Bernard-Henri Lévy laments the death of the West

From a review in the Wall St Journal of ‘The Empire and the Five Kings’, the latest book by Bernard-Henri Lévy.

'...Mr. Lévy used his growing trans-Atlantic prestige to champion Western intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and Syria. He did this in part by cultivating a style of unembarrassed brio, which his detractors called self-promotion or shallowness. But, to those who’ve loved him, Mr. Lévy’s romanticism is more than justified by his almost cosmic ambition: to bring an older reality to the doorstep of a newer one, often from the front lines of the most dangerous places on earth.

Now Mr. Lévy is reckoning with the fact that his project appears to have failed. The new world—the “Empire” of his title—no longer wants much to do with the old; cares not a whit about the Syrians or the Kurds or the Uighurs; will not face what Mr. Lévy calls the “Five Kings”—the “cartoonish yet terrible” actors China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Sunni radical Islamism—that are taking advantage of our confusion to persecute peoples and limit our reach. On the surface at least, Mr. Lévy responds to this failure in ways longtime readers might expect: by conjuring the spirits that have always powered his romanticism—the Hellenists and Virgil; Voltaire, Husserl, Sartre—to advocate for a replenishment of the breadth and depth of the Western soul.

'But what is most striking about these 250 pages of often arresting, always heartfelt prose is the doubt, even despair, that this most self-confident of men is honest enough to disclose. Sometimes the despair is overripe—you sense the author using language to evade his own emotions: “The idea of the West,” he says, “having become gaunt, plain, and barren, has begun to melt in the sun like a beached jellyfish.” Elsewhere he is less overpolished—simple, sure and almost heartbreaking: His heritage is now “the empire of nothing, a West that no longer knows what it is or what it wants but that, in knowing nothing, risks demoralizing those within it who still believe.”'

I loved Virgil as a schoolboy, do not care for the ideas of Voltaire and hate those of the Communist Sartre. About Husserl I know nothing. But the idea of the West is Christianity. The enlightenment, Marxism and Mr. Levy's liberalism are all Christian heresies. It is the decline of Christianity that leaves the West with no ideas. 

From an article by Tom Slater in Spiked this week

'As political scientist John Curtice has found, only nine per cent of voters now identity as a ‘very strong’ supporter of a political party, while 44 per cent say they are a ‘very strong Remainer’ or a ‘very strong Leaver’. 

'At the last General Election, middle-class Remainers bolted for Labour while many blue-collar Brexiteers bolted for the Conservatives. This was, remarkably, the election in which the Tories took Mansfield and Labour took Kensington.'

The Silence of Colonel Bramble by André Maurois

'A gentleman is never in a hurry.'

'To desire to be perpetually in the society of a pretty woman until the end of one's days, is as if, because one likes good wine, one wished always to have one's mouth full of it.' 

'He who has found a good wife has found great happiness, but a quarrelsome woman is like a roof that lets in the rain.'

'We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy.'

I have picked up and am rereading a book I loved at 12, The Silence of Colonel Bramble by André Maurois. (We had to translate a passage in a French lesson at school and then I found it in a 2nd hand bookshop). It is so funny and beautiful, so touching, but whereas the hierarchical virile aristocratic England of 1914 seemed outdated in 1974 now it seems so utterly dead. I feel like I want to cry for what we have lost.

The book is available for free here.

The happiest days of your life

Researchers claim people are at their happiest at 16 or after the age of 50. So says an article in The Times.

"Some factors were less immediately explicable. People in Northern Ireland were significantly happier than people in London." 

That's easily explained. NI is divided into two very homogeneous close-knit ethnic groups, is very traditional, family minded, well educated and people there believe in God. Very like Romania.

Being a member of the clergy gave the greatest contentment, closely followed by being a professional sports player or an air traffic controller. Politicians were fourth most contented.

Immigrants and Muslims in European prisons

In Berlin and Hamburg more than 50% of prisoners are foreigners. With the recent influx of migrants the Muslim population of Germany now numbers around six million, or 7% of Germany's overall population of 82 million. By contrast, roughly 20% of the 65,000 inmates in the German prison system are Muslim, according to data collected from regional justice ministries. 

This is partly, of course, because there are many more Muslim young men suddenly.

In an article entitled, "German Becomes a Foreign Language in Many Prisons," the Berliner Morgenpost reported on the growing number of conflicts between German prison officers and foreign inmates because of a language barrier.

I learnt this from a piece published today by Soeren Kern of the Gatestone Institute (an American conservative body chaired by John Bolton) and it led me to doing some research on statistics for foreigners, immigrants or Muslims in Sweden, France and the UK.

The Washington Post and many other sources have said that 70% of the population of France’s prisons are Muslims, despite only 8-10% of the population being Muslim. This statistic is attributed to a book called Islam in Prisons by Farhad Khosrovkhavar, a Franco-iranian sociologist, but he says he never said it. He says that he reckons a true figure is ‘around half’, 40%-50%. The French government does not record these things.

Back in 2013 18,300 of French prisoners registered for Ramadan, out of a total prison population of 67,700, or 27%, back in 2013 according to Agence France Presse. Professor Khosrovkhavar suggests that this is an underestimate, because some Muslims fear being ‘noted’ by the intelligence services. 

A Brookings Institution report says that 

“Muslims are greatly over-represented in prisons and within the eighteen- to twenty-four–year-old age group in particular: they make up only 8.5 percent of that age cohort in France, yet 39.9 percent of all prisoners in the cohort.” 

Muslims represent only 4.7% of the UK population, but 15% of the prison population, which again is tied to their age and social class.

In 1991 Sweden stopped keeping statistics on immigrant crime in the comprehensive way that they had done. The last survey that was made, in 2005, found that immigrants were 2.5 times more likely to be registered as crime suspects than people born in Sweden, but 

"if one standardizes in order to take into account differences in relation to age, gender, level of education and income, the relative risk among those born outside Sweden diminishes to 2.1"

In 2006 90% of all robberies reported to the police in Malmo were committed by gangs and gangs in Malmo are, according to Fjordman, understood to be Muslim gangs. 

A report on immigrant-related crime in Sweden in 2006 by Ann-Christine Hjelm from Karlstads University found that 85% of those sentenced to at least two years in prison for rape in 2002 were foreign born or second-generation immigrants. The Swedes, it must be remembered, count many things as rape that other countries don't and have a very high rate of reporting rapes. 

I quoted last year Bojan Pancevski of the Wall St. Journal saying.

"There is data about the ethnic background of convicted rapists in Sweden. Over 58% of them were foreigners in the 2012-2017 period. This obviously does not include people of immigrant origin who are Swedish citizens. This trend goes back decades. Ethnic background of criminal offenders was last included in the annual government report about crime in 2005, when foreigners were vastly over-represented. After that the government stopped including ethnicity in the reports. But the data can still be gathered in different ways. The 58% is from court records."

The proportion of "assault rapes" committed by foreigners might be higher than 58%. Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is much higher.

42 out of 43 of those convicted in Sweden for gang rape in 2016-2017 had foreign backgrounds, says Pelle Neroth Taylor, Anglo-Swedish journalist and director of Sweden Dying to be Multicultural. 32 were born abroad and 10 were born in Sweden of foreign parents. 

I met a Swedish prison office in a pub in Scotland last year and asked her how many of the prisoners in her prison (for criminals whose offences were drug-related) were non-white and she said about half.

In defence of the Pope

In defence of the Pope allowances must be made because he is clearly not nearly as intelligent as the last two popes. The last one was a stunningly gifted intellectual. On the other hand Pope Francis is very cunning, which is not a quality we immediately expect of a Pope.

Florida could have saved the world

Florida could have saved the world from Bush 2 and disaster both in 2000 and 2004.


But in 2016 it informed a startled world that the world had changed utterly and forever.


I remembered about 2004 when I read this article The Democrats don’t have a Star by Daniel McCarthy in The Spectator. I have the impression somehow that the Democrats expect to lose to Donald Trump again. If they do it will be the second defeat that is game changing as was New Labour's second landslide victory over the Tories in 2001.


The American South should have been allowed to secede in 1861. Obviously. I wonder if the American left would let it secede now. If so that probably would be its best bet.

There were 9.4 million (legal) immigrants living in the UK in 2018, out of a population of 65 million

On the subject of 'nativism' (which means the wish to halt immigration and which many are intent on making a thought crime) here is some useful information.

In 2011 just under seven million people living in Britain were immigrants – enough to fill a city the size of London. In 2016 the total number of people living in the UK who were not born in the country, which includes those who became UK citizens, was 9.2 million. It rose to 9.4 million in 2017.

Theresa May and the EU will not permit No Deal

An ITN reporter drinking at a hotel bar in Brussels overheard Olly Robbins, the British civil servant who is in charge of the Brexit negotiations and on whom Theresa May relies, with two colleagues in the bar saying that, in his view, he expects the choice for MPs to be either backing May’s deal or extending talks with the EU. He said he expects MPs in March to be presented with backing a reworked Brexit deal or a potentially significant delay to Brexit. He said:

“The issue is whether Brussels is clear on the terms of extension. In the end they will probably just give us an extension.”

As we all knew Theresa May's plan is to play MPs for fools and to run down the clock as Jeremy Corbyn pointed out in the House yesterday. John Rentoul the Blairite Political Editor of The Independent tweeted yesterday

Straw poll of 10 Westminster journalists this morning: average chance of no-deal Brexit 25%

but the journalists are foolish. There is, alas, little chance of No Deal. Neither the Tory or Labour leaders want it.

The remain proposition goes well beyond attachment to EU membership

"The remain proposition goes well beyond attachment to EU membership: it is driven by revulsion at the nativist spirit of Brexit’s marauding generals – Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg – and shock that they have hijacked Britain’s political identity. But that dismay is not exclusive to Labour."

Rafael Behr writes badly in The Guardian, but he touches on something that interest me very much. Enthusiasm, visceral enthusiasm, for Remain is about more than economics and I am not sure what.  Can anyone explain please? 

Neither Messrs Rees Mogg nor Johnson are nativists and I don't understand what is objectionable about nativism, though it's a silly American term, very out of context in the Old World. And even if some people do find it objectionable why should they find it very objectionable? 

I don't believe there are any 'Little Englanders', that's just a literary device, but in any case why are they spoken of with loathing and contempt?

There are deep emotions here. Patriotism is always a very strong emotion, the strongest there is in politics, but what feeds the intense emotional pull towards international organisations? More and more, patriotism is considered suspect in Great Britain (not in Northern Ireland).

Brexit, the world’s most boring thriller

I disagree with Matthew D'Ancona on almost everything but he is right about how inexplicably boring the Brexit crisis is. I turn to Brexit news first, like Charles Moore who thinks he is alone in doing so, read it insatiably, but it is so dull. And even I cannot bring myself to watch or read Theresa May's speeches. To quote Mr. D'Ancona, who recently announced that he is no longer a Tory (as if he ever were one):

It all has the feel of the world’s most boring thriller. Though there are only just under seven weeks left until Britain’s official date of departure from the European Union, public life seems drowsy with a lethal brew of fatalism, insouciance and burrowing cowardice.

Here is something from an article by George Soros today in - where else? - The Guardian today which cheered me  up immensely:

The clever men in Oxford know all there is to be knowed

The journalists, the neo cons, McCain, Graham, Hillary, the American deep state etc were wrong and the Syrian government has won, finally defeating ISIS. And better it did, absolutely ghastly though it is, than the rebels. I predicted this as soon as Russia intervened and welcomed it. Everyone said I was wrong. Obama thought it would be Russia's Vietnam.

What to remember is not to trust the press for insights into what is happening. Donald Trump's biggest achievement may be to make everyone realise that the press is a political actor, not an objective source of information.

Barren Europe

Pope Francis has repeatedly criticised the European Union over the past five years for its perceived lack of vision, drawing the ire of German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2014 when he described the Europe as an elderly woman who was "no longer fertile and vibrant".

Conflict between Germany and the papacy goes back a long way to Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV's walk to Canossa, where Pope Gregory VII was staying, in 1077 to seek absolution of his excommunication and to Bismarck's Kulturkampf. This time both the Christian Democrats and the Papacy are left-wing but pretending to be conservative.

In fact Europe is barren these days. The attack on Pearl Harbor marks the end of the long era of European supremacy and the continent, though never richer, more humane or more advanced, does not seem to lead the world in any thing or to have world changing ideas. How different to the days of Freud, Jung, or Keynes, not to mention Lenin.

An American historian I met on a train told from Bucharest to Belgrade told me that all European cities seemed like museums to him except London. 

(I'd say that London is not a European city, because an island is not part of a continent, but that is pedantry.)

Uncle Harold

Harold Macmillan's thought on becoming Prime Minister, as reported by the Duchess of Devonshire: 

"He told me it was wonderful because at last he had time to read."

From a very interesting article entitled

Confessions of a Feminist Heretic

by a feminist who became a Catholic after becoming a mother.

"While this is hard to admit, my feminism was, in good part, self-centric. It was very much concerned with my identity, my power and potential. Of course, this expanded to include an interest in womankind more generally, but my passion for feminism nonetheless sprang from an exaltation of my own experience. I extolled the ideals of autonomy and independence—until those ideals were utterly undone by the realities of pregnancy and motherhood, the reality of Julian.

Quotations

'The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.' William Blake

'A state is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people." It is a lie!' Nietzsche

'The harvest of this world is to the resolute, and he that is infirm of purpose is ground betwixt the upper and the nether millstone.' E.R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros

'In this world it is essential always to be pushing, but fatal to seem so.'  Benjamin Jowett 

'People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.' Saul Bellow

 

'This life is slow suicide, unless you read.' Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny

'You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.' Sir Max Beerbohm

'You gotta have a body.' Jayne Mansfield

'White people live in an arrogant fantasy land that ethnic persecution will never happen to them'

I quoted from Rod Dreher's article about the verbal attacks on the Covington boys, the Catholic boys wrongly accused of smirking in a racist manner. It refers to a Marxist historian who writes about medieval Jewish pograms and makes distant analogies between the pogroms and the verbal attacks on the Covington boys. 

I think it might be interesting to give you part of a comment on that article that I saw on the net.

'Funny, I have an Orthodox Jewish friend who says 

"White people live in an arrogant fantasy land that ethnic persecution will never happen to them, even though it has in the past and is the historical norm."

'He thinks once Whites are out of power, and a minority, since they've become the Girardian lightening rod for all evils, the masses will then take their revenge.'

The end of the film

Chris Addison‏Verified account @mrchrisaddison More

You know the end of The Italian Job when the bus is hanging off the cliff & one false move means everyone dies but they still want to get the gold at the other end, which is now just a fantasy, and Caine says, "Hang on lads, I've got a great idea"? That's Theresa May, isn't it?

Ben Lowry: Theresa May is still reluctant to challenge Irish nationalist narrative on Brexit

The best Brexit that could happen would be leaving with no deal, the hardest Brexit possible. The Norway option is probably the hardest Brexit that could happen given that Theresa May, who is not very clever, has been persuaded by Irish nationalists that a hard border would bring back the Troubles. She has been sold a pup by the Nationalists and another by the EU. 

Left and right share blame for the 2008 financial crisis

Someone pointed out to me that I have no right to endorse the US Ambassador criticising the EU as a regulation factory, when American bank deregulation caused the 2008 financial crisis. 

Well it did. No-one is arguing that all regulation is bad, but social engineering is another factor. 

The 2008 crisis had many fathers but one is Bill Clinton's Housing and Urban Development Secretary who gave banks higher ratings for home loans made in "credit-deprived" areas, i.e. bad parts of towns inhabited by Democrats. Banks were rewarded for loans to those who were at high risk of defaulting. These rules lowered down payments from the traditional 20 percent to zero in some cases by 2000.What Clinton was doing was social engineering to help his voters buy their homes. Such as the 'unemployed black man sitting on a crumbling porch somewhere in Alabama in a string vest" that John Wells mentions in a funny sketch. At 3 minutes 10 seconds.

Lennonism, not Leninism, is the great danger to mankind

Someone called Ben Shapiro, of whom all I know is that he has been de-platformed by American universities, agrees with me in this clip that the ideas of the Beatles' song 'Imagine' are inconceivably ugly. He uses the word evil. That's a word to be very careful about. I think I'd stick with horribly, wickedly misguided.

He goes on to talk about the need to stop Donald Trump being Republican nominee (this i\s from 2016) and the need to prevent an establishment nominee. Looking on the net I see that he is still a never-Trumper.

First legally recognised "non-binary" American has reverted to being male

The first person in the US to be legally recognised as non-binary has announced on his blog that he has reverted back to being male.

'I will not be a party to advancing harmful gender ideologies that are ruining lives, causing deaths and contributing to the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children.'

Cișmigiu yesterday

I love Cișmigiu in winter. The avenues of trees are so Cold War. Perfect for a dead drop.

The Fate of the Roman Cities of the Near East and North Africa

I was trying to remember the details of the theory that North African agrarian land became desert because Muslim invaders introduced goats. I recently by accident stumbled across the article in which I read about it years ago, here. The author has no footprint on the internet except on a conservative intellectual site called New English Review, which makes me wonder about him. I'd prefer him to be tenured academic.

The future for the American Democrats could be Trumpian

I used to support the Democrats despite their enthusiasm for abortion until 1993. This article makes an American Hindu woman Democrat called Tulsi Gabbard sound a good thing, apart from her strong support for abortion, which will lose her working class votes. 

Western civilisation's masculinity crisis

An interesting article in Crisis headlined

Christianity’s Masculinity Crisis

argues that society is now too feminised (or is the word effeminate?) and the churches too. The Catholic Church too has started to become less masculine.

I quote:

G.K. Chesterton observed that “it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people.” In other words, children should be first exposed to the time-tested ideas and facts that we’re most sure of. But in today’s educational wonderland, Chesterton’s formula has been turned on its head. These days, educators feel they have a mandate to introduce the most novel and untested theories to the youngest people. 

One of the fashionable new theories is that traditional expressions of masculinity, such as roughhousing among boys, are “toxic” and ought to be eliminated. But whatever the dangers posed to society by masculine aggression, a greater danger arises when men lack the instinct to resist aggression.

Gordon Sondland sounds like a man after my own heart

Gordon Sondland, Donald Trump's Ambassador to the EU: 

“The Commission is like a factory churning out regulation after regulation after regulation. Even regulating things that don’t exist today on the theory that someday, someone is going to get hurt somewhere. ”

Almost half college educated American young men think violent acts are acceptable to achieve a better society

Americans get heavily into debt, or their parents do, to be indoctrinated in far left ideology. 

48% of male students and graduates in America aged 18 to 29 think violent acts are acceptable to achieve a better society. I wonder what the figure was in Germany in 1932 or Russia in 1917.

Note the difference between male graduates in their twenties and those in their 30s. Has reality mugged them or was the teaching ten or twenty years ago less left-wing? Probably mostly the former, but the zeitgeist is becoming less rational and more nihilistic. 

Eastern Europe is a refuge but East European arts graduates from Western universities are importing the killer bacillus here.

Conservatives are now the peace party

The hard left nowadays hates revolutions whether they are in Iran, Venezuela, France or Britain. The hard left hated the revolution in Ukraine and the rebels in Syria (they were right about Syria, which the liberals got and get very badly wrong). Meanwhile the soft left have gone from opposing American intervention abroad to opposing Donald Trump when he advocates, for example, leaving Syria. Once German left disliked American interventions, but were appalled when Trump the candidate said (truly) that Nato is obsolete.

Conservatives, real ones, are now the peace party, as they were in Dr Johnson's time in England and in Herbert Hoover's in the USA. Fear and loathing of Communism had made comservatives adopt the liberal idea that foreign policy, and therefore wars, should be about values.

What is the point of Nato and what is the point of inviting Macedonia to join?

I ask for information. 

I have not thought it through yet.

Elegy for the young fogey

The Young Fogey Handbook came out just after I went down from Cambridge, consule Planco as we young fogeys say, and I suddenly discovered that I belonged to a youth sub-culture. Like Teds and Rockers.

I much later met and loved Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, the Apostle to the Young Fogeys. This elegy to the Young Fogeys makes me feel very sad and it is itself old now. The wind has blown them all away, in Belloc's phrase, along with Sloane Rangers. Tempus fugit.


For an elegy to Monsignor Gilbey, let Sir John Mortimer's wonderful interview with him suffice.

Blackface

Two Washington Post headlines yesterday:

Poll: Only 58% of Americans oppose blackface

Blackface is a global problem

A global problem.

There's a quiet pseudo-state contained within Moldova’s borders: Gagauzia

This article in Vice reminded me to visit Gaugazia, the forgotten semi-country in the Republic of Moldova. I must also explore the rest of Moldova. Transnistria I can recommend for people of a nervous disposition: it is the most peaceful place on earth. Peaceful and boring are synonyms but I meant peaceful as a compliment.

Suffering and responsibility - these are the hallmarks of masculinity

"Suffering and responsibility - these are the hallmarks of masculinity."
Archbishop Fulton Sheen

"Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it." -Raymond Chandler


Henry David Thoreau wrote that most people lead 'lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them''


As I sat in Le Café I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
They may sneer as they like about eating and drinking,
But help it I cannot, I cannot help thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!
How pleasant it is to have money. -- Arthur Hugh Clough


“Biden was never very smart. He was a terrible student. His gaffes are unbelievable. When I say something that you might think is a gaffe, it’s on purpose; it’s not a gaffe. When Biden says something dumb, it’s because he’s dumb.

...I hope I haven’t wounded Pocahontas too badly. I’d like to run against her!””

Donald Trump

Donald Trump the peace president

Donald Trump's State of the Union speech got mixed reviews in the British press. It did show that his second year in office was short on achievements other than winning the Judge Kavanaugh tussle. Pat Buchanan says it also reveals a winning strategy for the President in the election next year (so soon!) based on opposing abortion and socialism. 

If he succeeds in doing something about illegal immigration so much the better for him and everyone else. If he does not then his failure should win him votes. Unless electors ask why he did he not build his wall, or whatever it will be, when his party controlled both houses of Congress. 

They might. They are not fools. 

Theresa May's policy will take us to hell in a handcart - no deal is far better

Donald Tusk's expectation that a place in hell has been reserved by Brexiteers was not as shocking as it would have been sixty years ago, when many people still believed in hell, but it was considered by many impolite coming from a foreigner.  

Others agreed with Mr Tusk. An academic in Northern Ireland, where people still believe in hell and who specialises in conflict resolution, said that hell was too good for them.

This is a distraction from the real issues, of course, but the backstop itself is a very bigger distraction. 

Things start to become clearer: we shall leave the EU but stay in something like a customs union

Theresa May speaking in Northern Ireland yesterday said that under no circumstance would she permit a ‘hard border’ between Northern and Southern Ireland.

That was very stupid. A hard border would not conflict with the Good Friday Agreement by which the British government accommodated the IRA terrorists, but Mrs May sounds like she means it and that means there will be no hard Brexit.

If so, the backstop does not matter.

If the British government leaves the EU's customs union and single market, as Mrs May wants, checks would be required on products coming in and out of Northern Ireland, though possibly these checks could be made electronically. If checks happen, there is some sort of hard border. If customs officers are standing at the border it is what she means by a hard border. 

Nowhere in the world is there a border between countries that are not in a customs union where there is not some sort of hard border, though sometimes it is almost invisible. The more customs duties, the harder the border.

Quotations

"Your first house was a woman. Respect and thank." 

Mariana S. Rüppel

"My two cents: if any one cares about my respect for them, please stop posting flags or naive tree-hugging messages in response to innocents being slaughtered by islamic fundamentalists. Do your citizen duty and vote for anyone proposing something competent, practical and rational about the preservation of our European culture, civilisation and society. Anything else is simply disqualifying. And by the way: no, not all cultures are equally humane, nice, desirable or progressive. You have to make a choice, assume it, be proud of it, and be ready to defend it."
Florin Ilie

“An American who had served in France during World War One told me that he had been quartered in a castle where he and his ‘buddy’ wanted to surprise the old countess. He sat down at the piano and they both sang the Marseillaise with gusto. The good lady thanked them with a sad smile and remarked softly: ‘You must realize that this was the first and, I hope, the very last time that this dirty song was ever heard in our home.’ Actually, this anthem has a text unacceptable to any Christian. Here the two Americans indeed encountered the ‘other France.’”
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

"I wish I was as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything." 

Lord Melbourne

Quotations found by Karl White

"Christianity, and especially Catholicism being, as I said in "The Country Doctor", a comprehensive system of repression of the depraved tendencies of man, is the greatest social element. Catholicism and Royalty are two twin principles. I write in the light of two eternal truths: Religion and Monarchy, two needs that contemporary events proclaim and to which any writer of common sense must try to bring our country back." Balzac

This is appropriate today when Queen Elizabeth competes the 67th year of her reign. 

Quids in

Why is the pound (the unit of money, not of weight) colloquially called a quid? 

The Oxford English Dictionary says: 

"Late 17th century (denoting a sovereign): of obscure origin" and records quid used in 1661, citing the pseudonymous Peter Arentine’s Strange Newes from Bartholomew-Fair, or the Wanderer-Whore Discovered: “The fool lost his purse, but we knew how not; for the reckoning being suddenly brought in, his Quids were vanisht.” 

Some naive people say that quid is taken from Quidhampton, a town near Salisbury claimed to have had a mill that produced paper for Great Britain’s first banknotes. Obviously this is rubbish. Others talk of the Irish cuid, ‘portion’ or ‘share’, once used by Irish-speaking soldiers in the British army for their salary. 

I thought about it for five seconds and knew it is from the Latin quid, meaning ‘what’, specifically used in the expression quid pro quo, or ‘one thing for another’. This, I find, is considered, according to the net, to be what dons used to call the better view.

Tony Abbot on Brexit

Tory former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said this recently. 

He should be invited to become England's Prime Minister. He makes one proud of the imperial family, so to speak.

"It’s pretty hard for Britain’s friends, here in Australia, to make sense of the mess that’s being made of Brexit. The referendum result was perhaps the biggest-ever vote of confidence in the United Kingdom, its past and its future. But the British establishment doesn’t seem to share that confidence and instead looks desperate to cut a deal, even if that means staying under the rule of Brussels. Looking at this from abroad, it’s baffling: the country that did the most to bring democracy into the modern world might yet throw away the chance to take charge of its own destiny.Let’s get one thing straight: a negotiation that you’re not prepared to walk away from is not a negotiation — it’s surrender. It’s all give and no get. When David Cameron tried to renegotiate Britain’s EU membership, he was sent packing because Brussels judged (rightly) that he’d never actually back leaving. And since then, Brussels has made no real concessions to Theresa May because it judges (rightly, it seems) that she’s desperate for whatever deal she can get.

“Don’t touch me, you black heathen”

The film Mary Poppins is racist according to a US academic writing in the New York Times, who accuses Dame Julie Andrews of 'blacking up' with soot while dancing with chimney sweeps.

Professor Daniel Pollack-Pelzner criticises the moment when Mary Poppins joins Dick Van Dyke's Bert to dance on a rooftop for the song Step in Time.

He writes: 

"When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker."
"This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943)."

Calling things by their names

I wish employment law were still called master and servant law. Mental health law used to be the law of lunacy.

Free speech so long as what you say is kind

Mrs Margaret Nelson is a 74-year-old woman, living in a village in Suffolk, who on Monday morning was woken by a telephone call from Suffolk police. The policeman wanted to speak to Mrs Nelson because the police had received complaints that she had argued that sex is real but gender is not on her Twitter account and her blog.

The Death of Clothing

I discovered yesterday that clothing is going out of fashion. And it is true. People often no longer have work and lesiure clothes and express themselves on Facebook rather than through their choice of apparel.Which is a shame for someone like me who loves hats, suits and ties. They also prefer spending money on weekends away in foreign cities.

From the article to which I linked:

In 1977, clothing accounted for 6.2 percent of U.S. household spending, according to government statistics. Four decades later, it’s plummeted to half that. 

Apparel is being displaced by travel, eating out and activities—what’s routinely lumped together as “experiences”—which have grown to 18 percent of purchases. Technology alone, including data charges and media content, accounts for 3.4 percent of spending. That now tops all clothing and footwear expenditures.

Gore Vidal: “A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes"

“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species." 

Gore Vidal, American novelist, aphorist and liberal Democrat in 2000. The full piece is here.

Geoffrey Household's years in Romania

After I watched for the third time Peter O’Toole in Rogue Male a friend told me that the author of the (very good) novel Rogue Male worked in the National Bank of Romania, a couple of hundred yards from where I live and came back to Romania to blow up the Ploiesti oil fields.

The smoke of Satan is in the Church

“We have used ambiguous phrases during the [Second Vatican Council] and we know how we will interpret them afterwards.”—Fr. Edward Schillebeeckx, Open Letter to Confused Catholics,” p.106.

Nicky Morgan: Brexit would always have happened at some point

Nicky Morgan is a British Conservative and was the Secretary of State for Education and Minister for Women and Equalities from 2014 to 2016. 

I don't know why a Conservative government has a Minister for Women and Equalities, either. There are many things I don't know.

She was not given a job when Theresa May became Prime Minister. She campaigned for Remain in the referendum campaign, is trying to find a compromise that Remainers and Leavers can agree on, and made this interesting remark yesterday.

Climbing over dead bodies to the top: Sara Thornton is made 'Anti-Slavery Tsar'

Theresa May has made Sara Thornton her 'Anti-Slavery Tsar' charged with leading the fight against slavery and sex trafficking across the UK. 

Miss Thornton was chief constable of Thames Valley police when the force failed for years to believe the evidence that up to 373 children, mostly girls, were sexually abused by a Pakistani Muslim gang in Oxford, city of dreaming spires. She later apologised and accepted responsibility.

The disturbing history of Dr. Asperger and the movement to reframe his syndrome

The United States seems to be insane. It seemed so in Evelyn Waugh's day, but it gets madder decade by decade, year by year. The iconoclastic urge to remove statues of Confederate heroes and to rename colleges named after slave owners is only a small part part of the strange new culture war in which the left seems win without a fight.

Illnesses named after Nazi period German doctors, such as Asperger's Syndrome, now have to be renamed. This seemed at first glance ridiculous.

Here is the article.

"Recently in the South, there’s been a movement to remove Confederate flags and statues. Is this similar?"

Octav Dragan: beside the National Bank in Bucharest

From Rod Liddle's column today

It is always a circular argument — because there is climate change, everything that happens must be because of climate change. This is science at its least dispassionate and its most “woke”— and therefore most vulnerable and open to doubt. And it breeds in people a deep mistrust, because too often, according to the leftie climate-change experts, the villains are convenient targets: always the West, always us, with our privilege and our imperialism. Whereas if you dig a little deeper, rapid population growth and the ferocious industrialisation of China and India are far bigger threats.

*

A quick update for those who believe new guidelines on free speech at universities mean they are alive with vibrant debate, places where no view is deemed off limits, and so on. Justin Murphy, a political science lecturer at Southampton University, has been suspended and faces a hearing into “gross misconduct” after voicing his objections to abortion.

The British meant what they said, more or less

“If the UK does not change its position would you support or oppose the UK leaving without a deal?”

Support 41%; oppose 44%; don’t know 16%. 

Bălcescu: "Freedom can be easily regained if it is lost, but not ethnic identity.”

Nicolas Bălcescu, the Romanian revolutionary of 1848: 

“For me, the question of ethnic solidarity is more important than the question of freedom. A people can use freedom only when it’s able to survive as a nation. Freedom can be easily regained if it is lost, but not ethnic identity.”

In South-Eastern Europe the French revolution and Robespierre's revolutionary principle of Liberté was understood as national freedom or at least, for those Greek Phanariots like Alexander Ypsilantis who wanted to revive Byzantium with the Tsar's support, freedom from rule by infidels.  Ypsilantis's revolt in 1821 was defeated after failing to win the support that he expected from Romanians, who cared not a fig about Greeks. Thereafter Balkan history was about ethnic solidarity and identity. The next Greek revolt was a national, ethnic revolt and it succeeded.

Four possible Brexit outcomes and the worst is the most likely

There are four possible policies as far as Brexit is concerned: staying in; leaving with no deal; joining the EEA (Norway); or something like Mrs. May's proposal to negotiate a bespoke deal while promising to pay £39 billion Danegeld.


Since she wants this and so does Jeremy Corbyn, Mrs. May's policy that was so heavily defeated looks the most likely. I regret this very much. I'd prefer leaving with no deal and leaving on Norwegian terms. 

I am inclined to think I'd also prefer to stay in than be humiliated in the way we shall be if we adopt the government's policy. Inside the EU we could wage a guerrilla war until eventually we left on good terms.


Only a week ago Tory former Foreign Secretary William Hague (who was Remain) was warning that another referendum would be disastrous but was looking increasingly likely. Tony Blair, John Major and many politicians in the House like Dominic Grieve were seizing their moment to argue for another 'people's vote'. Now it seems to be almost forgotten. The country does not want it.


If we do leave, a real border with border infrastructure of some kind in Ireland is necessary and unobjectionable, unless we become a European vassal state. The stupid woman (in the words of Jeremy Corbyn) who is leading my country should have said this from the start.

American Catholics have raised $36,100 scholarship fund for the boy from Covington

American Catholics have raised $36,100 for a scholarship fund for the boy from Covington Catholic School, who was the target of a lot of very harsh words for allegedly smirking at an American Indian at a Pro-Life march in Washington D.C., and his brothers.

I wonder what the two bishops who condemned the boys think. One of them has still not apologised. That's the Bishop of Lexington, the Rt Revd. John Stowe, who said:

“It astonishes me that any students participating in a pro-life activity on behalf of their school and their Catholic faith could be wearing apparel sporting the slogans of a president who denigrates the lives of immigrants, refugees and people from countries that he describes with indecent words and haphazardly endangers with life-threatening policies."

“Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilisation fell”

The passage below seems to have a lot of topical significance to me. 

But if the gradualness of this process misled the Romans there were other and equally potent reasons for their blindness. Most potent of all was the fact that they mistook entirely the very nature of civilisation itself. All of them were making the same mistake. People who thought that Rome could swallow barbarism and absorb it into her life without diluting her own civilization; the people who ran about busily saying that the barbarians were not such bad fellows after all, finding good points in their regime with which to castigate the Romans and crying that except ye become as little barbarians ye shall not attain salvation; the people who did not observe in 476 that one half of the Respublica Romanorum had ceased to exist and nourished themselves on the fiction that the barbarian kings were exercising a power delegated from the Emperor. All these people were deluded by the same error, the belief that Rome (the civilization of their age) was not a mere historical fact with a beginning and an end, but a condition of nature like the air they breathed and the earth they tread. Ave Roma immortalis, most magnificent most disastrous of creeds!

The fact is that the Romans were blinded to what was happening to them by the very perfection of the material culture which they had created. All around them was solidity and comfort, a material existence which was the very antithesis of barbarism. How could they foresee the day when the Norman chronicler would marvel over the broken hypocausts of Caerleon? How could they imagine that anything so solid might conceivably disappear? Their roads grew better as their statesmanship grew worse and central heating triumphed as civilization fell.

Is it too late for the Norway option (NOT Norway Plus)?

Last night Theresa May received from the House of Commons an appropriately nebulous instruction to renegotiate the backstop. Today the EU said that the withdrawal agreement cannot be reopened and there are no alternative arrangements to the backstop. Jean-Claude Juncker told Theresa May the backstop could be renegotiated if Britain were to enter into a customs union with the EU but in that case the backstop would not be needed.

The obvious solution, for the time being, is the Norway option, i.e. entering the European Economic Area if Norway and Iceland would have us, or creating our own replica of the EEA just for us if they won't (they are certainly not keen).

We could do as Norway and Switzerland do. They are in the single market but not in the customs union. They are free to levy tariffs on European goods and diverge from the EU on regulations, but in practice do not. And in practice if we trade with Europe we shall have to obey the EU's rules anyway. Norway's agricultural produce does pay a tariff and her agriculture and crucially her fisheries are beyond the EU's greedy fingers.

After that we can discuss whether to remain like Norway - and Norwegians are very happy with their status and made clear in two referendums that they do not want to join the EU. But so long as we replicate EU regulations and levy no tariffs we do not need a visible border in Ireland - not that a visible border should matter.

But I am talking about Norway, NOT Norway Plus which means joining the customs union and being unable to make trade deals.

Mrs May's idea of a bespoke deal is a terrible one. If we guarantee to pay the Europeans £39 billion (they only have a good claim to about half of that, by the way) and negotiate a bespoke deal France has said she will not allow our fisheries to be closed to European fishermen.

Yes the Norway option means allowing free movement of Europeans (why does the EU insist on this?) but is this such a problem nowadays? Britain will in any case have large Eastern European ethnic minorities for eternity, which is a very long time. And although the numbers of immigrants who came were far, far too big, Eastern Europeans on the whole are model immigrants. We can instead of excluding Europeans exclude non- Europeans.

George Kennan in May 1998 on NATO expansion

''I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs.'

''What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don't people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime.

''And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia. It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then they will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.''

George Kennan's thoughts in full are here.

Tweeting Brexit

Michael Merrick‏ @michael_merrickMore
Brexiteers: what would it take for you to change your mind and wish to Remain? What would have to happen? Remainers: same q other way round

bernadette Eakin‏ @BernadetteEakin replying to @michael_merrick

Abolition of the EU in its present form. Reinstatement of the Catholic Monarchies across Europe. I realise this may be slightly idealistic.

John O'Sullivan‏ @JohnOSullivanNR Jan 29

John O'Sullivan Retweeted Iain Martin

May’s deal is Remain with no vote in E.U. institutions and no right of exit. Yes, it’s achievable. So what? Suicide is achievable but that’s no reason for doing it. A Remain outcome would allow a later Brexit and provide more than enough fuel for it.

A second referendum looks very unlikely - No Deal does too but is not impossible

A Romanian friend asked me at lunch yesterday if England really will leave the E.U. I said that had she asked me a week earlier I'd have said I wasn't sure. But now I felt sure that we would.

It seems, though I am far away, that people in England want this thing decided. Not that leaving with or without a deal will decide things: in either case the negotiations with the EU will go on for years. But at least we shall have left.

Almost half the country wants to leave with No Deal, say the polls. 

The extreme Remainers have suddenly gone oddly very quiet about their demand for a second referendum, because they think it won't happen and if it did they would probably lose it. 

But it won't happen, if only because it would apparently take a year to organise (how come the Greeks organised one in a week?) and would probably come to the same result as last time. 

And then, after another year of anguish and fury over Brexit, we should probably be in the same awful place we are now.

Quotations

"World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."
Marshall McLuhan, Culture is Our Business (1970)

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."
Lord Acton

"Acton advised the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History: 'our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, German and Dutch alike.' E.H. Carr had his fun with that, but who looks shabbier now - Carr with his denial of the Katyn massacre and his homage to Stalin, or Acton?'"
Tom Deveson

"If the next conservatism is to reverse this decline and begin to recover the America we knew as recently as the 1950s, the last normal decade, it must do three things. First, it must aspire to change not merely how people vote but how they live their lives. It must lead growing numbers of Americans to secede from the rotten pop culture of materialism, consumerism, hyper-sexualization, and political correctness and return to the old ways of living. The next conservatism includes “retroculture”: a conscious, deliberate recovery of the past.
"This recovery should not be, indeed cannot be, imposed through political power. This is the second action the next conservatism must take: putting power in its place. … The rejection of the counterculture that has become the mainstream culture must proceed bottom-up, person by person and family by family, on a voluntary basis."
"The Next Conservatism" by Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind in The American Conservative.

Yanis Varoufakis's advice to Mrs May in May 2017 still makes sense

'The only way May could secure a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style, off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.
'The benefits from such a request would be twofold: first, Eurocrats and Europhiles would have no basis for denying Britain such an arrangement. (Moreover, Schäuble, Merkel and sundry would be relieved that the ball is thrown into their successors’ court seven years down the track.) Second, it would make the House of Commons sovereign again by empowering it to debate and decide upon in the fullness of time, and without the stress of a ticking clock, Britain’s long-tem relationship with Europe.'

(Norway yes, for seven years, but not Norway plus please, which means joining the EU customs unions and not being able to sign trade deals.)