the historic future.

During an interview with H. R. Knickerbocker, published in January 1939, Jung said:

There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man. As somebody commented about him at the last Nuremberg party congress, since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. His body does not suggest strength. The outstanding characteristic of his physiognomy is its dreamy look. I was especially struck by that when I saw pictures taken of him in the Czechoslovakian crisis; there was in his eyes the look of a seer. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler’s is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, and unreasonable. … So you see, Hitler is a medicine man, a spiritual vessel, a demi-deity or, even better, a myth.

Was Jung right that Nazism was a quasi-religious idea and Hitler a (false) prophet?

Lothrop Stoddard was an American advocate of eugenics (though not a fascist) who visited Germany in 1940. In his Into the Darkness: Nazi Germany Today published that year he said: 

I am convinced that the [Nazi] ‘Old Guard,’ at any rate, are for the most part, fanatical zealots. If the Nazi thesis were a dialectic screen hiding mere lust for power and pelf, it would never have converted so large a portion of the traditionally honest, idealistic German people. If the Nazi leaders were just a band of cynical adventurers, with tongue in cheek and wholly ‘on the make,’ it would be far easier to deal with them.

Both Hitler and Napoleon can be compared to Muhammed.  Interestingly, Hitler and Napoleon both expressed their admiration for Muhammed. (Why don't the English any more use the traditional spelling Mahomet? The French do.)

Napoleon’s biographer Emmanuel-Augustin-Dieudonné-Joseph, Count of Las Cases, says that Napoleon, exiled in St. Helena, was unhappy with Voltaire’s play “Mahomet.” 

Mahomet was the subject of deep criticism.“Voltaire”, said the Emperor, “in the character and conduct of his hero, has departed both from nature and history. He has degraded Mahomet, by making him descend to the lowest intrigues. He has represented a great man who changed the face of the world, acting like a scoundrel, worthy of the gallows. He has no less absurdly travestied the character of Omar, which he has drawn like that of a cut-throat in a melo-drama. Voltaire committed a fundamental error in attributing to intrigue that which was solely the result of opinion." Omar refers to Omar bin al-Khattab, caliph after Prophet Muhammad.

Moving from the profane to the sacred, Napoleon's admiration for Mohammed was exceeded by his admiration for Jesus, of whom he said,

I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between Him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But on what did we rest the creation of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.

Hitler admired Islam. In the bunker he said, according to Martin Bormann, 

Had Charles Martel not been victorious at Poitiers — already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing is Christianity! — then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism, that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens up the Seventh Heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.

There is no doubt about the enthusiasm of other Nazis for Islam, including Himmler, who was a good friend of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Grand Mufti is said to have visited Auschwitz at Himmler's suggestion.

The point Claude Lévi-Strauss made was that France is obsessed by the ideas of the early 19th century as Islam is with those of the distant past. But I don't think Napoleon did fail. As Anthony Burgess said, pace Levi Strauss, he won when England joined the European Economic Community (or Common Market as we called it or EU as it is known today).

I suppose the USA venerates the Whiggism of the 18th century. Are the Enlightenment ideas of Locke a quasi-religion? These words from the American Declaration of Independence sound very like dogmas.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In fact, though church and state are separated in the USA the ideas of the Constitution are the established religion of America. There are heretics (Communists and fascists) but they are apt to be persecuted, just as were the only true American conservatives, the loyalists who were killed or driven out in the American revolution.

I think it is useful to see ideologies in religious terms, though some more than others. I think it is clear now that Marxism-Leninism was (or rather is) a religion, for example. Marxism is certainly also frozen in time, a product of the Europe of 1848, a by-blow of German romanticism.  

Was Lenin also a Mohammed who failed? Lenin's ideas are still influential, at least as mediated via Gramsci. He has not wholly failed, unfortunately.

First they came for the bakers

This article was published in Taki's Magazine. The vote was lost and Ireland is no longer a Catholic country.

All countries are traditions based on religion and genetics, though in irreligious countries they don’t know it. And all European countries these days seem to be in very big trouble.

Southern Ireland, where until the 1990s divorce was illegal, is about to vote on whether to institute homosexual marriage. Incredibly - in Ireland! -  all the political parties are in favor and people who are opposed are being told that they are bigots. Society is constantly persecuting and the intolerance of the old days has given way to a new intolerance. It’s sad for those of us who thought Eire used to be a shining city on a hill.

It’s customary at this point to deny being a homophobe, so I had better do so. The two closest friends I ever had were lesbians and I am completely broad minded in practice, if not in theory. I share Garrett Fitzgerald’s mindset. After reading some complicated text from his civil servants when he was Taoiseach he was reputed to have said “Well, that’s alright in practice, but how does it work in theory?”

“What if a Muslim baker was asked to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding?”

But why should homosexuals want to marry? What was attractive about them was the secrecy and sense of being outsiders, like Communists or Catholics. They should, one feels, drink absinthe and read decadent French poetry. Instead they want respectability, children and PTA meetings.

The Irish referendum result will be affected by the decision yesterday in Northern Ireland to convict some devout Presbyterian bakers who refused to bake a cake with the slogan ‘Support Gay Marriage’ on it. The bakers didn’t refuse to sell cakes to homosexuals, as until a few years ago it was any baker’s ancient Common Law right to do, but they simply refused to bake one saying ‘Support Gay Marriage’ as you or I might do if we didn’t support gay marriage. There were no doubt socially liberal or venal bakers who would have done so, but someone was trying to make a point. The poor bakers were being set up.

It’s always devout bakers whom homosexual activists pick on and try to ruin. There have been many cases in different countries involving bakers being asked to bake cakes for homosexual weddings and what splendid moral courage the Christian bakers show, quite unsupported by the clergy. Some have lost fortunes in fines. Meanwhile, bishops talk of global warming.



First they came for the bakers but I wasn’t a baker…



The backlash against the court’s decision might just be enough to swing the vote against homosexual marriage in the South but if it does there will be another vote, as always happens. The electorate originally voted not to legalize divorce in Southern Ireland but in these circumstances the electorate continues to vote until they get the answer right. Then no more votes. It’s the same with referendums on European treaties. 



Before homosexual marriage is on the statute books in one country after another, even religious ones like the USA, it becomes socially unacceptable to oppose the idea. Homosexuality has become one of the few things European societies hold sacred, as it was in some cults in pagan Rome.

What if a Muslim bakery was asked to bake a cake with a depiction of the prophet on it? What if a Muslim baker was asked to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding?

What would the Guardian and liberal clergymen like Dr. Giles Fraser say then? It would be an irresistible force meeting an immovable object. Liberal Anglicans pretend to think that Jesus, a first-century rabbi, would have thought homosexual acts were fine and dandy. Though they don’t care what the early church thought about the matter they do respect the view of the Koran. But liberals, who canted about freedom and free speech when the cartoonists in Paris were murdered, don’t think free speech should extend to what you write or don’t write on cakes.


No-one minds that vegetarians don’t approve of eating meat and say so, but it is very dangerous and even often illegal to criticise homosexuality. The only reason I can come up with is that anti-discrimination has to be understood as a secular religion in itself. An important function of all religions is to justify inequality and the chimera of equality of opportunity does this. Outlawing discrimination is the way that a society that finds inequality hard to justify justifies it.


Human rights are a new religion which seems to complement but is, in fact, replacing Christianity. Anti-discrimination and welfare considerations, which are wholly materialistic, have taken the place of the sacred in the European imagination. Homosexuality is the issue where human rights and Christianity conflict. It is making the West anti-Christian, instead of merely post-Christian.

Historians will spend much time trying to understand the complete lack of a conservative backlash against the sexual revolution, in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain or Ronald Reagan’s USA, after AIDS suddenly appeared. It was the dog that did not bark in the night. The clergy was as silent as the laity. In any earlier age, even in the 1960s, people would have thought and spoken in terms of the plague being a sign from heaven. Instead, the authorities busied themselves giving away condoms.

G.K. Chesterton condemned the modern and morbid weakness to sacrifice the normal to the abnormal. If only we had polemicists like him today to argue wittily and cleverly against the folly of single-sex marriage. The new teaching or absence of teaching by the clergy on sexual morality is the kind of thing that makes some people convert to Islam, seeking a rock which earlier converts found in Catholicism before the Second Vatican Council. I spoke to an American evangelist recently in Nazareth. He instructs Muslims and Jews who want to convert to Christianity. I found I agreed when he told me ‘Christendom has lost its soul. Islam deserves to dominate Europe.’

Eating King Louis XIV's heart: a curious history

Dean Buckland of Westminster (1784–1856, blink and he's gone) claimed to have eaten his way through the animal kingdom, including eating mole, bluebottle, panther, crocodile and mouse. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, twice president of the Geological Society and kept a menagerie of animals, including snakes, eagles and monkeys, at the deanery. While dining at Lord Harcourt's house at Nuneham in 1848 he was shown a silver locket containing an object resembling pumice stone. He popped the object in his mouth, perhaps to try and find out what mineral it was, and swallowed it. It was in fact part of the mummified heart of Louis XIV of France which had been taken from the royal tomb by a member of the Harcourt family. 

The New York Times for 4 December 1910 says:

One day at Nuneham [Archbishop Harcourt, obit 1847] was exhibiting [the heart] to his guests at dessert. It had been reduced by age and embalming process to the size and appearance of a small nut. It was passed around the table for exhibition. When it reached Dr. Butler [sic], Dean of Westminster, renowned not only for his zoological knowledge, but also for his extraordinary absence of mind, he without thinking what he was doing swallowed it, washing it down with a copious draft of the Harcourt port. That was the end of the royal heart of Louis XIV, the most powerful monarch of his time, and which thus disappeared down the maw of a famous English divine at Nuneham.

Augustus Hare tells a different version, which I read many years ago in a Victorian collection of anecdotes whose name escapes me.

Talk of strange relics led to mention of the heart of a French King preserved at Nuneham in a silver casket. Dr. Buckland, whilst looking at it, exclaimed, 

‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before,’ 

and, before anyone could hinder him, he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.” The heart in question is said to have been that of Louis XIV. Buckland was followed in this bizarre hobby by his son Frank.

Style

Lord Snowdon's photograph of my beloved friend Mgr. Alfred Gilbey is the best photographic portrait I ever saw. I looked it up today and find it was bought back in 2000 for the National Portrait Gallery​. As Charles Moore said, Mgr. Gilbey in this picture had more style than anyone of our times. He was a rich man who lived in the Travellers' Club for over thirty years after he resigned from the chaplaincy of Cambridge University, rather than minister to the spiritual needs of girl-undergraduates). Some famous rock star (I forget who) used to visit him in the Travellers' Club once a week to confess but the half-Spanish monsignor was cooler than any rock star. 

A lack of Prime Ministers

My favourite Harold Macmillan story is of when the Queen, Mrs. Thatcher and the five living former Prime Ministers had dinner at No. 10 in around 1986 to celebrate its 300th anniversary. As the photograph was being taken James Callaghan said: I wonder what is the collective noun for Prime Ministers. To which Lord Stockton who was 91 instantly replied: a lack of principals.

I suppose Ed Miliband would have been no worse, on the whole, than Harold Wilson, but a long way below James Callaghan.

I met them all as well now I think of it except the Queen and Mr Callaghan, whom I often passed in the House. I heard him speak often, of course. All are dead now except H.M. Long may she reign over us.

Was Harold Macmillan being self-revealing when he made this joke? Yes, probably. I think the others were principled except Wilson and Callaghan whom Marcia Falkender brilliantly summed up as 'a bent copper'. Home was, Heath was, dreadful leader though he was, and Mrs. Thatcher was.

Harold Macmillan said his son Maurice, who was my first boss, didn't go to the top in politics 'because he isn't a s-t, like us'. Though Maurice reached the cabinet. Evelyn Waugh thought Macmillan committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by seeing the truth of Catholicism and not converting from worldly motives (i.e. wanting to be P.M.). Waugh was being malign of course. Someone tried to blame Macmillan for his daughter's having an abortion, but this is unfair too.

Mr. Heath liked me on sight when we had lunch and was very charming. I was 19 and realise now, though I didn't then, that I was rather pretty. Even at the time, though I was very innocent indeed, I wondered whether there was a hidden reason why he was so charming. How I wish I had made friends with Enoch Powell whom I also met - much more impressive, slightly mad, very intelligent indeed. However Heath was a good man, who cared about the country and about the poor. I have been told that he secretly paid up the private school bills of two boys whose father was killed in the war, leaving their mother grateful to but baffled by her mysterious benefactor.

Harold Wilson said when Mr Heath went home he had no-one to abuse but himself.  

Macmillan and Wilson were the cleverest, Home the nicest of the bunch and a wise as well as good man. 

Though they didn't talk of it, Macmillan, Home, Heath, Callaghan and Mrs. Thatcher were all very religious, unlike Churchill or Attlee. Whether Harold Wilson, who was raised a Nonconformist, believed in God I don't know.

I took a very precocious interest in politics which I swear goes back to the time when I was still going into my parents' bed in the mornings and I remember very much about Harold Wilson and Edward Heath even though I was fourteen when Wilson retired. 

I remember that Mr. Heath, though a disastrous Prime Minister, was a true leader who dominated his cabinet - he didn't have an internal opposition in his government unlike Mrs. Thatcher. He took the weekends off to go sailing and no-one objected nor speculated on why he wasn't married. I remember Harold Wilson smoked a pipe on TV (how times change) but always a cigar off air. He prided himself on his conservatism with a small c, his dislike of going abroad, his Nonconformist Northern liberalism. He claimed to prefer tinned salmon to salmon (a luxury item then), loved Gilbert and Sullivan and the paintings of Lowry who detested Wilson in return. Even aged five I could see Wilson had no principles, was a consummate trimmer. Harold Wilson left little legacy except the baleful one of anti discrimination laws and the first law against what we now call 'hate speech'. The country sank under him.

Nevertheless, though I remember them I am a child not of Wilson and Heath nor of Mrs Thatcher but of the brief and un-memorable Callaghan era. This article from years ago in the Spectator explains what that means for me and my generation.

Callaghan before he became Prime Minister  seemed to me as a young but perceptive boy as much an unprincipled trimmer as Harold Wilson, but what St John Stevas called the grace of office made him a better Prime Minister than Wilson. Callaghan told someone that before making a decision he asked himself 

what Harold would have done and then did the opposite.

He said at a party conference in the early 1980s of Tony Blair: 

I don't know what that young man is but he isn't Labour.

British attitudes towards immigration

Despite the hatred and loathing some commentators and many people on Twitter seem to feel towards UKIP, their views on immigration seem to be very mild compared with many people's. A survey published in December 2014 shows that 25% of British adults agreed that all immigrants, legal or illegal, should be repatriated, 52% disagreed and 23% didn't answer. These figures will be found here on p.17.  

Oppression, rape and Ovid

News from Columbia University that teaching Ovid may be off the curriculum because the Metamorphoses

contains triggering and offensive material that marginalises student identities.'

Because it's important that undergraduates do not feel uncomfortable or marginalised. 

i think I have been marginalised all my life. Perhaps that's my tragedy. Still, it's to be expected if one's a conservative

A translation of Homer published in America came with an introduction warning students that much of the contents would today be considered unacceptable. So did the translation I recently read of the memoirs of an Arab slave trader in Africa who expressed racist ideas. The translator had thought of expurgating it but decided not to. Thank goodness I read the great books before feminism and PC took over.

I read the Metamorphoses in Latin at 18 immediately after leaving school. It is full of rapes and is deeply sexist and patriarchal. Now the classics are taught - in English - from a feminist standpoint. Thank God I read old books deeply and widely as an adolescent without being taught them or taught to put them into the context of modern modish ideas. I presumed that old writers were civilised, which is why they were classics.

Of course 'patriarchy' can be, often has been, oppressive. Oppression you have always in all societies, including our own, but the differences between men and women are natural, God given, if you believe in that hypothesis, part of the natural order of things, not social constructs. People for centuries read the classics to distance themselves from the ideas of the age. What academics in the humanities are teaching students, most of who inevitably are not particularly intelligent, is anti-conservatism. Often they do so because ideas like feminism are simply useful ones to play with. We should find new ones for them to play with.

When I as up at university I wanted to find a conservative critique of history and literature and wish I had applied myself. Later on I discovered that religious writers and theologians were full of unexamined liberal premises. Often it seems that defeating these people in argument is so easy that it is almost cruel, but I have never found time to write the books to do so. It is becoming very urgent.

I refuse to give up but I can't help wondering if this is a dying civilisation. Largely because of feminism Europeans are dying out. I wonder if we are at the Marcus Aurelius point, the point where Gibbon begins The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

St Petersburg

When I was 22, after I went down from the university and when all careers seemed like rival prisons, I made several large commonplace books. As a result quotations stick in my mind and I am a walking dictionary of them. I collected famous last words and here in St Petersburg I remember - as I very often do - the Decembrist who was walking up to the gallows, when it broke down and he had to go back down and wait. His last words were, 'Nothing ever goes right for me'.

Two feet from where I sit back in the B & B after long hours tourist work a young man is sitting one leg hanging off a window ledge cleaning the windows three stories up. In a way this disregard of health and safety is inspiring and makes on like Russia. In another way it gives me vertigo. 

Russia is enchanting, un-Western, backward. People are wonderful. Men are real men, women real women, all replete with Russian soul, except the vulgarians who walk into you as you cross the road..

Yesterday was a very serendipitous day. ! met and was invited to join a group of lovely young women being guided around St. Petersburg (I went to L to type Leningrad, oddly) by two lovely St Petersburg girls. As Nina who steered me around last time I was here said to me -"How I love these Russian girls - so beautiful and so kind." I decided not to wait in the long long queue for the Hermitage with the girls but as I walked away Vadim the seller of contraband caviar who knows the boy on the door fixed it for me to skip the queue and pop straight in. I bought some caviar from him for 1000 roubles = EUR 17 which is half the price of dinner at a cheap restaurant and it tastes good. I spent a very long time looking at the seven Claudes. He is the greatest of all painters for with him painting becomes poetry. He paints light itself. 

And, dropping an intellectual level or five, of course St Petersburg is a reason for me to retell my favourite joke.

What have Catherine the Great and Winnie the Pooh got in common?

Answer: the same middle name.

Stereotypes, whatever they are

I slept very comfortably last night on the train when conductress finally relented and found me a carriage to myself. St Petersburg is cold and grey and I am glad of my Nigel Farage overcoat. The fedora protected me from the rain in Red Sq last night. I wonder if this station is the Finland station. No jokes about Lenin. Keep your head down.

In Moscow I visited a British diplomat friend. His ten year old daughter came home from school while we drank tea, he asked her what she had studied in school and she answered 'Stereotypes'. I don't know what stereotypes are exactly but I know indoctrinating schoolchildren against them is bad news. 

Oddly enough, children have not been taught catechism for two generations and are no longer taught Christianity, except in the context of comparative religion.

In fact children are being taught a new religion, called human rights, though these rights are not the same as freedom and in many cases diametrically opposed to freedom. They are being taught the rebuttable assumption that equality is a good idea when it is usually a very dangerous idea indeed.

I imagine the idea of stereotypes is an attack on socially conservative ideas. I would have enjoyed kicking against these ideas were I at school or university but young people tell me it is best to keep your head down and pretend to accept them. 

Racism is unpleasant but antiracism is responsible for many evils. It is essentially a quasi-religious phenomenon, a specifically Protestant one, a mutation of puritanism crossbred with Marxism, a left wing movement disguised as simple decency, essentially irrational.

Romanians are fairly happy

A recent survey shows that Romanians are about mid way in world happiness rankings. Details here.

They are certainly much happier than Hungarians or most Slavs.I am not convinced Scandinavians are necessarily very happy but their culture (it's their culture, innit?) tends to make them say they are when asked.

Bucharest is changing

Davin Ellicson a brilliant young American photographer wrote this to me today, which is worth sharing.

I went to the night of the galleries last night and it was as if the Bucharest I knew is long gone. It was a shock. Bucharest is unrecognizable these days. Romanians have transformed themselves in every way. Since around 2011, Bucharest hit a new period. Romanians look different now, they carry themselves differently, they've traded BMWs for bikes. The city looks different with new streets, no wires, no dogs, bike lanes, all sorts of hip cafes and bars (even no smoking ones). Everyone has cameras and wears the latest fashions, many have the iPhone 6 and Apple laptops. There's an altogether different spirit about the place as if Bucharestians are finally reclaiming the city that Ceausescu took away from them for so long. At the route level it's about economics it seems to me. Money doesn't just buy new cars, it can buy a new found confidence. Many have traveled widely and globalization seems to finally be hitting up Bucharest, albeit in a sophisticated way. Bucharest is transforming itself in a way and at a speed you never witness in the West.


Calea Victoriei was also shut down for the light show and I had never seen so many Romanians in the streets except for the Rosia Montana protests. Romanians are taking back the urban environment that for so long was stolen from them. It's becoming their city again.

Freedom of speech in England

Freedom of speech means the right to offend. The freedom to say inoffensive things isn't freedom at all. Far too few people are being offended these days. 

As Kingsley Amis said: 

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.

And this is the motto for this blog. 

I think it's very sad that Labour in the British election have promised to bring in more restrictions on freedom of speech, this time to prevent 'islamophobia'. 

How recently England was a famously free country. Now Romania is much freer. You can say most things here, though if you are very unlucky you might get done for slander, which is a crime. People even smoke in restaurants here.

Why does Africa look away when Africans are drowned?

Why does Africa look away when Africans are drowned in the Mediterranean? Why do the Arab states look away when ISIS are killing Muslims Christians Yezidis? Are the Muslim countries less philanthropic than the (vaguely) Christian ones?

The United Nations predict 24 million will disembark from North Africa for Europe within the next ten years.This is not a humanitarian question or even a political one but an invasion.

Hillary won't win

Hillary Clinton won't win the US presidential election, simply because the dynamics of journalism require her to lose. Her winning would be such a boring story and America loves exciting serials: OJ; hanging chads; September 11; Lewinsky etc. Also she is too old, too physically unattractive, clearly an egoist and not really a politician, but a wife.

I read that the Taliban would have sold Osama to the USA in the 1990s and she told her husband that it would be wrong to give money to a country that oppressed women.

The Mar Mattai monastery five years later: Christianity is being extinguished in the Middle East

I was in the beautiful Assyrian monastery of Saint Matthew's (Mar Mattai in Syriac) in 2010, overlooking the plain of Nineveh. In those days Kurdish Iraq was the place along with Syria where Christians were safe.

Mar Mattai dates from 363 and was founded by a hermit fleeing from Julian the Apostate. Some parts of the nave of the church are very old indeed, though what you can see is late 19th century. The monk I spoke to there, of course, said that Saddam was a good friend to Christians. How could he not? The monk also told me that one of the departing Jews in the 1970s told him 'It is the turn of the Saturday people now but it will be the Sunday people later.' 

When we arrived there were three large coaches parked in the forecourt and I feared we were not the only foreign tourists, but I found that the coaches had brought pilgrims from Erbil. Now no pilgrims dare visit and only six monks are left. Jane Corbin has been there for the BBC and wrote this very depressing report. Her broadcast can be watched in the UK on the net.

Damn Mr Bush and Mr Blair. (Damn Mr. Cameron and Mr. Sarkozy too for overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi.) Swearing relieves my feelings but now we have to do what we can against IS. 

Exorcism and Christianity

Jesus was an itinerant exorcist. If you don't believe in exorcism, you don't believe in Christianity. Modern man prefers, understandably, to ignore this.

However, Pope Francis talks a lot about the devil and exorcisms are becoming more frequent, according to this interesting article in The Independent, by a writer I don't like, Peter Stanford.

It all comes down to our modern tendency to cherry pick the bits of Christianity that we like. Thumbs up to quoting Jesus, in the gospels, when he calls for a fairer, more loving society, but close your eyes when, in exorcist mode, he drives out evil spirits from the sick and afflicted. One is deemed real, the other, at best, symbolic. Yet for centuries the Devil was anything but a symbol. Priests would routinely deal with all manner of problems in their congregations by pronouncing the rite of exorcism, summoning out the terrifying reality of the Devil, confronting him with the crucifix, and applying holy water, salt and clouds of incense lavishly.

Modern man, and this includes bishops, likes Jesus when, in the gospels, he calls for a fairer society, but did he call for a fairer society? Not fairer in the sense modern politicians understand. 

Jesus also speaks often of hell and damnation. In the words of Henri De Montherlant,

Many are called but few are chosen, but devout Christians think this is the rhetoric of Jesus Christ.

Five wonderful quotations

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits."
Robert Louis Stevenson


"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back—
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Begin it now."
Goethe


“The Church says: the body is a sin.
Science says: the body is a machine.
Advertising says: The body is a business.
The Body says: I am a fiesta.”
Eduardo Galeano, who has died.

"In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first." 
Harry S.Truman

“Only one offence is now vigorously punished,—an accurate observance of our fathers’ traditions."
St. Basil on the Arian schism

Freedom is so last century

A New York yellow cabbie is facing $15,000 in fines for ordering two female passengers to stop kissing. It used to be the law not so long ago that London cabbies had to permit smoking in their cabs, a law that went back centuries. Kissing seems very reasonable between people of the opposite sex in London cabs where the driver is partitioned off but this cabbie had a no kissing policy. Meanwhile a cabbie who killed a 9-year-old boy as he held his dad's hand in a Manhattan crosswalk was fined $580.

In Scotland a Rangers fan who was arrested for sectarian singing while on his way to attend a game against Celtic has been jailed for four months.The sheriff described the words to the song as "inflammatory" an said it "could have led to horrendous violence".

Another man, Alexander Blood, from Saltford in Somerset, was given a community payback order after admitting acting in a racially aggravated manner.
Blood swore at police officers and called them "Jock".

Genius and childhood

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed." 

Charles Baudelaire

"Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence."

Norman Podhoretz

"Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life." G.K. Chesterton

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." 

Pablo Picasso

"One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste." 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe



"A little boy sees and hears birds with delight.

Then his “good father” comes along and feels he should “share” the experience and help his son “develop.” He says: “That’s a jay, and this is a sparrow.”

The moment the little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing. He has to see and hear them the way that his father wants him to.

Father has good reasons on his side, since few people can afford to go through life listening to the birds sing, and the sooner the little boy starts his “education” the better. Maybe he will be an ornithologist when he grows up.

A few people, however, can still see and hear in the old way. But most of the members of the human race have lost the capacity to be painters, poets, or musicians, and are not left the option of seeing and hearing directly even if they can afford to; they must get it secondhand.

The recovery of this ability is called “awareness.”

Eric Berne

Time management advice by Jung

If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. … you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. 

Carl Jung

Who are the best prose writers in English?

A friend of mine and I have just exchanged these mails. He wrote first.

Sat at home, sombre, listening to St Matthew's Passion. Thought some more about the best prose writers I can think of. 
Amis - Kingsley and Martin. Martin brilliant, complex, sometimes convoluted. Kingsley polished. 
Waugh - often brilliant and economical writing. 
Hitchens - very consistent, punchy, funny. His brother also good. 
Rana Dasgupta - superb long form journalist, wrote a brilliant essay on the ills of modern Delhi 
Jonathan Sumption - his books on 100 years war are exquisite although he sometimes meticulous to the point of dull. 
Russell Brand - ignore his Revolution twaddle. His autobiography is one of the funniest books I've read and he sets the scenes of his misdemeanours superbly. 
Kenneth Tynan - brilliant, funny, uninhibited.

My reply:

I forget it's Holy Week. Of course I should have listened to the Bach Passions. It doesn’t help that everyone here thinks Easter is in ten days’ time.

I would rate Jeremy Taylor very high but I brought Holy Living with me when I came here in 1998 and only dipped into it. The King James Bible is better if that counts. Robert Burton is fun.  I never quite went loopy about Sir Thomas Browne but he is good - all the early 17th century writers wrote great prose. And I love of course John Aubrey's unfinished Brief Lives that had he finished it would have lost much of its charm.

I must read Coleridge's prose. I am atrociously badly read in some areas. But without ANY doubt my favourite prose writer is Macaulay. I haven’t read Ruskin. Not much Newman or Carlyle. 

Of the 20th century I love Harold Nicolson’s diary, my favourite diarist (along with Macaulay). Sybille Bedford is wonderful. I like Belloc’s essays and The Path to Rome though not his novels. I like Eliot’s prose better than his poetry, much better. Churchill was very good. I also love William Dalrymple. Yes, I love Tynan very much. And Hitchens wrote great polemic – although I only read a 2 or 3 of his pieces.  This in particular sticks in my mind as great prose. 

I love Macaulay’s letters enormously, my favourite letter writer. Also Lady
Diana Cooper's letters, in her autobiographies and in Philip Ziegler's biography. I love The Faber Book of Diaries. Not a fan of Pepys unlike my beloved Dad, but Pepys is more fun than Evelyn.

My favourite sentence in English is by Landor. Quoted in '84, Charing Cross Rd', that enchanting play, then book and then film.

There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave : there are no voices, O Rhodope ! that are not soon mute, however tuneful : there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last.

Oh and I almost forgot perhaps the best prose writer of the 20th century was Raymond Chandler. I love Evelyn Waugh very much and rate him higher than Graham Greene but as a prose stylist I prefer Graham Greene. Greene's book reviews are wonderfully written as are Philip Larkin's.

Here is the best thing Macaulay ever wrote.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

I blogged about the best opening lines of books here but actually I think the opening lines of Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul might be best of all. 

Doctor Eduardo Plarr stood in the small port on the Paraná, among the rails and yellow cranes, watching where a horizontal plume of smoke stretched over the Chaco. It lay between the red bars of sunset like a stripe on a national flag. Doctor Plarr found himself alone at that hour except for the one sailor who was on guard outside the maritime building. It was an evening which, by some mysterious combination of failing light and the smell of an unrecognized plant, brings back to some men the sense of childhood and of future hope and to others the sense of something which has been lost and nearly forgotten.

Young fogeys never grow old

Young fogeys never grow old.

As I strode on my way home through a decrepit part of town a gypsy woman in peacock-colourful dress just stopped me not to ask for money but to say how much she loved what I was wearing (brown fedora, Nigel Farage covert coat, check shirt, pink woolen tie) and ask if I was 'in the opera'.

If Conor Gearty were British Prime Minister things would be even worse than they are

An article by Professor Conor Gearty from today's Independent makes a plea for an internationalist United Kingdom, a sibling in Europe not merely a good neighbour. If he were Prime Minister, he says, he would speak the truth:

that Britain is a small place that should stop pretending it is a power, much less a super-power; that the future depends on sibling and not just neighbourly relations with Europe; that immigration is what Britain is, not what Britons should fear; that the country is horribly class-conflicted with the engine of inequality being driven not by the poor but by the upper middle-class with their different schools, accents, health plans and gated communities; that the "free press" is merely the commercial tool of capitalists who trade off the worst instincts of the people for their own gain; that the green belt is a rust belt standing in the way of British homes; that re-industrialization is a fantasy but that the skills to cope with post-industrial Britain can only be delivered by the higher taxation needed to fund the better schools and colleges we need.

His ideas are utterly mistaken, topsy-turvy. The class system is one of the few things that unites Britain and creates social cohesion. Immigration, on the other hand, gravely weakens social cohesion. It acts on our sense of national community like Agent Orange did in Vietnam on forests. So, to a lesser extent, do European integration and devolution, of course.

I am told and believe that Conor Gearty, Professor of Human Rights law at L.S.E., is very clever but this stuff does not impress. As a Southern Irishman, naturally enough, he does not particularly love English national identity, sovereignty, our tradition or our ruling classes. Which goes to make my point for me about immigration and social cohesion.

He might be right, though, that we should forget about being a second rank great power. It is the case that the main threats to us come from terrorists and extremists at home. Also from nationalists who want to dissolve the union and, I should argue, from the European Union.  But if we abandon our role as an American satellite and the USA becomes isolationist what ensues? I am not sure we would like it. 

So I am torn. Perhaps we should be isolationist ourselves, though I am not sure about this one. I think we should probably leave the EU and certainly resile from the ECHR. International law is a great threat to democracy in Great Britain, but so, even more so, is the authoritarianism of the British political class and the sheepish docility of my compatriots. By authoritarianism I am thinking, inter alia, of much human rights law, which extends rather than restricts the powers of the state to tell people what to do, while giving power to foreign institutions to tell the British state what to do. 

Short story set in London

Ernest Hemingway’s friends bet him that he couldn’t write a complete story in just six words. He wrote:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

They paid up. Hemingway said it was his best work.

Facebook statuses can have  a similar terse brilliance, rather like haikus. This is a status posted today by a beautiful, very right-wing Romanian girl, who recently graduated from the University of London. It's much better than Hemingway's six worder, but it does use 105 words.

So I'm sitting next to a middle aged couple having their first date. The lady, which is dressed very well, is a single mom with a newborn in her arms. I sit next to them and I admire the baby, we start talking she says 'oh just have him' and she placed him in my arms continuing her date. He is continuously on his phone texting while she is ignoring her baby and asking her date if he had a prenup with his ex wife... Then he suddenly leaves and she pays the bill and takes the baby away... I am loosing hope in love.

Someone asked me if this were an urban legend (I have experience of those) but my friend, an honest woman, promises me she heard this yesterday.

Talking of haikus, dreary things we had to write at school when I was reading Byron in my spare time, it is one of the semi-religious duties of the Emperor of Japan to compose these. I always have in mind this one of Hirohito who sat on the throne when I was in my twenties.

We had intended

To visit the flower show at Kyoto

But were prevented by ill health.

Christianity and European Culture

I keep coming back to this quotation, which seems to have more meaning and a different meaning from what it had years ago when I first came across it. Suffixed with the terse word 'Discuss', it would make a good question in a history general paper.

“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe--until recently--have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning...I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”

T.S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940)

Had Richard III won at Bosworth, would England now be Catholic?

Yesterday King Richard III was given, as he would have wanted, a Catholic Requiem Mass, his body having been discovered under a car park in Leicester, not far from where he died on Bosworth field. His body was taken to the church where he will be buried this week, the procession being attended by thousands. As one man said,

You don’t go to a king’s funeral every day.

Richard III will be buried in a Church of England church, despite having been a Catholic. He was given a Requiem Mass, naturally, by the Catholic Church but his funeral (actually reinterment, because he was given a very perfunctory funeral in 1485) should have been Catholic, sung and in Latin.

Had he won at Bosworth, Henry VII's son, Henry VIII, would not have been king. Would England still be Catholic?

I'm glad that the fact that Richard III was a child murderer and usurper does not prevent his receiving royal honours. There is a majesty doth hedge a king, even one who kills a king. When I was a boy, King Edward V, the boy-king whom Richard had murdered, was my favourite king and he still is, poor boy.

Thank God the monarchy and the class system do something to keep England, or rather Great Britain, united - I wish residual Christianity did, but I am not sure it does.

Archaeologists are to start digging for another of Britain’s ‘lost’ kings, King Stephen, under a school playing field in one of England's most beautiful towns, Faversham in Kent. Henry I is also missing..


Stephen was always another one of my favourite kings when I was a young boy. No idea why. I learnt about them all aged four from a wonderful book written between the Golden and Diamond Jubilees which my father gave me and which his father had bought him second-hand called The Royal portrait Gallery. So I have them all fixed in my mind with their portraits. It was exactly the sort of thing Sellars and Yeatman lampooned in 1066 and All That.

HENRY I was famous for his handwriting and was therefore generally called Henry Beau-geste. He was extremely fond of his son William, who was, however, drowned in the White City. Henry tried to console himself for his loss by eating a surfeit of palfreys. This was a Bad Thing since he died of it and never smiled again.

Do people today even get those jokes? Shakes head wistfully.