Joy (and sorrow) in London last night

The scene last night in front of the Palace of Westminster in Parliament Square. 

The event was organised by Nigel Farage and excited contempt and derision from Remain-supporting newspapers. The Independent sketch writer, who is paid to be funny, wrote

Parliament Square was a knuckle-dragging carnival of irredeemable stupidity

What makes Britain’s independence day different from those that have gone before it that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants

"I must report that on Friday 31 January, between the hours of 9pm and 11pm, Westminster’s Parliament Square played host to a static, knuckle dragging carnival of the irredeemably stupid."

And Tom Peck goes on, making no attempt to be amusing, with a long cry of anger and pain.

"We simply do not have more in common than that which divides us. It is an irreconcilable, fundamental rift that goes to the core of everything everyone on either side believes. There will be no moving on. For 10 years or more, all the nation’s fortunes will be tied back to this event.

"What happens, say, when another huge financial crisis hits, lives and livelihoods damaged? Half the country will blame the other half for the vast economic growth squandered to Brexit. We won’t move on. We can’t.

"The prime minister urges healing – but he is the disease, not the cure. What do we do next? Are we to accept defeat, make peace, all the while knowing that, were the shoe on the other foot, Farage and company would be doing absolutely nothing of the sort?"

The BBC also took it badly, though they tried to put a brave face on it.

Quotations

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

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

Quotations

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

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

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

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

Joe Biden on Saturday on Twitter.

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

The atrocious crime of being a young man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotations

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


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

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

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

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

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

Things I did not know about the Kaiser

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

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

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

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

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

Books

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


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


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

The American left is literally mad

A footnote to the history of our times.

France is an archipelago

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

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

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

Big cities and the global village

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

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

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

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

Quotations

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

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

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

— Tom Holland (@holland_tom) January 23, 2020

Humanity is horrible, but nations are beautiful

Another aphorism.

Quotations

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

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

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

Quotations

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

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

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

Democracy and traditionalists versus the new elite

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

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

Conservatism is about love

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

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

Sir Roger Scruton

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


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

The decline and fall of the English high street

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

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

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

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

More from Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020)

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Ezra Klein: Really?

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

R.I.P Sir Roger Scruton

I am so sorry Sir Roger Scruton has died. He has been one of my great heroes since I read Conservative Essays while a sixth former.


The Liberal Heart, a collection of quotations and extracts from liberals that I read in 1984, was studded by attacks on him and his then outspokenly conservative views on homosexuality. They seemed bracingly High Tory then, but are thought crimes now.


Let's not forget or forgive James Brokenshire’s sacking of Roger Scruton from his unpaid job as a government adviser on beauty in architecture last year, after the latter was stitched up by the New Statesman and falsely accused of antisemitism. 

Perhaps it is why Boris did not give the wretched Brokenshire a job, even though he was the first cabinet minister to come out in support of Boris. I do hope so.

No more war

The British Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace tells the Sunday Times that the prospect of U.S. isolationism keeps him “awake at night” and that Great Britain must prepare to fight wars without Washington. 

He mentions the US pulling out of Syria and possibly leaving Iraq as if these were bad things. We should leave Iraq and Afghanistan even if the US stays.

Surely the UK should fight no more wars unless our country is threatened, which is scarcely probable. The only threat of invasion we face comes from refugees and migrants and the only likely threat of war comes from domestic terrorists. 

For the time being we must make nice to the US and EU to get good trade deals, but after we have done so, let us instead go back to free trade with the world, friendship with all countries, certain pariahs aside, and splendid isolation. This policy served us very well in the past and would again. No more sending young men to die in liberal wars for values, please.

From Bertrand Russell's "The Conquest of Happiness"

External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way. 



To all the talented young men who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: ‘Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy all your energies.’ I do not recommend this course of action to everyone, but only those who suffer from the disease that Mr Krutch diagnoses. I believe that, after some years of such an existence, the ex-intellectual will find that in spite of his efforts he can no longer refrain from writing, and when the time comes his writing will not seem to him futile. 

From someone who actually understands what is happening in Iran

A powerful & important thread from someone who actually understands what is happening in Iran >>> https://t.co/fkH5O4sH23

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) January 12, 2020

Some permanent officials are very unimpressed by President Trump.

Iranian diaspora

The BBC reports the crowd in Tehran protesting against the Government for shooting down the Ukrainian civilian plane and lying about it. This is good news for Donald Trump, the West and for Iranians, I hope, but the report contains a telling point at the end: some in Iranian diaspora in Canada support the Iranian regime.

Quotations

Sacred to the Memory of Lt Col John Brown Accidentally Shot Dead By His Batman On The Fourth Day Of April, 1882. 'Well Done, Thou Good And Faithful Servant'. Tombstone in the North-West Frontier, according to the wildly unreliable Ned Sherrin.


It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil...he is the only explanation of it. Mgr. Ronald Knox (In its obituary the Times called him the "wittiest Churchman in England since Sydney Smith”.)

Suleimani's brutality made him unpopular in Iraq and with the Iranian secret service

This is from The Intercept.

A more nuanced portrait of Suleimani emerges from a leaked archive of secret Iranian spy cables obtained by The Intercept. The documents were generated by officers from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, stationed in Iraq between 2013 and 2015, when the Iranian war against the Islamic State was at its height, and Suleimani was running the show. 

The reports reveal how Suleimani was perceived in some corners of the Iranian intelligence establishment, and the picture that emerges does not always align with the carefully crafted public image of the general as an indomitable strategist. While the Iranian-led war against ISIS was raging, Iranian spies privately expressed concern that the brutal tactics favored by Suleimani and his Iraqi proxies were laying the groundwork for major blowback against the Iranian presence in Iraq. Suleimani was also criticized for his own alleged self-promotion amid the fighting. Photos of the Iranian commander on battlefields across Iraq had helped build his image as an iconic military leader. But that outsized image was also turning him into a figure of terror for many ordinary Iraqis.

A Syrian friend of mine told me that Iran is the devil and I am sure he spoke truly. Still my
friend rightly wants the Syrian government to win, because the alternative would be worse. 

Iran

'We want to own Iran like we owned it when we had the Shah in power, and nobody’s going to be happy until that happens.' Ron Paul, in an interview on Wednesday.

'You like Donald Trump and why do you like him? Because he's a game changer. He’s a once in a century kind of leader.' Greg Gutfeld, American TV personality.

'Love or hate him, Trump has used military force less than any other president since Jimmy Carter.' New York Times today.

'The elimination of Soleimani was not a prelude to deeper US involvement in the Middle East. It was a farewell letter. Always admitting the fickleness of contingency, it
nonetheless looks as though Donald Trump will go down as the man who catalyzed the United States economy, who brought unemployment down to historic lows, who goosed real wages, especially at the lower levels, who made important inroads against the stultifying miasma of the the regulatory state while also resuscitating the US military, curbing illegal immigration, and — just now — extricating the United States from foreign involvements that help no one but our enemies.' Roger Kimball in The Spectator yesterday. 

Rod Dreher: 'The culture war is lost'

'It’s arguable that America is not losing its religion so much as replacing the old faith with a political pseudoreligion — as Europe did in the early 20th century. I would argue that the religion with the most effective political power in contemporary America is technically not a religion at all: it’s the cult of social justice.

'...The march of SJWs through American institutions is fast achieving complete hegemony. The unexpected victory of Donald Trump in 2016 is not a sign of recrudescent conservatism but, for traditionalists, actually a desperate last stand. Despite the purplish enthusiasm of conservative Evangelicals for Trump, he is properly seen as a kind of culture-war katechon — a restraining force holding back the mob. As a prominent Evangelical leader confided to me last year, ‘We know that when he goes, we’re done.’ Après Donald, le déluge.'

Rod Dreher, 'The culture war is lost', in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition.

Sic transit Brexit

The Brexit bill had just three days of debate before it passed the House of Commons today. Yesterday the debate ended four hours early, because so few MPs wanted to speak.

This was the bill, pared of concessions made before the election to Remainers, which the House had refused to pass in three days in time to meet Boris's pledge of achieving Brexit by 31 October. 

I caught my old friend from university David Anderson, now Lord Anderson QC, informing Radio Four's Today programme in October that, though as a crossbench peer he could not get involved in politics, he could say the bill would require a year to eighteen months for Parliament to scrutinise properly. 

This strengthened my view that lawyers do not understand politics and that judges should not be allowed to overrule Parliament. Judicial activism is as undemocratic as international or EU law.

Brexit, the EU and the Whig Interpretation of History

Lord Glasman, who announces in his by-line in Unherd that he is a Labour peer and the founder of Blue Labour, is a most interesting thinker. Like Patrick Cockburn, also a man of the left and almost the only good British journalist writing about the Middle East, he thinks the assassination of Qassem Soleimani may save the Iranian regime, which faced huge challenge from discontented Iraqi Shias and from Iranians.


We shall see. The truth is that no-one knows what the Iranian mullahs will decide or, more importantly, what millions of Iranians and Iraqis will decide.

This morning it looks as if Iran has settled for some fairly symbolic retaliation to American bases with nobody killed or injured. The fact that Iranian media is telling Iranians that many Americans have been killed suggests that this might be the end of the matter.

I have reread and am fascinated by the essay by his lordship produced on the British election result. He thinks that the EU is killing social democratic parties by imposing 'the rectitude of Hayek' via the Treaty of Lisbon and has now killed the Labour Party just as the UK is leaving. I cannot forbear to quote more from it.

It is a minor irony in all this that Andrew Murray and Seamus Milne, who prided themselves on their Marxist analysis with a central role for class ran a campaign based on ‘values’ and were trounced by the Conservatives who placed a relentless stress on the working class and transferring their loyalties. Labour Marxists turned out to be Whigs. What a lot of luggage for such a short journey.

More Brexit thoughts, by Remainers this time, if you can bear any more

Progressives are by definition an elitist minority: They think they have reached the future before everyone else and that the majority will have to follow them. But sometimes the majority just won’t. And when that happens, the majority can’t, in a democracy, be coerced.
Andrew Brown, Foreign Policy, December 17 2019

Remainers point out that Brexiting would trigger years of trade talks with most countries on earth. But by then most Britons would have turned off. They would no longer have to expend emotion on Brexit, or spend more of their short lives on earth arguing about the customs union.
Simon Kuper, Financial Times, December 5 2019

I also intend to turn off from thinking and writing about Brexit and British politics. It is difficult to remember that however big a political story is eventually and in most cases surprisingly quickly, people turn off, turn away, stop reading. I remember wondering how the war between Russia and Georgia could ever leave what are still called the front pages, even though most of us do not read the news on the printed page any more. Then, very suddenly, the story was completely forgotten, except in the Georgian enclaves occupied by Russia.

We are not living through an era of change but a change of era

"Pope Francis said recently that we are not living through an era of change but a change of era. This Conservative victory is an important part of defining what the features of the new era are. The previous consensus was defined by four shared assumptions; that the nation state, democracy, the working class and conservatism would matter less. The dominant forces were the educated middle-class, globalisation, written constitutions and liberalism. Blair and Cameron expressed this perfectly."

Lord Glasman, Labour peer and founder of Blue Labour, who voted Leave in 2016

"How different the world before 1914 was. It is a punctuation point as stark as the Fall of the Roman Empire. Before: curves, Degas, detail, shadow, mystery. Afterwards: eye-searing light, straight lines, Otto Dix, unconcealed power and no mystery at all. Power needs no mystery. On the contrary, it is keen to be recognised as what it is, straight away."

Peter Hitchens

Tweets

Emerald Robinson
✔@EmeraldRobinson

Pope Francis to school kids in Rome: "We are not living during the time of the Crusades!"

Menwhile, all the Christmas markets in Europe are under armed guard by soldiers and the police in Germany are wearing chainmail... https://twitter.com/_TheFireWithin_/status/878325095256604674 …

The West Remembers@_TheFireWithin_

Welcome to the XXI century. Or is it XI again? German police dressed in chainmail armor to confront a refugee armed with a meat cleaver




6:28 PM - Dec 22, 2019

Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn lead MPs to listen to the Queen read out Boris's speech

Boris, not for the first time, looks like Nigel Molesworth in Back in the Jug Agane - or William Brown in Richmal Crompton's Just William. Jeremy Corbyn, I suddenly see, is Fred Kite, the Stalinist shop steward played by Peter Sellers in I'm All Right, Jack, who dreams of visiting Russia.

"All them corn fields and ballet in the evening."

Quoting Joseph de Maistre

"Like the Protestant Reformation, the Revolution was, in the words of de Maistre, Satanic in its essence. To like it is to move away from God....I hope that these sentiments will be perpetuated by my descendants." Henri de Gaulle, father of Charles.

"In all systems there are relationships which it is wiser to leave undefined."
Joseph de Maistre, quoted by Eamon De Valera in July 1945, talking about Eire's relationship with the British Commonwealth

Thanks to my friend Karl White for bringing these to my attention on his Joseph de Maistre Appreciation Group page on Facebook.

Careers advice

I've heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance.
Ronald Reagan


I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
G.K. Chesterton

Attack on Rabbi Neumann, who is unlikely to recover

Hananya Naftali@HananyaNaftali

This is what #Antisemitism looks like!

This a photo of Rabbi Josef Neumann, released by his family, who was brutally attacked in #Monsey during Hanukkah celebration.

Neumann's family wants the world to see what hate is capable of, and asks to pray to pray for his recovery.

The way we live now

Library collections continue to promote and proliferate whiteness with their very existence and the fact that they are physically taking up space in our libraries. They are paid for using money that was usually ill-gotten and at the cost of black and brown lives via the prison industrial complex, the spoils of war, etc. Libraries filled with mostly white collections indicates that we don’t care about what POC [people of color] think, we don’t care to hear from POC themselves, we don’t consider POC to be scholars, we don’t think POC are as valuable, knowledgeable, or as important as white people.

Sofia Leung, who describes herself as follows:

Beginning of 5 page memo in 1985, by Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth, from Mrs Thatcher’s Policy Unit

"Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale; in the midst of the depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door, and expecting to see groceries there when they got back."

When this document was made public in 2015 Oliver Letwin said parts of it were "badly worded and wrong". I am not sure whether he explained which parts.

The Roaring Twenties begins

No one wants the British and Americans to keep out of war in the Middle East more than I do, and no-one sees less need in principle for conflict with Iran, but Iran gave Donald Trump no alternative. He had avoided rising to repeated provocations.

I do not mourn Soleimani but I suppose it unquestionably was murder. Moral theologians, please advise.

Montaigne on life and death

I am rereading Montaigne, who bored me to death in the Penguin translation when I was fourteen. I am doing so partly because a friend told me I reminded him of Montaigne and partly because I bought an Edwardian edition that fits into my jacket pocket and helps me escape the Internet. Here are some quotations.

He still rather bores me but I like Florio's prose.


Life in itself is neither good nor evil: it is the place of good or evil, according as you prepare it for them. And if you have lived one day, you have seen all: one day is equal to all other days: There is no other light, there is no other night. This Sun, this Moon, these Stars, and this disposition is the very same that your forefathers enjoyed, and which shall also entertain your posterity.

An unattempted lady could not vaunt of her chastity.


I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we will have sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.


The worst of my actions or conditions seem not so ugly unto me as I find it both ugly and base not to dare to avouch for them.

We the people

I was the Rev Giles Fraser's Facebook friend till I couldn't stand his crazy leftism and that of his friends. He has always been loony left, a huge admirer of Tony Benn and originally of Corbyn, but he voted Tory this time. He said

"It wasn’t the referendum debate that changed me. It was the establishment’s reaction upon losing it."

I was interested to learn that he voted Tory in 1983 because he thought a victory by Mrs Thatcher would enable a left-wing victory afterwards. This is the mirror image of the view of Paul Gottfried that voting Democrat, for example for Mayor De Blasio of New York, hastens a palao-conservative backlash. Giles Fraser and his left wing chums were wrong in 1983. Paul Gottfried is wrong now?

If women ruled the world

BBC report: 'If women ran every country in the world there would be a general improvement in living standards and outcomes, former US President Barack Obama has said. Speaking in Singapore, he said women aren't perfect, but are "indisputably better" than men.'

Madeline Albright, whom Bill Clinton appointed Secretary of State because she was a woman, disagrees. She said people who think the world would be better if it were run by women have forgotten what it was like at school.

Every nation has the government she deserves and England deserves Boris

'Every nation has the government she deserves.' 

Joseph de Maistre's famous aphorism applies to the UK today, as it does to Romania and the United States and Russia and every country in the world.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the 109 new Tory MPs at a party on the chilly Commons terrace Monday evening. The 1922 Committee had to send out for an extra 50 bottles of wine. Victory is sweet and sweeter because of the lamentations from the left.

I liked this truth uttered by Graeme Archer.

Corbyn's party finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class.

The last word belongs to Dan Hodge

(((Dan Hodges)))@DPJHodges

We’ve spent about a billion hours debating Brexit. But in the end it all boils down to one simple fact. If you offer people a choice in a referendum, you then have to do what they say. That’s it.

Bloodlines

I see more and more, what non Europeans always see, that we are each of us not individuals so much as bloodlines.

Thank God

Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.

The exit poll shows the British Tories winning an 86 seat majority and Labour doing worse than under Michael Foot in 1983.


Blyth Valley, Eddie Milne's old seat, solid Labour mining seat, has a Tory MP. He thanked 'Boris' in his acceptance speech.


A constituency-by-constituency exit poll suggests Jo Swinson has lost her seat but Dominic Raab has held his. Trill it!

I wonder what Theresa May is thinking now.

Waiting for the British election result

'When you win, everything you did was an act of genius and when you lose, everything you did was the work of a fool.' (Ed Miliband) 

So it will be with Boris and Corbyn after tonight. Nothing is inevitable until it happens but once it happens people think it inevitable. We need a philosopher to explain how causation works.

Now, with an hour to go before the British polls close and we know the result of the exit poll, I want to say that Boris let the country down by not getting Brexit through Parliament before calling his election. I think he could have done and he should have tried.

In 2015 and 2017 the exit poll results astonished everyone and turned out to be pretty accurate. What will they say this time?

It's a bit like the scenes with the witches in Macbeth.

I have been compared to Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham!

This is a nice compliment from Kathy Gyngell,the Editor of Conservative Woman, a good website where I have started sending some of my articles. 

She has awarded me her weekly prize, for my account of last weekend in Paris, in preference to other writers including James Delingpole.

'The prize goes to Paul Wood for his quite wonderfully written essay on France’s migrant revolution, which in my opinion had its way paved by those earlier soixante-huitards student revolutionaries. His evocative comparison of the past Paris with the Paris he has just revisited in its new Muslim incarnation took me back to those past geniuses, Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, that so few today have the education, let alone the ability, to reproduce. Do read and appreciate.'

There is not much diversity in British academia

This week's Times Higher Education survey of the voting preferences of British university lecturers: 

54% Labour 

23% Lib Dem 

8% Conservative

Over half want Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister and they are forming the more intelligent half of the British people of the future. This is the Jeremy Corbyn who backed Sinn Fein IRA and who responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by running an article in the newsletter he edited headlined 

'No cheers here for a united capitalist Germany'.

Pius XII was not Hitler's Pope

A recent article in the Catholic Herald explains the large part Pope Pius XII played in saving the lives of Jews in the Second World War.

The untrue idea that he ignored their plight is the fault of The Deputy, a play produced in 1963 by a previously unknown German, Rolf Hochhuth, which blamed Pius XII for the Holocaust. 

We know from the memoirs of Ion Mihai Pacepa, the Romanian Securitate general who defected in 1978, that the KGB had supplied Hochhuth with false information and his play was rewritten by Erwin Piscator, a famous producer and communist agent of influence. 

The Soviets’ aim was to derail the improving relations, after the Second Vatican Council, between the Church and Judaism.

Why is there more intellectual freedom in Bucharest than Cambridge?

Several people sent me this Spectator article recently about how much more intellectual freedom there is here in Romania than at my university, Cambridge. The writer, a Romanian student at Cambridge, tells how he wanted to speak to a political society about 

‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ –and was asked not to do so.

‘The problem is… we’re looking for something a bit more mainstream.’ Mainstream? But this is broadly the view of 52 per cent of the UK population! ‘Right. It’s just that we had a pro-Brexit speaker once and it all got a bit uncomfortable, a bit… controversial.’ Controversial ideas? At a university? Whatever next?

Hitler, the new human rights religion and the fall of the West

The history of the Western world after 1945 is essentially a meditation on Nazism and Hitler.

The history of Eastern Europe is not. It is a meditation on the nation, freedom, Marxism, Christianity, what Unamuno called the tragic sense of life, on many things but not on Nazism or Hitler.

This is why a highly intelligent Romanian woman from an old boyar family recently complained to me, "I am tired of hearing about the Holocaust. It was 70 years ago."

The reaction against Nazism after 1945 is the theme of Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West by R.R. Reno, Editor of the wonderful First Things Magazine. I have so many books I must read and this is another for my list.

He writes,

"The violence that traumatized the West between 1914 and 1945 evoked a powerful, American-led response that was anti-fascist, anti-totalitarian, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist. These anti imperatives define the postwar era."

The book talks about an Open Society orthodoxy. It views what is now called neo-liberalism and the free market reforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as part of the same 'restless utopianism' as the current movement to give transgender people rights.

Values now define Western countries, not blood, religion, or history. Freedom of contract, by the way, is not a value that is respected. Anti-racism, anti-discrimination and diversity rule.

Some people conclude, according to Mr. Reno, that

“after Auschwitz, the West does not deserve to endure. They welcome the mass immigration that will fundamentally change the society that produced so many decades off catastrophe. The change should be welcomed as a blessed deliverance from a cursed inheritance. He cites President George H.W. Bush, speaking to the United Nations on October 1,1990:

“I see a world of open borders, open trade, and, most importantly, open minds.”
You see, gentle reader, where Brexit and Donald Trump come from, even though Brexit is about returning from protectionism to free trade. By ‘return of the strong gods’ is meant not Thor or Odin but love of one's people.



Mr Reno shows that the elites in the West seek to dissolve the the strong beliefs and powerful loyalties they think fueled the conflicts that convulsed the twentieth century. In fact mass immigration and the ethnic mosaics it has created are what will fuel war. The Islamist atrocities are a start.


Mr Reno talks about the social benefits of religion but the churches are abasing themselves before non-Christian idols and replacing metaphysics with materialistic projects like ameliorating climate change and engineering more mass migration.


Christianity in Western Europe by 1945 was strongly coloured by liberalism and found Auschwitz a tremendous stumbling block to faith. How could an omnipotent God have permitted the murder of the Jews? This is one of the reasons for the retreat from traditional Christianity to the 'Christianity and water' preached in churches nowadays and the loss of belief everywhere.

A new secular religion of human rights is being born to replace traditional Christianity, with Auschwitz at its centre. It is, oddly enough, the force behind Extinction Rebellion as well as, more obviously, the transgender movement, single sex marriage, third wave feminism, mass immigration and the diversity ideology.

'World’s Finest Byzantine Icons At Risk After Erdogan Court Win'

Since a friend first took me to the Chorea Church/Museum I visit it every time I visit Constantinople. I stay next door, in the very charming Kuriye Hotel, and love to walk from there through the working class Fatih district. There I stumble across beautiful but largely forgotten mosques, completely forgotten churches and Roman pillars which stand ignored in busy streets. This is how travel should be, free of tourist kitsch, free of people from Idaho. 

I didn't know until I read a post on the blog of a Greek-American that the Chorea mosaics were the best Byzantine mosaics in the world. Nor did I know that Turkey’s highest administrative court ruled last month that the 1945 cabinet decision that made the mosque into a museum was unlawful because a mosque “cannot be used except for its essential function”. President Erdogan is expected to implement the court’s decision.

Will the Hagia Sofia be next?

In the nineteenth century Russians expected one day that High Mass would be celebrated in the Hagia Sofia. After the Ottoman Empire lost the First Balkan War it seemed possible one day, but it never happened. Now it is easy to imagine that it might become a mosque again.

The old landmarks are disappearing, or perhaps I should say they are re-emerging..

Evelyn Waugh might have invented mass murder at a conference on “reducing reoffending”

I was in Paris and busy when another Islamist atrocity partly on London Bridge took place in the middle of a British election, as happened in the last election. I am pleased that the parties did not suspend campaigning for a day or the BBC suspend political programmes,
as absurdly happened in 2017.

A young Cambridge man, Jack Merritt, was murdered foully, stabbed to death, and I offer my condolences to his loved ones. The killer, Khan, whom he had mentored, had hours earlier given a talk about reforming prisoners at an event Jack Merritt helped organise. He bravely tried to disarm him and died doing so.

He worked at the University of Cambridge’s criminology department. The event held at Fishmongers’ Hall in the City of London was called Learning Together and an attempt at “bringing students in Higher Education and Criminal Justice institutions together in transformative learning communities”.

The aim was to form connections that “make society more inclusive and safer by reducing reoffending”. Khan, however, wanted to reoffend. With the mirthless sense of humour of a psychopath he used the occasion to go on what the tabloids call a killing spree. He stabbed to death another Cambridge graduate, Saskia Jones, and injured more people.
Mr Merritt’s grieving father David described his son, a Labour supporter, as “a beautiful spirit who always took the side of the underdog” and who believed deeply in the concept of prisoner rehabilitation.

On Twitter he said: ‘My son, Jack, who was killed in this attack, would not wish his death to be used as the pretext for more draconian sentences or for detaining people unnecessarily.” 

A savage indictment of Pope Francis by recent editor of the Catholic Herald

The decline (and fall?) of the Church concerns not just Catholics or even Christians. It involves the decline of Western civilisation, as economic and political analyst David Goldman recently said. He is an observant Orthodox Jew. Ask not for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. 

For many years I was annoyed if people spoke of Catholic priests as child abusers and pederasts, wrongly thinking the numbers of guilty men were tiny. Most priests are good, selfless men, of course, but the numbers who are wicked are not tiny at all. 7% of priests in Australia, a Royal Commission was told, allegedly abused children between 1950 and 2010.

The Church is in as gravely corrupt a state as in the early 16th century, before Luther nailed his theses to the wall. The hierarchy and the College of Cardinals are riddled with depraved men and with men who protect the guilty. Damian Thompson, who was Editor of the Catholic Herald in London until he resigned recently, says the Pope has repeatedly protected guilty men and names lots of names. 

Meanwhile, he asks us to confess to 'ecological sins'.

Paris in the wintertime

“For years, every year during the summer, he would go to Paris. It was automatic with his wife and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, ‘Jim, let me ask you a question: How’s Paris doing?’ ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore. Paris is no longer Paris.” — Donald Trump, May 2017

I spent this weekend in Paris to celebrate my birthday with some friends. I hardly know the city and saw the Leonardo exhibition, walked around St Germain in the beautiful, very cold sunshine, ate four wonderful meals in exactly the kind of good, characterful restaurants you imagine, enjoyed the late 19th century Parisian atmosphere and succeeded in navigating the baffling Châtelet–Les Halles overland and underground railway hub to find the train to take me the ten minutes to Saint-Denis. Everything in French stations is endlessly difficult and I think this helps explain why England voted to leave the European Union.

In Saint-Denis stands the basilica where most of the French kings and queens are buried, from King Clovis I (481-511) and the Merovingian rois fainéants to King Louis XVIII, the last French king not to be deposed, who died in 1824.

A necropolis is an odd place to visit on one's birthday. I suppose, a sort of momento mori. 

Remember you must die, as a Roman celebrating a triumph was reminded by a slave sitting beside him. Not that I consider my life so far exactly a triumph. Still, as the Abbé Sièyes said when asked what he did during the French Revolution, I have survived.

But countries die, as well as men. 

Christianity and the Decline of the West

Catholic Mass attendance in Great Britain overtook Anglican attendance around the turn of the century. A bigger proportion of the population in Great Britain attends Catholic Mass than in France. 

But Catholicism in Great Britain is also in steep decline and many Mass goers in England are Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians and other foreigners, of course. Damian Thompson, until he recently resigned editor of the Catholic Herald, says that by mid-century mosque attendance will overtake church attendance in the UK.

Meanwhile, stranger and stranger things happen in Catholic churches. Catholicism, which, until the present Pope ascended the throne, seemed rock-like and unchanging now seems to change. 

Here is a quotation from a letter that Archbishop Vigano wrote yesterday to Alexander Tschugguel. He is the young man, 26, who, during the Amazon Synod, seized several “Pachamama” statues from a church in Rome and threw them into the Tiber. On Saturday

Quotations

Les Murray

'God is in the world as the poetry is in the poem.' 


St. Pius X in his motu proprio Fin Dalla Prima Nostra, articles I and III:

“Human society, as established by God, is composed of unequal elements, just as the different parts of the human body are unequal; to make them all equal is impossible, and would mean the destruction of human society” and, further, that “it follows that there are, according to the ordinance of God, in human society princes and subjects, masters and proletariat, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, nobles and plebeians, all of whom, united in the bonds of love, are to help one another to attain their last end in heaven, and their material and moral welfare here on earth.”

News item in The Tacoma News Tribune, April 11, 1953.

There'll Be No Escape in Future from Telephones

Mark R. Sullivan, San Francisco president and director of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., said in an address Thursday night:

The decline of Christianity is closely linked to the decline of the West

"Whenever I try to raise the topic of persecuted Christians in EU minister's meetings everybody says: 'Peter, better say 'religious minorities'. Well I WANT to say 'persecuted Christians'.." Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Sziijártó at the International Conference on Christian Persecution that took place recently in Budapest and was ignored by the press. 

"Finally, on hearing about the persecution of Christians, the greatest mistake Europeans can ever make is to say that this could never happen to them in their own country. Many
people share this delusion, even though Europe has been repeatedly struck by terrorism.

The new fanatical religion of human rights

Toby Young writes well about fortieth anniversary of The Life of Brian, considered blasphemous by many, including my schoolboy self, in 1979. The song from it, 'Always Look on the Bright Side of Life', sung on the crucifix, formed part of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics. (I was invited to attend and foolishly turned the invitation down, damn!) That opening ceremony was a homage to an idea of Britain, shorn of its conservative aspects, that sophisticated, highly educated Londoners could admire. Presumably its mockery of religion is considered central to an idea of Britishness that the centre-left can respond to, along with immigration and the National Heath Service.

He says:

"Turns out, the Pythons were naive in thinking that mankind’s yearning for religious faith was an aspect of our nature we could outgrow. The ebbing away of the Christian tide has left a God-shaped hole in the Anglosphere and it has been filled with something more sinister — a constantly mutating moral absolutism. Its latest manifestation is Extinction Rebellion, but no doubt it will be something even more fanatical and millenarian in a few years’ time. These quasi-religious movements resemble Christianity in its fundamentalist, pre-Reformation period when believers were less willing to forgive heretics and sinners."

The whole article deserves to be read.

As I try to understand the madness of our times, the only explanation I can come up with is that we are living through a period of religious frenzy, the religion being the malign religion of human rights, to which is spliced the religion of climate change.

Lam to the Slaughter

LAM TO THE SLAUGHTER?
HONG KONG Pro-democracy candidates have swept the board in elections to Hong Kong's local councils, winning 17 out of 18 councils in elections seen as a de facto referendum on Hong Kong's protest movement and the leadership of chief executive Carrie Lam.

Lam to the Slaughter is a great headline. The above is a quotation from a daily email I receive from the New Statesman, but I see on the net that several sources use it, including the Economist.

But it pales beside this one. When Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif looked likely to fall from power because his daughter submitted documents to the Supreme Court dated before January 31, 2007 and typed in Calibri, a font which only became available on that date, it occasioned the best headline I ever saw: