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.

226 years today since the fall of the Bastille

It’s 226 years today since the fall of the Bastille. By the time it 'fell' the Bastille had not been a political prison for years, but a sort of old people's home and lunatic asylum for a very small number of well-connected old and mentally ill people. The decision had already been taken to close down the Bastille to save costs. 

His relatives had placed the Marquis de Sade there but he was taken away ten days before the attack, by which time the Bastille housed seven old men (who were very disturbed by the events of July 14), four forgers, two lunatics and the Comte de Solages, who had committed incest and was placed there at his family's request. After the fall of the Bastille the forgers were free and the others were homeless. 

These things are a parable for progressive politics.

The Marquis De Sade helped cause the fall of the Bastille in that he shouted out from his chamber to demonstrators outside, using an improvised megaphone

'They are killing people in here!'

about 10 days before the storming and before he was moved out of the Bastille. This was a complete lie (De Sade was considered mad), but it got the crowd stirred up and from that day on there was a countdown to the eventual violent storming of the building on July 14th.

Alex Woodcock-Clarke explains De Sade's role in the revolution.

His atheism is one reason that a later class of French intellectuals led by symbolist poet (and pornographer) Guillaume Apollinaire resurrected his writings in the early 1900s. Another reason was de Sade’s ideas about political and, above all, personal freedom. A brief scan of his social works reveals that he was most ardent for man’s freedom to do whatever his nature inclined, even if that includes a little rape and torture, which puts him in the same class as political thinkers like Charles Manson. He was most coherent in his arguments against the imprisonment of for law-breakers, not surprising for a sex criminal who spent twenty-seven years in various jails and asylums.

His spells in behind bars in no way make him a martyr. Life in a royal prison for a nobleman was not too strenuous. He had his own food sent in and his own clothes. His correspondence to his long-suffering wife consists mostly of demands for money so that he can attend dinner soirees hosted by other prisoners. Not only was he allowed to write what he liked but, on July 2, 1789, he somehow got hold of a megaphone, and spent a happy afternoon shouting "They are cutting the throats of the prisoners here!" through the window of his cell in the Bastille, This inflamed the brooding Parisian crowd so much that a few days later, a huge mob stormed the fortress, marking the beginning of the French Revolution.  

De Sade would have been sorry to miss the fun. He had been transferred to the insane asylum at Charenton where he was permitted to stage his own plays using the inmates as actors. This was hardly a high security institution since, boring of the place in 1790, he waddled to the gates (he had grown morbidly obese on a diet of rich prison food), announced “I am the Marquis De Sade” and released himself on his own recognisances. When he was eventually brought back to Charenton, after a brief career as a Revolutionary Tribunal jurist dishing out death sentences galore, he was allowed to bring a 12-year old mistress with him who, perversely, was not allowed to leave until his death in 1814.

Actually, the Bastille was not really "stormed" - the Governor was promised safe conduct for himself and the guards if he surrendered the arms stored in the place (the real reason the mob had been manipulated to go there). When he came out he was instead brutally murdered.

Today progressives celebrate this murder, along with the hundreds of thousands of murders (mostly in rural France) that they went on to commit. Lenin of course modelled the Russian Bolshevik revolution on the French one.

From the French Revolution a line runs to the Bolshevik revolution. Alexander Solzhenitsyn makes the point.

The French Revolution unfolded under the banner of a self-contradictory and unrealisable slogan, "liberty, equality, fraternity." But in the life of society, liberty, and equality are mutually exclusive, even hostile concepts. Liberty, by its very nature, undermines social equality, and equality suppresses liberty--for how else could it be attained?

53rd anniversary of Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives

It’s fifty-three years today since Harold Macmillan’s Night of the Long Knives, when Macmillan dismissed a third of his cabinet.

Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, who heard about his dismissal on the wireless, told the Prime Minister, 

'You have given me less notice than I would a housekeeper' 

to which Harold Macmillan answered,

'But good housekeepers are so hard to find.'

Brutal. 

Jeremy Thorpe famously observed that

'Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.'

Jeremy Thorpe was to have experience in sacrificing friends' lives for his own political career, or trying to do so. Thorpe found he was a lot more brutal than Supermac.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

I like the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig.

Monsignor Alfred Gilbey would have been 114 today

My beloved friend Monsignor Gilbey would have been 114 today. Alfred Newman Gilbey pray for us.

At last this wonderful interview with Sir (as he then wasn't) John Mortimer is on the net.
Do read it.

Banning 'Gone with the Wind'

Mark Steyn is always worth reading. Here he writes about attempts in the USA to ban Gone With The Wind following the massacre in Charleston. Hitler also banned the book, even though it was Eva Braun's favourite.

Someone rang the police to complain about Confederate flags and Nazi helmets being sold at a flea market in Wallingford, Connecticut at the weekend, but the police said this market was on private property and permitted under the constitutional right to free speech.

I am angry on behalf of the Southerners. I think all intelligent people who think about the U.S. Civil War have to back the South. Even if a legal case can be made out for Lincoln there is no moral case for a war that cost 600,000 lives fought to keep a part of the country in the Union which wanted badly to leave. 

There is a strong prejudice against Southerners in the rest of the USA. This attitude is exemplified by an American who told me, 

I hate Southerners because I hate racists.

I replied that I hated racism but I didn't hate racists. 

I hate racists

 he said firmly and afterwards I realised it was he who was the racist. 

EU has made a deal with Greece - and presumably will achieve regime change

"There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." 

(John Adams, the second U.S. President.)

The EU has made a deal with Greece. 

I always thought a deal was more likely than not. I am disappointed that Greece is not leaving the euro, which would have been an earthquake for the EU. Now the Greek parliament must vote on a far tougher proposal than the one the Greek government almost made before the referendum and which the Greek people voted against.

Presumably the EU will hereby achieve regime change in Greece (I hope so).

The Greeks would probably be better off out of euro - the UK would then be able to restructure EU. I was cheering Herr Schauble when he suggested Greece leave the euro. Germany has probably made a mistake backing down. 

Just to remind ourselves, the Greeks are in this mess because of the money they spent bailing out the Greek banks. Had they let their banks go bust and had Sarkozy and Strauss-Kahn let the banks take the hit on their loans to Greece all would (probably) be well.
I note Boris Johnson agrees with me but dislikes Herr Schauble. If only Enoch Powell, the great classicist, were alive to explain what's going on with Greece and E.U.

On the other hand, I don’t feel so very sorry for Greeks who have much better living standards than Romanians. As a Romanian said to me yesterday, Greeks have pensions of EUR 2000 a month and Romanians have pensions of EUR 200 

and yet Greeks want us to pay their debts.  

I thought that the average salary here was not much more than that but find it has just reached EUR 400 net monthIy.

It was a damned close run thing, apparently. Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, said this morning

A couple of times last night I would have laid bets on the agreement failing. But...we managed to stop just a few centimetres away from crashing.

Alex White,of the Economist Intelligence Unit, has said

We continue to believe that a Grexit is likelier to occur than not, although we are pushing back the time period in which we expect this to happen. We shift our call from Grexit within the next three months to Grexit before the end of our medium-term forecast period (2019). 

This call is based upon our view that the referendum, and subsequent events, have permanently changed the political dynamics in Greece and the wider region. If the Greek parliament does approve a deal, it will be implementing a package that 62% of the population explicitly rejected a week ago. The chances of successful implementation are low. There are particular questions around how Greece will find the required €50 billion in assets for transfer to the European trust.

Jonathan Loynes, the chief European economist at an outfit called Capital Economics has opined: 

Our first reaction is that this will merely delay the inevitable. With the crisis having done enormous damage to the Greek economy and financial system in recent months, it is impossible to imagine that conditions will now return to anything like normal. 

Capital controls are likely to have to remain in place and the additional austerity needed to build up the primary surpluses will weaken the economy further. In short, a Greek exit from the eurozone MIGHT just have been kicked down the road a bit. But unless the new deal includes a substantial restructuring of Greek debt – which is unlikely – Greece’s future inside the eurozone remains under huge doubt.

Robert Peston yesterday retweeted a tweet from Siegfried Muresan

But once principle of temporary exit is established, the euro becomes a glorified currency peg, and they never endure.

That's a very interesting point indeed. 

Free cities

I wish we had made Jerusalem, Constantinople and perhaps Smyrna free cities, under the protection of England and France, in 1918 and they remained free cities now.

Greeks are not Europeans

So Greece caved in and accepted harsher terms from Europe than the ones they had 98% agreed two weeks ago, when suddenly they put the deal to a referendum, advised the electors to reject it and won the vote. Is that clear?

Greece would be better out of euro, the euro wouldn't suffer much (though if it did that might be a good thing) but Greece doesn't want to leave Europe. So what someone called the lethargic dance continues.

Since Greek independence, the government has gone bankrupt six times and they have been in default, I read, for longer than they have been solvent. I think it would have been better had they defaulted years ago, while their debts were owed to private lenders like Goldman Sachs, before the French philanderers, Sarkozy and Strauss Kahn, had the public institutions take over the debts. The banks were foolish to lend to Greece, they should have lost their money but they are being bailed out, not Greece. And Greece, while she suffers, needs to restructure her economy and society, needs a Margaret Thatcher.

Here is an interesting analysis from the Washington Post. I find these analyses convincing until I read the next one. Political analysis sticks in my mind, economics not.

The problem, of course, is that the Greeks are not Europeans. At least not in the sense that people in Catholic or Protestant Europe think of as Europe. They are Levantines. Greece, like Romania, is or was part of the Near East. Thinking about Greece I remember Graham Greene, as epigraph in his wonderful collection of stories May We Borrow Your Husband? quoted a Lebanese Prime Minister who said in a radio broadcast 

Let us always be guided by the virtues traditionally associated with the Levantine peoples.

In Homer's time Greeks were known for cunning and duplicity, but no doubt this was Homer's racism.

Seven conservative principles and the tragic view of life

The common principles of the early Conservatives of Western Europe (roughly, from Burke to Donoso Cortes) listed by Robert Nisbet in his foreword to “The Works of Joseph de Maistre” (Schocken, 1971). 

1. God and the divine order, not the natural order, must be the starting point of any understanding of society and history. 

2. Society, not the individual, is the subject of the true science of man. 

3. Tradition, not pure reason, is the only possible approach to reform of government and society. 

4. Organism, not social contract, is the true image of social reality. 

5. The groups and associations of society, not the abstracted individual, are the true seats of human morality – and also of human identity. 

6. True authority springs directly from God and is distributed normally among a plurality of institutions – church, guild, social class, and family, as well as political state. 

7. A tragic view of man and history is required, one that sees the recurrence of evil and disaster in human affairs, not the kind of linear progress assumed by the Enlightenment.

Lermentov

So? If I die, then I die! The loss to the world won’t be great. Yes, and I’m fairly bored with myself already. I am like a man who is yawning at a ball, whose reason for not going home to bed is only that his carriage hasn’t arrived yet. But the carriage is ready . . . farewell!
I run through the memory of my past in its entirety and can’t help asking myself: Why have I lived? For what purpose was I born? . . .
There probably was one once, and I probably did have a lofty calling, because I feel a boundless strength in my soul . . .
But I didn’t divine this calling. I was carried away with the baits of passion, empty and unrewarding. I came out of their crucible as hard and cold as iron, but I had lost forever the ardor for noble aspirations, the best flower of life.

Lermontov

I love dingy Constanta very much

I spent the dog days sitting happily on the terrace of the Palace Hotel, Constanta, where I may continue to work on Monday or until affairs that can’t be conducted by telephone or internet require my presence in Bucharest. I always like to stay at the oldest hotel in town and rejoice when they are small and friendly and cheap. The Palace is wonderful, built 1914 when Europe was still civilised and a lift takes me from my bedroom to the port. I regret the chi chi little bars and restaurants on the 'port turistic' but they are practical, unlike the shabby slumminess that I used to like. 

A snobby Romanian-American woman friend expressed horror that I could enjoy being alone for days or stay at a hotel that only costs EUR33  a night, including (a splendid) bedroom. Gosh how far the leu has fallen recently. Actually the hotel is probably the nicest on the Romanian coast. It feels like a good hotel should - has an internal courtyard, high- ceilinged bedrooms and a terrace overlooking the sea. It is full of nice families, nice people (snobbish people go to more expensive places, unimaginative people avoid Constanta for places with more beach and less town). There are thankfully very few children but those there are make the place feel like an Edwardian novel. Seaside holidays are always Edwardian but here more so than elsewhere.

I first came to Constanta in 1999 and felt it belonged to a black and white film - you expect to see Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet playing backgammon outside a shop. But it is only sixteen years later that I finally am smitten. And it's not because of the tarted up restaurants and bars on the port. It's not because of the beach which I haven't visited nor the National Archaeological Museum - ditto, alas. It's the dusty tree-lined broken streets. Exactly the Balkan dingy disreputable charm I seek in Durres, Burgas or Edirne but which is here two hours now by fast train from Bucharest.

Why I like it so much more may be because in 1999 I thought of 1880s buildings as recent - my home town is full of them - and because I didn't yet know that much of the middle East feels a bit like this. I get into trouble with some Romanian friends by comparing Romania to the Arab world (it's to do with the Romanian formality and attitude towards power, mostly) fact I do so to persuade myself that Romania is the Near East, not really European. here in Constant though it does feel that Romania is the Middle East dream that it is France.

Here is what I wrote about Constanta after a a fleeting visit here last year.

Can Orthodox or Muslim countries be modern liberal democracies and successful economies?

I always thought Greece should not have been admitted to the EEC and made Romanians cross by saying so back in the late 1990s. It seems I was right.

Marx of course got it exactly wrong. Culture determines economics, not the other way around. And culture is determined by religion much more than anything else plus climate, history – genetics? We shall see if extending the EU to cover Orthodox countries will prove a good idea.

Greece is an agricultural country given an artificially high standard of living by the Americans and then the EEC and EU for geo-political reasons. Nothing wrong and everything right with agricultural, conservative countries but things are arranged in such countries by connections and families and clans, unlike in atomistic Protestant societies like the UK and USA. Plus you have the Byzantine tradition of the powerful autocratic state.

Can Orthodox or Muslim countries be modern liberal democracies and successful economies?

It’s simply a question, but a very good one. Some people mention Malaysia and Indonesia but it's early days with those two as far as democracy are concerned and it's the Chinese who drive the Malaysian economic miracle. Where else? Turkey was for long secular and undemocratic - now it may be becoming Islamist.

Obviously 'human rights' - some of which I love and some I don't - are a product of enlightenment which is a product of western Christianity, Protestant and Catholic.

This morning a friend who's a high up in EBRD told me his friends in the negotiations with the Greeks thought the Greeks would probably leave the euro.

Is this best for everyone? I suspect so but really I don't know and these matters are above me. This evening it seems like the Americans and French will force Germans to cave in.

Russia: we are not enjoying the spectacle of the Greek crisis.

This headline reminds me of Lord Whitelaw saying: 

We must not gloat. It would be wrong to gloat. But quite frankly I am gloating like hell.

Meanwhile a bigger problem might well be the stock market crash in China and certainly a very much bigger problem yet is the vast influx of asylum seekers rushing into Greece and Italy To this the solution, unfortunately, is not to admit any into Europe. But the EU does nothing.

Advice for tourists intending to holiday in Greece: Albania is much more interesting

My friend Alexandra wants advice about whether to go on holiday to Greece this summer. I said holidays should be cheaper if bought at the last minute, especially if bought in drachmas, but what do I know about economics? A Greek friend has decided to cancel his annual holiday in his native island for fear of  lack of food, fuel or supplies.

I was pleased to find this discussion in the Daily Telegraph today. British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) George Osborne told the Commons yesterday that 150,000 British people a week usually go on holiday to Greece.  (What an off-putting thought - I infinitely prefer Albania).

They must, he said, “take sufficient euros in cash to cover the duration of their stay”, plus any “emergencies”. At the same time, however, they should “take sensible precautions against theft”.

Personally, I’d have thought that the most sensible precaution against theft would be, “Don’t go to a country on the brink of economic disaster, especially if your pockets are stuffed with large sums of money.”

But then, I’m no expert in financial stability and the Chancellor obviously is, so I suppose I’d better defer to him.

I intend every year to go to Albania and never get there but this year I hope to. I was at Palermo castle on the Ionian coast in August 2008 and was the only tourist. On the horizon was Corfu. I was the only tourist in Gjirokastra too.

The real reason why white Americans feel guilty about slavery

I asked a week ago, 

Why do white Americans still feel guilty about slavery?

A strong reason why Americans still feel guilty about slavery has suddenly become clear to me, on further thought. It's because the USA is founded on Enlightenment ideas. 

Americans believe Rousseau's idea that man is born free and is everywhere in chains, that society was originally based on contract and was later based on status, whereas it is exactly the other way around. Though not in North America. Except for the slaves and indigenous peoples, life in North America was to a large extent based on contract, not status. White society in North America was built by individualists who decided to seek their fortunes in the New World, without hierarchies or a powerful church or state.  This is why there is no American culture, in the sense that European and Asian countries have cultures, except a whispish WASP culture and a richer African-American culture. 

This is why there is no conservative tradition in North America. The myth of the Southern gentry was always a myth. The slave-owners were no more aristocrats than any businessmen in the North. The 'peculiar institution' - slavery - was not an ancient institution, like serfdom in Europe, but a cruel business strategy, arrived at because white indentured servants left the plantation when they became free, Indians ran away but Africans stayed and could survive the mosquitoes.

Around the world, at most times, most men have been unfree and freedom is something that has developed, through institutions, laws and civilisation. Slavery in the New World was a tragic revival of an institution that, thanks to the Catholic Church, had been abolished in Europe centuries earlier. Americans find it hard to understand how such a thing could have happened because, although they are for the time being the one developed country which is genuinely Christian, they do not have a strong belief in original sin. They tend, like good liberals, to believe that man is basically good. All Americans are either right-wing or left-wing liberals, apart from a small number of Marxists and fascists.

This reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's explanation for why a good novel cannot be written in America (he certainly didn't write one)

because America has no shadows.

America has almost no shadows, unlike Europe, Asia and Africa, but Hawthorne, like most men of his time, forgot that the USA does have two terrible shadows: slavery and the extermination of the Indians.

Actually, I am very interested in slavery in North America but much more interested in the huge and complex significance American slavery has assumed worldwide since 1960. It seems to me that the most interesting and valuable book that one could write would be a 'History of Anti-Racism' 1945-2015'. I suggested this to a famous historian who has written brilliantly about Winston Churchill's views on race, but he told me I was inviting him to throw away his career.

A final point. I love footnote knowledge and this is an interesting example. Czar Nicholas I strongly disapproved of slavery in America, which he considered inhumane and un-Christian, even though one third of his subjects were serfs. One contemporary historian of Russia has stated that the difference between slavery and serfdom in practice was so fine as to be indistinguishable. This, however, is not quite true. American slaves could be sold ('down the river' which is where we get the expression from) whereas serfs, to use an English legal phrase ran with, i.e. were part and parcel of, the land. 

Nicholas I's son, the great Alexander II, shared his father's views on slavery and emancipated the serfs in 1861, thus freeing vastly more people than Lincoln did, and without a terrible war. Yet we hear nothing about this and no-one feels guilty about serfdom, not even in Russia.

In praise of me

On Tuesday evening I met the owner of a British company, who was thinking about building a sizeable factory in Romania, and several of his associates. This evening he wrote to the group of us and some others to say he has made the decision to invest here. 

This is very good news but that's not why I'm blogging. I cannot resist quoting what he said in his mail about me.

Paul Wood, as a seasoned traveller of the world I have the privilege of meeting many amazing people from interesting back grounds and with tales of joy, woe or general frustration. Generally the last person I want to meet abroad is an Englishman. If they are not moaning about the country they are in,  they are moaning about something they left behind, or they are covered in tattoo`s and wearing a stupid football shirt, which is normally at least two sizes too small covering a body that has never played football moaning about the English breakfast they ate in the afternoon.


Then we met Paul! An English gem, full of joy and an infectious positivity and zest for life, clearly very comfortable in his own skin and indeed even more comfortable in Bucharest. A joy to meet, a font of possibly useless knowledge along with some very useful knowledge in respect of recruitment in Romania. I urge you all to read his blog, if you read it with an open mind and accept it as opinion and  not fact it will make you chuckle and you will most certainly relate to many of the comparisons mentioned. It is excellent! http://pvewood.blogspot.ro/2013/04/25-reasons-why-i-love-living-in-romania.html

Finally comfortable in my own skin, huh? It's true but it took half a century.

The possibly useless information was about Rochester where he lives. I told him about the Prince of Transylvania  who’s buried in the cathedral but was an imposter. More here.

By the way I wrote that article, 25 Reasons why I Love Living in Romania, in about an hour and a half and it has gone viral. Every day another thousand clicks. It's reached 72,000 clicks and the rate never slows down. Here, providence is telling me, is the subject of my book. 

Slavery in Romania and Liverpool

I showed my article (blog post sounds inelegant but little essay sound precious) on American slavery to a friend of mine, who commented interestingly:

I also come from a slave owning family…yes…gypsies were slaves..and by the way the largest slave owner was the Orthodox Church, being the largest landowner in the Romanian principalities up to Romanian unification

Do I feel guilty about it?  How could I since it was not me but my ancestors who indulged in the practice?  Furthermore, anyone with a sense of history knows that what is deemed “moral” changes all the time (although I am not a moral relativist and I certainly do not condone slavery today).  However, the fact is that “gypsy owners” at the time did not perceive that they were doing anything wrong. I am also proud that we were apparently the first Wallachian family to voluntarily give up their gypsy slaves, which interestingly enough happened almost at the same time as slavery was abolished in the US (though there was no direct linkage at  the time, unlike today where what happens in the US reverberates round the world)

It is sad that politically correct people focus on historic slavery, whereas the practice continues today throughout many developing countries, especially Africa and the Middle East.  People with a grudge to bear do not seem to care about the current practice of slavery, but focus on what happened over 200 years ago, which in any event cannot be undone.  There is also quasi-slavery throughout the developing world which is economic exploitation to a degree that is slavery in all but name. Another interesting point is that for all the achievements of the European Enlightenment, it is not liberal political theorists like Locke to whom we owe the abolition of slavery, but to dedicated Christians who lobbied against the practice, leading to its abolition in the British Empire'

He is right that people talk about slaves owned by whites two hundred years ago but  do not speak of slavery today. Today very many of the slave-owners are Muslims. It is not slavery that upsets people today but whites oppressing non-whites.

I doubt if Locke and the Whigs disapproved of slavery. Whigs are heartless people. It was Low Church Tories like Wilberforce and Lord Macaulay’s father Zachary who persuaded the political class in the UK that slavery had to be abolished. Interestingly, W. E. Gladstone when he was the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories, made his maiden speech justifying slavery. He was a Liverpudlian – Liverpool was a city that waxed fat on slavery – and his father Sir John Gladstone made his fortune in the slave trade. W.E. Gladstone was also High Church. He later, during the American Civil War when he was a leading Liberal politician, described the American Confederacy as 

A nation rightly struggling to be free.

I think, by the way, that Gladstone was right about this, but he said it at a time when Lancashire cotton girls, made out of work by the Royal Navy's embargo of the Confederacy, were nevertheless backing the North.

Note:

I did some research after writing this - it took five minutes, so wonderful a thing is the internet - and found that Locke wrote about slavery. He thought it only legitimate to enslave people if they were prisoners of war. It was legitimate for a just conqueror to enslave them because slavery is

but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror and a captive.

I am indebted to Eric Brandt for telling me that John Locke invested money in the slave trade and helped draft the Constitution of the Carolinas, which provided for slavery.

I dislike Locke and the Whigs and all the shabby crew of American rebels and love Tories, like Dr Johnson, who said 

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes? 

The Old Testament approves of slavery ('Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's slave') and Jesus did not condemn it, unlike divorce. Still, it was the Bible that in the end brought about the abolition of slavery, not Locke, Hume, Voltaire or Rousseau and certainly not the Koran.

Inequality in Romania

The Gini coefficient is a measure of the variation in incomes within a country. A value of 0 means absolute equality, a value of 100 absolute inequality, though I do not know what absolute inequality means. 

Romania scores 27.4, much the same as Bulgaria. Hungary scores 31.2. The average for rich countries is around 31.5. Russia by contrast scores 40.1 and the USA 40.8. The USA is the exception here, but the UK is more unequal than most rich countries at 36.0. Norway scores 25.8, Germany 28.3, Rwanda 50.8.

Romania has seen a clear rise in standards of living since I came here in 1998 but everyone complains about how expensive things are and many older people (over fifty) say things were better under Communism.

The very rich are very rich indeed in comparison to the average and spend their money ostentatiously, though they know very well the malice and envy riches provoke. This is why the rich often prefer to entertain in restaurants, not at home. The very rich first emerged soon after the 1989 revolution, but there were far fewer of them then. Before the revolution some people were rich, it's true, but they were very careful about not displaying the fact. 

One of the reasons for the revolution and the changes throughout the Soviet bloc was that leading apparatchiks had power and money but nothing to spend it on. The revolution, which began with an outbreak of fighting in Timisoara and spread to the crowds assembled by the Communists in the centre of Bucharest, triggered a coup plan that was already being organised by the KGB. The plotters wanted to replace Ceausescu with reformed communists well disposed to Gorbachev and the Soviet Union. At some point before or after Ceausescu was killed it suddenly became apparent to powerful people in the Communist power structure that the end of Communism would not be the end for them, but instead a liberation for them. So it proved. The revolution was in effect a management buy-out. 

But the oligarchs, many of whose names are unknown but who wield great economic and political power, are only part of the story. Former secret policemen and party officials grew rich and so did entrepreneurs who were not in the party. Some were crooks, some shysters, some hard working entrepreneurs who may have cut corners and given bribes but grew businesses that sold things people wanted. A few were even completely honest. The numbers of very rich grew enormously as the Romanian economy grew in the 00s. But the growing middle class of professionals and employees of international firms is also increasing inequality.

Income inequality is changing Romania, in good ways - a middle class is what she most needs - but noticeably in bad ways. Romania is becoming consumerist. Dark satanic malls sprout everywhere. They are depressing places and the amount of shopping that is being done depresses me too. What human activity, after all, is less life-enhancing?

Inequality has been widening almost everywhere for thirty years and in the former Communist countries the process is much more striking, although it's fair to say that the disparity in power and life-chances under Communism between a member of the secret police and someone with a 'bad [political] file' was wider than between rich and poor today. 

In Romania porters, ill paid old men whose function is to sleep in cubicles on the ground floors of blocks of flats, say 'Respect, respect, dom'l!' to the occupants and tug imaginary forelocks. Hierarchy is everything here, based on class, universities, culture and command of Romanian grammar, as well as money. I find I like this and I even more like the way Romania, like all ex-Communist countries, is strikingly egalitarian. The kind of people - even hot girls - who in England would expect fancy restaurants go to cheap dives and terraces with their friends. Waitresses are friends with television stars, multi-millionairesses with bank tellers. 

Economists keep arguing that inequality is bad for economies. An OECD report last month contrasted unequal Britain with much more equal France. I am not convinced that inequality does much harm. Certainly the French economy and polity seem in disastrous difficulties, while Britain is doing reasonably well. Nor do I think that inequality weakens social cohesion. 

Romania, from one point of view, lacks cohesion or any sense of a public space or public-spiritedness. Charities - it's purely my subjective impression -seem to get most of their support from foreigners. From another point of view, social cohesion seems to me the most remarkable fact about Romania - people take pride in their country and her history, identify Romania with Orthodox Christianity and have shared values that you only get in relatively poor countries, without much pluralism and with very few nonconformists. 

In fact, it's a bit like 1930s England, with a very small number of very rich people, a smallish middle class, a mass of poor people and only a tiny number of bohemians or free spirits. Under Communism, the pre-war upper class and bourgeoisie fled, were imprisoned or sidelined and a Communist bourgeoisie was created. Nevertheless Romania has many of the cohesive qualities 1930s England had: deference, homogeneity, a natural acceptance of hierarchy and very little crime. 

How to be happy

Aldous Huxley

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aristotle

Happiness is bloom upon the cheek of youth. 

Eleanor Roosevelt

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.

Baruch Spinoza


Happiness is a virtue, not its reward.


Eckhart Tolle

The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.

Benjamin Franklin


Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards; there it enters the roots of the vines, to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.

Bertrand Russell

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

(Thank God I do.)

Alfred Adler

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Dryden, translating Horace. Book III, Ode 29.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
'Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv'd today.'

Rousseau

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

Arnold Bennett 

Pessimism is as much fun as optimism when you get used to it.

Anonymous

Oh, see the happy moron;
He doesn't give a damn.
I wish I were a moron.
My God, perhaps I am.

Dr. Johnson

Sir, that all who are happy, are equally happy, is not true. A peasant and a philosopher may be equally satisfied, but not equally happy. Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not the capacity for having equal happiness with a philosopher.

There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

In the long history of mankind there have not been so very many democratic republics, yet people lived for centuries without them and were not always worse off. They even experienced that ‘happiness’ we are forever hearing about, which was sometimes called pastoral or patriarchal.

Marcel Proust

Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

M. Scott Peck

Life is difficult. This is one of the greatest truths because once we truly get it- we transcend it. Once we accept this, then life is no longer difficult. Because once we accept it, the fact that it is difficult no longer matters.

Immanuel Kant

It is not God's will merely that we should be happy, but that we should make ourselves happy.

Wittgenstein

I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.

Malcom Muggeridge

The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.

Cardinal Newman

God has determined, unless I interfere with His plan, that I should reach that which will be my greatest happiness. He looks on me individually, He calls me by my name, He knows what I can do, what I can best be, what is my greatest happiness, and He means to give it me.


I am reading (very slowly because of severe internet addiction) War and Peace and am loving it. War and Peace teaches much about how to live a happy life. This article explains. Leo Tolstoy said 

If you want to be happy, be.

Three more thoughts

Life is not a science but an art. The art it most resembles is dancing.

Very young children are happy because they don't know what could go wrong. At school they find out. Nothing later is nearly as bad as school.

Political correctness, though originally Marxist, is now a secular progressive version of Calvinism.

Very young children are happy because they don't know what could go wrong. At school they find out. Fortunately, nothing later is nearly as bad as school

To say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book, said Nietzsche. Here are ten sentences of mine.

Romania is the Orient dreaming that it is France.

The Balkans is not a geographical expression but a state of mind.

The Victorians liked sex. If they hadn't there wouldn't have been any Edwardians.

One tells oneself Guardian readers are people too but somehow that makes the offence worse.

The existence of women is the strongest proof of the existence of God.

Biology is very right-wing.

History, like poetry, art and jokes, exists to reveal a hidden order and meaning in the world.

Economics does not determine culture, as Marxists taught. Culture, of course, determines economics. Culture is determined most by religion, then by history and genetics. Nobody knows in which order the last two go.

When I was growing up I used to thank God every day that I wasn't American, but now I take it for granted. I am at ease in Zion.

Life is a helter-skelter. I am clinging to the sides.

Why do white Americans still feel guilty about slavery?

Commenting on the murder on Thursday of nine black Americans in church in Charleston Mr. Obama said slavery

casts a long shadow and that's still part of our DNA that's passed on.

This eloquent article by Charles P. Pierce links the massacre to

the mother of all crimes

slavery. As William Faulkner, who came from Mississippi, said,

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Ronald Stockton, Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan was exuberantly happy the day Mr Obama was elected president in 2008. In an essay he wrote he quoted an email he received from a distant relative who was a genealogist, who said

I have an estate distribution of my ancestor Valentine Barton, dated 1832, in Boone Co., Ky, bequeathing his slaves, by name, with values attached, to his heirs including my great great grandmother Alcey Barton. It is a chilling document, tough to take if it is your own lineage. It took us almost two centuries, to erase the stain, but tonight WE MADE IT!

Professor Stockton went on to ask, 

Why do we feel bad for a sin we did not commit? Is it because our ancestors let us down? Is it because the problem is still there as a constant reminder of an injustice in which our ancestors took part? She used the right word, stain. It was the word John McCain used in his concession speech. The former President of Germany once discussed how Germans felt about the Holocaust, which occurred before most of them were born. He said, “We do not believe in collective guilt, but we do believe in collective shame.” 

This is how many Americans felt, even those who voted for Mr. Obama's Republican opponent, Mr. McCain. It's how Mr. McCain himself felt. He mentioned the stain in his concession speech, though he somewhat gingerly consigned the stain to the past, saying

We both recognise that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

I think England, by which I mean the UK, is the greatest country in the world. We had slavery too, in our colonies. In fact, we brought it to our thirteen American colonies, which became the USA. Going back to the dark ages our own people were often slaves ('thralls'). Much worse, we burnt heretics or hanged, drew and quartered them, heroic Catholic saints and Protestants. We burnt witches too. This is desperately sad. Yet, I don't feel that any of this is exactly a stain on my country's honour. 

Why don't I or my countrymen feel guilty about these things or even think about them very much?

Because it was the spirit of the age. Other countries did the same things or worse, at the same time. 

Had we burnt only Welsh people, or had we enslaved the Cornish, would people feel differently? Possibly. Race/ethnicity is the collective neurosis of our age, not only in the USA. 'We' bought and transported African slaves, it's true, but in fact only a very small number of British people were slave traders and they were far from home.

Why do Americans, on the other hand, still feel guilty after 150 years about slavery and feel very much guiltier now than they did sixty years ago?

First, because 1865 is not so very long ago.

Secondly. clearly because it's about race, not slavery. Had the slaves been white no one would feel it was a stain on America's honour. Slavery brought a large black population to North America and they have not been part of the melting pot. Race has occasioned a collective nervous breakdown in the USA starting in the early 1960s, which they have exported worldwide. Nowadays slavery is still widespread - mostly in Muslim countries - but we hear very little indeed about this and instead very much about slaves owned by whites two hundred years ago.

Thirdly, though America is really based on an ethnic Anglo-Scots core and on English Protestant and puritan culture, Americans think that their country is based on ideals. Ideals they have to live up to. Americans, admirably, judge themselves by higher ideals that they expect from lesser countries (I almost wrote 'lesser breeds'), although they often try to impose their ideals on other countries too. Slavery uncomfortably suggests that they are as bad as or worse than countries which are not founded on high ideals.

Fourthly, because the American ideals, including egalitarianism, are really puritanism. Anti-racism is a form of puritanism, as is feminism and, going back further, prohibition. Puritanism and Calvinism morph in different times and places. In the American South they used to justify slavery, in the north they opposed it, in South Africa a moment ago, they supported apartheid, but in recent years, especially in their secular godless form, they strongly reject white supremacy.

Even the horror felt at the racist murders of the black churchgoers is not so much horror at the murder itself but at the racist motive. Since the massacre black killers have shot ten blacks in a mass shooting in Detroit, ten blacks were shot by blacks in Philadelphia and four in Detroit. 93% of black homicide victims in the USA in 2010 were killed by blacks and blacks, despite being 11% of the population, killed whites slightly more often than the other way around. In other words, blacks oppress blacks far more than whites do, and it could even be argued that blacks oppress whites more than vice versa, but this too, at least so think many high-minded people, may be because of slavery.

Is it so? I really don't know why blacks and whites do not live together happily in the USA. I do know that American statesmen before and during the Civil War took it for granted that they could not do so. Lincoln took time off from the directing the war to urge a delegation of free black men that the blacks should leave the USA, where they could never be the white man's equal, and colonise Central America. Madison, and many others, argued for blacks to be manumitted and deported to Africa. Jefferson said

Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people shall be free, nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.

Only the first half of that sentence is inscribed on the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.