The Lost Heart of Asia

I am just rereading Colin Thubron's The Lost Heart of Asia which I first read in the mid-90s, about his journey to Central Asia just after the USSR split up. 

It is quite marvellous and the perfect introduction to Uzbekistan. I wish I had reread it before my recent visit, though I did read his Shadow of the Silk Road about his return in 2006.

Uzbekistan is a place whose heart has been ripped out by communism. Lovely people but half destroyed by atheism, materialism, socialist internationalism and deracination. 

Had the khanates of Samarkand, Bokhara, Kokand and Khiva been British not Russian protectorates they might be something like the UAE now, with gold and plutonium instead of oil. Though thinking about Dubai that does not seem such an attractive idea.


For decades I only travelled in post-Communist Europe and I still find it rather depressing to go to Western Europe. All that shininess and affluence make my heart sink. Now I travel around Western Europe because it has the best monuments and to exotic places like Iraq and Mozambique, because I wanted to see the world, but I realise it is only Eastern Europe and the especially the former USSR that I really love - where people are human and normal. 

I loved Uzbekistan, as I expected to. Colin Thubron says he is in love with the whole of Asia but for some reason I am not.

China, Vietnam and Laos which still are Communist and Cambodia, which was Communist, do not greatly interest me. I wonder why not.

Is it because Uzbekistan was ruled by Russians and is therefore less Asian? No, because Indochina was ruled by the French. 

A lot of it is to do with the attraction of the Muslim world. I am a proud orientalist who thought Edward Said's critique of orientalism vapid and uninteresting. I found Pakistan more appealing than India.

The attraction of the Mohametan world and the former Soviet bloc. Former Soviet Central Asia is where the two circles overlap and it has the poetry of inaccessibility and obscurity.

"At the moment you see we have no feeling about ourselves as a nation. History is the key and the Soviets took ours away. We were sold a mass of Bolshevik stories and nothing of our own." An Uzbek talking to Colin Thubron in 1992. 

I detect faint echoes of this in present day Western Europe.

That was the news

Some people prefer just not to follow the news. I think it's a duty. Perhaps in a macabre way it's even a dark pleasure. But no not a pleasure.


Winnie Mandela who said 

"Together, hand in hand, with our matches and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country"

died and was praised in the Western press. Necklaces meant burning people alive by putting tyres around their necks filled with petrol.


When F.W. Klerk, who dismantled apartheid and freed Nelson Mandela dies, his obituary will be unflattering.


Emmanuel Macron talked about the threat to democracy from populists, by which he meant the threat to democracy from politicians who offer to do what the public wants. He won widespread praise for this.


In England a male voice choir was ordered to admit women.


Canada announced she will no longer discriminate on the grounds of physical disability when deciding which immigrants to accept.

Tweets

Tara Ann Thieke‏ @TaraAnnThieke
Basically I don't want to hear a single supporter of the Iraq War offer their foreign policy advice without long, sustained mea culpas and explanations of why they should now be heeded. The burden of proof is on them, not on war skeptics.


Scott Greer (@ScottMGreer):
Principled conservatism: the president can drop bombs wherever he feels like but we can't deport criminal aliens

Censorship and fake tweets

Something very strange happened to me yesterday. Can anyone give me advice?


I was told my Twitter account was being temporarily limited for 8 hours because of a tweet I sent.


This was very annoying but the tweet in question (below) is not one I sent or retweeted though it has my 'avatar'. 


Paulvew
@paulica44
@BourneWolf @AlfDubs @paullewismoney @stellacreasy @YvetteCooperMP @guardian @ThangamMP @safepassageuk @HelpRefugees @refugeecouncil @KateGreenSU Syrian refugees have already been involved in terrorist murders in Europe.

The people it was sent to are not people I know.

“Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber foaming with blood”

"All quotations are out of context." (Enoch Powell)

Two weeks ago an extraordinary thing happened. The BBC World Service made the fiftieth anniversary of the murder of Martin Luther King its first item on the world news. 

Was the fiftieth anniversary of anyone’s death ever before, since the world began, first item on the news around the world? Lenin’s perhaps, in the Soviet bloc in 1984, but not worldwide.

Two weeks after the murder of King and fifty years ago today, Enoch Powell, a member of the British Conservative Shadow Cabinet, gave his famous and misnamed 'Rivers of Blood' speech, in which he warned in very highly coloured terms of the consequences of continued immigration from the former colonies into Great Britain. 

Godless communism

This Godless Communism, 1961, a story in volume 17, issue number 2 of Treasure Chest, a monthly comic book published by the Catholic Guild in the USA from 1946 to 1972. Each issue featured several different stories intended to inspire citizenship, morality, and patriotism. 

2 former British Ambassadors are sure that Assad is not responsible for chemical attacks

I was opposed to a strike on Syria in 2013 but have been thinking through the arguments this time. 

The 2017 strike by the Americans seemed worryingly like the start of a US intervention but in fact had no consequences apart from showing that Trump was not a Russian stooge, repairing the damage to US prestige caused when Mr. Obama did nothing after his red line was crossed and killing some innocent people. 

If Assad is responsible for using chemical weapons this time the 2016 strike did not deter him.

But is he?

I am very reluctant to think this is a trick by Western governments but is it a false flag operation by others unknown? The Saudis? 

How can we know?

But we do know this.

A former British Ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, thinks that the Syrian government did not use chemical weapons this time. The former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, is certain that Assad is not guilty. I think two former Ambassadors saying this means the case against Assad is not proven. 

Taken today by Octav Dragan

Today was a heavenly day.

House of the People, Bucharest - acknowledgements, Octav Dragan

Frank Furedi: for anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought

Frank Furedi says very truly:

For anti-populist ideologues democracy is an afterthought - especially in places like Hungary. Why because the people are unreliable and then to vote the wrong way. And yet they dishonestly go on about threat of dictatorships.

He has written a very good article which says everything you need to know about the election result. It includes this insight.

The emergence of Hungary as the bad boy of Europe has little to do with its supposed plunge into authoritarianism. As I argued in my book, Populism and the European Culture Wars, the pathologisation of the Orban regime is largely due to its promotion of national sovereignty and its willingness to uphold traditions and values, including those of Christianity. It is hostile to those who would dismiss the legacy of Europe’s past as the ‘bad old days’. Hungary is hated by the Western political oligarchy for the simple reason that it dares to challenge post-traditionalism, identity politics and anti-humanism.

Easter in Bucharest - acknowledgements, Octav Dragan

What did I think of Uzbekistan?

Tashkent is a very eery, quiet place with wide roads, few cars and few pedestrians. The Bradt Guide said Samarkand was bustling but it was nothing of the sort. It too was almost deserted. Neither city had a centre or much life.

The mosques were beautiful, over-restored for the benefit of tourists but empty of worshippers. Islam I felt was repressed by the Communists much more than was Christianity in other parts of the Soviet Union and this repression continues now, though

Tamburlane's tomb

I saw the tomb today of Tamburlane in Samarkand and must now read the play by Marlowe, which I can download on my kindle. 

I found the Samarkand Necropolis much more beautiful. Here among many others are buried Tamburlane's favourite two wives. He had 90 legal wives and very many concubines.  

He is responsible for the death of perhaps 17 million people, perhaps 4% of the world's population. He is naturally regarded as a very great man and a national hero of the Uzbeks, despite being no more Uzbek than Boadicea was English. Coach parties swarm converge on his tomb. 

How will Hitler be regarded in 700 years?

Nobody knows.

From beyond the far distant Oxus

Alim Khan, the last Emir of Bukhara, delighted to watch his enemies boiled in oil. I am enough of a Tory to think he was slightly better than the Bolsheviks who deposed him.



The Registan in Samarkand. Lord Curzon, as he then wasn't, thought it the noblest public square in the world. Now I can agree with him. 

Sandy Arbuthnot in Greenmantle knew some interesting places in Samarkand and Sir Fitzroy Maclean, as he then wasn't, walked here through semi desert from Bokhara, followed by an NKVD man in an ill-fitting dark suit.


I read once that Tennyson's poems are like objects that you hold in your hand and are one moment astonishing diamonds and the next pieces of coloured glass.

Khiva, Bukhara and Samarkand are like that.

Each of them in turn has impressed me at first sight as the most impressive place I ever saw in my life, but each, like some famous beauty, on closer inspection proves to have had a lot of work done to make her stunning. 

I am never sure what is centuries old, what Brezhnev era and what created under the unlamented dictator who died last year.

A German designer who comes here because Bukharan patterns are alive and German ones lifeless (at first I thought she meant patterns of life but she meant patterns) told me that if the Acropolis were in Uzbekistan it would be completed and roofed. This is exactly right. 

The Soviets were not romantics: romanticism was bourgeois and decadent.  They saw no poetry in ruins. Nor did President Karimov after he sloughed off Lenin.

It could be much much worse. They are building a huge tourist centre close to the Ark in Bukhara, the fortress from which the Emir watched his enemies killed with cruel and unusual punishments.

Already Bukhara has 150 mostly small hotels but still the number of tourists is relatively few. Samarkand and Bukhara feel remote despite the occasional coach party, often of Indians.  

Marrakech is perhaps equally beautiful but it is a tourist trap and now almost as familiar as Bournemouth or Southend. Though these things change fast.

Gertrude Bell was the first white woman to enter Samarkand but when she left she noticed advertisements for charabanc excursions.


Enoch Powell said the life of nations like the life of men is lived in the imagination. Travel is lived entirely in the imagination and being somwhere distant and little visited fires the imagination. 

Lord Byron proudly said 'I have seen the ruins of Ephesus' but so can anyone for the price of a budget flight to Ismir. Lord Curzon boasting about Samarkand still moves us to envy.

I arrived in time to see the fairly deserted Registan at Samarkand tonight at dusk, the birds making a deafening noise and the tourists gone. I envy myself.

Part of it is the name. Samarkand like Madagascar, Persia and Mozambique captivates by the sound of its very name. We visited Lalish the Yazzidi holy village because Noemi loved the name. Names contain magic.

We are not far from the Oxus here.

I take the golden road to Samarkand

Tashkent is not dour if you lived twenty years in Bucharest but it has no heart. Though a city of four million people, once the largest in the Soviet Union after Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, it is empty. It is very Soviet, which to me is charming, but my ignorant impression was that here was a place which had had its heart ripped out and nothing to replace it with.


The city is as old as Rome but badly damaged in an earthquake in 1966 and its ancient buildings have been rebuilt. The roads have little traffic but, as throughout the USSR, are wide enough for military planes to land on them,


I had a pleasant plov (pilaff, the national dish) at the city's best restaurant, Caravan, and a much better dinner at Florea. I attended La Traviata sung very well. The very talkative audience was almost entirely female and over fifty. This I read was the place where one came closest to the still beating heart of Tashkent. The beautiful opera house was built for the Communist administration by the architect of the last Emir of Bukhara.

Khiva

I remembered Colin Thubron's 'The Lost Heart of Asia' and wanted to miss out Khiva but luckily my travel agent persuaded me not to. Colin Thubron found it a lifeless over restored museum. That was in the early 90s and I suppose it is true, but Khiva is less well cared for than when he saw it, everywhere else is now much more restored than 25 years ago and it has far fewer  tourists than most beautiful places nowadays. Every vista makes your jaw drop

Marrakesh is less lovely but still very lovely. But Marrakesh is touristland. Khiva has what Marrakesh has lost, that wonderful feeling of being remote. Every scene looks like it's from the Sunday Times colour supplement but there seem to be no Sunday Times readers. An Englishman does not go abroad to meet Englishmen.

Yesterday was very hot. Today was supposed to be 31° Celsius but instead it is 3° which is a surprise. It's also raining, which one doesn't expect in a desert.

I have read about twentieth century Englishman in Uzbekistan like the heroic Colonel Bailey and that great writer Sir Fitzroy Maclean but the astonishing Captain Burnaby, who defied the Tsar by entering Khiva, was only a name to me until today. Here is an excerpt from the conversation he had with a worthy citizen who put him up in a large house in a village through which he passed.

' Which do you like best, your horse or your wife ?' inquired the man.—' That depends upon the woman,' I replied ; and the guide, here joining in the conversation, said in England they do not buy or sell their wives, and that I was not a married man. 'What! you have not got a wife?'—' No; how could I travel if I had one ?'—' Why, you might leave her behind, and lock her up, as our merchants do with their wives when they go on a journey.' In my country the women are never locked up.'—' What a marvel l' said the man ; 'and how can you trust them ? Is it not dangerous to expose them to so much temptation ? They are poor, weak creatures, and easily led. But if one of them is unfaithful to her husband, what does he do ?'—' He goes to our moullab, whom we call a judge, and obtains a divorce, and marries some one else.'—' What! you mean to say he does not cut the woman's throat?'—' No he would very likely be hanged himself if he did.'—' What a country!' said the host ; we manage things better in Khiva.'

From what I gather from my reading even seventy years of Marxism did not lift the condition of women very much higher.

This morning I went back to the Village Museum

How to fix the Irish border problem

The border between Northern and Southern Ireland and whether it will have to become hard again if the UK leaves the European Economic Area is much in news (the news that people interested in Brexit read). This article by Shanker Singham reveals the interesting information that 87% of Northern Ireland’s turnover represents sales within UK. Just 5% is sales to Eire, 3% to the rest of the EU and 6 % to the rest of the world. So Northern Ireland's primary economic interest is in maintaining the UK single market.

Shanker Singham argues that a customs border would give rise to few problems with

Cambridge Analytica and the Romanian election

My friend Rupert Wolf-Murray has made the headlines in Romania by telling Associated Press that Cambridge Analytica approached him before Romania’s 2016 parliamentary elections to work for the Social Democratic Party (PSD). 

He would have worked with another person and given strategic advice and assistance to the PSD campaign team for two or three months. Here Rupert is talking about it on television.

He declined the offer so does not know whether Cambridge Analytica did play any role in the election, which the PSD won by a wide margin.

Playing truant this morning in the Village Museum after a meeting

Evil and historical judgments: more reflections on R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny"

Historians used to have heroes and villains. Livy's hero was Scipio Africanus for good reasons, though Hannibal was too great to be a villain. Macaulay's wooden hero was the usurper William III. Leopold von Ranke's hero was Napoleon. 

American historians admired another high minded warmonger, Lincoln.

But no man is a hero to his valet and historians these days think like valets. 

Almost everyone has been debunked. They don't usually spend much time painting historical figures as heroic except when race comes into it, as it does with Martin Luther King, Rosa Parkes, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. With them old fashioned history, of the type taught around 1900 and parodied by Sellars and Yeatman, still obtains. 

Because of race,  Lincoln is still a great American hero, even though he wanted to deport the freed slaves to Central America because, as he told the first ever meeting of blacks in the White House, 

"not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours".

Mandela and Gandhi, you note, are the Americans' foreign heroes now. They have replaced the racist and imperialist Churchill.

Historians do not much use the word evil, except about Hitler and the Nazis.

As Lord Bullock said

"If he is not evil, who is?"

Lord Peter Hennessy

I find this absolutely incredible. I knew standards at my middle class university had fallen (and the politics faculty was always made up of Calibans) but for a university website to describe Peter, Lord Hennessy (an annoyingly P.C. life peer) as 'Lord Peter Hennessy' as if he were the son of a duke, marquess or earl....

The Village Museum, Bucharest, under snow

Pope Francis is a populist

The other  day I agreed with Daniel Hannan that President Macron is the ultimate populist. I also said his far left opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was one. 

It seems to me that another populist is Pope Francis.

Women down under

The old cohesive, blokish, laid back Australia has changed in many ways. The 1960s social revolution is working itself out there as much as anywhere.

An Australian feminist last year was advising women who want to have careers not to have children. I can't find the link. 

Australian feminists have marched against Donald Trump but never against female genital mutilation, an increasingly common thing in Australia.

Feminism has always been a top down movement, in which a small group impose their views on the mass of people who couldn't care less. But that small group is not just a few activists and left-wingers but also academia and the global bureaucracy.

International organisations are just as feminist as anyone these days.

Australia's solid labour market performance is sullied by its failure to fully tap the potential of women: those with young children, single mothers and females in their late 50s. Women with children under five and sole parents with a child under 15 in Australia face an employment gap of about 25 percentage points to those without kids, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development said in a report on Friday. (The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 March 2017)

Islamism is a post-colonial movement

'Free market capitalism cannot provide for everyone or sustain the natural world. Its very imperative is of ever hastening exploitation of all resources including people, and it needs armies and weapons to secure those supplies. The political appeal, unchallenged in the 1990s, of this concept is fast fading by a combination of Islamic opposition and the radical popular movements of landless and poor peoples in many poor countries.' 

Jeremy Corbyn in the foreword to Imperialism: A Study, 2006.

“[T]his is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.”

Christopher Hitchens

"We do not have a plan. They do. History shows that those that plan, anticipate and have a coherent strategy usually win. We are not winning."

Fjordman

Quotations

"Whereas people of faith tend to accept the natural world, those who profess a material view often go to war with it. Such discontent has proved of great value to successive political movements that have promised to transform everything, from society to gender."
Toby Guise

"The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner."
Albert Jay Nock

Macron is the ultimate populist

Macron is the ultimate populist. So said Daniel Hannan the other day.

In many ways this is true.  He is up there with Napoleon III. But no-one calls him one. 

His left-wing opponent, Jean-Luc Melenchon, was also a populist and his right-wing opponent, Marine Le Pen. 

And Charles de Gaulle?

Immigration and robots

Professor James Newell of Salford University, in his latest posting in LSE blogs about the Italian election result, thinks that in Italy

immigration is essential to helping Italy overcome its economic problems, especially to ensure the sustainability of the pensions system, since immigrants are on average younger than Italians and have a higher fertility rate.

The same arguments apply to other Western and Eastern European countries. 

But why not use robots instead?

Donald Trump is being clever with tariffs, Korea and China

The global economic system, like NATO, was set up after the war by the U.S.A., with British help, to contain Soviet expansion. 

Like spending on Nato, which Donald Trump in his election campaign called 'obsolete', U.S. tariffs unfairly disadvantage the U.S. for reasons that ceased to exist in 1991.

The U.S., which is less dependent on trade than the other G-7 economies, could easily win a trade war if it conducts one cleverly. 

A new era dawns in Italy

I take back what I said about the LSE's blogs reflecting the sad lack of diversity of thought among academics, who are almost always left-wing or at least liberal. Roberto Orsi's blog post on the Italian election has proven me wrong and makes up for wading through the muddy waters of Conor Gaerty's writing.

Dr. Orsi comes straight to the point.

The outcome of the election was determined primarily by the policies of uncontrolled mass immigration which started in 2014 under Enrico Letta and continued under Renzi and Paolo Gentiloni. These have de facto turned Italy into a giant camp for asylum seekers, generating a sense of societal breakdown and acute political conflict.

I want to know the reasons why European leaders have failed to defend their countries

Books are becoming everything to me

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

Lord Macaulay, in a letter to his sister Margaret.

“Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” 

Rereading Peacock forty years after

I picked up a second hand Penguin edition of Gryll Grange, Thomas Love Peacock's last and mellowest novel from 1860, in a charity shop in the enchanting and enchanted Devon town of Totnes last summer. Thanks to giving up the net (more or less) for Lent I actually reread it. I loved him when I was 14, but one is so much more highbrow at 14 than after 40.

Peacock's are conversation novels and therein is their great charm. Aldous Huxley revived the genre with Crome Yellow.

How civilised the conversations and the characters are. Dr Opimian's

tastes, in fact, were four: a good library, a good dinner, a pleasant garden, and rural walks.

What good have we done for America asks Lord Curryfin and Dr Optimian answers that we gave the Americans wine and Latin and Greek literature.

Nowadays such a question between British intellectuals would get such a boring answer. From Robert Peston on the BBC for example. I shall eviscerate his new book when I have time.

Real wages of Soviet workers regained their 1913 level only in 1963

My nephew was taught at school in England that Lenin was an improvement on Tsar Nicholas II. This article on the complete failure of socialism in the Soviet Union is worth reading for people who are not clear about it. 

It tells us inter alia that

According to such scholars as Professor Sergei Propokovich, Dr Naum Jasny, and Mrs Janet Chapman, for instance, the real wages of Soviet industrial workers in 1970 were hardly higher than in 1913. Similarly, the Swiss economist, Jovan Pavlevski, calculated in 1969 that the real wages of Soviet industrial workers attained the level of 1913 only in 1963. Pavlevski also found that the real incomes of Soviet agricultural workers in 1969 were only 1.2 per cent higher than in 1913.

Aristocrats

Has it ever been really noted to what extent a genuinely religious life requires a leisure class, or half-leisure—I mean leisure with a good conscience, from way back, by blood, to which the aristocratic feeling that work disgraces is not altogether alien—the feeling that it makes soul and body common. And that consequently our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for “unbelief.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Beyond Good and Evil'

Henry de Montherlant

Throughout history the world has been laid waste to ensure the triumph of conceptions that are now as dead as the men that died for them.


When something is detestable, and yet inevitable, what one must do is not merely to endure it-a hard task whatever one may do-but find an excuse for loving it. Everything is a matter of points of view, and misfortune is often only the sign of a false interpretation of life.

Teffi on Lenin

'As an orator, Lenin did not carry the crowd with him; he did not set a crowd on fire, or whip it up into a frenzy. He was not like Kerensky who would make a crowd fall in love with him and shed tears of ecstasy. I myself witnessed such tears in the eyes of soldiers and workers as they showered Kerensky's car with flowers on Marinsky Square. Lenin simply battered away with a blunt instrument at the darkest corner of people's souls, where greed, spite and cruelty lay hidden. He would batter away and get the answer he wanted... 

“Yes, we'll loot and pillage—and murder too!” 

Squire Haggard has died

Alas Squire Haggard (Michael Green) has died. 

I want to reread Squire Haggard's Journal in memoriam, which I found precis-ed thus by Amazon:

'Haggard's typical entries begin with some notation of the invariably miserable weather (typically "Fog," "Sleet," or "Gales") followed by itemization of recent deaths, either by exotic disease, like "Bloating of the Bowels," or by some witless human act, such as drinking a pail of ale in one continuous swallow. Haggard then plunges into his own affairs in his inimitable style, abbreviating freely and capriciously. Sometimes the squire has his slow days: "Lay on my bed nearly all day, shootg. at tradesmen who approached the Hall with bills and succeeded in damaging a particularly obnoxious grocer."'

The real Charles Darwin was a social Darwinian

A psychopath once told me that his religion was Darwinism "because Darwinism is a religion". 

All psychopaths are at least unconsciously Darwinians, even if they believe in another religion, as Stalin, for example, believed in Marxism, which is also a religion.

Nothing makes liberals angrier than conservatives who reject the idea of evolution for religious reasons, as Vice-President Pence does. I wonder if they give Muslims a free pass to do so. 

But Darwin's ideas are only liberal and progressive in the sense of making it very hard to believe in the existence of souls and therefore of the Christian God. Darwin clearly saw, as all biologists must, that hierarchy is the law of the universe. 

In fact Darwinism, like nature itself and like pagans (real pagans, not Intersectional Pagans for Social Justice), is right-wing in tooth and claw. It is pretty obvious that the ideas of Darwin and his cousin, the now discredited Sir Francis Galton who invented eugenics, are a large part of the basis for the ideas of Hitler.

Charles Darwin on race and sex

A psychopath once told me that his religion was Darwinism "because Darwinism is a religion". 

All psychopaths are at least unconsciously Darwinians, even if they believe in another religion, as Stalin, for example, believed in Marxism, which is also a religion.

Nothing makes liberals angrier than conservatives who reject the idea of evolution for religious reasons, as Vice-President Pence does. I wonder if they give Muslims a free pass to do so. 

But Darwin's ideas are only liberal and progressive in the sense of making it very hard to believe in the existence of souls and therefore of the Christian God. Darwin clearly saw, as all biologists must, that hierarchy is the law of the universe. 

More Thomas Love Peacock

Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.


They have poisoned the Thames and killed the fish in the river. A little further development of the same wisdom and science will complete the poisoning of the air, and kill the dwellers on the banks. I almost think it is the destiny of science to exterminate the human race.

Lenin, who is still admired in Eastern Europe, in British universities and by Jeremy Corbyn

"If for the sake of Communism it is necessary for us to destroy nine tenths of the people, we must not hesitate." 
V.I. Lenin

Dr Opimian on America, from Thomas Love Peacock's Gryll Grange (1860)

The Rev. Dr. Opimian. Without magnetism we should never have discovered America; to which we are indebted for nothing but evil; diseases in the worst forms that can afflict humanity, and slavery in the worst form in which slavery can exist. The Old World had the sugar-cane and the cotton-plant, though it did not so misuse them. Then, what good have we got from America? What good of any kind, from the whole continent and its islands, from the Esquimaux to Patagonia?

Mr. Gryll. Newfoundland salt fish, Doctor.

There are two sides to the story of East Ghouta

Why are the Russians bombing East Ghouta (I assume they are) and killing civilians (among them children, of course) instead of starving the inhabitants into submission, which is how sieges usually work (though this is now, for some reason, considered a war crime)? 

My namesake Paul Wood writes about it here and is more even-handed than one expects from the mainstream media.

My namesake thinks Putin may have bitten off more than he wanted to chew. Journalists

Mărțișor

Today is Mărțișor and the first day of spring in Romania. Some years it's sunny. This year we've a foot of snow and it's minus 16° Celsius = 3° Fahrenheit.

"Mărțișor is an old tradition celebrated throughout Romania every year on March 1st. The name Mărțișor is a diminutive of March (Martie in Romanian). It is believed that the person who wears the red and white string would enjoy a prosperous and healthy year." 

More on Mărțișor here.

Footnotes to history

Poles and Swedes partitioned Ukraine 100 years before Poland was partitioned by Prussia, Russia and Austria, but nobody talks about that. Lord Salisbury, the future Prime Minister, pointed this out.

People always say that the 1905 Russo-Japanese war was the first time in the modern era that a European state was defeated by a non-white state, but the Abyssinians defeated the Italians at Adwa in 1896.

Enlightenment values as a secular religion

"The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilised but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."
T. S. Eliot, "Thoughts After Lambeth" {the 1930 Lambeth Conference that permitted Anglicans to use contraceptives in certain circumstances)

"Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Justice" was the official and public motto of the Ottoman Empire under the reforming liberal Young Turks who organized and carried out the Armenian Genocide -the template for the litany of nation-building State slaughters that has ensued for over a century of progress. Christian Roy

Germany's "historically unique experiment"

Yascha Mounk is a German in his mid-30s who is a Lecturer on Political Theory at Harvard and describes himself on his website as "one of the world's leading experts on the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of populism". Talking recently in an interview with German TV about the threat to democracy posed by populists he said populists thrive for three reasons. The first is economic stagnation and the third is the internet, which allows extreme politicians to be heard. The second reason is this:

"We are in a historically unique experiment. There is no example in history of a democracy founded on mono-ethnicity and transformed into a liberal multi-ethnic democracy. We are halfway, but certainly not arrived yet and have to feel in the dark."

Quotations

"A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld


"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."
Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.

"He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future."
Adolf Hitler

Life and Death in a Small Town in Ukraine

The history of Eastern Europe is a series of national or ethnic conflicts, one on top of another. Galicia, now Western Ukraine, which came under the rule of the Habsburgs when Poland was partitioned in the 18th century, was always divided by conflicts between the Austrian government, the Polish landed gentry, the Jews who dominated business and the professions, owned 20% of properties and half the property leases, and the Polish and Ukrainian (or Ruthenian) peasants. 


I think Ukrainians and Ruthenes are the same thing but some think otherwise. Gentle reader, please educate me on this point.

Omer Bartov, an Israeli historian, has written Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, about his mother's home town in Galicia, which was in Austria when she was born, in Poland when she emigrated to Palestine, was later ruled by the USSR, the Germans, the Soviets again and is now in Ukraine.

Before the Second World War Jews made up the majority of the town's population and lived in the best houses. They were a minority of 11% in Galicia as a whole but made up most of the Galician business class, owned 20% of terrains of land and held 50% of the leases. They were resented for racial, religious, class and economic reasons, as were the Poles and Ukrainians.

Violence was part of the town's history going back at least to 1648 when the the town's large Jewish population were tortured and killed by Cossacks (Ukrainians) in extraordinarily horrible ways, including skinning Jews alive, tearing unborn children from their mothers' wombs and other equally terrible things. From the first chapter, then, this is a harrowing book to read, though after the town was liberated from the Turks by the Poles for the last time in 1683 it seems to have been largely undisturbed by war until 1914.

The town changed hands several times during the First World War and the enormities committed during and after the war are hard to read or to believe. Witnesses tell of mass murders, mass rapes, torture and gouging out of eyes. These things happened to Jews, especially at the hands of Russians, and also to Ukrainians and Poles, who killed one another and raped one another's women.

Austria Hungary had kept order and peace between the ethnic groups. It was an E.U. that worked. When the Empire fell apart in 1918, thanks partly to the foolish idealism of the American President, Poles and Ukrainians struggled to replace Austrians. 

Jews were seen as having been loyal to the Austrians, which made them unpopular with both nationalities.

After seven years of horror in which a generation of frightened and embittered Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish children grew up, including a brief period of Bolshevik rule, peace returned in 1921 and the town settled down as part of Poland. The monarchy had provided its own legitimacy but Poland's legitimacy rested on ethnicity. It was an ethnic state where minorities made up almost a third of the population and who were inevitably second class citizens. 

So the peace that lasted until 1939 was a frozen conflict.

With the Poles now in charge, the Jews started speaking Polish (almost everyone in this drama spoke German, Polish and Ukrainian) and Ukrainians dreamt of their moment of national revival. Some joined the nationalist party of Stepan Bandera that began to use violence.

The First World War and the Second World War were one Thirty Years' War. This is the background to the atrocities committed by Germans, Ukrainians, Poles and Russians between 1939 and the late 1940s when Stalin asserted Communist control over the area, deported the Poles and slowly suppressed the Ukrainian resistance.

The Soviets took over Buczacz in 1939. The Soviet invasion meant

"those national minorities that had been under the thumb of the Polish authorities, the Ukrainians and even more so the Jews, now had the upper hand as the Soviets used them to enforce their rule."

No doubt the Jews were very grateful to be ruled by Communists rather than Nazis. The local Catholic priest, Father Rutyna, an ethnic Pole, testified that Ukrainians and Jews greeted the Soviet soldiers with flowers and pointed out to them whom to arrest, including teachers and municipal officials. 

"'I saw how they threw their captives like cattle into the truck and sat on top of them with their rifles and took them away. These were teachers, people from the administration whom they unfortunately all later slowly murdered.'"

The Polish elite suddenly lost its power. A Jew became mayor and Jewish proletarians were appointed to jobs in the town hall and police. Poles were anti-Soviet and many were deported. 

When the Germans invaded in 1941 the Ukrainians thought that their time had at last come. Ukrainian militias, some members of which had resisted the Communists, took charge of the town and began killing Communist collaborators and others against whom they had a grudge, but in a couple of weeks the Germans took over. With the help of very many Ukrainian collaborators the SS began a comprehensive massacre of the vast majority of the fifteen thousand Jews in the town, drawn out over three years, as well as killing people from other ethnic groups.

Professor Bartov is writing about the fate of the town's Jews, not the townspeople as a body, but acknowledges that another tragedy was also unfolding, the ethnic cleansing of the Poles by the Ukrainian militias. In my opinion it would be a better book had it covered this story too. 

He says that the Polish government in London estimated that half of the original 48,000 Poles in the town were lost through killing, flight or deportation and that the Poles were pleased when Soviet soldiers returned to deal with the Banderite Ukrainians. I'd have liked much more about this but the book skirts it.

One Ukrainian in the town told local Jews that

"the Ukrainian intelligentsia does not approve of the murder of the Jews"

but plenty of Ukrainians of a lower intellectual level did approve of it and of murdering Poles. They did not know that, had Operation Barbarossa gone to plan, the Germans intended to starve to death millions of Ukrainians that winter.

The Ukrainians in 1941 were repeating the murderous role they played in the revolt of 1648 but I'd have liked a detailed explanation of what sort of Ukrainians killed Jews and Poles and why. I presume that, as in 1648, they were peasants, wreaking revenge on groups who were perceived to be well-off and privileged, meaning this was a peasant's revolt. The Romanian revolt of 1907, always said to have been Europe's last peasants' revolt, and glorified as such by the Communists, was also aimed at Jews. As Solzhenitsyn said, writing about the Russian civil war, Jews were generally wealthier than the peasants and therefore they were obvious targets for attack.


In addition, Jews were no doubt considered by Ukrainians to have sided with first Austria, then Poland and then Bolshevik Russia. 

Professor Bartov has a good gift for narrative and details a very long and harrowing catalogue of atrocities by the Gestapo and the SS and their Ukrainian collaborators. He notes the

“astonishing ease [with which] spouses and children, lovers and colleagues, friends and parents, appear to have enjoyed their brief murderous sojourn in the region”

as they killed people whom they knew. 

“For many of them, this was clearly the best time of their lives.”

One Gestapo driver, who in the 1950s was investigated by the Germans for murder, before the case was dropped as most such cases were, told the investigation that he still could not understand why

“the Jews went to the execution like sheep. . . . I shook my head over that at the time.” 

He seemed, to the author, to blame the Jewish community leaders, not the Germans, for the killings.

There are many stories in the book of sickening killings, some horrible stories of Jews who were betrayed by Gentiles and somewhat fewer stories of brave Christians who saved Jews at great risk. There are also plenty of stories of robberies and murders of Jews carried out by young Jewish policemen recruited by the Germans. One Jewish witness said Jewish policemen 

"made a fortune from the torments of the Jews and lived by the slogan: 'Eat and drink for tomorrow we shall die!'"

The most affecting stories are the stories of children killed. They remind me of the unbearable stories of the children hunted and murdered by Gilles de Rais.
One five year-old girl in a school held a German officer's hand and begged her not to kill her, but he shot her first because she was annoying him.

A girl of six hiding in a bunker remembered hearing a Jewish boy saying to a Ukrainian policeman,

“I'll show you where there are Jews, will you let me live?"

A Jewish girl who was given shelter and passed off as Polish, despite speaking the language poorly, and who survived remembered:

"The children always played 'Germans and Jews' . . . and 'Jew hunt.'"

After a time, children at execution sites were buried alive rather than shot, to save bullets.

Meanwhile Frau Koellner, the wife of the SS man in charge of killing Jews in the town, discussed with a German woman friend how they could keep their children from knowing what was happening. The friend, years later, testified to this when, at her husband's trial, Frau Koellner denied that they had known about the killings.

I read it all, but you might want to skip parts.

At least one American reviewer has read this book and drawn the conclusion that after reading it we should be more welcoming to immigrants and refugees. This is obviously aimed at readers who support Donald Trump or aimed at making readers who dislike him feel pleased with themselves. 

Another conclusion is that because different ethnic and confessional groups can get along for generations, when forced to do so by a strong state, before exploding into violence, it therefore follows that increasing the size of ethnic or religious minorities creates a greater risk, in the long term, of terrorism, civil war or genocide.

Lenin's ancestry was a state secret

Lenin considered himself and was always considered Russian, but he was not an ethnic Russian. Lenin's father was half Chuvash and half Kalmyk. The Kalmyks are a Mongol people, which is how Lenin got his slightly Mongoloid appearance, and the Chuvash are a Turkic people. 

This is interesting when one thinks that Trotsky and also, I think, though I cannot find it cited on the internet, Lenin himself referred to Stalin's 'Asiatic cruelty'. 

Roger Scruton

"Hayek sees that the zero-sum vision is fired by an implacable negative energy. It is not the concrete vision of some real alternative that animates the socialist critic of the capitalist order. It is hostility toward the actual, and in particular toward those who enjoy advantages within it. Hence the belief in equality remains vague and undefined, except negatively. For it is essentially a weapon against the existing order – a way of undermining

Review of R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" - Part 2

Macaulay disapproved of Napier's History of the Peninsular War because he disapproved of military history. He thought it immoral to divorce military strategy from history in the wider sense. 

He had a point. Someone said that military justice is to justice what military music is to music. Perhaps military history is in the same case. 

Russell Stolfi's unsentimental attitude to Hitler may derive from coming to him from studying German military strategy. He is an interesting military historian who sometimes admires Hitler as a strategist. Nevertheless he is sure that Hitler made many mistakes and, by ignoring the generals, lost the war on a single day.

I learnt from Stolfi that once Britain and France declared war Hitler was in a hurry to invade France, expecting every day to learn that the Allies had taken over Belgium without firing a shot. Would that they had!

Review of R.H.S. Stolfi's "Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny" - Part 1

John F. Kennedy, aged 28, wrote these words in his diary on holiday in Germany in the summer of 1945, after visiting the Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's Lair.

“After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him."

They now read very oddly, although there is no question that Hitler was one of the most significant figures who ever lived. Kennedy did not foresee that the hatred that surrounded Hitler in 1945 has not lessened at all in 72 years. 

Books read since last summer

Reading War and Peace intermittently and lackadaisically took up almost two years, not because it is dull but because it is hard to read when the internet exists. Since then I have read a few books and hope to get off the internet as much as possible. Giving it up for Lent (video, audio and this blog excepted) is an experiment.

Bold means I loved it and highly recommend it. * means I have read it before.

Last year:

War and Peace - the best novel I ever read, toppling The Charterhouse of Parma.

Lady in the Lake*, Raymond Chandler, transcendent prose.

Quotations about 'Cambridge (and Oxford)', written in my commonplace book just after I went down

[I collected them in the dear bygone time before the internet made finding quotations easy. I wonder where I found them. I suppose I just read a lot, much easier to do before the Internet and life began.]

Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own mother university.
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage,
He chooses Athens in his riper age.
John Dryden

But how I longed
As a boy for the groves and grooves of Academe.
Christopher Fry, Venus Observed

Quotations I collected when I was 22

I kept commonplace books of quotations in the months between going down from university and starting work. Five thick ones, A4 sized. I intend to publish a selection from them as an e-book. One has been sitting in my sitting room for years and here are a few quotations from it.


Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch's wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?

Lord Byron

Was it Great Britain, not Russia, that was interfering in the 2016 US Presidential election?

The investigation into whether Trump colluded with Russia to help him win the election - spoiler alert: he didn't - is for me very boring and not at all important. What is interesting is that the FBI relied on uncorroborated information in order to investigate someone in the Trump campaign. They did so because they, quite reasonably, had faith in Christopher Steele, the supposedly retired M16 man who produced the information.

The Guardian in April 2017 said:

John Kelly's troubling views and why I back the South in the U.S. Civil War

The Guardian is very disappointed that retired General John Kelly, Donald Trump's Chief of Staff, is not 'restraining' the president, which they see as his duty. And he does not have approved views on the Civil War.

John Kelly expressed some troubling views of his own. He described Robert E Lee as “an honorable man” and blamed the conflict on “the lack of an ability to compromise” rather than slavery. ....Pressure grows on him to resign.

I remember my supervisor in my first term at university telling me that the Civil War was fought over the Union not about slavery. I replied 'Of course. No other reason would possibly have been justifiable'. She seemed a little surprised.

The UK needs Michael Howard as Prime Minister - there is no-one else

The UK needs Michael Howard to come back to the Commons and form a government. No one else has the stature political skills and is Leave. A Prime Minister is needed who believes in Brexit.

Suffragettes made no contribution to women getting the vote

A lot of nonsense in the press today about Suffragettes. I am sorry to see allegedly Conservative politicians like Mrs. May and the unspeakable Davidson woman praising the Suffragettes, whose illegal and violent tactics delayed women getting the vote. 

Women were given the vote by a predominantly Conservative government as a reward for their contribution to the war effort.

From a letter in today's Guardian:

It is simply untrue to state that the suffragettes only targeted property, not people. That may have been true of the leadership, but certainly not of the rank and file membership. In one year alone, 1914, shortly before Mrs Pankhurst disbanded the WSPU’s campaign to concentrate on the war effort, there were several incidents of suffragette violence against individuals: Lord Weardale was attacked with a horsewhip by Mary Lindsay, who mistook him for Asquith, the prime minister; a bomb on a Blackpool train badly burned a train guard. Meanwhile there were widespread reports of suffragettes practising with revolvers on shooting ranges around London. Had war not broken out in 1914, there can be little doubt that suffragette violence against individuals would have intensified still further.

Time once more for Lord Curzon's 15 Good Reasons Against the Grant of Female Suffrage.

We don't want to fight but by Jingo if we do...

The Great MacDermott's song was the big hit of 1877, as Britain geared up to go to war to defend Turkey from Russia in the Balkans. Here he is on YouTube!

Thus the word jingoism was coined. The Tories sympathised with the Sultan as legitimate monarch, the Liberals with the Christians for Blairite reasons.




We had no reason to fear Russia. Even had they captured Constantinople it wouldn't have mattered. The Cold War was probably not necessary but, even if it were, it is certain that Russia is no threat to Britain now.


I used to be a pro Turk a propos 1877. I am not sure now and should read about it but I think that that war, which led to Romanian independence (but Wallachia and Moldavia were de facto independent anyway), was unnecessary.  The majority of people in Eastern Thrace (which remains in Turkey) were Muslim and I am not sorry it is not in Greece, but the majority in Constantinople were Christian. Now I regret that, as so many hoped, Mass was not celebrated in the Hagia Sofia. Yet I regret the passing of the Ottoman Russian and Hapsburg empires. In the Middle East a democratic federal Ottoman Empire would be far better than the mess we have now.

The British don't want to be ruled by foreigners

The reason people who want UK to leave the EU do so is that they don't want to be ruled by foreigners. This way of thinking is permitted, which is one of the things that makes Brexit such an interesting issue, but it is not far from the borders of permitted thought. There are actually Remain voters who think this racist. I have spoken to two such people. 

Historians will one day tell us why they think like that or psychologists. Theologians are beyond hope these days.

Quotations

‘The perils of change are so great, the promise of the most hopeful theories is so often deceptive, that it is frequently the wiser part to uphold the existing state of things, if it can be done, even though, in point of argument, it should be utterly indefensible...Resistance is folly or heroism—a virtue or a vice—in most cases, according to the probabilities there are of its being successful.’ Lord Salisbury

Capture kindergartens and you capture the world

Bill Ayers who co-founded the Weathermen, a communist revolutionary group that conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings, spent the time that his wife Bernardine Dohrn was in prison running a kindergarten to instill his ideas in the very young. Those ideas seemed eccentric in 1983 but are pretty much universally accepted now.

Liberalism is a religion (a false one, I think)

Amanda Spielman, the Head of Ofsted, the UK's Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, said she wants teachers to combat extremism with “muscular liberalism”, instead of religious extremism. She has in mind Muslim schools, but may triangulate by persecuting Christian ones.

is any religion compatible with liberalism? I doubt it.

Does she mean Catholic schools won't tell pupils that sodomy is a sin? Do they even do so now? Or that wives should obey husbands?

Why should schools teach liberalism anyway? Why can't schoolchildren be conservatives or socialists or nationalists or whatever their parents bring them up to be?

Because the idea of our time is that the state is responsible for children, just as the state (in theory the electorate but in practice the man - person, sorry- in Whitehall) is responsible for how much property and money you have and how healthily you eat. 

When the USA was Anglo-Saxon

King George III, granting his first audience to the first US Minister Plenipotentary (Ambassador) John Adams, sweetly said:

I pray, Mr Adams, that the United States does not suffer unduly from its want of a monarchy.

Of course it did and does but the Loyalists who saw that had been driven out in a horrible manner.

The future President Adams, replying, declared:

I shall esteem myself the happiest of Men, if I can be instrumental in recommending my Country, more and more to your Majesty's Royal Benevolence and of restoring an entire esteem, confidence and affection, or in better Words, "the old good Nature and the old good Humour" between People who, tho separated by an ocean and under different Governments, have the same Language, a similar Religion and kindred Blood.